Shipping in the Alternity-Verse.... Same-player vs Multi-player

[gwendolyngrace]

Aliethen asked:

With the cast list coming out, it was revealed that a lot of characters who played opposite each other in storylines were in fact played by the same person. How did you balance that? Was it ever hard?




I felt that deserved its own thread. Discuss!

Comments

[gwendolyngrace]

For my part, I will note that I don't think we wound up with any relationships that formed during Alternity who were played by the same player. The same-player relationships were the married couples: Alice and Frank (Linny), Arthur and Molly (Peg), Lucius and Narcissa (me), Rodolphus and Bellatrix (Rene).

Except for Rod and Bella, none of them started as same-player (you'll see when we show you the wiki, boy, I feel like we're totally cock-teasing about the wiki but we're just not quite ready to open it up yet), but when we lost players for various reasons, it just made sense to reassign the orphaned character to the player who already controlled the other half of the couple.

By contrast, I think almost all of the other played relationships - except for Terry and Luna, which only came to being in the codas - were among two different players. I think this was deliberate in everyone's case? But I couldn't say for sure.

The thing is that when you're playing a couple who can finish each other's sentences, it's a little easier to play both sides. Though IMO that's less easy to do when they're squabbling because there's a temptation to craft the conversation so that you hand one character or the other a perfect setup for a line, and honestly, I don't think that even old-marrieds are that considerate of one another all the time.

The advantage with another player being the other half of your relationship is that you can't predict or dictate what that person is going to say in response to your statements. That can be stressful, especially if you're not coming across the way you intend, and conversations go sideways, but it can also be really really fun, because you're in a position where you really have to work to get to the place you want to be.

[lapin_agile]

There was a while where Daphne and Draco were (pretending to be) a couple. Rene played them both. But otherwise, yes, you're right.

I suppose another type of relationship was like Lana's with Ned, a PC and NPC. Or Daphne and Barny Bole. There were a few others. There one player controlled both sides and had to bring the second character to life in negative space.

[naomikritzer]

Personally, I did not like having to talk to myself in threads. (Peg and I were kind of polar opposites in that respect.) I found it cumbersome and like work instead of play. I did it when I had to -- for instance, the conversation between Seamus and Sally-Anne during the May 16th Battle where he tried to get her to come heal Stephen Rosier -- but for the most part, I tried to avoid playing characters who talked to each other much. Trying to do a marriage between two people I was playing both of would have driven me nuts!

On those occasions that I did talk to myself, I tried to do it as organically as possible. One character would say something; I would log out and in as the other person and try to respond in-character in the moment. But I did this a lot less than the people RP'ing married couples, for instance.

[gwendolyngrace]

Yeah. I agree - I did it occasionally, too, more often with L&N than other random characters who suddenly needed to interact. One issue I always had was "why are they writing instead of talking?" But at least with L&N it was easy to explain cuz the manor is big.

Naomi's and Rene's point is good thoigh about other chars controlled by the same player even if they weren't shippy. Writing both halves is more like writing and less like role-playing.

[lapin_agile]

Yes, and where a post was theoretically open to other characters to join (an Order conversation, for instance), it could be challenging to get a word in if another player was having their couples or characters talk amongst themselves because sometimes you'd stumble into something that seemed like open conversation but was really planned out and so the independent voice could take the wheel off a conversation.

I found this challenging when I took up Ron, actually, because all the other Weasleys (at that time) had the same writer. There were times when Ron became the odd one out in his family, and that grew organically out of the way play happened--this writing dynamic shaped their interactions.

[reenie]

Playing the Lestrange clan was interesting, and also challenging at times (I played Raz for quite a while before shedding off a few characters due to real-life constraints).

Bellatrix became much more active by the end of the game, but you'll notice her contributions were pretty sporadic otherwise. Same with Rodolphus. I held back with them in part due to the aforementioned real-life constraints - I just didn't have as much time to devote to them, and in a way I thought they were more threatening if both the characters and readers were never quite sure what they were up to. (You might recall that everytime Bellatrix posted a PM in her journal, the ISS or Order would sometimes freak out that she was Up To Something).

That said, some of the domestic conflicts I wrote between Bella and Rod, and Rod and Raz, and Bella, Rod, and Hydra, were really satisfying. I particularly liked those two moments where Bellatrix had to reach out and ask Rodolphus for help - something she absolutely hated, by the way! The first is when she was trying to save a dying Voldemort; the second was when Rigel was being a pain at Buckingham, just as the DEs were trying to escape through the wards.

