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

[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.