Random question...

[auronlu]

Besides those I've interacted with in the days of yore... how many of the writers on my flist have done online, realtime, text-based roleplay, via MU*s or some other 1990s net format?

I'm asking because I know full well that my literary strengths and weaknesses are strongly impacted by 10+ years of experience in almost nightly roleplay. Having to blat out paragraphs describing what one's character was doing and saying, in order to move a scene forward, gave me a lot of practice writing dialog and gesture, and atrophied what little ability I had to carry a plot. It also emphasized description, since we were having to establish setting, atmosphere, and pacing of the scenes on the fly. I think I was very lucky that I was on a MUSH which required character applications as proof of writing competence. They got too nitpicky and hidebound about their rules, as nearly all online comms do, but it ensured that the writing was vibrant and you were challenged to respond with good writing of your own. Also, for the most part, people on that MUSH typed extremely quickly and accurately, so we were all chunking out 2-10 line paragraphs nearly at the speed of conversation. It was improv theater via fingertips, and made the roleplay stunningly immersive.

More specifically, the character I played was essentially a shaman, so I'm extremely comfortable with an animist world-view and precise descriptions of magical healing, spirits, elemental forces, the dead, prophecy and dream sequences. We worked a lot with interaction/correspondences between the physical and spirit world, ordinary people and supernatural forces.

So anyway. Have you MU*ed? Do you find that what you learned in MUing translates into other forms of writing? For that matter, if you've done bulletin-board style RP, where posts are longer and have to cover more per chunk, has it helped your traditional writing?

 

Comments

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness. Your first D&D game? How adorable!

I played it in '78. I was very young. Dice with more (or less) than 6 sides were a brand-new invention at the time.

I think modern D&D is almost unrecognizable from the early rule systems I remember. I don't think I've played D&D in 15 years!

The MUSH I played on from '93-2002 or so was garouMUSH, which is still going scarily enough. It was actually used to playtest the beginning of the World of Darkness series of games; a pity the developers stopped consulting and interacting with us to see what worked and what didn't. Parts of the Werewolf/World of Darkness series are annoying, but with the right group of roleplayers an imperfectly-constructed world can be amazing. One of the character races were modern-day descendants of the priests and artisans of ancient Egypt, secretly keeping alive the old ways. They also had Great Gobs of Angst. Since I've been hooked on Egyptology since the cradle, that was a great sandbox to play with.

[lassarina]

Oooh, you did concept WoD testing? That's completely awesome. I've always been a Mage girl, myself, but I do a regular Vampire: the Masquerade LARP and I'm starting up a Demon: the Fallen game.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse was always my least favourite of the old games; but at least it didn't abbreviate to WtF as new-Werewolf does. XD

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

I got to GarouMUSH about the time the WoD rep stopped logging in -- Sam Chupp or something. So no, I hadn't any part of play testing, which was mostly while Garoumush was in beta before it opened to the public. Though I've got friends who freelanced for WW, and very old friends who developed an obscure game series called Aurora.

I was the "hey, do you know the Greek for X and Y?" emergency contact for a friend of a friend at WW, which unfortunately means my real name is listed on the web as a research consultant for a couple of werewolf tribebooks. Golly gee, that looks great on an academic resumé. (Even worse, the Greek I gave got mangled, so I look like a CRAPPY research consultant.) But at least I managed to browbeat someone up against a deadline and a freelance developer gone AWOL into letting me sneak some of my meta into the original Strider tribebook -- including the back cover, which still makes me smug. What little I wrote for that sourcebook has probably been chucked out now; they made an artform of continually coming up with new additions and revisions to existing manuals so they could force you to buy more.

I adored Ars Magica, the predecessor to Mage, mostly because of all the Latin in it, but I haven't really paid much attention to White Wolf in a decade. I realized finally I disliked Werewolf, I just liked my character's tribe and the particular batch of characters/RP that I'd fallen into. When the latter morphed through the vicissitudes of online community, I drifted away.

[lassarina]

I am so incredibly unsurprised that your Greek got mangled. One of the covenants in Neo-Vampire is named Lancea Sanctum, and I cringe every time I see it (and have taken to correcting it when I speak aloud, which amuses my boyfriend no end.) There is such a thing as gender agreement in Latin, guys, just like Spanish and French!

Yeah, WW's constant revisions make me slightly nuts. I think they've gotten a bit better about it in their more recent game lines, since they killed the old WoD and launched the new, but I've been avoiding the new one (I don't have money for all those books) so I'm not completely sure.

I have a really good face-to-face gaming group that runs the gamut from White Wolf to D&D to Shadowrun, Mutants & Masterminds, and a dozen others, so there's always something interesting to be had.