Meander through my thoughts for a moment...

Bear with me here as I really have no idea where this post will go, only that I'm having one of those rare moments where I feel like sharing.

When I got up this morning---no, wait. This started yesterday. Yesterday, a friend from the old Yahell rp group was nudging me rather insistently about starting some new rp. See, I have been trying to seduce him into CoX with the free trial stuff and singing the praises of the game like a siren enticing a---okay, yeah...like a junky trying to hook someone else. :P

So, I put up the usual protests to returning to text-based rp, including a further note of frustration that all but like two people have moved on. I mean ...come on! What the hell are we really gonna rp?

Except...even I know better, because where you have two people willing to sit down and run characters in a text-based rp environment, you can WRITE your damned antagonists and/or situations. I used to say that all the time. It just takes two people willing to sit down and hash out an interesting situation. No one ever told me back then that I was writing a story or whatnot. I was just rp'ing.

It wasn't until CoX that I was given a differential and given the impression that one was not the other. In fact, I was told what a great writer I supposedly was, and I said "I'm not a writer. I just like to rp." Then, I got some real pride going, and when it was intimated that an rp transcript wasn't as good as a thought out and planned written scene between two people, I got downright insulted.

So, back to my friend.

I'm asking where any rp could really go and what kind of results one could really expect after he proposed that we just run two characters, and he gives me the one answer that should (and did) quell any further protest: For the fun. "You do it, because it's fun."

So, yeah.

Now, the group we were in used to run rp anywhere and everywhere we could grab the opportunity. Text-based is good for that. Chat, messangers, email, message boards...all of them. It's a matter of where you have the time to spend. In fact, we'd often start a scene in one place and run it through two or more of those mediums due to time constraints or as a matter of convenience. So, I tell him to fire me an email, and that's where my brain started this morning - checking my email.

After bouncing a reply to his latest post, my attention was inevitably drawn to the folder sitting on my puter's desktop labelled "RP and Log Archive". I've been running a character in CoX that is actually a sorta transplant from that group. There are a couple, actually, but this one in particular is on my mind of late: Vicious Deception.

Vicious Deception is actually an assassin I used to play in the Yahell group. She actually travelled to table-top first, died, and came back in CoX. Because of the way I brought her into CoX (with full-on amnesia), I had created in her a different personality to begin with, and now, she's beginning to remember bits and pieces of her former life. Writing this morning's email reminded me that I could probably get a more confident feel for her if I could root around in the archive for some of her old stuff. You know...start to bring out hints of her old personality and memories that would really gel the transition I'm about to push for?

So, I start looking through this folder, trying to sort through about a million trillion text files (cuz 90% of it is little text files labelled things like "JShodan1" through "JShodan850"...okay, not that high, but you get the point), and I come across actual Word documents that are compilations of the little text files meant to pull together whole scenes or an ic day with all the ooc crap cut out to give them a more consistent feel.

Oh yeaaaah! That was like this huge project I wanted to do! I didn't get very far. :(

The first of those documents caught my eye though, and I saw the names on the file and got immediately nostalgic. My character's name was Sheridan, and I just HAD to open it and get a feel for her and the unique rapport she had with a vampire that would turn out to be the bane of her existence. It was like cleaning a bookshelf and seeing an old favorite pop out at you, so you pull it down to thumb through it to your favorite scenes. Except, you get hooked and sit down, forgetting what you were doing as you just start reading and can't stop.

Three compilation documents covering 14 text files later, I somehow can't stop. I'm hooked like I'm reading them all for the first time. It's not that I can't remember any of this, but that I remember "there's a point where this happens" and I want to read it in context. Text files 15-39. Took me all of a day I spent mostly shut up in my room shunning all but the most necessary tasks (like picking up the kid...that's kinda important. They get cranky when you don't pick them up from school for some reason. :P) I just got totally obsessed, but it wasn't just the discovery of a great story that I got to write part of...

---It was a reminder of text-based combat. This is probably the most frustrating and yet the most exciting part of text-based rp. You have to fully respect the other person's control over their own character. You can't just say "Character A punches Character B in the face". You HAVE to write your post in such a way as to give the other person the opportunity to dodge or get hit. Not only that, but if you're good, you'll really sit and think about every damn body part - where they are and where they're going - and really get descriptive, because it can all be used against you in the post coming back at you. After all, your opponent has to look for every opening you leave to them for a counter-attack.

I had the priviledge of being part of a particular group early on that dominated chat rooms with text-based fighting that was a terror. We actually had meetings that consisted of practice fights so we could be spectacularly good at A) killing our opponents, and B) arguing to the point where we whittled their defenses to shit while defending our own. People hated members of that group. You spent more time arguing oocly about your fight than you did writing the fight. But! It made me really respect that the devil is in the details, and I really tried to put as much thought and detail as I could into every aspect of the fights my characters would get into.

---It was a reminder of what it was like to rp an involved story that had no limits in level or mission requirements or...well...it was all about the story. There were no gimmes. Sure, there were clans, but they weren't a necessity. When chat went down, we went to the message boards or emails (and yeah, you could do emails with multiple people - we did). If we needed a setting, we wrote one. If we needed a reason for two people to run into each other, we wrote one. The better you wrote a character, the more background you had to draw on later. Everything was off the cuff. Spontaneous.

---It was a unique look into where I was back then oocly. Truly. Look at your best rp - the stuff you really sink your teeth into and put your heart into, because you care that much about how good it is. Even when the character is nowhere near like yourself, you've drawn on something inside yourself to bring that character that much to life. An experience. A particular viewpoint. Something.

Then, I talked to Mike.

So many couples out there seem to go through a tenth year bump in the road, and a lot of them seem to stall out. We talked about that - that bump in the road I hit along about the time the last of that rp was done before moving on to CoX. We were barely talking at the time outside of the necessary and whatever rp we had going on. We each had our momentary "what if" place where we looked at someone else and wondered if we belonged where we were. We mused over the circumstances around those moments, and we talked about forgiving ourselves for the mistakes we made that year.

I think it's the point where you have to decide whether you want to try to learn how to talk to each other again or just...talk to someone else until the marriage dissolves into nothing.

The player of this other character is an old friend who I regard as very dear even though we rarely find the opportunity to really talk anymore. He was Mike's greatest ally at the time. He would encourage me to talk to Mike or give him time when I was expressing frustration at our non-communication. He let me keep my guard up in our friendship, and he rp'd with me when I needed the outlet.

Really, that's what rp was for a good long while - an outlet for all the things I really couldn't address fully in the real world. I guess it still is in some ways, though the issues are different. You can tell that by the difference in the characters I'm drawn to playing.

I had a point, but I lost it somewhere along the way.

I'm looking forward to the return to text-based, even if only in a few emails with an old friend. It was kinda funny when I was showing him around in game, and he said something like "So, what's the difference between describing what my character does here and describing what my character does in an email or in chat?"

He's right. In truth, everything I read today was far more detailed and involved than anything I've done in CoX. It even felt more complete in some ways.

I don't know if he's right about being able to get enough of the old group together to start a new message board, but he's right about one thing: should be fun. :)