It's 2001. I'm 12 years old. My guy has a Katana, and magic spells, and a cloak that he can use to turn into a hawk. He is of course a mercenary soldier. In his long career of being very cool, highly righteous and defiant of the corrupt authorities, he has made many enemies. Currently, he is hiding from them in an ingenious way: he used his magic to take on the appearance of a woman. A very attractive woman. Nobody thinks that this gay-- in fact, by its audacity, it is maybe the straightest thing anyone has seen. But it is gay-- it is in fact lesbian.
For a very long time I played games like Dungeons & Dragons and White Wolf's many monster RPGs and stuff like Call of Cthulhu, and I struggled to fit these games into my ethos, which I felt rapidly vanished as online play of tabletop games grew in sophistication. Even "storygames" did not really fit what I was going for because they were created for people playing face to face around a table and saying essentially "my guy does this" and "my guy does that"-- and the roleplay I had actually grown up with was people writing 500 word posts on a forum where a "my guy" statement would have seen you get laughed out of the place. "Freeform roleplay" was what I did, and in the aughts it's what I wanted to do but could not really find the spots to do it in again-- ultimately what I really wanted to do was write novels and ultimately that's what I did. But whenever I think about tabletop roleplaying games I think back to the roleplaying I did on forums in the turn of the millennium. If people call actual play podcasting "collaborative storytelling" I think what I was doing was closer to "collaborative novel-writing."
On an rp forum in the era of dial up internet it was basically impossible to guarantee that your game master or any of your players would ever be around at the exact same time to play. You could enforce certain commitments, but the rule was usually that each player was required to make one post a day. If you happened to be online at the same time, to prevent more active players from just running away with the game by themselves you could cap it at two or three posts a day. Because you'd usually only ever get one post a day, you had to make it count. These posts ended up being hundreds of words, sometimes entire like thousand word microfictions. You'd set the scene, talk about what your character was thinking and doing and saying-- just like writing a piece of a novel or fanfic. You wrote exclusively about your own character, because it was seen as rude to "pilot" anyone else's character in your scene. But it was also common courtesy to lay down crumbs for others to follow-- suggest that their characters could respond or do certain things if they felt inclined to do so within the thrust of your own post.
It was this kind of roleplaying that fascinated me as a kid. I eventually "graduated" (you can do this, when you are a child) to just writing pokemon fanfic but I *really* started off with writing by joining pokemon forum RPs. I eventually played other kinds of RP-- after I started writing pokemon fanfic I mainly played original fantasy RPs rather than "fanfic"-y roleplays due to my evolving interests as an internet savvy twelve and thirteen year old. Pokemon RPs tended to have a restrictive tone, and my tastes were becoming more salacious. I stopped lying about my age by saying I was 15 and started lying about my age by saying I was 19-- *and* a girl. But that's a story for never-- you'll never know what happened with that, nobody has the messenger logs.
I tended to be a team player-- I liked writing things that led to interactions. I liked having conversations and saying revelatory shit about my characters and forging bonds and stuff. There were guys who just wanted to write 1000 words about how cool their guy is, how much the wind sweeps his hair, how far his shadow stretches, how much more detailed the walls in the castle become when he is the one that climbs them, how much shit there is for his katana to cleave when he is the one swinging it-- and I wasn't always not that guy. But I had a personal rule to try to include at least one other person in my interactions. Especially the katana guys because it annoyed them to have to talk to my fucking character because they're lone wolves! They don't do this talk shit that much it cramps their style! But I was a little bit of a troll also. My favorite thing to write, however, was also description. When I got to do it, I could do florid scene setting with the best of the lone wolf katana guys. I liked to set the scene. I could see the landscape and characters in my mind so vividly.
I've always had a very vivid imagination. I conceptualize it as "making movies in my mind." I can play the audio, I can move the pictures. If I focus on it, I can see vivid depictions of things drawn from aesthetics I like. For example, whenever I read my mother's fantasy or mystery books, I always thought of the people in them as anime characters, because that was the aesthetic I found really attractive. All of this made the forum RPs really fun for me. It was cool seeing other people's spontaneous descriptions like that. To form the picture they put onto the forum and to try to put the picture in my mind back through my own posts-- as vividly as possible, with as many words as it would take.
I think about my time doing freeform RP because I think it is part of why I came to love writing novels and always found tabletop rpgs to be missing something that I just couldn't place. Tabletop RPGs are a conversation-- and I did not want to talk but to write. It's something I only came to understand in the past few years, as my age and health and the relative "popularity" of Unjust Depths compared to my other attempts at writing a running story have led me to a lot of introspection about what I do and why I do it.
To some degree, the pictures in my head have haunted me as a writer. I feel that I've always been chasing the "picture" I have and that I frequently fail to realize its full grandeur on the page. I don't think that I would do any better if I was a visual artist. The reality is that my mind has unlimited resources and responds perfectly to my demands-- writing, drawing, these are mediums of compromise to skill, equipment, materials, and patience. Sometimes, you can't keep describing the landscape. You're telling a story-- you have to move on.
Maybe now, without deadlines, and with some reevaluation of what I want out of my life and art, I might be able to chase those pictures in my head again.
Eh. Probably not. You lot might get too bored with that.