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Investing Yourself into your MU* Chars
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@Pyrephox said in Investing Yourself into your MU* Chars:
I invest a lot into my characters in the sense of – I definitely know what they’re doing when they’re not ‘on screen’, I will play out scenarios that no one else would have interest in RPing just so that I know how this event in their life went, I have a firm idea of their backstory and how their relationships with NPCs are.
But I try very hard to keep a big gap between ‘my character’ and ‘me’. My characters like things I don’t, and they hate things I believe in. It doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated, but my frustration tends to feel like the same sort I get from a board game or a video game when the RNG or dice are being dicks. It’s less about my character and more about “is this interaction fun”.
And my fear of people who are over-invested in their characters and how exhausting it can be to manage other players’ insecurities are definitely…a couple of the smaller reasons why I’m not playing anywhere right now.
Part of why I started this thread has to do with some of the points you made. A number of things in my characters’ lives happen off screen, or become “well what happens in X year which likely will never be seen on screen/during the game’s life?” and other timeline events that I don’t really have any intention of playing out with other PCs. A vignette/flashback, maybe, but not really meant for other PCs. (Relationships with NPCs in their life like NPC parents, etc.)
But some of that speculation led to places that just really got to me, as mentioned above. And I can’t help but wonder if that means I’ve severely blurred the line between my character and me, for me to be having such an emotional feeling over a very specific, not-intended-for-RP moment.
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@dvoraen This is just my personal take on it, but it’s not emotion that crosses a boundary. If you’re not hurting anyone then who cares if you cry at some scene in a character’s backstory? As long as you enjoyed exploring it, go for it.
To me, problems only arise if a) you put your feelings on other players or try to make them change what their PCs are doing because of how it makes you feel (outside of things like harassment, no-go RP boundaries, etc.) or b) if your emotions are so caught up in your PC that it’s actively hurting the rest of your life. As long as it stays on the level of a good catharsis, like watching a sad movie or reading a touching book, that’s fine! But I’d be concerned if, for example, instead of having a nice cry and moving on, you could not let the fictional event go and it made it difficult to either play the character or focus on other things in your real life.
Ultimately, it’s all about does this ADD to your life’s experiences, or does it have a negative impact on your life. For me, anyway.
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@Pyrephox said in Investing Yourself into your MU* Chars:
@dvoraen This is just my personal take on it, but it’s not emotion that crosses a boundary. If you’re not hurting anyone then who cares if you cry at some scene in a character’s backstory? As long as you enjoyed exploring it, go for it.
To me, problems only arise if a) you put your feelings on other players or try to make them change what their PCs are doing because of how it makes you feel (outside of things like harassment, no-go RP boundaries, etc.) or b) if your emotions are so caught up in your PC that it’s actively hurting the rest of your life. As long as it stays on the level of a good catharsis, like watching a sad movie or reading a touching book, that’s fine! But I’d be concerned if, for example, instead of having a nice cry and moving on, you could not let the fictional event go and it made it difficult to either play the character or focus on other things in your real life.
Ultimately, it’s all about does this ADD to your life’s experiences, or does it have a negative impact on your life. For me, anyway.
Thank you for this. I think this is exactly what I was hoping to hear, in a way. I had no idea if my reactions were normal. I can’t recall a time where my writing made me literally blubber when thinking about the sad parts, like your example of reading a sad story, except the story was being narrated in my head.
My brain did kind of flagellate it a bit, because my mind would constantly veer towards the saddest part of this fiction in my head, even during work when my hands were busy but mind was free. Fortunately, it hasn’t affected me to the point of debilitation, because I’ve forced myself to change topics internally, but the frequency felt like a concern.
Anyway, what you said gives me a basis of comparison, because I am not a good judge of “what is normal”, considering I tend to have off-kilter behavior at times.
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I create characters with a general sense of maybe what I want to do with them or a corner of the world they occupy, but plans have a tendency to change at a moments’ notice, and games don’t always last, plus a whole other host of factors which you had no way of anticipating that will expand the experience far beyond what I’d initially envisioned. Often times for the better.
So anyway, the only real sense of investment I have is time, simply because I’m one of those people with a 75% “character dies in chargen” rate (seriously it’s like Traveler or HOL over here) and the idea of taking the usual matter of days/weeks I do to app something and hopefully clear all the hurdles is about as much fun to me as dremeling my own teeth.
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I do get really invested in my PCs. Even the ones I don’t get to play for very long! I have definitely cried over PCs (happy or sad or angry). Or scenes! I have also laughed my head off. Or felt depressed/down!
