Class Threads Are Awesome! And You Can Too!

Role-Playing Classes: You Can Do It

1. Interact All the Time

Interact with another character in every single post you make.  And interact meaningfully.  I see many class threads where each post is a single student going about their work without speaking to another soul.  Role-playing class threads should not be as boring as real school.  Collaborate with other students.  Ask the professor questions.  Get off task.  Say hello to friends.  Ask if you can sit there.  Come to class late.  Try and budge in on those cliquey Ravenclaws and their discussion.  Muster up the courage to sit next to the kid you’ve got a crush on.  Interact with at least one character in every single post you make.  (It doesn’t hurt at all to PM the other writer.  Even diligent readers might miss your cue.)

2. Use Class Threads to Further Your Own Plots

Class is a day in the life of your character.  Use that time in their life to continue and enrich the plots that you’re already working on.  If your character has been planning some mischief, give your mates a psst to remind them of that meet up tonight.  Got some romance brewing? Stoke the awkward.  Stoke it.  Whatever juiciness your character is involved in outside of class, bring it right into Herbology.  If we make classrooms a staging ground for real plot, class threads become the place to be.  They become just as exciting as the rest of our writing.  JK Rowling only wrote Harry in classes to press her plot along with him, after all!

3. Professors: Have Some Style

If I might wax nostalgic, the professors in the books were all really strange.  Professor Snape was just always such an asshole.  Professor McGongal was strict.  Professor Trelawney was flighty.  Really color your classes with your professor’s style.  Let your professor’s style touch everything.   How does class begin? One professor at Absit Omen locks his door when the bell rings – there are no tardies in that class.  Another professor I can remember considered it a loss if he didn’t make a student cry on the first day.  Your class should not follow a standard format.  Your professor need not be predictable, organized or fair.

4. Students: Cause Disruption

Make your professors acknowledge you.  Demand their presence by demanding their attention.   You don’t need to be a trouble maker to cause some disruption.  Wands slip and spells misfire.  You’ve lost your rat.  You’re sick from lunch.  Perhaps you have a thousand questions.  Perhaps you can absolutely work with no one else but your best friend.  Perhaps you are a trouble-maker whose disruption options are nearly endless.  Make each class something to write home about.  Do not wait passively for your professor to entertain you.  I bold: Do not wait passively for your professor to entertain you. Do not worry about their plans for the session.  It is class. It is, by its nature, open.  I don’t mean that we writers should be uncooperative, but more that we should collaborate and realize that the story does not have to go smoothly.

5. Don’t Just Respond – Create!

This goes for every role-playing thread.  There is not a single thread where this is not true.   Each and every writer shares an equal responsibility for where the plot goes.  This is especially true in class threads.  All writers are equal and so no character should be passively responding to the class going on around them.  Your professor and fellow students are writing with you, not at you. Your post should contain reactions to what has just occurred, and then, most importantly, new action! New action for others to respond to.  And don’t forget number 1: Interact! Your new action should include others.  Create plot by doing things.  It seems like a basic idea at the foot of all role-playing – and it is. Always, always take the opportunity of every post to add something new to the plot in your thread.

(I wrote this post for my blog awhile ago, but I figured it would help here!)

 

~Organization~

With the implementation of member boards, I find it fascinating to watch how everyone chooses to organize their character biographies and other related threads. I, personally, am a bit of an organizational freak (tables, I love tables, everyone should use tables!) and I’ve noticed that I tend to go about things a lot differently from the rest of Absit Omen!

I have noticed that the majority of people who have a vast amount of characters (including secondaries I’m sitting on twelve at the moment) tend to spring for character childboards because they make it easier to keep all of your character’s information in one place. Unlike the masses- I’ve chosen to keep everything in my member board, instead of branching it all out.

My board has master thread lists and networks- one thread to maintain the lists/networks of all of my characters. That way everything is in one place, making it easier to maintain my list of active threads and it also makes it easier for others to reply to my network. Instead of clicking into multiple places to post in networks, a person can post for as many or as few of my character networks in a single reply to a single thread. I was very excited about this whenever we made the change!

Of course that leaves the matter of all character-related information. What I have essentially done at this point is come up with a standard table of contents for a character biography thread- which includes: Original Biography, Network, Thread History, Plot Tracking, Schedule, Career Info/Special Titles/Special Ability, Family Information, Adoptables, Arithmancy, Astrology, Character Home, Place Holder, Place Holder. The network, thread history, and adoptables link to separate master-threads. I find that this level of organization in each bio gives me plenty of room to elaborate on my characters. By adding in a couple of place holders, it gives me the option of adding more in later.

The reason I go ahead and post the placeholders instead of replying as I become “inspired” is to maintain all of my biographies in alphabetical order. Our board organizes threads by last post, meaning that the order in which you post replies to your threads in your member board dictates the order they display. I have strategically replied to all of mine in such a way as to put all of my character biographies in alphabetical order by first name. When they fall out of alphabetical order it drives me just a little batty.

