Discipline

For a few months I’ve really wanted to write about this, but I’m glad I waited until now to do so. While I’ve aimed to do about one post per month, November was sidetracked until now because of competing in the NaNoWriMo event! After several long weeks, I was able to push out a very, very rough draft of a novel, just breaking the 50,000 word mark on the last day. It was quite the ride, and I’ve learned a lot, especially related to this topic of discipline.

Like almost everything I’ve brought up on this blog, to say that writers (and consequently roleplayers) require discipline seems like an obvious claim to make, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that the pieces really came together for me. I found myself looking at people I’d gotten the opportunity to roleplay with over the years, and I realized some of them were seemingly immune to the roleplaying cycle of disparity I described a while back—at the beginning of this year actually.

As I’ve said before, my goal in looking closely at roleplay isn’t, in fact, to simply be a heady elitist who think he knows best. My goal has really been to just solve that question that’s been bothering me most: why do people always seem to fluctuate in and out of roleplay, never able to maintain consistency and consequently never really get anywhere? For a good majority of this blog my key argument for striving for quality in roleplay has been because I believe that it facilitates roleplay that lasts longer. But I was looking at some of the people who I regard most highly in roleplay, and I noticed a connection between a number of them.

In a Perfect World

In a perfect world, I never step on the back of your shoes. When it’s been a long day and you sigh with exasperation over one of my quirks, I catch your drift and apologize. I laugh when it’s appropriate, and I give silence when the situation requests it. I’m understanding, caring, and patient as you lay all your worries at my feet. I’m a man that’s perfectly satisfied with his calves, my shoulders, my arms, and my weight. I’m a woman, my hair is straight without a being straightened, it’s conditioned without showering that morning, and my face is always unblemished, regardless of what happened yesterday.

When you try and tell me something, I always understand, unless you don’t want me to, in which case I ask a caring, prompting question. I don’t do anything embarrassing, unless it’s on purpose, and when I do it, it can only improve other people’s opinion about me. I know when to make jokes and when to take jokes, and I’m always at a happy median for volume. I talk just enough, but if I’m on the quiet end, well, that’s of course just because I’m a reserved person; I’m confident enough in my own thoughts to not need the approval of you!

When danger arises, I have a heart of courage. I don’t hesitate to protect the weak, and I don’t boast in my own strength; I don’t have to. No obstacle stands too high for me, no enemy too strong for me, and any confrontation I avoid is simply because it’s ridiculous. Or perhaps it’s just a waste of my time, you know? If all current events were going through the Normandy’s computer, I would be the Commander Shepard of the world. I have no formal weapon training, but my natural talent renders me on par with an expert.

I never lose my wits in a fight, but I do level into an intense focus that I just can’t explain. I’m mortal, I’m human, I’m old, I’m young, I’m inexperienced, I’m not good with people, I’m a real lone wolf, I’m a man with plenty of things to hide—but nothing I do would ever suggest this. My actions and emotions are two separate entities; letting them mix is a dangerous recipe for failure. When I get tired, I don’t let it touch my body, and I certainly don’t make mistakes. I’m not lethargic, exhausted, lazy, or apathetic. Everything I do I do with passion.

Roleplay as a New Genre

So I typically reserve the first paragraph of my articles to talk about myself or the blog while introducing the new topic. I’ve felt for a while like black on black was kind of depressing for the blog, so now I’ve finally transferred it over to something a little brighter. Hopefully it represents the mood I have while writing this! Roleplay should be fun, exciting, and not dismal and tedious. But how? Sometimes it certainly doesn’t feel like it, as I’ve been so consistent on bringing up. Today I want to talk about an important element of this: roleplay should be new.

As I’ve pointed out in the past, roleplay offers a number of unique opportunities in and of itself; these things make roleplay a truly unique form of literary and narrative style. I’ve brought up in the past few articles that roleplay is unique because of its innate inclusion of other writers into what I would call a Shared Universe, where your literary additions to the story (hopefully) affect more characters than just your own.

I’ve talked too about how roleplay is unique because of where drama comes from—in the moment—a significant divide from the typical standard for fiction. Perhaps the closest comparison to another form of narrative is that done in theater or film, but ultimately the two are still different by a single notion: an entire roleplay thread or scene can be incredibly interesting and engaging while simultaneously having no climax. It’s not to say that climaxes have no place within roleplay, but in a sense this idea is immensely freeing for the roleplay style. Because drama (and the enjoyment from it) springs largely from in-the-moment actions, a climax is not required for a roleplay to be effective. For once, the writer actually has a choice.

