Forums » RP Discussion » Same Characters; Different Universes

What if a roleplay ends inconclusively? For me I have an extremely difficult time developing my characters because I have extremely bad luck when it comes to my roleplays. Part of this is my fault, I am not going to lie about it. I have my flaws like most people and I want to improve on them. However the other times people have simply disappeared on me, sometimes they explain why they have to abruptly end an rp which I apprciate, but more often then not, they just disappear without warning.

I also have no idea how to develop my characters when their roleplays end like this. It's normally not something easy like I can say that they felt betrayed, heartbroken, relived or whatever and move on. Sometimes through the roleplay I do learn a few things about my character which i update, but more often then not I just hit reset because I simply don't know what to do.

Now it's not that I don't know how to develop my characters because I have in the past, but that was when I was with a group of friends so rps didn't really end inconclusively.

What would you guys suggest when such things happen?

Generally when this has happened to me, I try and think of the most logical conclusion as to why the characters would end up parting ways in the case of the other role-player leaving without a reason. Maybe they had to go away on business and could not come back for an unknown amount of time, and wrote to your character to say what happened? Are they in a dangerous profession - if so, perhaps there was an accident. I could probably give a few more specific suggestions if you gave a clue as to how or at what point the role-plays cut off.

I'd like to think of what *I* would do if someone in that situation disappeared on me all of a sudden. What would it motivate me to do? What conclusions would I draw? If I were my character, how would I feel about it?

If someone drops out you're forced to do something in order to make the character playable in other situations once more.

Depending on how far along in the story you are, this can mean you can reverse the storyline because so little happened, it basically doesn't matter (i.e. they were introduced to one another, spent a few hours together, poof RP ends). If it has been going on longer, I'd personally keep the story as it is and then fabricate my own story to how they parted.

Well, some people when they create characters they kind of know what they want to do with them- as in at least plot wise what point they want them to reach- like a character setting a goal to be... idk a Master at Blacksmithing for example. Lets say you RP to get to that point but alas they run off on you. Well you could IC say they had a family emergency or perhaps you are just a traveler and the villagers didn't like you so much so you got chased out of town. That's the beauty of this sort of situation is you can be imaginative and decide "Okay this happened" without rping it. Granted RPing it out is lots more fun as you have another player who's mind doesn't work like yours- hence plot twists! But if you don't want to scrap it all and have your character get set months back just continue on. Heck you can leave that side of your character as a 'mystery' till its needed in later RPs when you have a much better idea of what you want- you won't lose your character development.

I might be a little bit late to the party here, but I'd like to give some input.

Personally, I find myself within both camps of thought depending on the character.

A few other commenters here have already pointed out the idea of a "branching out" style of RP, where you have a "Main" canon and then something like spinoffs, and alternate realities that might have happened.

I do this a lot in RPs taking place within my established universe I call the SET Project. (If you haven't had the pleasure of hanging out with me in chat- SET is preeeetty much a majority of the RP I've got going on.) It's a pretty large world, with a bunch of potential conclusions, and tons of stuff happening outside the main canon. I've got a main story going, and it's awesome, but I like to explore a lot as well, y'know? So I make a carbon copy of my character, find somebody willing to explore this alternative to the main story, and throw 'em into a new universe where instead of solution X happening and everybody lives happily ever after, problem Y crops up, requiring everybody to do a little more work before they can relax. This can happen on both large and smaller scales. My main story still goes on, and that main story's version of my character is still the character I'll use if I ever am requested to do an RP. But the alternate universes are super fun to play through. I've got one going on right now right now that's spanned PM, two forum topics and a side RP of its own. It's technically an alt. universe and it has no consequence on the "main" reality, yes. But even then, it is its own reality, and exploring that reality can be just as rewarding as sticking to the "main" timeline.

Think of it like a comic book character- Spider-Man or Batman or The X-Men. They have their main storylines that everyone knows, and then they've got an entire multiverse of potential realities.

Now, while I do this quite a lot, the SET Universe is mainly the only instance where I do this, excepting "What if?" RPs that I create on a whim. (i.e. What if we were thrown in a fantasy world with our characters? What if our characters went to high school? Etc.) - The alt. universe SET RPs happens within an isolated group designed for exploring SET's possibilities. My partners know what they're getting into ahead of time, so they don't have to worry about keeping their character in only one RP, thusly freeing them up to go RP "real" connections and events.