Playing the same family of characters really allows you to tell their story coherently, and shape all the pieces just so. One of the challenges, though, is making sure that their conversations don't sound entirely scripted. You lack the spontaneity of not knowing how another character is going to respond, so it can sometimes feel like the conversation goes from point A to point B a little too neatly.

[jenett]

I remember you saying something about how it's also much easier to torture someone else who's also you.

Which I found with Umbridge, actually: there are some things that were mentioned about Umbridge before I asked to play her that made Siz a particularly good target, but a big part of it was also that if I was being horrible to myself, as it were, it was a) a lot easier to do (and to do without tons of advance conversation about what she was going to pick on this time) and b) I didn't have to worry that I was going to mess someone's day up by dealing with Madam Pinkness in all her glory.

I mean, torturing other people was good too, narratively speaking, but we did a lot of that by her doing something off camera, and then having it come out in other conversations, which made the timing easier.

[gwendolyngrace]

So, on the subject of torture: Teddy's player left the game early and she asked that we not reassign him to anyone else - that he remain an unplayed NPC for the rest of the game.

Which was sometimes ... challenging, but we generally managed to deal with it. However, there were times when it was important that everyone in his vicinity have a clear idea of what he was up to. So there was a short while there where Rene and I would chat and I would supply the "voice of Teddy" for Hydra to report out...

I mentioned on another post, too, that when we ran the "Who Wants to Be a Death Eater?" competition, we both randomized some of the outcomes, *and* we asked players with an association to the Council-sponsors to take on the responsibility of ghost-playing those sponsors in communication with their candidates. I also (IIRC) asked them to judge the other contestants' efforts, so that everyone had the opportunity to upgrade their own choices and give poor scores to their opponents....

So there are ways to get around it, but yeah, being considerate of the player while trying to fuck with the character is a big part of it.

[naomikritzer]

Sometimes it's just a full-on availability issue. Peg was pretty much ALWAYS up for Corax abusing Bill, but I didn't want to have Corax do something horrible to him when she wasn't around to react to it.

If you're around, ALL your characters are around. And while there were posts that worked just fine non-synchronized, there were others where you wanted to post the first thing when the other person was around to reply promptly.

[annia]

Just going to drop this here.

After Bella died, I re-read her last post and I absolutely loved that the last thing Rod ever said to her was about Hydra. I remember thinking it was just perfect and I wondered if Bella and Rod's players had decided between them to leave it like that.
Obviously now I know that they had the same player.

But I thought it was wonderful, and I don't know, just a bit amusing that Bella was most likely thinking about Hydra when Sirius and Remus turned up to kill her.

So thank you for that because it was one of those perfect Alternity moments of something funny happening during masses of angst.

Actually, that's something that was masterfully done over all of Alternity. Humour amongst the angst. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have been able to read Alternity because the sad stuff would have been too much. Jenett and Kiya would always say to me "this is Alternity, of course it could get worse" but for me, it never did. That was mainly because of the sprinklings of humour you guys did.

[longstrider]

I found trying to manage Cedric/Cho while only being able to show one side of the conversation very hard. Which is a large part of why it ended so quickly.

I much preferred Siz/Raz where we could collaborate and bounce ideas off of each other.

[gwendolyngrace]

Well, having had a few relationships for characters who were unvoiced....

Yes. It was tricky. One thing was it was hard to balance. Either everything went well and it made for boring reading, or the couple fought a lot and that too got tiresome.

Mostly I think that was a product of other players not wanting to step on toes and so the player depicting the ship was the only person showing it happening. Occasionally I or others would bounce ideas off each other in those cases, to inject a sense of the unvoiced romantic partner as more than a cipher.

[gwendolyngrace]

It's sort of the same problem as "Day 3,786: still evil." But with romance.

[synecdochic]

I had the same problem with Charlie and his relationship with Dree and Em -- if I'd realized at the time I thought that up how difficult it was to give a sense of a relationship happening offscreen, I probably wouldn't have done it, or at least not in that form. (Although it really is such a huge part of Charlie's character that he's good at communication and spotting/taking care of emotional needs because he's got that experience doing so in his various polyamorous relationships, but I probably could have done it another way.)

I was always so in love with Deb's ability to convey so much plot in so few words with her messages from Barty to other Aurors. It did such a great job of filling in the holes.

