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.
