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

[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.