Some resources:

• [The Improv Wiki]
  • There's always something to be learned from other media and art forms - with roleplay, one of the biggies is theatre, especially improvised theatre.
• TriStat - An exercise in familiar face-to-face amusements and hidden revelations.

Pluralistic Lemmings ate my Words!

What's it all about? Well, we're words, that's what it is. And there are many ways of expressing those words

" " Those ol conversation bits, invented in the 19th C. Punctuation marks that help with readability

The Colon: Posing or action. I've been experimenting with this a lot, mainly with the idea of showing other actions going on in the same room that aren't Zoe's doing, which, I guess, can be considered to be cinematic, that while there are all of us online, there are also other things going on. Or I may, as whim seeks me, immediately start writing as if I were continuing something

Whispering, or 'Non-consensual private information-sending'. I haven't been experimenting with this much and so I haven't been using it much past the 'My character is whispering to someone else in the same room'. I don't use it very often because I can simulate it using either " " or posing, and that lets the other critters in the room decide wether or not they 'hear' it

Page mail is a joy for me. I use this often as a way to 'play multiple stories at once'. I may, for example, be tossing paper airplanes with Glal whilst I am also listening to a certain critter's heart go beep!beep!beep!. There are those here who know of my Puzzlebox mysteryService Announcements and they are still experimental

Spoof is another joy, as the text that bumps up on the screen has no context for me. A particular example of this that has me in awe [twin et al in the featureless alleyway--I'll find the url eventually -:]

Do you mean [this] spoof frenzy? The [scene in the alley] didn't really involve spoofing. There's a certain magic when the spoofs start going that doesn't quite come through when it's up there as a static object... -- Twin

Things that I think about:

		--when I'm 'awake', what is awake?
		--Brom enters the room. What does that mean?
		--What else could posing be?
		--What does it mean to be in a 'room'? Are there player preferences
                  that help with this besides 'spam'? What are the use of rooms?
                --The meanings within sending a private message to someone and
                  sending a global message and letting critters choose

Structure

I've noticed that - for me, at least - the actual structure of the muck, with its 'rooms' that you have to 'build', subtly encourages thinking of things in real, physical concrete terms. My 'architectural mind' kicks in and I start making mental maps of the place. Most of my characters are similarly rooted in ground-level physicality. Partly that's just how my own mind works.

But of course, nothing really enforces that. The point of PB is that anything can happen so long as you can type it (or draw it or what have you).

I'm reminded of [Scott McCloud]'s "picture plane" idea from Understanding Comics (a great book, with some ideas about narrative that I've been meaning to work into PB). He graphs the images used in comics along a continuum from extremely realistic art to extremely iconic to completely abstract. The result is a [Big Triangle].

In an interactive text environment you could think of things in similar terms.

At the "Realistic" extreme are things that could happen in RL. Everything is physically plausible. Not much on PB belongs in this corner, but it's still important - all our players are rooted here, and the fact that things here bear some resemblance to a known reality helps make them meaningful and understandable and stirring.

Move rightward toward "Fantastic" and things get weird, bend the known rules of physics and so forth, but they remain logical and self-consistent. At the lower right corner you might get, say, beings that are completely alien from anything humans, but their behaviour, physiology and so forth, all has a good ol' Rational Explanation. And if something happens, it stays 'happened'.

Venture above the baseline and things start getting very odd. The fourth wall starts to crumble, or falls on your head. Story continuity no longer matters. It's all a dream. Or a dozen different storyteller's version of the same event - all of them correct, or perhaps none of them.

Amanita's closer to the Realistic corner. In the Fantastic corner might be someone like System. And up in the Metaphysical reaches are beings(?) like Zoe.

Comments? Anyone care to add to this or offer a completely different take on things? All this rambling is nothing so much as a reminder to myself to get weird on occasion. ;)

That is so neat! In the Puzzle, I'm sure being 'Realistic' can be seen with some form of pity, or archaic quaintness, the Puzzle seeming to be a kind of Rest Home for the Transcendent, where the 'base' reality is Metaphysical (as opposed to, say, our reality, which can be thought of as Realistic--for the purposes of my thoughts here -:) and where sentients can dip into other modes voluntarily. I am also thinking of the Pentacle with the apex pointing down representing grounding the spirit in the Earth. Or the Kaballah Tree of Life (which might make an interesting Subway, hmm? -;) Or maybe another way to map that neato triangle could be Spirit, Earth/Ground, Imagination/Ego, I'm not sure about the last one, but I'm really ticking on Spirit and Earth/Ground --Zoe

Woah...I love this explanation. I usually imagine PB existing somewhere between the Fantastic and the Metaphysical. Though my perception of a good deal of characters are rooted in either the Realistic or Fantastic zones. I'd love to do something to occasionally bump it up into the top of the triangle. Am actually working on that with Nikolai...an experiment gone wrong that will cause regular anti-continuity subjectivity storms. An explosion of the subjectivity distorter (also know as...an Improbability Generator).