Since not everyone is a huge fan of organizing or coding, I’ve even posted “spines” (empty BBCode forms that can be customized) for each specific section of my board. I’m more than okay with others using them. I’ve noticed that my network spine has been used quite often across the board- which I love, because it makes everything so pretty. (TABLES I LOVE TABLES.)

Ideally my board would be ordered:
-Table of Contents
-Master Thread List
-Master Network
-Adoptables
-Spines
-Bios

However it is a bit inconvenient to maintain proper order of stickied topics. At this point I would have to delete the topics and re-post them in reverse order to ensure that the threads were in the right order. Chances are, after I finish filling out the spines for my characters, I’ll end up doing that.

I often wonder if other members of AO are equally obsessive about the organization of their member or character boards. How do other people on the board do things? Is there a rhyme or reason to the order? Are you indifferent? Do you find my organization techniques a little obsessive? I think it would be a great way to get some insight into how our brains works by realizing the different ways that people organize their own little corner of Absit Omen.

Responsibility?

This post was directly inspired from Hyperbole and a Half.  (Be sure to read it and read it good – that blog is amazing!) It’s just too true in so many ways.  We all love Curating, but you know how responsibility goes sometimes, even the funnest of responsibilities… Elle & Erika got to talkin’…

So you sit down and log on and you’re like – I’m gonna DO this! You crack your knuckles and get down to WORK HELPING AO BE THE EXPLODING PLANET OF AWESOME.

And you are an amazing Curator beast.

But then you hear the cbox burp.  And there is another burp.  And there are decisions to make and canons to look up and the tags are not working and the wiki’s getting spammed, and you wonder what in the world you’re doing spending 40 hours a week playing make believe wizards when your parents just think you write ‘short stories with friends’…

And you start to… waver…

 

The cbox burps quietly in another tab.

 

Burp.

 

Burp.

 

Burp.

 

The winter of badass moments

Do you ever have moments when writing a character that make you want to stand up and cheer?

This has happened to me a lot recently, namely with Fauna. It’s gotten to the point where Dawn and I dubbed it ‘the winter of badass moments’. Despite hurdles in December 2008 and January 2009, it’s as if all the changing and growing she’s done has started to become an entity in itself. Like one of Fauna’s floppy, ridiculous hats- you can’t ignore it. It won’t go away. Even Jordyn Dimbleby and Callum Knight are forced to admit, “what is this?! She’s doing things now?”

I can’t help but be proud that one of my brain children is growing up *wipes away tear*. So I ask all of you: have you had characters that have changed in drastic ways, positive or negative, since you began playing?

It’s almost like I can’t predict what she will do next. In the beginning of AO, it was fairly easy. Fauna was a shy, timid student who had extreme difficulty standing up for herself. Ollie and other friends had to constantly come to her rescue. She was seen as somewhat immature, unsophisticated, and weird but nice. She didn’t know how to handle conflicts between others at all, which characters picked up on, mistaking her for a younger student or commenting on how ‘fragile’ she looked.

There were elements, even then, that showed she was ready for a change. She started the art club, which started to give her more confidence. She stood by Ollie during her transformation. And she attempted to stand up to Vienna, which ended in disaster because she didn’t quite have the dueling skills to make an impact. But she tried, oh did she try.

If not for some major events in the game, I’m not sure where she’d be at now. Ollie’s expulsion caused her to join SAWS, which was a much more public and active way of supporting someone than the quieter, personal support she showed earlier. Finding Akiva after her kidnapping caused her to become close to Akiva, and also caused Raynor to help her with defense. Witnessing the werewolf attack on Greyfriar caused her to question her goals for a while and then cemented her involvement in SAWS. She’s surrounded by adults in her life who support her, care about her, and encourage her to be a stronger person (the list includes her own family, Greyfriar, Akiva, Tamis, Tulo, Covadonga). These are some pretty powerful allies, and I think one of the major reasons she’s been able to change so much is because she has these people to look up to.

So basically, there are moments in threads that have demonstrated these changes. The first that comes to mind is the Mixer thread, where later in it she tells two people from the Ministry to stop making insulting comments. She sticks around and handles it in a fairly mature way without resorting to insults herself (though she does flounce away at the end, haha). The other thread that comes to mind is the one where Callum puts up posters all over the school making fun of Sasha, and she tries to stop him. When she levitates him in the air and then drops him on his arse, she didn’t just do it for herself, but for the people he was bullying.

She also seems more willing to fight with friends and to show angry or negative emotions instead of always running away or shutting down. She got into an argument with Sasha back in November, and fought with Addie in the Great Hall in January when pressed to confront her.

Despite all the ways she has grown, there are still some roadblocks:

One of her biggest difficulties is letting go. She’s hard on herself when friendships fail and finds it nearly impossible to just ‘move on’. Most of the time she just wants to stop feeling bad or guilty, she wants people to not be mad at her, and she wants everything to be peachy without really understanding what she needs to do to get there or where she’s at fault, or when she should let go. This has been really interesting when looking at how her friendship with Waker disintegrated when she started dating Devlin, how she and Sasha keep butting heads, and why she had no clue how to handle the personal drama at the mixer between herself, Sophie, Chance, and Devlin. I think she still has a really long way to go to understand personal relationships.

