RPing with Nobody
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My experience with ‘solo rp’ isn’t MUSH based. But in my pre-mush games, this was frequently called ‘blue booking’, and it was used for little peeks into a character’s life that didn’t always warrant a scene.
In some games characters had a perpetual thread on a forum where they’d post their blue books, they were available to everyone to read, in others you just shared where you wanted, in some only staff saw them. Some sites awarded XP for them, some only for really well written ones, and some not at all. Some places allowed blue book submissions for XP justifications.
I tend to treat RP games like collaborative story telling between me and other players, rather than just a thing my character is experiencing, so blue books were often a way for me to add another layer to the story. Sometimes they’d be flash backs to significant parts of their life, sometimes aftermath to emotionally punchy scenes, sometimes legit journal entries.
It often felt like the RP equivalent of throwing in some material for the player, the way a cartoon throws in some material for the parent.
But there wasn’t really a showboating component to it.
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@tsar said in RPing with Nobody:
I first started RPing by joining PernMUSH and posing into empty rooms.
“Banain sat down at the table and watched the other people eat.”
Eventually someone saw me on +watch and joined me, lol. That person introduced me to RP, explained how the commands worked, and is the reason I’m still bothering all of you today~
Okay, I’m going to go to the bar and watch the person at the table doing <something> to show I didn’t read the pose about what they’re doing and just wanted an excuse to be in the room for everyone to give me xp/noms, because I was being that interactive and not actually just RPing with myself.
ETA - I just had a cursed thought occur to me. Does that count as RP voyeurism, where you just watch other people do a thing IC that you don’t (intentionally) interact with, not because of your character intentionally being a wallflower or the like, but you as the player just “pretend” to be there engaging?
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ETA - I just had a cursed thought occur to me. Does that count as RP voyeurism, where you just watch other people do a thing IC that you don’t (intentionally) interact with, not because of your character intentionally being a wallflower or the like, but you as the player just “pretend” to be there engaging?
Me watching reality tv for the same reason:
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I solo LARP every time I go up a flight of stairs or try to squeeze through a closing door before it shuts.
I liked journaling. It was the only RP-adjacent thing I could do on a weekly basis for a while. But writing like that… I don’t know if I consider it RP, even if writing in-character.
Vignettes are nifty if they add to an on going story. I don’t think I could exclusively just do vignettes over and over again and feel like anything other than a waste of time.
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If we expand out from the MUniverse I can recall solo RPing a lot on play by forum games. But that, much like the vignette most recently demonstrated and expanded upon in the Ares system, was… it was sort of like RPing for an audience, rather than RPing solo. Does that make sense, or make it different?
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I always thought of vignettes and journals/blue books and things like that less like solo RP and more like RP hooks–you’re putting it out there hoping someone reads it and is like gee this person sounds cool or hey I have information on that I could help them with.
So I guess it is kind of like throwing a (long) pose out into an empty room and hoping that someone sees it when they come in and wants to pose back.
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@DrQuinn I definitely see them as RP hooks and also a visual presentation of character development. Both for other readers and the player of that character. I saw in another post that someone mentioned that some players treat these games partly as a CRPG that is closest to a TTRPG and I can definitely see that. When I play a character, I try to create one or pick a roster character that is more of a blank slate and let the character shape itself through the adventures and scenes they participate in.
In my opinion, vignettes can definitely help both for the player to write out how they see their character growing in the story they are part of, but also let others in on it as well. Vignettes also play a part in plot +requests the player puts in, being able to show what may have happened with dice rolls that happened behind closed doors.
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I have no earthly clue why I journal for characters but sometimes I am playing a character where I just wanna do that. Also sometimes I write bad poetry/songs because I want to do that, too. Sorry, I dunno why. This is super helpful to the discussion, I bet.
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I like journaling. I like vignettes. I got a surprising amount of RP out of writing IC poems of dubious quality. I do it for myself for character building if there’s no outlet to post it. Also I post it.
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@Third-Eye shhhhh they were beautiful and I loved your poems
