Doug Millington-Smith (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
magicaddict) wrote2006-08-21 02:18 pm
magicaddict) wrote2006-08-21 02:18 pm
Thoughts On A Hollow Victory...
...as I sat watching a four-hour IC session in the pub after Sunday's larp.
Did I miss a trick here?
Three years ago when I started, I distinctly remember there being one IC post-larp pub session. Now, each and every week, there are two, three, four separate conversations that happen between characters who may or may not have been present on the preceeding game. In addition, I have to assume that the number of IC MSN conversations has at the very least, not dropped between then and now. To whit, the game world has transcended time in/time out boundaries, and carries on in its own dynamic universe of player-created and multilaterally influential plot free of GM, ref, or scaffold-toting giant moderation.
Hang on, I think to myself, this all sounds very familiar.
It appears that one way or another, some of my points got across.
Looking around this brave new (or more likely rediscovered) world, I ask myself: Did I create the concepts I see now in regular use? Not remotely. Did I catalyse their inception/return to BLADES? Quite possibly. Am I pleased they are now (once again) in place and people can enjoy them? Very much so. Am I pissed off that continued criticism of my use of them prompted me to stop trying not six months before they became both commonplace and acceptable?
Ever so slightly.
I find the character I created to pander to these very criticisms is obsolete. A character that could not affect the world around him, by way of his being unable to physically or socially interact with it, I thought would cover all bases of acceptability. No-one could possibly claim that a character who never spoke to them or looked at them could be interfering with any roleplay they were engaged with or might be engaged with in the future.
Now I find that it was alright to do so all along.
Not only am I left feeling as though I slammed the stable door shut just as the horse managed to bolt, but I face the added dual annoyances of the horse having been mine and my inability to afford a new one. I have two dead characters, another who was more boring to play than statistical mechanics and another who's roleplay occurs exclusively in his own head, the only place I thought it was safe for me to do so without somehow getting anyone else's way, and now I find precisely what I dreamed of my dynamic characters being able to do happening for several hours every Sunday night and all over the MSN network 24/7/52.
Am I selfish to be wanting a part of what I spent my entire career at Bath trying to do and now has belatedly been accepted? Maybe I am, but similarly maybe I'm not, and regardless, this is my LJ and I'll cry if I want to.
Did I miss a trick here?
Three years ago when I started, I distinctly remember there being one IC post-larp pub session. Now, each and every week, there are two, three, four separate conversations that happen between characters who may or may not have been present on the preceeding game. In addition, I have to assume that the number of IC MSN conversations has at the very least, not dropped between then and now. To whit, the game world has transcended time in/time out boundaries, and carries on in its own dynamic universe of player-created and multilaterally influential plot free of GM, ref, or scaffold-toting giant moderation.
Hang on, I think to myself, this all sounds very familiar.
It appears that one way or another, some of my points got across.
Looking around this brave new (or more likely rediscovered) world, I ask myself: Did I create the concepts I see now in regular use? Not remotely. Did I catalyse their inception/return to BLADES? Quite possibly. Am I pleased they are now (once again) in place and people can enjoy them? Very much so. Am I pissed off that continued criticism of my use of them prompted me to stop trying not six months before they became both commonplace and acceptable?
Ever so slightly.
I find the character I created to pander to these very criticisms is obsolete. A character that could not affect the world around him, by way of his being unable to physically or socially interact with it, I thought would cover all bases of acceptability. No-one could possibly claim that a character who never spoke to them or looked at them could be interfering with any roleplay they were engaged with or might be engaged with in the future.
Now I find that it was alright to do so all along.
Not only am I left feeling as though I slammed the stable door shut just as the horse managed to bolt, but I face the added dual annoyances of the horse having been mine and my inability to afford a new one. I have two dead characters, another who was more boring to play than statistical mechanics and another who's roleplay occurs exclusively in his own head, the only place I thought it was safe for me to do so without somehow getting anyone else's way, and now I find precisely what I dreamed of my dynamic characters being able to do happening for several hours every Sunday night and all over the MSN network 24/7/52.
Am I selfish to be wanting a part of what I spent my entire career at Bath trying to do and now has belatedly been accepted? Maybe I am, but similarly maybe I'm not, and regardless, this is my LJ and I'll cry if I want to.
Summary: It's a hazy line
To refer to my subject: the whole out of game roleplay issue is a hazy line between acceptable and not. Various people in various ways have tested the position of that line, sometimes we have discovered it's more inclusive than we've realised, sometime as you've witnessed things have over stepped it and there have been consequences.
What we have isn't a truly fleshed out 24/7/52 world, but it isn't a world who's existance is solely between Time In and Time Out - End of Game. I don't believe that either has ever been or ever will be the case, at least for the period since I joined the club anyway.
Undoubtably in pub, in email and on msn conversations have increased frequency, but I would say this is a trend I've witnessed change over five years, but that pace has increased in the last year or so. Did the debate that was sparked off around you have an effect? Undoubtably, but it's not a strictly new change.
But yes, what you will find is PC's having conversations outside of the game, dicussing events, discussing plans with each other and forming relationsips. Occasionally there will be conversation with those characters who are the GM's puppets, the A-G command, the captain of the ship, Johen, Lord Havelock.
What you won't find is a tavern full of NPC's to chat to, or anyone out of that small group of characters defined in the campaign world. You might converse with a local guard commander in an email, but not with any of the non-PC guards who form the rest of the barracks except when you see them in game. There won't be any hidden treasures to uncover, any items bought from a suspicious man in an alley (unless that man has the grinning puppet master that is a GM behind him), but there won't be any drunken brawls, or muggers in dark alleys to cause your untimely deaths on the boards either.
Pure IC gain of powers must come with realtime IC risk, else it's not larp - even if that risk is merely what earns you the money to go buy something from a shop. That doesn't mean your PC can't cement a friendship with someone else's PC who you have never seen in games, but shares your interests, while your character sit in an IC tavern, the two or more of you are portraying in an email.
Is the world we have the world you want? I don't know, last time we talked your world had to be absolutely complete.
Can you find a TL now that you can enjoy? I hope so.
Have I made the point I wanted to make, well only you can tell me.
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In the absence of a tavern full of NPCs, a shady black market dealer and hidden treasures to uncover, we instead have IC pubmeets, Coventina Inc. and the possibility of lurve on the horizon for various different characters. This is the void that I thought I was trying to fill, adding my own content to supplant the lack of it worldside, and I see it happening now, but this time I'm not the one doing it, and it seems you don't mind.
The world we have in TL now is far from what I would enjoy, but as several people have said rather self-deprecatingly to me, it's better than nothing. If working through frustration that has driven me to tears has got it no further than people accepting that nothing is what they had before, it may have possibly been worth it, but it shouldn't be like this. I shouldn't need to quit amid a hail of negativity in order to make people entertain notions that I may not be entirely wrong, and possibly even a few percent right. Nor should anyone else. While the OOC portion of TL sits in this bracket, it'll never be something I truly enjoy.
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