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

[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.