Hello, my pretties! How are you all? Doing well, I hope! I’m doing well… a bit bored of being home and waiting for my turn to be vaccinated to come (we’re still working on the elderly population here, so I need to be patient). How is vaccination going where you all are? I’m curious!
Pleasantries aside, I came here to talk about roleplaying today. Again. First things first, I want to add the disclaimer that this is not about anything sexual. That’s better left for another blogger, I suppose.
This is about the game or collaborative writing kind of roleplay. I do mention it here often, so I thought I’d talk about it in more general terms just so we’re all on the same page
We’re going to talk about two kinds of roleplaying here: roleplaying games and the kind of roleplaying I do, which has very little of the “game” aspect and a lot of the “roleplaying” aspect.
Role-playing games, or RPGs, are something a lot of people has probably heard of. If you have ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons, you have heard of RPGs. There are other systems as well, of course – such as GURPS, the World of Darkness (old and new), and others. If someone can remember others, please comment on them, I’m sure I’m forgetting something important!
Roleplaying, without the gaming element, is what I usually mean when I post here. It’s simply when a group or pair of people come together, choose a setting, create characters, and start creating a story together, by playing their main characters and several other side characters (those would be the NPCs on role-playing games) to craft a plot until completion, or until everyone involved gets bored.
This second kind is much more flexible, in my opinion. You get to choose the venue – face to face, via some voice chatting system, email, discord, forums, or pretty much any kind of communication system you choose. When it’s a one-on-one relationship, you get even more flexible, as you don’t have to worry about turns. When you have a group, you need a little more work on making things organized, storing character sheets, recording the important info, whatever it happens to be, etc. In my case, I tend to store everything in a Google Doc or shared folder, so everyone involved can have access to the important info in one place, or, if everyone is in agreement, create forums to store all of it within the same site we’re writing our stories. If the roleplay involves a group, I usually also create some house rules to deal with chance, establishing what we dice roll for and what each result means. I do try to keep the roleplays dice mechanics-light, though, as I don’t usually do combat-heavy plots.
Well… I’m thinking of more things about how I deal with roleplays, but I can’t really think of much more to say, as I currently only have a few one-on-one stories happening on Discord, and those are with a close friend and my girlfriend, so we have much more leeway to do things as we please!
I might come back to this in the future, if there’s any more to say! Do you have questions, opinions, or anything to add that I might have forgotten? Talk to me in the comments!
See you on the next post!
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