Coming back in a different way

[Rougue]

Hello everyone who reads this message and especially those with whom i have an rp on going.

I am sorry that i havent replied in quite a while and to make this news even worse,when i come back I will most likely either delete my entire roster or put them up for adoption.

I will then only make 2 characters and no more since I found for myself that the more characters i got the more I lost focuse on each character and they felt like a huge gray mass without a distinction between them.

So yeah thats if from me for now. I will see how i am going to decide what to do.

[Ichi]

I don't think that character deletion (i.e. deleting character posts/threads) is necessary, unless you're going for some sort of psychological effect/feeling of finality or something. Apart from potential psychological aspects, I don't think there's much practical difference between a character profile being deleted and a character being retired + left open for full or faceclaim adoption without deleting the character profile.

I think leaving character profiles up is arguably the better option than outright deleting character profiles. That allows people to look at your old threads and find the character in question, thus avoiding the sometimes irritating situation when the character profile cannot be found. You can always indicate that the character is retired/not in use/available for adoption/is not reserving the faceclaim.

I believe one valid way to handle this would be to move your existing characters to a spoilered "Retired" section on your roster and to indicate what "Retired" means---e.g. character is not being used, character is free for adoption, character's faceclaim is free.

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Deleting Characters
Pros:

• Might give a sense of finality that could mitigate doubts about the decision.
• Can help prevent people from asking for RPs with your old characters, potentially helping you to commit to your actions more/not feel tempted to go back and resurrect old characters.

Cons:

• Benefits are mostly psychological
• Might still allow for confusion about which character references are free
  • This could be partially mitigated by announcing which character references are free.
• Might make it harder for you to facilitate others adopting your characters
• Can prevent future readers from looking back at past characters/RPs (some people like to be able to read about the characters in RPs)

Marking Characters as Inactive/Retired
Pros:

• Allows future readers to see/find out more about your past characters
  • Avoids irritating people when they try to look up characters in your old RP threads due to character profiles having been deleted
• Can help facilitate character adoption as character profiles are still up

Cons:

• Keeping character profiles around might tempt you to go back to using characters
• Might still allow for confusion about which character references are free
  • This could be partially mitigated by announcing which character references are free.
  • This could be partially mitigated by editing individual character profiles to clearly indicate that character references are free.