Seeds of Fire in Dream

One of “big white piece of paper” aspects of roleplaying in Second Life is that there’s no set structure for anything, so everything you do with others has to first be structured in some fashion. Part of this is the Social Contract (see my last entry about that), and in that Social Contract is the idea of how long the RP is going to last, its duration.

Something like a Gorean sim will be a well-nigh continuous RP. If they are anything like the Goreans I’ve met in 2d cyberspace (Yahoo, IRC), they do not break character, ever.

My in-world friend Ludo Merit is creating a RP that is an overlay on the SL experience, a continuous, long-running RP that incorporates events and aspects of SL and makes them part of the narrative.

I suspect that Haven is like that too, although I’m not sure, will be doing more Haven-investigation very soon.

Seems like the Firefly RP at Washtown is also a continuous RP, but it’s definitely location-centric.

(Idea for future blog entry: Location as an aspect of RP: scenery, etc.)

My focus, when I finally get my ducks in a row, is to have a RP event and to have it be a specific time and place in world. Folks who participate will need to agree to meet in-world just like people do in World of Warcraft to go on raids.

Does this limit my audience? I think it does. However, I really want for people to get a sense of occasion, and also I want everyone involved to have a good time and to get some good RP interaction. It will make for a smaller, more intense, more personal-seeming game.

At first, my story-games will be episodic; that is to say, each individual game session will be one episode, or complete story from start to finish. The subsequent game sessions will perhaps build on the story elements from the first story, but 100% participation in every episode will not be required to understand what is going on.

I will do that until I get to a point where a serialized story becomes more appropriate - where I have a core group of players I can count on to be there every time, and I can do a story that has a longer story arc, that other people can join or not and be worked in, but that is more stable.

So, think about it. If you’re going to RP, what are the time-related aspects of the RP? What are the upsides and downsides of each one?

Continuous RP means that play is nearly always available, but the focus of the RP to be had in that situation is going to be a bit scattered. You can’t run a plot in a continuous RP that demands individual players be there, or that involves some outside event happening or not happening.

There also must be a reputation-based vetting-period for each player as everybody gets to feeling comfortable with RPing with that player - a kind of “friend or foe” recognition that says “OK, are you going to be a jerk and break character and cause problems, or are you cool and are going to be fun to RP with?”

Of course, on the other hand, it’s possible for more people to make a commitment to a continuous RP than it is for people to agree to show up to a episodic or serialized RP session.

Even though most of us grew up scheduling our lives around television shows, those days are over with the advent of digital TV recording; and I think that points to a real truth about time in our modern lives: for whatever reason, it is very difficult for people to schedule a time slice for a virtual event, even if it is one they enjoy.

The virtual world doesn’t have the same immediacy as the real world does, and as a result, it’s hard to say to someone “Um, I can’t go to that party, I’ve got a roleplay session on Second Life scheduled.”

The upside to a session-based RP is that you can be certain that you will get good RP, that you will have a storyteller who focuses things and keeps action going, that you will have a story that will provide context and meaning, that you will be able to enjoy playing a character that is automatically accepted by the other players rather than having to go through a long reputation-building period.

In other words, it takes less time to get into it and get up to speed, everybody is starting at the same point, and there is a structure to hang everything on.

And that’s the kind of thing that makes me interested in playing a session-based RP, but I can definitely see the value of continuous RP. I think that best of both worlds would involve a continuous RP that had session-based episodes blended into it, much as they do already on MUSHes, text-based 2d worlds.

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