Role Playing Games

[dr_mabeuse]

I've been fooling around lately with the Sexual Role Playing board below, and I wondered how many others of you have tried this. I've never done anything like this before, and I'm finding it really fascinating. ("Fascinating", yeah right. Like my interest is purely academic.)

The cross section of players os probably similar to what we see here. You've got some really good writers and then you've got your share of semi-literates. Likewise, there are some really interesting stories and a lot that are just silly, some are hot, some are boring. Some stories consist of trading a couple oif lines per player, in some a player's entry may take an entire page (I tend toward the latter. Logorrhea again.)

It's great because you know someone's reading what you write.. In fact you have dedicated readers, and it's not unusual to get PM feedback on what your char's doing or how he's doing it. It's also terribly interesting (or frustrating) to see where other people take your ideas and where you take theirs. Of course, you lose exclusive control of the plot, but that's interesting too.

I guess I'm getting tired of working on a story, putting it up in Literotica and getting one or two feedback messages on it before it more or less sinks permanently out of sight. It's really nice to know at least one person is reading your stuff.

Anyhow, I can see where this could become addictive. I just wanted to see if other people have had experience with this and what they thought. I've noticed that I don't see many from the author's board in the SRPG board.

---dr.M.

 

[NoJo]

I guess it might be a good way of loosening you up a little (and helping you learn to listen to other people and subvert your ego), but unlike something like say, jazz improvisation, there's no real structure and the stories ramble. Better is a two person collaboration. If you see two dogs pulling on a bone, it tends to go off in a cerain direction. With ten dogs, the bone tends to meander around a little. Vector sum is more likeley to be zero, which is the kind of interest level these rp stories have for me.

Mike Leigh makes films by rehearsing actors in isolation till they have a persona crystallized, then sets them in situations where they interact. The story and dialog is continuously rehaersed until by shooting time there is no improvisation. This only works because he is a very controlling influence.

Miles Davis would create pieces identically to this, making musians work on themes in isolation, then meet together for the first time to record. Again, it only works with a director.

 

[TheEarl]

I have tried writing there before, but I couldn't think of any idea that I didn't want to use as stories to start my own thread and I've never liked any more than 3 people in a sex scene, so that rules a lot of the existing threads out. All of the rest were usually full, not my thing or illiterate.

So I've stopped going there now.

The Earl

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Sub Joe, I would disagree with your jazz analogy. For me, I see the central theme of the story as the analogous to the chord changes with the chars free to improvise on them as they please, within reason. And if someone stumbles on a good riff, others can join in in harmony or countermelody or whatever.

Also take exception with your dog & bone analogy, because I find that no matter how many people are in a game, almost all interactions take place between only two people at a time. So in that respect it's more like playing a board game with a bunch of players. You run into someone, bump them back, push them forward, things like that.

Earl, I was thinking of you when I started this thread because I wondered if it would help your sexual block to work with another person. I know in my own case, that writing for someone else is my one and only true incentive to write.

I also wanted to talk about an RPG thread I started in which all players are required to run two chars: male and female. I was really curious to see how men would write women and women write men, and especially interested in seeing how I'd react if my female char was going to have sex with another guy's male char.
Would I get the homo willies? Could I do it? Could I have my male character have sex with a woman played by another guy?

What I've found so far is that there's absolutely no problem, which surpised the hell out of me. And it's a ball to play a woman for a change and see how another female player's male characater tries to seduce me.

<plug> If you want to have a look or join the game, it's called "Carnival of Souls"

---dr.M.

 

[NoJo]

RPGs are fun to play!
But forget creating a decent story this way. I was talking about what you end up with, not in terms of how much fun it is in itself.

I started writing to learn about my own sexuality, and role-playing is also a great way to do that, to get some objectivity about the whole thing. Also (re)learning the art of text-based flirting is fun.

I have collaborated on some (non-erotic) stories, and I find that unless there's a pretty clear agreement about overall structure, you get a rambling story that at best comes out like the Illuminatus Trilogy.

I guess that I prefer a chat room or phone sex for the kind of thing you're talking about!

 

[tenyari]

A lot of Play by Emails and Play by posts tend to read like stream of thought stories.

I suppose you could get a decent story out of them if you took the finished work and handed it off to an editor, then reposted the fixed up work.

I think the format is probably easier for Americans to read, with their familiarity with sitcoms and soap operas that don't have a predefined end point...

That's how a lot of RPGs feel to me, like a story that should have ended on chapter 10 but is still going in chapter 306 for some reason. On those occaisions where've I've been invited to play in them, I find that after a certain point I want to wrap it all up and move on the next one, where-as the others are trying to just stretch a dead dog in new directions.

But if you can break it up into an arc, and hand that arc off to an editor in order to put in consistant plot and a logical conclusion, using the original play logs merely as a very developed outline, you should be able to come away with something.

 

[PoliteSuccubus]

Gee, Dr.

You didn't give me any credit after I gave you all that info on ORP and SRP.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Wait! I don't think I said anything about RPG's being a good place to get story ideas. They're useless for that. Too much like real life, with all the confusiuon and false starts and misunderstandings and missed opportunities. No, no, not what I meant at all.

They do expose you to a wide variety of situations, require you to write fairly quickly, and are just generally less demanding than working solo on fiction. And I have played in one or two that could have been made almost directly into a story, but these were both 2-people games. The main attraction to me is that it makes a nice break from writing erotic fiction, which I think I'm getting stale on anyhow. Too much work, too little reward.

---dr.M.

 

[English Lady]

I had a go at one SRP and really enjoyed it, I came in late and at first i thought i would never get a "real" part in the plot but once i got intergrated into the story i found it was really interesting! I loved the interaction. never qite knowing where things would go next....maybe i should try another, its just a bit daunting seeing the list of all the different ones.....where do I start?

 

[tenyari]

That's the hard factor that's always kept me out of these things, knowing where to come in.


I always feel like I'm crashing someone else's party.

 

[PoliteSuccubus]

Check out the OCC threads to the ones you want to join...

OCC means "Out of Charcter Convo", it's where the players get together to create new scenes etc.

Also, there are the "Casting calls" for when someone has a new idea and they want to see if anyone is intrested.

And please, don't limit yourself to one board!