----------__----------
Role Playing: 3 Basic questions
1. I keep hearing about RPs, but something's bugging me... What exactly IS a role play?
Great starting question. In short, a role play is a story told from the perspective of several people who are playing at once. Many people start, but the real test is to see how long it takes before the RP trickles down to no one. Approximately 95% of all role plays are NEVER FINISHED! Many reasons for this are evident, but let's focus on the definition first.
For the more technical peoples within the crowd, a role play has much in common with a book's script; action scenes are played out using words instead of visuals, detail is very important, and interactions between characters drives the story along. However, unlike a book, which may be written between one or two people, a role play often involves several parties, each with their own unique style and preference as to what characters they use. This makes role plays more diverse and interesting, since they give insight into how another person thinks and acts, even if neither of you meet in real life. That's about the best description I can give as to what role plays are.
2. What makes role plays so fun? I mean... why not just write the whole story out yourself?
Anyone who says this obviously has not tried to write their own story...
As mentioned before, a role play involves several people in the process of creating a story. Even if one or several people are new to the experience, it can still be fun and interesting, since people put forth their ideas of what their characters should look like, act like, sound like, ect. If only one person were doing this, that means 1) they have to create all these details themselves, and 2) they don't have outside help in creating different and unique characters, which could be good or bad.
For amateur writers, role plays are a good starting point before launching into making a story yourself. The mix of ideas you can get from playing multiple RPs makes life very interesting indeed, as some people might find ways around problems that you never saw or even would never HAVE seen, had they not done so. This furthers your understanding about what you can do should you find yourself in a similar situation later on in your writing career.
3. Ok, so basically they're fun because people make them fun... got that. So.... what exactly do you play as?
Heh... that question is possibly the hardest one in the world to answer! First, there must be a place for people to come to in order to play. If you're doing one for the first time, an excellent idea would be to participate in a few others in diverse categories beforehand to get the feeling for what you like to do, or would like to do.
As the genres for role playing stretch as far and wide as the number of genre niches there are in the world, simply making one role play can be daunting x-x trust me, nothing is more annoying that starting what you think is the perfect RP, and then having no one join it because no one knows where to start x-x
----------__----------
Creating a masterpiece
To begin, really, it all starts with a single thought you might have had a while back, or something that came to mind that you though “Hey, this would be cool!” If you become serious about your role playing (as I have >w<), keeping a journal or notebook of all the ideas that you want to keep when they pop up is an excellent idea, since notebooks and journals are cheap and ideas can come at almost any time of the day.
After that comes a “character rough”, as I like to say :3 Basically, what do you want your character to look like? How will they act? How will they react to someone? Thinking this up isn't hard, just time-consuming sometimes. This is why many people like to use only one or two characters for most of their role plays; it simplifies things a LOT. Me... I like a diverse cast, and use different characters for most role plays (outside of series, where you kinda have to have the same character for everything x-x).
Finally, to finish up the prep work, you need someplace that you know will let you host the RP. This can be any place from right here on Gaia to a more specialized site that deals specifically with your role play. There are several free forum-hosting sites, the more popular of them being InvisionFree, but these don't really give you many options to work with. Best for people who aren't obsessed with making their forums all nice and pretty and such.
Once you have the basic format down, have a character to start with, and a location that will let you do so, then comes the hardest part: starting the actual role play. Like many things in life, its easier said than done... First, writing up a rough on paper or a word program would be a most intelligent idea, as (i have found out the hard way many times,) simply writing it down on the web page can become... disastrous, especially if your computer is prone to being on the fritz quite often x-x Saving or even just writing it down in a word processor of some kind prevents that, as most nowadays have an auto-recovery system that prevents loss of important stuff, should your browser or computer abruptly die for an unknown reason >.<
Once you have that rough, read through it a time or two if you feel like its not up to snuff. If you feel confident and ready (or just ready... confidence can be a hard thing for some people to have x-x), draw up the rules for the role play. These will consist of the background or setting for your role play, what boundaries you set, such as: how many people can play, what era of technology you can use, pre-existing feuds you might have in the storyline, ect, ect, ect. Also, any special rules, such as “You are allowed to team up with one other person on someone else” would be put here. All of this is usually found at the beginning of the RP before you even begin, either in a separate post or at the beginning of your story. These keep other people from doing whatever they want, and tell what should and should not be found in their first posts and onwards.
----------__----------