Zoe, you've an awesome idea, there. When I first got on PB I totally wanted to build something based on the Tree of the Sephiroth (Kaballah Tree of Life), but nothing really fit. The Subway system, however...really fits well. 6 warps, maybe a few interwarp stops. The only resemblence to the actual Tree might be how things linked together between stops. --Coalesce/Nikolai

Coool. Maybe there could be different subway lines, even: the Ellipse, the Kaballah, the Metropolitan... not that we'd have that many stops built on the muck... just little details that could be mentioned on signs and in poses... -- A

---

Another thought: I can think of two extremes in RP style that correspond roughly to the baseline of the triangle and the upper corner...

Plotline RP, if you will, is all about canon, continuity and so forth. I've tended toward this type just because it's how I tend to build my characters - building them up from their history, their past experiences and so on. I'm the classic cheesy actor going "So what's my motivation here?" In fact, you could say it's the Stanislavsky school... all about naturalism, mannerism and so forth.

Having the wiki and stacks of logs around makes it easier to stick to a single, self-consistent history - perhaps a little too easy. The down side is that it can be stifling. Trying to wrangle a plot through a gauntlet of technical and continuity considerations gets to be work. Big cinematic plots can be fun, but to anyone not immediately involved, they can seem like a three-hour movie that's going on in the other room, and already an hour or two in. And the obsessively detailed episode guides and the spaceship technical manuals really ought to take a back seat to the stories.

Contrast this with Episodic RP, in which characters act out scenes that don't necessarily follow any linear version of history. Like the legends of Robin Hood that vary drastically from one telling to the next, or the daydream adventures of Snoopy or Calvin, they take place outside of the linear timeline.

This sort of play turns up more often in out-of-character interactions, when people pose silly gags or more involved scenes. It bears more resemblance to improv theatre. There's often a quick setup that thrusts the characters into distinct roles (the one that springs to mind, for some reason, is a scene from FM: "Wychwood is going to invite me to the prom! I'm so excited!"). The characters in them are often archetypal, or at least, they start out as archetypes and gain more detail as the story goes on. They are the Nervous Teenage Kid, or the Everytiger, or the Strangevampire, and their motivations and qualities are similarly stylized to begin with.

There is, of course, a lot of middle ground between these extremes. Most people will probably find it comfortable to strike a balance between continuity and context on the one hand, and freedom and imagination on the other. You might compare it to a comic strip or TV show where there is a history, but you don't have to know every last detail of the plot to follow it.

Perhaps it would be more useful to think of things not in terms of canon but perhaps spirit... you don't have to look up, say, the name of the authorities in Upwarp, or even agree on whether they're a Council of Chief Scientists, or a Planning Board or what... just take the idea of 'benevolent technocracy' and run with it. (Maybe we should make that disclaimer on the front page bigger and more frequent, while we're at it...)

-- Amanita

I don't know if it fits into any category, but I've had good success from Invention RP. Basically taking a cool idea, making an invention out of it or creating something at random, then seeing how people interact. A simple idea/invention can spawn many plotlines and episodes, just for the sake of existing and being something to interact with. A 'plot device' as it were, can explode into many uses. (See the StrangeCure or the Charmvirus, for example) It's not so much an RP style except in RP'ing one who comes up with the crazy inventions. It usually gives rise to episodes, but can be merged into the plotline style too. Depending on the invention, it most likely fits on the lower bar of the triangle, realistic in expectation of what the creation does, except when it's fantastically better...or worse.

--Coal/Nik

Yeah! Or making a 'discovery' works as well - discovery and invention are practically the same thing on the muck. In improv terms, they're like an opening 'offer'. And then everyone else can help [advance the scene]...

-- Amanita