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(originally posted on Diaryland.com, 2003-08-23 - 2:01 a.m.)
Catching up on missed posts... on to roleplaying! In particular,
THE "A.I." ROLEPLAYING GAME! Or, "How I learned to stop worrying and love playing Gigolo Joe."
You can visit the AI RP Yahoo! group and this related AI RP Tripod site.
Basically, I run it. I didn’t intend to initially. However, the person who started the group (Jennifer December) had no experience whatsoever in running RP (roleplaying), while I have about 16 years of it under my belt. I came in as a player with Gigolo Joe as my character (lucky me!), and agreed to take over the RP for “a little while” until Jennifer learned the ropes.
This, by the way, is Joe. Isn't he pretty? :-D
That was back in about January. Now Gigolo Joe is an NPC (non-player character), and I’ve found myself challenged to keep ahead of four EXTREMELY intelligent, inventive, and agile players, running eight PC’s (player characters) between them. To misquote our good Gigolo, “They test my limits, but try I must!” And it’s been one helluva hoot, let me tell you!
But I wouldn’t have it any other way. They’re a joy to work with: Twinkle, who plays Monica Swinton with deeply thoughtful emotion; Ruby, whose bounty hunter Cal McPherson is a wonder of smoking, drinking, hard-edged cynicism; Ruby again, playing Nicky Panzini, a young man uncertain of himself whose visions may hold the key to the future; Northlight, playing both the bemused astronomer Tsivil Joblowski and her exacting, order-obsessed Mecha companion Sirus; and finally Matrix Refugee, playing the trio of Cecie Martin, Frank Sweitz, and Hal McGeever, three characters whose personalities span such a range of imagination and variety that I am always in awe of her ability to act them out so clearly and strongly. In almost two decades of RPing in groups, I have never met a group with such synergy that works in such harmony.
The “Main Game” is played out in live-time chat, usually once every two or so weeks. The chat is logged, and the logs edited and sent out to each of the players a few days after the chat session. Play typically lasts about 7 hours per session, but the time seems to fly by with so much going on! Not that the game skims over a whole lot: this is an RP where a glance between PCs can change the course of the action, character-driven in the extreme. An 8 hour session can also cover 8 hours in the gaming universe, or sometimes even less.
I eventually plan to upload all chat logs to the group’s Tripod site (initially we were fictionalizing each chat, but there’s just TOO much happening in each session to rephrase it all).
On the Yahoo! mailing list, a second phase of the game is played out: the “PHUN” universe! Here all of our characters live in our houses, make love and war, play jokes on each other, and generally get up to all kinds of hijinks. (My cat Emmie, mentioned in an earlier post, plays her own little role in the PHUN universe, lol...)
The sheer inventiveness of the group is evident in the number of monthly posts: 359 in April, 439 in May, 250 in June and 267 in July (people being on vacation), and 125 so far in August (again, folks being on vacation...). Gee, can you tell I love these guys yet? :-D Wonderful, amazing, incredible, fantastic... I’m so, SO lucky to have this opportunity. All I can hope is that I don’t let them down.
A final thought on top of all the gushing: another RPing friend of mine once asked, “Aren’t you afraid that you’ll accidentally leak stuff to the PC’s, since Joe is a God-run NPC?” The thought made me chuckle. “No, never!” I replied. “Joe is such an airhead in so many ways, there’s never anything in his mind to leak!” Playing a character with such a one-track mind can be difficult, but so far I’ve never had anything but fun with him. In fact, after a tough day of being myself, playing Joe seems like a vacation.
NEXT UP: Wicca! or, "Don't they make furniture out of that?"
Catching up on missed posts... on to roleplaying! In particular,
THE "A.I." ROLEPLAYING GAME! Or, "How I learned to stop worrying and love playing Gigolo Joe."
You can visit the AI RP Yahoo! group and this related AI RP Tripod site.
Basically, I run it. I didn’t intend to initially. However, the person who started the group (Jennifer December) had no experience whatsoever in running RP (roleplaying), while I have about 16 years of it under my belt. I came in as a player with Gigolo Joe as my character (lucky me!), and agreed to take over the RP for “a little while” until Jennifer learned the ropes.
This, by the way, is Joe. Isn't he pretty? :-D
That was back in about January. Now Gigolo Joe is an NPC (non-player character), and I’ve found myself challenged to keep ahead of four EXTREMELY intelligent, inventive, and agile players, running eight PC’s (player characters) between them. To misquote our good Gigolo, “They test my limits, but try I must!” And it’s been one helluva hoot, let me tell you!
But I wouldn’t have it any other way. They’re a joy to work with: Twinkle, who plays Monica Swinton with deeply thoughtful emotion; Ruby, whose bounty hunter Cal McPherson is a wonder of smoking, drinking, hard-edged cynicism; Ruby again, playing Nicky Panzini, a young man uncertain of himself whose visions may hold the key to the future; Northlight, playing both the bemused astronomer Tsivil Joblowski and her exacting, order-obsessed Mecha companion Sirus; and finally Matrix Refugee, playing the trio of Cecie Martin, Frank Sweitz, and Hal McGeever, three characters whose personalities span such a range of imagination and variety that I am always in awe of her ability to act them out so clearly and strongly. In almost two decades of RPing in groups, I have never met a group with such synergy that works in such harmony.
The “Main Game” is played out in live-time chat, usually once every two or so weeks. The chat is logged, and the logs edited and sent out to each of the players a few days after the chat session. Play typically lasts about 7 hours per session, but the time seems to fly by with so much going on! Not that the game skims over a whole lot: this is an RP where a glance between PCs can change the course of the action, character-driven in the extreme. An 8 hour session can also cover 8 hours in the gaming universe, or sometimes even less.
I eventually plan to upload all chat logs to the group’s Tripod site (initially we were fictionalizing each chat, but there’s just TOO much happening in each session to rephrase it all).
On the Yahoo! mailing list, a second phase of the game is played out: the “PHUN” universe! Here all of our characters live in our houses, make love and war, play jokes on each other, and generally get up to all kinds of hijinks. (My cat Emmie, mentioned in an earlier post, plays her own little role in the PHUN universe, lol...)
The sheer inventiveness of the group is evident in the number of monthly posts: 359 in April, 439 in May, 250 in June and 267 in July (people being on vacation), and 125 so far in August (again, folks being on vacation...). Gee, can you tell I love these guys yet? :-D Wonderful, amazing, incredible, fantastic... I’m so, SO lucky to have this opportunity. All I can hope is that I don’t let them down.
A final thought on top of all the gushing: another RPing friend of mine once asked, “Aren’t you afraid that you’ll accidentally leak stuff to the PC’s, since Joe is a God-run NPC?” The thought made me chuckle. “No, never!” I replied. “Joe is such an airhead in so many ways, there’s never anything in his mind to leak!” Playing a character with such a one-track mind can be difficult, but so far I’ve never had anything but fun with him. In fact, after a tough day of being myself, playing Joe seems like a vacation.
NEXT UP: Wicca! or, "Don't they make furniture out of that?"