But I can’t say that I feel entitled to continuing on a game that was closing, or a certain storyline or even a story resolution. A lot of that is just age/experience. I’ve seldom had “starring” characters in the whole game sense, for whatever reason, I simply don’t inspire that kind of thing. But I almost always get to be part of a smaller group rewarding thing even if it’s 50/50 that staff are involved, and almost always have enjoyable plot scenes if a game has metaplot. Arx will be the first game I’ve played on that is coming to an organized end, most of the others have just folded “suddenly” when admin throw in the towel (various degrees of coasting beforehand). Since I don’t stay on games that I don’t like the admin of, I don’t begrudge that either, and appreciate what I got to do in the time I got to do it.
But like many hobbies, of course stories infect my daydreams, just like I sometimes daydream about cool pottery things I’d like to make, or the latest short story I’m working on, something about tabletop, ect. I think that’s pretty natural!
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I cry at scenes the way I cry at folger’s commercials: I’m moved, I’m not actually upset.
If I AM actually upset it’s time to take a break, because that doesn’t feel healthy.
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I usually find discussions of this edge into weird territory.
It is not bad to be invested in a story or a character. It’s good. It’s necessary. It is axiomatically necessary. The Eight Deadly Words of fiction are, “I don’t care what happens to these people.” If your audience says them (and in the case of MUing, the core of your audience may be you) then the story is not worth reading/watching, much less writing.
'Course, there’s a huge difference between, “I don’t care what happens to these people,” and “I will be devastated to such a degree that coping will be a RL challenge if anything bad happens to one of these people.”
People who fall on the ‘a little too much’ side of the how-invested question will require emotional support, which is usually not too hard for them to gather up if they don’t get smacked around for wanting it.
People who are underinvested will simply fuck up the game.
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I would argue that MUSHing doesn’t really fit well into truisms of writing. This is why several people who famously were not great mush players have fantastic and celebrated careers as writers of fiction works. They didn’t suck at writing while on mushes–they sucked at never being able to really integrate with others writing at the same time. Or, well, being unable to see anyone else in the space as equally human.
On a mush, unless it is very small, chances are that really very few people on it care about what happens to your PC. And they really don’t need to, especially if you’re not part of their story! It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with your PC. Or them/theirs!
I also think that it is also more natural unfortuantely for people to swing on the opposite side of the spectrum because of the social nature of mushing. I mean, I have many friends in the hobby now I’ve known for years or several decades now. I didn’t just enjoy their PCs obviously I enjoy them as people too. I don’t think I’m a clingy person, I regularly decline or don’t jive on places where they are, or even like the same playstyles anymore! But I do think sometimes that investment in people (even if you wouldn’t call them friends) can be way different than reading a published novel that was written a year ago and your writing hasn’t influenced at all. (THough even then, there are some real sick puppies out there in regards to how they behave towards/their entitlment about authors they are ‘fans’ of!)
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@mietze I’d argue that the truisms of writing fit MUing pretty well. The truisms of RPGing fit better, but the truisms of RPGing are a kind of aggregate of the truisms of writing and the truisms of socialising.
Jet pilots need good eyesight and good hand-eye coordination. Great MUers need to be good writers and good company. Good writers who are real bulls in the social china-shop are bad gamers, but this doesn’t remove the importance of writing and story-constructing skills.
'You ride the mechanical bull, you do not fight it.'
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@Gashlycrumb Nah, I agree with Mietze here, and would add that improvisation skills – being able to react in an interesting way, being able to build on top of what someone gives you, and maintain an overall “yes, and” sort of philosophy where you can – are actually much more important skills for a RPer than raw writing skills.
MUs use the written word as a medium, but it’s not actually a writing hobby (like writing books, fanfic, articles, or anything else); it’s acting via writing. The most important fundamentals of good MUers are different from the fundamentals of good writers.
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@Roz You are right about that.
Sort of. I am pretty lousy at improv, in that I have poor dramatic/comedic timing and am a shitty actor.
But I’m pretty decent at improv in the sense that you mean.
But I would consider that to be an improvisational writing game. Or, rather, story-building game. It’s the same as the classic campfire/parlour game Can You? (I say something along the lines of “Once upon a time there was a cat with three legs and a torn left year. Its name was Margo,” and then point at you, say, “Can you?” and you carry on with the story, unless you can’t.). It’s not literally writing and you don’t really have to be good at the writing-it-down part of making up stories to be a star at Can You?