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

Well, I for one loved Charlie's polyamory, even if a lot of it did have to happen off-screen ;)

[gwendolyngrace]

+1

[synecdochic]

Thank you! And, I mean, I loved it too, just that it was very difficult to portray properly. :D

Charlie sort of sprang to life in my head fully formed -- I was going through my usual questions of "what makes this person tick" and got to 'relationships' and I didn't even have to think about it before he was like, yeah, I've never understood monogamy and never will, but I've at least managed to figure out how to do it without things blowing up. He was definitely poly before he took the job at the Reserve (I think he talked a bit about his teenage dating habits here and there), but the job definitely helped, because dragonkeepers tend to be an isolated population doing intense and all-consuming work and not have time to go looking elsewhere. So they develop a really strong cultural understanding around how you go about hooking up with the others on the job -- and how you don't, not if you want to avoid causing trouble.

When Peg and I were trying to figure out how Charlie related to his parents and to the rest of the Weasleys -- he loves his family dearly, and he's definitely a Weasley, but he's definitely a fish out of water sometimes -- I said that Molly probably thinks Charlie's never had a serious boyfriend/girlfriend, even though she's met loads of the people he's slept with, because a) he keeps his mouth shut about what he's up to because otherwise the Weasleys will be Weasleys at him (although Molly got SO MUCH BETTER about boundaries over time!), and b) all of the people he's slept with have been friends first, not romantic partners, and he won't sleep with somebody unless he's friends with them. (I always hesitated to call him aromantic, because he does form romantic relationships, they're just not his primary concern. But he's a few steps closer to aromantic than your 'average' person.)

Which is why he and Tonks worked together so well! Very early on -- I've actually gone looking for it and couldn't find it again; I'll have to really dig at some point -- Tonks had said she was feeling wistful about Bea getting older and wondering if she should have another kid, and Charlie said, hey, you know, if you ever want to, come ask, I will totally knock you up, and for him it was just the sort of thing you do if you have a friend who wants a kid but whose other relationships are Complicated. Charlie and Tonks were never Complicated, and that's why I loved them! (Well. Beyond the complications of Bill still having not gotten over his crush on Tonks when Charlie and Tonks started sleeping together, but. He did feel kind of guilty about that.)

(And then they did have Adam, and Charlie surprised himself by immediately falling head-over-heels for his son -- he knew he'd love the kid, but he didn't expect to have his life priorities shift so suddenly and sharply on a dime. It confused him a bit! But he's such a great da, and will be again once he gets over the "my life has been completely upended" and "oh God I don't want my kid to see me like this".)

[kiya]

A while back I made the comment about Charlie that his work was so overwhelmingly dangerous that it probably soaked up his entire capacity for Gryffindor recklessness, and thus meant that he was capable of having a wellspring of good sense where most lions have extra "Okay, on three!"

I loved Charlie's relationships, speaking of character representation.

[synecdochic]

*sporfle* Oh, I love that theory. (And speaking of Charlie's dangerous job, I loved that you'd get these little snatches of just how much he was downplaying here and there. Like, this is a job where if you want two days off and you can't find somebody to trade shifts with, you go out and deliberately let the highly poisonous dragon bite you because it's 48 hours off shift lest you manifest a severe allergic reaction, and Charlie's always like, yeah, hang on, lemme go get bit by the Vipertooth, nbd.)

I didn't decide until later on that the Hat had offered Charlie Hufflepuff or Gryffindor and he picked Gryffindor because Weasleys, but it does work for him. :D

[batrachian]

*cheerful swearing*

and this is where I make inarticulate gibbering noises again about how you've managed to take a piece of my psyche and self-image and project it out onto a character in such a way that I fall deeply in...sync...with them, and then you make a post like this where you lay the pieces out and I go "oh. that's why."

(not that you're the only person to have done this, mind *cheerful stare at jenett*, but you are so consistently good at it)

[synecdochic]

Oh, yay! happy to be of service. :D

[jenett]

I cannot imagine doing Siz/Raz without either you or Rene, because part of what I think made them work is they went at things from very different points of view sometimes. (And not just the obvious ones.)

[synecdochic]

I was SO GLAD I didn't have characters who needed to talk to themselves very often. (There were a few Charlie and Snape moments, but they all happened offscreen and were referenced in-journal, rather than played out.)

I don't know how those of you who did it, did it, man.

[queenbookwench.livejournal.com]

One nice consequence of the Mean Girls arc was that afterward Susan & Lavender almost never interacted (except once or twice for prefect stuff).

[synecdochic]

Unexpected benefits!

[stormyhearted]

This is fantastically fascinating stuff. :D

[pegkerr]

I had an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast, because I played it both ways. I had Molly and Arthur by myself, and I also had the opportunity to play Bill against Naomi's Rachel.

