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.