Tag Archives: re:roleplay

Ahem.

eitrit:

So I’ve calmed down a bit from last night. (Thank you to those who offered words of love. I appreciate them, even if I seemed like I ignored them and didn’t reply.) And now I feel like I want to actually take a bit of time and tackle the thing about purple prose and why people may not want to roleplay with those who write it. Please keep in mind that I’m not attacking purple prose or anyone who writes it. I’m not bashing a writing style. I’m going to point out the problems that I (and likely many others) have with it.

Please don’t send me hate, or anyone else hate.

When I was a kid in elementary school, which was grades 2 through 5, we would get vocabulary lists, which were basically lists of words we had to learn for the week or month, usually week. It was our weekly homework to look up each word, write out the definition, and use it in a sentence correctly. In this way, we learned first, how to look words up in a dictionary, and two, how to use those words. We also learned grammar. Rule structure. Parts of speech. Consistently, every year. Nouns, verbs, adverbs, subjects, adjectives, conjunctions, punctuation, and how to use it.

I bring this up to sort of set the foundation for what I’m trying to say, I think, and to illustrate that I know what I’m talking about. I may not have a degree in creative writing, but I have written professionally for a company website or two, and I do know how to write.

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michiferangst:

ask-beatrice-luck:

  • Do not make assumptions about my character
  • Do not make assumptions about my character
  • Do not make assumptions about my character
  • Do not make assumptions about my character

especially don’t assume he knows your OC

Screw you — read everyone’s info and don’t assume their assumptions have no reason to be valid. Nobody lives in a vacuum.

If I follow you, and you are a roleplaying blog, I want to roleplay with you.

If you follow me, and you are a roleplaying blog, that is tacit permission for me to roleplay with you, play your askgames, and insinuate my muse into your muse’s life.

If you aren’t okay with that, don’t follow me.

I’ll be back to full operation tonight.

Oh hi social anxiety, I did not miss you.

I realised this morning (morning?) that if something was important enough to keep me up for three hours working it out in my head, it was important enough to write down. Buckle in for unpopular roleplay opinions.

Remember that conversation I had last night? The one about OCs, and writing with them? Yeah, That started because I asked, “What do you perceive as the difference between an OC and a character like Skye with currently very little canon story?”

And the answer, basically, is “Skye’s limited information is accessible to me in a way that I prefer, and she is presented from the beginning as interacting with a character I accept as canon.”

And that is bullshit.

I’m going to use my Summer as the opposing example here, because I’m a horrible person who thinks everything revolves around her. By doing a very little reading, you know a great deal more information about Summer than we know right now about Skye.

You know her history. What’s Skye’s history?

You know her name. Is Skye her real name? What’s her last name?

You know her family. Does Skye have a family? Where are they? What kind of relationship does she have with them?

You know what kind of job she does, both as a superheroine and as a normal person. How does Skye make her money?

You know her powers. Does Skye have any powers? She’s presented as a genius hacker, but so far there’s actually not a lot of detail beyond her own claims to support that.

In terms of personality, there is exactly as much information available for Summer as there is for Skye — the difference being that Summer’s information is presented via writing in interactions with other roleplay characters, and Skye’s information is presented via television in interactions with other new characters.

To say to me, “With Skye, i’ve seen her interact with other people that Tony already has a background with – Coulson, May – and I’ve seen how she reacts to them. I’ve seen how /they/ react to her, and therefor, Tony already has a baseline for how he would react to her, to what she does for a living” is to utterly, utterly denigrate all the work I’ve put into shaping Summer as a character, in writing with other people and thereby fleshing her out.

It’s also showing yourself up as a lazy roleplayer who is apparently incapable of getting enough into character as to figure out how your muse would deal with someone brand new.

So somebody explain to me this, because it seems to be the key problem with OCs: why is it considered so hard to write your muse meeting someone new? Why do you have to have a preexisting concept of that other muse before you can imagine how your character would react to them?

And given all the information that is available about my muse that isn’t available about these new ‘canon’ muses, why am I being slighted in favour of someone who is making up just as much information about their muse as I have about mine, simply because you happened to watch a tv show where they interact with a minor canon character?

What’s the difference between all the roleplay history that you demand people be aware of when coming to interact with your muse and all the roleplay history I’ve created for mine?

If you can’t figure out how your muse meets someone new, maybe you shouldn’t be roleplaying.

Thank you so very much for taking the time for that answer. I honestly expected a couple of links and a “good luck.” I look forward to reading through it carefully and hope to embark on a new adventure and make a new friend or two!

Heh! I was actually driving home thinking of all the other things I wanted to say as well.

