Dex 🔞

God damn I really like roleplaying, getting to hop into these characters I made up, make up a little story, write out a little scene. It brings me such fulfillment, such a burst of creativity.

I really wish freeform roleplay with a friend or two wasn't so demonized. Oh it's now cool if you have dice and rules because it makes it legitimate, but if you just make a little story with your friends it's weird! "NO RP," goddamn give yourself a little freedom to have some fun! Pretend to be your fursona, you don't need a fursuit for it, roleplay is free!

I think this is the issue I have with tabletop RP and VR, you're so restricted in expression! TTRPG you have rules you have to follow, you have to conform to the story and world. VR you're still you, just moving a puppet, constrained by what the VR space can accommodate and what model you can afford. In roleplay, you can do whatever you want! You make the space, you make the story, you make the characters based on how you write them. The world isn't one made for you, you get to make it!

Maybe this is a side effect of me being extremely hyperphantastic but making up a world and the people who inhabit into it and falling into it on my terms is so much more fulfilling than being in a VR chatroom or a tabletop space that someone else is in control of.

I think my hyperphantasia might be part of the issue of why I can't that deep into furry things nowadays: a fursuit or VR avatar is just a facsimile of what my mind can actually create. What's in my head is so much more vivid than what I can ever hope to have represented in the real or virtual worlds.

Not that the past was some golden age, there was (and remains) plenty of bullshit and drama, but it was so easy to whip up a desc and do things, and it cost absolutely nothing beyond whatever you're paying your ISP anyway.

Is a person you do not need in your life.

Zomi: [Purge them with unholy fire!]

..... Thank you Zomi

This was, and is such an important thing to us. Roleplay has long been a critical sort of self expression, given there’s only so much we can do to our vessel without stepping on one another’s style. We used to practically live on MUCKs and we’re still kind of exist on a MUSH or two.

But we especially feel the rigidity of things like VR, much like Furcadia not having even a quarter of the species that would be needed to handle our system, or the animations being so limited. Describing a vivid scene from our head is so much easier than trying to recreate it in something like VRChat or Second Life.

Definitely something we need more of in our lives, yip! Sadly we can’t even handle group scenes anymore, owing to our ADHD having gotten worse over the years. With a few friends, though, it would be a lovely time, though.

Honestly it… kinda feels like a dying art form and that makes us sad.

The advantage that MU*s have over scening in chat is that MU*s have a sense of place, a topography, a presence that chat doesn't have; similarly, when everyone has a description (and often a profile) available for viewing in advance of any roleplay, they seem more there than if they're merely a name in a chat window.

And yes, the brilliant thing about roleplaying in text is that your imagination is free to travel as far as it likes, to create a depth and complexity unavailable to computer graphics; and this mental imagery is yours, it is uniquely tailored to resonate with you. In comparison, to be presented with a 3D avatar or an illustration is to be constrained by that specific vision, even before one considers the lack of verisimilitude in these representations. The concrete image is profoundly limiting.

I feel... a lot of this, honestly. A lot of my own roleplaying with friends as of late has been in a small setting I whipped up of my own that's kind of just organically fleshed itself out over the months with contributions from myself and others, all situated within a channel in a personal Discord server with another attached for character profiles - which... really is just a way of emulating that exact kind of sense of 'place' that starting a scene from scratch doesn't necessarily give you.

At this point I'd say F-list is probably the closest thing to like, a real major inheritor of that whole scene (not counting the various still functioning but really, mostly dead MU*s out there), but also... god, if that place's community isn't fucking godawful - in no small part because it's basically Twitter but for RP, in that everyone's there in a way that ruins the experience for all but the lowest common denominator. Yet I keep logging on daily, because at this point if you're looking for new partners, where else do you even go.

Egh.

I think for us, longform roleplay worked as something for when we had more mental energy to devote to it - but after that point, like so many, we slipped into mainly only being able to do it shortform, a tiny little vignette; it's the main reason [redacted] is still on Twitter, because it's the best place for casually doing that.

We like VR a whole lot, but I would agree that it serves a different purpose; it allows for embodying a character within the limitations of technology/cost/platform restrictions (and I'd still say that for most, it is likely going to be better for those moments of trying on a different shape, looking down, and going "holy shit, this is me" - it takes a very vivid imagination to match that sense of self-actualization ¹) - but it is primarily more for talking to the people/animals behind the avatars, just in forms we prefer and without other physical limitations such as geography - and without the additional effort of always having to imagine everything from scratch.
The interactions can still be inspiring - but the limitations do make them only ever a rough approximation of what characters can do; the macro's paws can never deform a landscape (that isn't specifically built for that).
The dialogue is more out of character than anything else, even if it might stray back in briefly. ²

We still will RP if a friend wants us to - had a nice session the other day.
We don't explicitly put "no RP" anywhere, but if we did that would be more just as shorthand for "we wish we had the time and energy to do this with friends more often, so we cannot devote that time to people we do not know"

1. shoutout to all first person TF artists, who I know have invoked some Feelings in friends before

2. (Or stray to the wrong character, for those with multiple avatars - quite easy to hear some very unwolf-like noises from an ancient forest wolf spirit we know)