Anymore, I like games that offer the quickest avenue to RPing out on the grid. Whether that’s allowing a bullet point background, or offering roster characters that you don’t have to write applications for, or whatever that is - I think it’s important to get people out there and playing vs locked up in chargen for days on end while they are busy working on their 3 paragraph note to try and justify having 3 dots in sportsball that isn’t even going to really come up or offer any sort of mechanical benefit anyway.
I don’t think that application processes stop the worst offenders from coming onto your games. You’ll weed out the trolls (probably) and the characters that don’t fit your game (likely) but the true creeps will look good on paper and not show themselves until they’ve already infiltrated the community.
For roster games, I don’t know how valuable it is to have people write several paragraphs about why they want to take the character and what they want to do with them. Sometimes people don’t really know until they’ve played the character a few times. Sometimes they are BRAND NEW to the game and really, really don’t know whatsoever, they just thought this specific roster looked cool and want to give it a go. The only time I think it’s valuable to apply to a character is if the character could be in high demand and it wouldn’t be fair to give it to someone on a first come, first serve basis, but even then, I think there should be multiple characters like that so there’s enough to go around, I guess.