Playing Arthur and Molly together I found very easy, actually. It probably helped that it was an extremely well-established canon relationship, and really, their characters had not drifted terribly far from their canonical selves. But I never found it boring. Other players have remarked that they would find it boring to only be talking with themselves, but I never did.

I loved playing the Weasleys as a group, actually. I think on the whole I was pleased with how I managed to keep their voices/characters distinctive and let them play off against each other. Somehow, when I was writing Weasleys en masse I felt more confident/witty than I feel in my own RL. Here are a few favorite examples:

Molly, Arthur and Bill react to Dolohov's Intra Profundus disaster.

Bill grits his teeth and agrees to meet with Percy for lunch.

The Weasleys react to the twins ambushing Molly on their birthday to force her to reveal the Order to them.

Bill faces down the twins.

I never had a single time that I can think of that I regretted that I played more than one Weasley, like that this was just boring. Sometimes I regretted more that the other players who were playing Weasleys were not available. I quickly grew to love Bill Charlie interactions so much, but there were times I would have been happy to do another scene between the two of them, but Denise wasn't available.

Now, with Naomi, between Bill and Rachel, things flowed very well, too. Part of it was that I was working with a partner I work well with, whom I trust. I have often asked Naomi to vett posts I've drafted, and I knew she would have great suggestions. Sometimes I would ask her for ideas about what MY character would say.

Trust is very important if you're going to be working with another player regularly. There were times I had to be absent, and I would give Naomi my passwords and ask her to make any comment that needed to be made by one of my characters.

Sometimes you can get frustrated because another player just doesn't see your character as you do. It's like you're playing with someone who is expecting (or playing assuming) totally different reactions, or who acts like your character is someone totally different than you're trying to convey. Sometimes this was fixed by swapping/trading characters between players, so that a character dyad could be played by players who worked together a little more smoothly. Sometimes the result is that you just don't play with another character as much as you hoped you would, because the frustration gets in the way.

Sometimes this resulted in players leaving the game.

Flexiblity helped. Being willing to find ways to work with different players helped. Being willing to explore directions where other characters/players are pushing you helped, too. And sometimes, despite your initial, inner resistance, it could lead to dazzling play that ended up being better than anything you could have imagined.

[gwendolyngrace]

Peg, I wouldn't say that it's boring to play both halves of a conversation - it's just different. I greatly enjoyed a number of the threads I did for Lucius and Narcissa or even Sirius and Hermione. But for me, more than half the fun of this process was the back-and-forth between the players that resulted in the dialogue seen on the screen. And when you're both sides of the dialogue, then it can't be interactive like that.

My point about playing a relationship with a complete NPC wasn't actually about it being boring, either. It was that it's hard to balance those relationships so that they are neither so perfect or smooth-running that there's nothing to really talk about, or so riddled with angst and constantly rocky that the PC who talks about his/her relationship problems becomes tedious and repetitive.

The nice thing about another player in the mix is that you have that person also pushing and pulling against your own thoughts and desires for the ship that you're building, so that you're not the only person trying to figure out what the ship is like, how it changes shape over time, etc.

Deb did a great job of showing relationships in different stages, particularly Lana and Ned, but even some of Barty's conquests. Rene also had some great bits with Daphne and Barney, and there were some good notes, I thought, in Jeremy's relationship with Maureen.

BTW, you are absolutely correct that some player-player relationships just didn't work, and the characters they were playing had to be rethought and/or the action had to change. Ultimately I think that the players who wound up leaving the game over "artistic issues" left more for reasons of style, tone, and general "fit" with the voice of Alternity, but it has crossed my mind more than once whether relationships not gelling, and/or not seeing characters and ships in the same way, was a factor that made playing too uncomfortable.

And, I should also add that having another player is not necessarily proof that the relationship (as shown on the screen) will not be repetitive from time to time. That's also one of the things about playing in real time that is challenging: In a book, you'd skip all the tedious, plodding, daily stuff and get right to the highlights. In a "real" continuum, you have to either just be silent (which doesn't work because you have to earn whatever payoff you're going for) or put up with a lot of posts that may be variations on a very simple topic.

[pegkerr]

One of the advantages I had, playing so many characters, was that I got the best of both worlds: I could play against myself, and I could play with others, and so I could reap the advantages of each.

There were times when I was noodling over an interaction between two characters and I played both of them, I would still turn to other players for advice, to read over a draft, etc. As I mentioned before, one of the things I discovered by doing Alternity was how much I enjoy collaborative play.