Thinking more about Drama Free Roleplay.
My characters aren’t here to act as NPC’s for yours or vice versa.
That is a key point to keep in mind in free form roleplaying, where one of the main precepts is that you choose what happens to only your own character. But it gets sticky when roleplay crosses over into collaborative writing, where it’s often necessary for one player/writer to occasionally use another character as an NPC in order to advance the story. Trust between the players/writers, familiarity with the characters, and understanding of the overall storyline is important there.
There are a few people I trust to use my character as an NPC:
- Lilithiel, who has followed Alysia’s development since the character’s inception and influenced the character’s development. Besides, she’s my twin and tends to think like I do.
- Missy, who is almost like a sister anyway, and we’ve roleplayed with each other for more than a decade.
- Jen, who is also one of my other almost-sisters. Even though we haven’t roleplayed together in years, she was very instrumental in Alysia’s development as a fictional entity and roleplaying character.
- Dean, who has an almost instinctive understanding of Rhilshen and can usually predict Alysia’s reactions without really thinking about it.
There are a couple others, too. Lucien’s player is another one I’ve been roleplaying with for years. Joon, who was like my younger brother and totally “got it”. All of them have the courtesy to run major plot twists by me before putting them into play — even though by now, they don’t need “permission” to do so.
Is there anyone you trust to run your characters as an NPC? Who, and why?
My apologies for re-registering, but it seems I can’t remember my password when it is too “strong”, and the reset password thing doesn’t seem to like me.
As to whom I trust to use my characters? Lucky (Lucien) is definitely one of them, because, like Alysia, I have been RPing with him for years now. When we have doubts about making a certain move we communicate that question, and I trust that communication will happen if there’s anything on the edge.
Everyone in the Yransea group are trusted as well, but I suppose because I know most of them won’t do anything extreme without throwing it past me first, and because the knowledge of building a world together outside of Rhydin helps. Anything minor that I don’t agree with can be played around.
Some of my other characters, well, I allow almost anyone to NPC them, but no one does. An RP Partner of mine once had an issue of someone playing against an environment (the environment specifically not allowing certain things), which I think is a bit more difficult. We don’t say a lot about places as much as characters. I don’t know how that one was resolved.
I trust me to write my own characters, and I trust others to write their own.
I have play partners that I really really really trust, but I’m not so sure I trust them with the task of writing my characters. But as of right now, there’s no one I’ve really played with for omgyears like others have. Still, I don’t see it changing. I could just be paranoid and overprotective, but it’s what I’m comfortable with, and there hasn’t been a problem with that.
I’ve had others say I can write their characters, but I won’t. I don’t trust myself for such a task, and I have this thing where… I dunno. I don’t actually desire to write a large scene for one of my characters and someone else’s, even at their urging. I may as well be playing by myself, or writing a solo story, or some such. Cuz why not just play it out with me, mm? Maybe I’m weird for not wanting to write for others, but.. eh. I have enough of my own characters to worry about writing for, than having to worry about writing someone else’s character. If that makes sense…
Obviously Eve, who can get into my head and see where I’m coming from when I’m working out a scene. Plus, she just “gets” the characters I play.
There are two other players I’ve trusted to write for my main character, both of whom were highly influential in how my character evolved over a couple of years.
One of them ended up having a way different idea of what kind of character I was playing, which was disappointing, but it served as motivation to check my own roleplay and consider whether I was having my character do things that gave him that idea, or whether he was just smoking crack or something. The other one proved to be pretty well worth the trust for the writing he did.
Unfortunately, the only one in my head is me, so I don’t think anyone would be able to write for or understand my character’s reactions.
[...] – bookmarked by 1 members originally found by YagamiDeathNote on July 19, 2008 Trust + PC = NPC? http://www.gardenofeden.net/eve/2008/06/27/trust-pc-npc – bookmarked by 1 members originally found [...]
“But it gets sticky when roleplay crosses over into collaborative writing, where it’s often necessary for one player/writer to occasionally use another character as an NPC in order to advance the story.”
This may be nice writing experiment for your to test some literature elements and settings in online environment:
Collaborative Writing Community