Things like:

Roleplaying is a social thing. There will be drama. There will be mistakes. You will get frustrated. You might get overwhelmed by people, or you might spend your time wondering why you aren’t overwhelmed. You have to decide how much of your time and energy you want to put into this as a whole.

There are a lot of things on which there is no common consensus. F’r’ex, how long do you wait for a reply before asking that mun where it is? Waiting for a reply can be exactly like waiting for the next new episode of a favourite tv show, except you don’t know when it’s coming! It’s so much fun to really get into a thread, but you aren’t the only person involved, and they have to eat, sleep, work, etc, just like you do.

Something I like to repeat, to myself if no one else, is that /everything/ is a plot. Everything is a story. Your muse is interested in this other muse who won’t give them the time of day? That’s a story! Stories where two muses are at odds can be a lot more difficult to write, but are often more rewarding.

Another hugely important point to remember is this: the mun and the muse are not the same. They may be /very/ similar, as I and my Summer are, but I may be laughing hysterically behind the screen as I write that Summer is screaming with rage at another muse, because I love the play so much. So as hard as it may be, keep in mind that antagonising the muse is not the same as antagonising the mun, and that asking questions is important.

Something that is a fun way to get your toes wet is to look for the ask games that are designed for non-roleplayers: the ones like ‘what is your favourite pairing my muse is in’ and ‘break my muse’. These are fandom type things, and we as roleplayers love to see that our followers are excited about the stories we’re telling.

I have been a follower of yours for some time now, but your most recent string of RP posts got me to wondering… how does one begin in this RP world? I know nothing, and am intrigued.

This is going to be a huge and somewhat tangled answer so bear with me.

How do you begin in the roleplay world? Well, it depends a little on where you’re starting, i.e. tumblr, email, tabletop, mmo, forum, lj, etc. I’ve done all of those. But basically, the first thing to do is shape a character. Around tumblr those are often called ‘muses’.

You might feel a particular connection to a pre-existing character, a canon character from a book, a movie, a tv show, a game, a comic. Do you feel like you know a lot about that character, how they think and react? It might be a good character to roleplay. If you feel that way about a character with multiple canons, i.e. both book and movie, or game and comic, or in some cases play and book and movie and radio play and game and … you get the picture — you probably want to choose one canon to stick with.

Playing a canon character means you already have a worldspace, appearance, personality, and history to work with, but you probably also have ideas about that character that don’t clearly appear in their canon. Those are called headcanon, and as a roleplayer they’re hugely important — they help you shape that version of the character as your own, and separate you from all the other people also rping that character.

You might be more like me, slightly uncomfortable with getting into the mind of a pre-existing character. In that case, you have more work to do. You need to know what they look like. What gender they are, and what gender they’re into, or not into. Age. History, personality. Little things like the things they like and the books they read. You might not figure some of these things out immediately; they may come to you later, as you roleplay with particular people. This is particularly true of relationships.

After you have shaped your character, then you get to figure out how you want to get yourself noticed. That’s where all those things I reblogged can come in handy — along with following people, on tumblr. Simply following certain other players can often get you noticed, though not all roleplayers do starters (the ‘hi I see you followed me here is my muse noticing yours’ posts, which I don’t do). Or you can look out for exactly the kind of post I reblogged, and respond to them with the appropriate symbols in the other player’s inbox. Or you can just jump into someone’s inbox in-character (ic) and just play, or out-of-character (ooc) and plot.

Plotting can be complex, and this is where it’s especially important to both know your muse’s history and the other muse’s story — if you are offering to play with someone who is a singleverse player (everything happens in the same timeline), you’ll have to deal with not only your interactions with that muse, but be aware of any other interactions as well. My gadgeteerphilanthropist is singleverse. Other players are multiverse, meaning every time that muse interacts with someone new, it’s in a whole new timeline and space, as if no one else is interacting with them. This can present a much wider range of possibilities. Many muses combine the two, with a mainverse which is considered their primary plotline, and which new characters are most frequently placed in, and splits into alternate universes (AUs) for ideas or muses they find intriguing but which do not mesh with the mainverse. This is what I do — the Gadgetverse is my mainverse, but duplicate muses usually end up in their own AUs.

There are a few things which are specific to tumblr roleplaying. You should check out the differences between a primary blog (the one you log in to), and a secondary blog. The former can follow, and send asks; the latter cannot. It can be much harder to get noticed as a secondary blog.

There are a huge number of little tips and tricks with regard to roleplaying, especially on tumblr. Things such as cutting threads, reblogging photos as part of a roleplay, paragraph play versus conversation play versus gif play versus ask play.  Patience with regard to replies. Many of these are things best picked up by doing.