I began roleplaying in World of Warcraft in 2006, and that has been my sole venue for roleplay throughout most of these last five years, with brief sojourns in other games – Aion, Rift, Lord of the Rings Online, Borderlands. It was only recently, since quitting WoW, that I’ve adventured into a new territory.
Text based roleplay. All of a sudden it was up to me to describe my character in full detail – including general things usually included in the avatar. It was up to me to describe the scenery, the landscape. The world. So much more creativity was required of me, and I loved it. No longer constrained by the short allowance for text in WoW, I was able to form full paragraphs, and force myself further without mental blockades.
But there is one thing that I really miss from MMO roleplay, and that’s casual roleplay. I have a character, I’m standing around, you’re interested in roleplay, so they chat for a few minutes before parting ways. No pressure. No plot required. No theatrics, no obligations, nothing. Just nice, honest, quick roleplay that doesn’t need to go anywhere.
It’s harder, I’ve found, with forum and IM RP. Gone is the spontaneity. You need to plan, but more than that, you kind of need an idea about why you’re roleplaying. And there’s a lot more pressure to do well because it’s just you and this other person working to entertain each other. There’s not going to be another random passerby approaching (even in forum RP most people feel uncomfortable in joining in after it’s gotten started), and if your responses aren’t interesting enough, chances are it’ll just fizzle and die.
I loved the casual, no pressure RP where I could just talk to someone, get a feel for them and their character, and if we didn’t mesh, we could carry on with nothing lost. And because it wasn’t planned, I didn’t feel pressured to put in x amount of time into the roleplay. We could reveal our characters in small doses and see how they worked with different types of people without putting in a ton of work to find those different types of people.
It was, in a word, easy. Effortless, sometimes. And I miss that.
Overall, I love text based roleplay. I find that I’ve been constantly pushing to better myself and put more detail into my posts that I didn’t in past times, and it’s been immensely rewarding to me. But sometimes, I really do just miss light hearted banter that doesn’t go anywhere.
I hear you, there. I’ve consistently noticed that the quality of my own roleplay is far higher when I’m doing text- or forum-based roleplay. For me, a big part of it is the lack of visual cues. If my Klingon walks into a room in Star Trek Online, for instance, I can see what he looks like. I can see the room. I can see the other people in the room. So I don’t (and most others that I roleplay with in MMOs don’t) spend much time describing things visually. Which is a problem, because we’re all just standing around like sticks. With pure text-based roleplay, I find my character stalking or slinking or leaning or floating (in science-fiction roleplaying, zero-G, you know), partially because I have to describe what my character is doing.
One game that I’ve played heavily in the past which (inadvertently) enables this sort of roleplay is Eve Online. In Eve you play a spaceship pilot, and you really only see the spaceship. They’ve recently added actual avatars you can walk around, but they haven’t gotten things to the point where they can actually *meet* one another. Consequently, the RP community there uses chat channels exclusively, with all sorts of interesting channels depicting various settings. I remember after I stopped playing Eve, MMO roleplay all had an odd sort of stiltedness which I think is largely because it adds in the avatars that you can now see.
Love the blog, by the way. I hope you continue writing it.
Good point. I’m just getting back into WoW after a year off and finally can enjoy it again. I was pleased to see there is still plenty of RP on MG, even if BTT is alot smaller. Text based leaves more to the imagination, which is nice. There are some super creative people out there.
If you’re into Text roleplay, but still like the whole idea that a world is set up for you already, so you can, infact, just have small interactions, and then go your own way and do your own thing, you should try a MUD. They’re all text based, most you can set your own description, craft your own items using your own words, fight off invasions, fight monsters, level up, whilst still being able to create your own emotes, your own character. MUD’s are like MMO’s and text roleplay shoved into one. I play one from a company called IRE, Iron Realms Entertainment, called Midkemia Online, they have a whole host of different games. You’re in a world based on Midkemia by Raymond. E. Fiest, you’re put into a world full of other players, full of quests, player politics, things to kill, war, and its all done by text. I only came across this blog after looking for an mmo which has everybody staying In Character, since I found on things like WoW, people were walking around with ridiculous names and there was little to no roleplay, with the IRE set of MUD’s at least (and every other single one i’ve tried) You -have- to stay in character. Its a really fun and enriching experience.