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@Roz said in Investing Yourself into your MU* Chars:
@Gashlycrumb Nah, I agree with Mietze here, and would add that improvisation skills – being able to react in an interesting way, being able to build on top of what someone gives you, and maintain an overall “yes, and” sort of philosophy where you can – are actually much more important skills for a RPer than raw writing skills.
100% this.
You can be the most brilliant writer of purple prose in the world, but if you write a 600 word pose that gives me nothing to react or respond to in my next pose, what am I supposed to do?
A good RPer, in my mind, isn’t necessarily the best writer, but someone who is “picking up what I’m putting down” and throws in their own subtlety for me to pick up on, and gives me something to have my character do in my pose.
And sometimes that can be very basic, almost linear screenplay-style language with a lot of dialogue on a little stage direction.
But that moves the scene along more than the 500-word pose where the other character gazes out the window and waxes philosophical about their garden back home.
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@Alveraxus said in Investing Yourself into your MU* Chars:
You can be the most brilliant writer of purple prose in the world, but if you write a 600 word pose that gives me nothing to react or respond to in my next pose, what am I supposed to do?
A good writer writes to the genre and the audience. Giant streams of purple prose don’t work in MU, but they also wouldn’t work in a lot of fiction genres either.
MU RP is a different style of writing, but it’s still fundamentally writing. That’s why we write descriptions and dialogue instead of doing the TTRPG style of “I slash at the ork” or LARP interactive acting. The best MU stories I’ve experienced utilized the hallmarks of good storytelling and writing.
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@Roz said in Investing Yourself into your MU* Chars:
MUs use the written word as a medium, but it’s not actually a writing hobby
Thanks. There goes my only excuse for spending so much time on this stuff. "I’m working on my writing."
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I think I’m on both sides! Improv skills and collaboration are pretty much just as important as raw writing talent in this hobby for me, but the second one feels like more of a personal preference than a necessity to the medium. Writing is my artform, so naturally I’m drawn to others who view it the same way, and I love the opportunity to learn from them that rp provides. But I think good writing more fuels the chemistry of rp than defines it.
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I agree that being able to write well aids in the hobby. I just think that in mushing it doesn’t save you for as long. Especially now that except for a few holdouts we’re less tolerant of gross behavior.
Many people don’t dump the books they read that were their favorites, and in fact will still reread even if they later discover that the author was a grade A asshole to everyone around them. Because there’s that distance there, and you don’t see the sausage making or have the author around determined to make sure that everyone around them KNOWS what a total ass they are.
On a MUSH, great writing does in fact give some predatory asshats a cover for awhile, but if someone is a disruptive or gross person especially now they’ll be removed. And seeing everyone’s sausage being made (as it’s being written and influenced by many things on the fly) is one of the points.
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@mietze I’ve run into players in the past who were frustrated because nobody wanted to play with them. I feel really bad about that sometimes so what will sometimes do is coach those players.
I can tell they don’t really know how to write. They come into this hobby for the role play and the socialization, not from a more text-based background. And well, they can’t write.
So I try to coach. The advice I usually give is: mind your spelling, mind your punctuation, and in every pose try to both respond/react to things other people did, AND do things that others could react to.
It’s so often that people will write very self-centric poses not because they’re self-centered people, but because they don’t know how to do this.
And it makes me happy when this coaching works, and I get told that it’s having ani mpact, they’re having more fun in a game.
The ability to write isn’t everything. But knowing the tricks for how to write in a MUSH, sure helps a lot.
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@Polk I’ve never not RPed with someone who can’t write to my standards. I may not seek them out frequently, and they probably aren’t going to turn into an IC inner circle of a PC of mine.
But I would still rather spend time with them over a player I see being abusive, mean, or obnoxious on a game, especially publicly or on chan–especially when it’s done in my presence but not directed at me, like I’m supposed to support that in any way. I don’t care how well you write. If you harm people or treat them like shit, I have no interest.
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@mietze I wish more thought as you do.
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@mietze said in Investing Yourself into your MU* Chars:
I don’t care how well you write. If you harm people or treat them like shit, I have no interest.
Abusive behavior should never be tolerated.
That said, I’ve met plenty of RPers through the years who were perfectly nice people, but their RP was just boring because they didn’t know how to write. I’m not talking about spelling and punctuation; I’m talking about the art of making a compelling character and writing an interesting story.
MU RP exists at a crossroads between writing, improv, and gaming. Different games and/or players may value these things to different degrees, but they’re all essential IMHO. (and as with any activity involving other humans, basic social skills matter too)