Roleplaying Partners

Article number seventeen for me, but it will be the sixteenth that talks specifically about quality, since you can exclude my first post. I’ve talked a lot about that, really, and I’ll probably talk a lot more about it. There arises the question though, why should we care? I mean after all, isn’t this just my own little fantasy of elitism and personal tastes, so why should I be so audacious as to tell people how to roleplay? Shouldn’t roleplay just be from a fount of creativity? How dare you suggest something may be better!

Some people seem to think this argument is satisfactory, but I no longer think so. Our society has absolutely latched onto this notion that “What’s true for you may not be true for me” as if it were so simple. I personally find it quite lacking and more than a bit of a cop-out, especially for roleplay. Roleplay is, after all, a hobby that involves more than just you, so indulge me for a minute and understand it’s not just about your own little sphere of creativity where you can just act however you please.

Many are convinced there are not objective reasons for demanding quality (or a desire to reach quality) in roleplay, as many communities simply go, “This is what we want to see. This is our taste, respect it or leave.” That’s totally fine, but I think it can go further than that. In a lot of my articles in the past I’ve referenced one of these objective reasons I would argue matter: the enjoyment of your own roleplay. It’s a tricky one, but really, if you have more fun roleplaying, because you’re improving in quality, it becomes significantly more enjoyable. When the roleplay is more enjoyable, you tend to stick with it longer, hopefully not falling into that cycle of dipping in and out of activity.

This extends into a lot of areas, many of them relating to motivations to roleplay. For example, if you’re roleplaying simply to live out another fantasy and escape your own miserable dimensions, then your desire to roleplay will fluctuate alongside your own personal satisfaction with your life. If you haven’t figured that out, it changes a lot, so it’s kind of not the greatest thing to rely on.

But that’s just the recap of what I’ve talked about already. Maybe another time I’ll go into that stuff again more directly, but today I’m here to talk about something else.

Why should you seek to improve your roleplay?

Who is it for?

Today is a day for something a little bit different. I want to take a break from talking specifically about roleplay, and spend a little bit on the idea of a roleplaying community, specifically the point of administration inside of it. While I’m not going to bother going into specific roles and titles and such, I will likely reference them simply as “moderators” or “staff” or some spin-off of that. I’d like to be clear up front though, that a mod in a roleplaying community can mean many different things, and what ultimately matters is whether or not you have power in this forum that was granted to you by someone else.

So my question I raise to you is this: who is a mod’s power for?

In the Moment

I’m actually really excited to write this one—I’ve wanted to ever since I released the last one, and now I have the time to do it. So here we go: Roleplay in the moment.

As I was writing about Roleplay Perspectives and searching for a good objective way to explain it, it occurred to me that, from my experience, the actual fun part of Roleplay is, and I think should be, each post. In its most unrefined form, RP usually shows up as present-tense, which makes a good deal of sense, though most people do past-tense because it’s more familiar and perhaps professional. What’s important, though, is that RP naturally tends to gravitate toward the present-tense, because the interest is very much involved with the present and less so of simply recounting a story.

Ever read someone else’s RP, after it’s been finished? Ever noticed it’s actually really boring to look back on, and you wouldn’t want to read it unless you had to? Exceptions exist, but for the most part this really stands. Does it mean that the RP was just as boring to read at the time as it is for you now? Not necessarily.

Roleplay Perspective

In my last entry I talked about Mary Sues for… a long while. A lot of the feedback I got was along the lines of it being very negative, perhaps pessimistic or even narrow-minded as far as types of characters go. I would argue being faulted is largely required for a roleplaying character to be interesting, but it’s certainly not the only way to add interest! Indeed, there are a lot of really interest things to exploit to make your character feel that much more real and engaged with the world they’re present in.

So today I’m going to consider one of those concepts that, like many of the other things I’ve brought up, seems very obvious. A lot of people don’t take this perhaps as far as they ought, though, and good intention dies short of completion. This concept is the idea of In Character Perspective in Roleplay. You could also call it “Seeing the world through your character’s eyes.” This notion applies to all fictional writing, of course, whether it’s simple things like character personality integrity or larger things character knowledge.

