Role-Playing

Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
Lukas Kelly
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Role-Playing

Post by Lukas Kelly »

has anyone ever considered this? For those who don't know, role-playing on a forum is like collaboratively writing a story, where a person is in control of usually one character, and they write how they interact. I was thinking that this could be a very good medium to explore conworlds, as I used it as a vehicle to build them at least twice. In fact, my largest conworld was designed for RPing in. So, any thoughts? Good, bad? Able to be done on this forum, done on another? Discuss.

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Trailsend »

Feayran (along with the majority of my other projects) was created for the Domhantir setting, a collaborative world-building project being developed by a writers' guild. Guild members use the world as a setting for their work, and there's a lot of role-playing done. On another site that shares a lot of the same members, a group of folks are attempting to learn Feayran by role-playing a bunch of kids who get magicked away to Feayra, but without Narnia's convenient everyone-in-the-fantasy-world-speaks-English hack. It's been a blast so far.

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Lukas Kelly »

Sounds interesting actually. I might check it out.

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by rickardspaghetti »

Trailsend wrote:On another site that shares a lot of the same members, a group of folks are attempting to learn Feayran by role-playing a bunch of kids who get magicked away to Feayra, but without Narnia's convenient everyone-in-the-fantasy-world-speaks-English hack. It's been a blast so far.
Wait, what?
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Trailsend »

rickardspaghetti wrote:
Trailsend wrote:On another site that shares a lot of the same members, a group of folks are attempting to learn Feayran by role-playing a bunch of kids who get magicked away to Feayra, but without Narnia's convenient everyone-in-the-fantasy-world-speaks-English hack. It's been a blast so far.
Wait, what?
True story. There had been interest in the guild with learning the language, but I wasn't able to stay engaged with lesson writing; I was never sure where to go next, and I didn't feel like I could keep it interesting enough. So we figured, hey, we're storytellers. Let's tell a story instead. There's seven of us working on it, and it's a bit of an experiment to see how much language ability arises out of the plotline (and vice versa). The going is slow since we're all in school, but that is to be expected with such things.

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zelos
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by zelos »

Dont use forums but over IM I have

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maıráí
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by maıráí »

If I remember correctly, there were a couple of con-role-playing threads a while ago, mostly in the form of tours. I imagine they could be started again on any number of topics.

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Astraios »

Yeah, those tours were fun. :D But sooo time-consuming. ><

And our characters spent so long talking about their various homeworlds that we never actually got any of them further than six hours game-time, which doesn't lead to much actual exploration.

I think the thing me and Trailsend did was somewhat more productive overall - a group of my conpeople visited his, as linguists documenting his conpeople's language, and he visited mine. The problem with that again is that it's very time-consuming, and it only really allows for two players.

An idea I just had: we make a role-playing thread where the location is the "University of Con" (not located on any of our conworlds, or on Earth, to make it nice and neutral), and each player is a character from his/her conworld, studying in this university. Every (game-)weekday there is a lecture or seminar, given by a different character each day. The subject of the class could be anything to do with that character's home world, i.e. politics, demographics, religion, familial structure, etc.

It would be organized like this:

1. All characters are allocated a game-day on which to hold their talk.
2. Lecturer-Of-The-Day posts the introduction to his/her talk.
3. Other characters decide if they will attend or not.
4. LOTD posts the body of his/her talk.
5. Other characters ask questions to LOTD.
6. LOTD answers questions.
7. All characters chat about the content of the lecture.

If we wanted to take it further, we could have "weekends", where all the characters go to their regular hang-out (wherever), and just have a bit of general socialization, so that we learn a bit more about how our conpeoples interact, teach each other basic greetings in our conlangs, etc., or a bit of more private emotional things, such as a message from family, development of a crush on a fellow constudent, etc.

The only things I think we would need to make this work are a) a conrace, b) four players, minimum, and c) the patience to stick with it.


Thoughts?

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Nannalu »

I don't think I really like of UoC idea. It seems so... silly.
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Astraios »

The whole concept of conlangery is silly. Say something constructive. :P

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Nannalu »

I think it's stupid, basically. You might as well make a thread about rambling on about your concultures.
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Astraios »

Um, isn't that just exactly what everybody does when they write a non-RP post about their conculture?

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Nannalu »

Yes, but this is about RPing and doing things differently.
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Astraios »

Oh, come on. The only similarity between ordinary posts and the UoC posts would be a splurge of information from the LOTD, because we wouldn't be responding as critical conworlders, but as students who want to learn for the sake of learning about or getting a job in the conculture being described. It would have a completely different feel to it because we'd be in-character; different questions would be raised because of the characters' different values and opinions to our own. It wouldn't just be a list of points, it'd be a list of points punctuated by your amazing story-telling skills. And if it's the word "lecture" that's turning you off, then you can tell an anecdote, or hand out virtual reality hats, or show a recording. It doesn't have to be boring.

Anyway, it was just an idea of how to make an RPG more controlled and less likely to take an IRL-year to pass a game-week. It doesn't matter if nobody likes it, because maybe someone will have a better idea.

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by personak »

I like Astarios' idea.
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Lukas Kelly »

What about just normal people, or outsiders, exploring a world. Exploring worlds from the inside have been a great way for me to expand and visualize ideas.

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Trailsend »

That's what my guild group is doing, and essentially what Astraios and I did some time ago. But Astraios is right, progress is very slow with such projects.

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Lyhoko Leaci »

That was also pretty much what the tours were, as well. And yes, they do take awhile... The Myon tour ran for a month or so I think, and only went from morning to afternoon in the world. And the other tours went at about the same pace.. too bad they ended and got pruned... but 4 tours at once probably was too much. Then someone else tried to start a 5th, but it never got off the ground.

And I like the UoC idea.

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Amuere »

I RP alot so I'd be more than willing to help out.
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Astraios »

Well, if personak, Ebba Leaci, and Amuere all play, that's the minimum number of players I suggested.

All the characters would naturally have to speak English, and it would be advantageous to come from a conculture familiar with the concepts of school, but that's not strictly necessary - as long as the character figures out how the system works, s/he could join.

Shall we see if more people want to join, then? Impose a size-limit on the class of Interconnational Studies? Begin a thread already?

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Risla »

I would definitely join with a speaker of South Eresian. :D

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Lukas Kelly »

So, would it just be linguistic analyses, or are some of the classes going to be along the lines of learning to speak them, comp & lit, etc.?

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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Christopher Schröder »

This does sound like a fun way to flesh things out a bit -- would the lecturers necessarily need to talk about language, or could topics include things like culture, scientific discoveries, and the like?
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Lyhoko Leaci »

Sounds like it's general, Astraios didn't say anything about it being limited to just language when he first posted the idea.
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Re: Role-Playing

Post by Astraios »

Yep.
I wrote:The subject of the class could be anything to do with that character's home world
;)


You can give a linguistic analysis, an outline of biological history, cookery lessons, an explanation of the physical and mental sensations involved in shapeshifting, a breakdown on how to pilot a starship, an exhibition of your character's stamp collection, anything. The only rule is that it has to be exciting enough to hold the others' attention - you can have your LOTD swinging naked from the light fittings throwing carrots at the constudents, if you think it'll help them stay awake. (Actually, maybe not. I don't think they have carrots in this parallel university.) It'll be written in-character anyway, so it's bound to be interesting, as we'll get to see how your conspecies deals with speaking in front of crowds, technology that doesn't always work, etc. :D

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