Despite all of that, I absolutely agree with Sanne and others when they say that it's frustrating for an RP to become inconsequential because the person just decided to up and erase all that happened to go do something else. I try to keep my RPs as real and true to life as possible- (Well, as true to life as a pyrokinetic telepath with the ability to breathe underwater can be, that is. ) so I do make every effort to make sure that my characters are affected by the actions of others and themselves, and they are changed as a result of those actions. Character development is my favorite pastime. (Action scenes are a close second. )

As for an inconclusive RP, Sanne and spellplague hit the nail on the head. I couldn't really say anything better.

One thing that came to mind when I was reading through this topic is that the idea of keeping a character the same throughout their lives vs. "resetting" them for each RP depended on whether or not you used chatroom style RP when you first started role playing.

There was a website that went down recently: CyberChat-RP.com that was a chatroom type of RP site. You'd make a character profile, and then enter the OOC room. Then from there, you could chat OOCly, join one of the default IC rooms (i.e. Forest, Graveyard, City Streets, Tavern, etc.) that had people in it, one of the player-made rooms, or make your own room.

This style of chatroom RP forced your character to be in on place at one time. If you joined one room, you were logged out of the other. Your character could not be in more than one place at a time. Every RP was a one-off scene, and if you wanted to continue the RP later, the RP's setting would happen later too. You'd RP for a little while in the chatroom and then you were done. This resulted in years upon years of character development. They would meet regularly for RP with their friends- I met characters on that site that were older than I was, and they had rich and long histories. There were entire family trees created on that site. These characters had ties with other characters on the site, and they met up for regular RP as well as going and making new connections. There were character births and character deaths, people moved into and out of houses, underwent massive changes. It was as if the Chatroom itself had a living, breathing world. It all happened in real time, so the passage of time for scenes was as fast or as slow as you went. The years of your life were also years of your characters' lives. There was very minimal/nonexistent time skipping for most players.

Furcadia would be another example of this, I'd think. Being in one place at one time, creating lots of character connections, keeping the character over the years...

Contrast this with forum RP that we use here natively on the RPR, and on a large portion of RP websites. On forums, you can just sign up for a bunch of RPs and replies aren't required instantaneously. It becomes less "real," somewhat. You can get detached and just have a favorite character that you throw into a ton of different scenarios willy-nilly. (I see it happen on my newsfeed all the time- The same character replying to five or ten or twenty different topics at once.) There's no consequences because it's impossible which RP the player is taking seriously as what's really happening to their character and which RPs are "just-for-fun" RPs where nothing is intended long-term! (Not saying that RP isn't always supposed to be fun.)

Now, I'm not condemning either form of RP, because at the end of the day it's a game (a very very great game that gets your heart involved,) and we're all here to have fun. I will say this, though: If your favorite TV show, book series, or movie fanchise suddenly had fifty different sequels each having the same set of characters doing different things at the exact same time and setting as every other sequel, and none of those things had any consequence to any of the other parts of the series, how would you feel? Even the Marvel comics-based movies stay within a single timeline. (Avengers, X-Men, etc. They don't branch off into the hundreds of Marvel's "What-If?" series. And I would be seriously frustrated if they did.)

Anyway- That's my two cents. Hope I contributed to discussion in a meaningful way! Kudos, Kytsora, for sparking a hot discussion topic!

~Oaky

I miss this SO MUCH. Back when I RPed solely in Furcadia, I had this happen a lot. I'd be a regular in this dream, my character built relationships and connections, and even if they spent time apart (e.g. I'd be playing with a different group of people for a while), eventually the two characters who met previously can meet again and they will have changed. They made new friends, they had new adventures, and they learned many new things about themselves and the world around them. It was awesome because when an RP had previously become dull, suddenly there's an immense amount of new content to work with.

It also meant that, because most people only RPed 1 version of their character, my character could bump into a stranger and they'd both realize they have a friend on common. Boom, multiple storylines instantly linked together and blasting open dozens of doors to new possibilities.

I've never once had this experience with forum RPs, mainly because it's so common here for people to RP multiple versions of one character. It makes storylines feel so narrow and limited to me.

Thanks for the advice everyone. I really appreciate it.

This whole topic would be a good candidate for the next time Kim holds a site wide discussion event lol.

I would have to say that this boils down to a few things: How much work you put into your characters, why you RP, and what exactly are you looking to take away from RPing.

