"My hands are full of snow."

[greygirlbeast]

Here we go with the higgledy-piggledy again. It's a coolish day here in Providence, but sunny. After the anticlimax of Hurricane Earl, summer collapsed like a leaky balloon. Now it's sweater weather again

Comments

[miakodadreams]

...it's mostly interesting because I've known a lot of people who are very resistant to the idea that rp involves this sort of therapeutic vicariousness. But I think it's where the true value of rp lies, in allowing us to explore secret parts of ourselves. Now, admittedly, it can also allow us to view the world through alien eyes, through minds not our own, and try to become people we aren't. But the best we can ever manage in those situations it to try, because all our characters will always only be splinters of us.

Well said. Do you do tabletop RP, as well? I've not tried anything like Insilico, but I'm curious how the two forms compare, in your opinion. The closest I've come to online RP was a short stint in WoW and Ultima Online -- both good venues for cracking skulls with friends, but a joke as far as RP goes (at least on our servers).

We occasionally do collaborative written stories/conversations between players or a player and the GM for a few of our tabletop games, and honestly I find those even more absorbing than the face-to-face interactions. There's something about being able to take the time to think and respond in your own time that makes those pieces more satisfying, to me. I find it easier to add more detail and depth to the responses, and a couple of the characters have become immensely more interesting to me -- especially the one that is essentially my polar opposite in most ways. (Which has been an interesting exercise in itself.)

[greygirlbeast]

Well said. Do you do tabletop RP, as well? I've not tried anything like Insilico, but I'm curious how the two forms compare, in your opinion. The closest I've come to online RP was a short stint in WoW and Ultima Online -- both good venues for cracking skulls with friends, but a joke as far as RP goes (at least on our servers).

It's hard to write a short reply to a question I feel like deserves an essay.

Yes, WoW is not a fit venue for rp. And it took me a while to learn that and make peace with it, and let the game be just a game.

I started out with tabletop D&D in about 1978 (there was no other sort!), and did old-fashioned D&D as recently as 2005 But I never really thought of any of that as genuine rp. To me, roleplay is impromtu, improvisational theatre (I have some theatre background), and Second Life, in theory, is ideal for that form. In practice, there is very little good rp to be had in SL. You can find it in Insilico, though even there it can be tricky. This is freeform rp, and while there are GMs, they stay out of things unless there's trouble. Most of the stories are created by players, and many are only lived out by two or three players. At it's best, it's wonderfully organic and cathartic.

Having begun doing SL rp in May 2007, it's hard to ever imagine rp without a "visual interface." But then, I was always a sucker for LARP, and dice (while pretty, and attractive to me in a magpie shiny sort of way) are ponderous and annoying.

[miakodadreams]

Hm, Insilico sounds intriguing. I have too many offline games grasping for my attention at the moment, or I'd be tempted to look into it. It does sound like an excellent method if you can find the right players, though.

We've been lucky with our groups over the last decade or so, in that the games have been fairly high-trust between players and driven by narrative rather than mechanics. We tend to play more urban fantasy and horror than traditional fantasy, and honestly we end up building as much of the world and setting as the GM, these days. It's an interesting exercise when the whole session feels like good improv -- we use customized character-quirk cards as our resolution tool, so you have to narrate the results. It doesn't feel like you're breaking the story to look up stats and roll your shiny magpie dice, which is nice. Especially compared to good old D&D.