Unlike some other aspects of storytelling, roleplaying has the potential to take this to an entirely new level on a regular basis, and I feel that most people miss this opportunity a lot.

Mary Sues

All right, I’ve been meaning to get this one done for a long, long time, and now I’m going to give it a go. The subject of Mary Sues is an incredibly important one, and I’m going to take as much time as I need to with it.

With that being said, a definition of a Mary Sue is certainly in order – in *roleplay*a Mary Sue is a character without true fault, often used to placate the reader or writer. It should be noted a Mary Sue is not simply an unhealthy character but a truly faultless one. This may seem like it would quickly eliminate most fictional characters from that spectrum, but on closer look that is unfortunately not the case. I should note too that I will bring up the idea of a Mary Sue “element” throughout this post – while a “Mary Sue” is a faultless character, a Mary Sue “element” makes a character Sue-like, but it’s possible to have Sue elements without being a Sue by definition. I would argue that’s a lot harder than it sounds, though.

What’s interesting?

This question has been haunting me a lot, recently, and I think it would do me good to try and actually address it in regards to roleplay. I think it’s important, though, because I think the level of interest you have in what you’re roleplaying directly affects your ability to actually roleplay. This is a most troublesome issue indeed because all over the place, no matter where you go, you see nearly all the RPers present struggling to maintain activity, usually coming or going in bursts of several months. Because roleplay builds upon itself very heavily, this proves to be incredibly problematic for accomplishing any sort of long-term character or plot building, and ultimately leads to dysfunctional roleplaying communities that move very little.

Okay, so why do people just… stop roleplaying? I would argue it’s because what they’re roleplaying simply isn’t interesting enough. It also takes a reasonable amount of effort, but I’ll talk about that later. I’ve talked about this a little bit with roleplaying on compulsion as well as my thing on special snowflakes, but I’m going to try and focus on it now, so let me see if I can break it down.

Special Snowflakes

So today I’m going to be talking about Special Snowflakes. It’s weird, but for some reason very few people actually acknowledge the existence of Special Snowflakes. They may understand what I mean when I bring it up, but that doesn’t mean they’ll care about it. But I care! But I’m also going to try and make an argument as to why they’re inherently destructive to roleplay.

What is a Special Snowflake anyway? It’s a character that, in the universe they exist in, would be noticeably out of the ordinary. Some people might say “Wow, you’re going to put someone down for that?” because people are so used to this. They read novels or fanfiction, play games or watch movies, and the story is completely focused on exactly that: people out of the ordinary. That type of thing is fine for all those mediums, but roleplay is something completely different. Let me break it down for you.

Escapism Through Roleplay

Okay, so I’ve mentioned this frequently so far, always with the promise to come back to it, so here it goes. Escapism isn’t anything new, and it’s kind of tricky to define, but I’m going to do my best to clarify and reiterate the idea of escapism, specifically its connection with roleplay. I will say right off the bat, though, that I think escapism is innately harmful to the quality of your roleplay, and I’m going to be focusing mostly on how to detect and then how to avoid it. If people are inclined to disagree with this and find escapism to be a perfectly acceptable aspect of your roleplay, then you have a choice here.

1. Stop reading
2. Bear with me
3. Re-evaluate

Compulsion isn't Enough for Roleplay

So it’s been a while, and a lot of that is due to generally stagnation in my own roleplay, but that’s no excuse. I said last time I would do a recap of my “Character Building” series, but after dragging my feet on that for so long, I guess I’m just going to cut my losses and roll with what’s next. It’s getting kind of late, my legs are starting to hurt, and I have a quiz tomorrow, but right now I’m waiting for something; if I stay up late enough I might get a chance to see the blizzard start that’s supposed to slam us. I really love the snow, and I love storms even more, so a snow storm ranks up pretty high in favorite things to watch, but why should you care? Segway!

The thing I love about snow storms is that there’s so much anticipation leading up to it, and then you get several glorious hours of being surrounded by the storm, and then the aftermath seems so… tranquil; you might even spend some time out in the storm, and that’s fun, but you don’t spend too long in it. Being in it is the most intense part of the experience, maybe the greatest amount of consolidated “pleasure” during the whole event, but the beauty of the storm isn’t being stuck in it, it’s being surrounded by it. Roleplay, in fact, is very much similar to this.