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

[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.