When I hear things like this, it is almost always a case of a player looking for specific story lines that appeal to them, dressed up in the guise of AU. It almost always ends (or doesn’t, in the sense that the RP is dropped) the same way, but the player thinks that it’s a good excuse to RP redundancy with a favored character.


I am sorry, but I don’t really see the point of this. How does your character grow if they are stuck in the same instance? Changing key details of your character and placing them in similar situations to gauge their reaction on a ‘what if’ basis isn’t really growth. I’d have to say it’s just another form of character stagnation.

Why not just make a new character? If you are changing part of a personality, their physical appearance, and their family then the fundamentals that make up your character have been removed. What you are describing is a completely different character. Personally, I would handle that as a new character, not an old one.

Having one or two key links isn’t really a ‘tell’. It’s a relation and it doesn’t seem like a very strong one. These different renditions of Kystora sound like cousins rather than remotely the same person.

I think you will find a lot of people on RPR have different styles of RPing, our characters are our children as well. Personally, I see my characters as ‘near to real’ people and just like with a real child, I could never dissect one of them, pick the pieces that I liked, rebuild them, and watch how it reacts based on ‘what-if’. I would much prefer to create a new character to love and let them all grow and react like they would if they were living real linear lives.

I have a feeling that we're not really understanding Kytsora. Copper_Dragon's explanation makes a lot of sense, and I'm getting the feeling that's what she's trying to say too.

Unless Kytsora participates in the conversation again and gives us more clues, we're not 100% sure what she means. There are still a lot of questions left unanswered, and I'm starting to feel like there's been some mis-communication going on that's upset some people.

I'd really like to have more information to help us understand her better, but unfortunately it looks like she's left the discussion entirely.

I -think- she's trying to say that she occasionally thrusts her characters into situations outside the parameters of their current RP (minor, non life-changing situations) in order to gauge their reactions and therefore learn about them.
Not trying to put words in her mouth, though. That's just what I got from all this.

I'm guilty of doing this with characters not currently involved in an RP, to keep them alive and fresh somehow. And when partners disappear I have to offer my character an explanation, and so work thigs out mentally.

I... do a mix of things.

All of the characters I've mentioned on this site have been in other things previously, and most of them have been used in worlds very different from the ones they were created for, often because I simply have no way to adequately mimic that setting. Usually I still keep it to something at least similar - same genre, roughly the same period.

Most of my characters have been set to fit a particular setting that's a hybrid of scifi and fantasy, and they become more flexible that way. When needed, I can usually easily wipe away some aspect of that. I do sometimes keep key moments and interactions rather than completely reset a character, but I fit those things to the new setting - which usually doesn't really require any change, since it's only particular details that might be a problem (an example that I've never experienced would be a notable meeting that changed from starting with ice cream gotten from a Star Trek style device to just buying it from a shop, because it's only the meeting that really matters).

My main reason for at least mostly resetting a character is necessity and habit. Aside from issues duplicating the setting, most of the games I've played have been one-off things where that particular world with that set of characters is never visited again. If I didn't fit my characters to other things, I wouldn't get to play them again. And then, times when I have fully kept character histories... things have turned messy.

One example is the character I took my name from; I carried her around so much that I had to establish that she traveled between realities. She's a dragon, currently living in a fantasy world, but she still remembers her first romance, which was in a modern town.

In another instance, I managed to play in the same world something like a thousand years after the events of the first. My character in the first had died during the events we went through (mostly because certain players were seriously pissing me off, so I found a reasonable excuse for my character to die), and in the second, I played a character who was basically a distant niece to the original. One character had been alive long enough to have interacted with them both, though, and events led to the original coming back as a ghost, basically - but aside from the fact that I had already grown and improved as an RPer (thus allowing me to better stick to her intended personality better), the way everything had worked out left her pretty bitter. Eventually, I decided I no longer liked part of what she had been or any of what she'd become, so I reset her and changed the things I didn't like - and now have my modern version of Kyra Lo'ora, rather than an animal-feeding vampiric half-elf who was traumatized out of remembering how she became a vampire, is pissed off because she died for the guy she loved, both to help him and not have to deal with being in a love triangle, only to come back and find him getting romantic with a brand new lady; and is further frustrated by being just a ghost who can only interact with anyone other than a little girl when possessing said little girl's body. I just don't want to deal with that.

I think I'm rambling, though.