One of the main things that is difficult for me to write, personally, is where she’s at now in her relationship with Devlin. Alisha and I have talked about this some, and decided that he is only a ‘good’ person when she is around. We realized that if they ever ended up together for the long-term, one of them would have to change so much that it wouldn’t be realistic (for example, Devlin would have to completely give up his criminal activities, or Fauna would have to be an enabler). I think eventually she will want something that is more balanced. Right now, however, she is hanging onto this picture she has of him in her head, of someone who is a nice person but who gets into trouble because of his friends or because of outside influences. I expect that will slowly start to change as she’s at Hogwarts and he is at home, and she finds out more information. What’ll happen later, well, I’ll leave that as a surprise!

I hope describing my thought process about her doesn’t sound incredibly arrogant of me. Though the AO community is very small, we don’t write in a vacuum, and I’m not just writing for myself, but collaboratively, with an idea that people read and care about my characters like I care about theirs. There are other characters people write that I root for, love, love to hate, and get attached to. In our little corner of the online world they matter, and I would like to think that we all impact each other.

How have your characters surprised you and grown over the course of the game? What kinds of obstacles do they still need to overcome or face?

Will I Ever Have Friends Like You Again?

This is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately and I know a lot of you guys have experienced this before as well. Bascially I’ve been thinking of how to cope both in and out of character when a beloved player (someone who was well integrated into the site) disappears or leaves for good. With a board as large as ours it’s something that does happen, it even happens with smaller boards but doesn’t tend to have as much of an impact. I’ve found that AO is so wonderful and it’s so easy to get characters involved in many things across the board that when those characters disappear it can be devastating for all those involved (mostly because we miss our fallen brothers and sisters )

This has come to mind most recently with the ‘disappearance’ of Shana (not to say that she’s more important than anyone else who has left recently, I was just more involved with her characters than others) I was thinking about how much this actually affected my characters. Three out of her five characters were rather deeply involved with my own. Bella had just become Xavier’s girlfriend, Serenity Lee was Dahlia’s best friend and we were working on Penny Lane having a back story with Cillian to get him more solid and involved beyond being just a teacher.

With no sign of a return and with the game obviously moving on I’ve been facing some dilehmas and had to make some changes to my own characters storylines (mainly the explosion between Xavier and Peyton. Bella was supposed to be the catalyst) So I was wondering where to go from here and how everyone else has dealt with this sort of obstacle in the past. Would you go on with your characters lives as if they had never been involved with these people? Casually write them out of the storyline? Or continue on writing them in every now and then as if they’re still there but are more of a non played NPC now?

The Future is Now: Wishes Do Come True

In April 2009, I posted a wish list of features I wish existed slash were available to us at A.O.   And a year later, some of these wishes have come true!  I’m pretty amazed.

1. Log on with one account and be able to Post As Character Blank.

Wish granted! We now have the amazing SubAccounts mod that works exactly in this way. Not only can you switch from account to account without logging in and out, you can edit posts to change which account posted them. Here’s a guide to using this feature.

3. Be able to fully integrate web page style information pages with forum-style threads so that information threads don’t have to ‘settle’ for thread format when a wiki set up might be better.

Wish granted! We’ve found a mod called Baker’s Dozen which gives us an easy way to add up to 13 webpages to our top navigation bar without having to reprogram the .php files by hand which not many of us really know how to do well. If anyone. Check out our evolving Rules & Info format that should consolidate all the important information in an easy-to-find, easy-to-navigate format.

11. Small date interface for role-play threads so that threads are automatically dated and added to a timeline.

12. Characters & NPCs can be tagged to help search for threads.

With the sweet Tagging for Threads system, these two features are well in hand and being used to great effect. How to Tag at A.O. It’s not always ideal, but when we finesse it just right it’s pretty amazing. It’s a simple thing to link a new member to all previous First Year Flying classes, or pull up another character’s thread list. I often Control-F to search the Tag list and find what I need. It’s also helping out a great deal with the A.O. Lexicon wiki project.

So those wishes have been granted – what’s on the way?  What rpg technology wishes would you like to be granted a year from now?

How to Survive at A.O.

The idea for this entry comes directly from Alisha, one of our Curators. June and July has brought record new membership and activity and up came the question of new member ‘mortality’.

Three distinct things tend to happen with new A.O. members. Maybe if we get everyone on board, we can all help those people who want to be involved with us stick around. Every community has its own culture, and these three things seem to be a pretty big part of ours.

1. Creates a couple of open threads. Unfortunately, A.O. members don’t really respond super well to those, all the time, especially if the thread isn’t dated, or attached to a plot. I don’t say this as a slight to A.O. members at all, or to the new members who do this. It’s more of a clash of cultures. In some places, that is the best way to get involved. Here, it isn’t. So in this case, the member won’t get any fun threads off the ground and leaves.

2. Brings in a very sweeping plot and attempts to play it out. This in itself is not bad at all; it’s more in the manner in which its done. I think that if the member doesn’t get others on board before hand, or attempts to keep things a secret, this just doesn’t go well. At A.O. we like to be in on the secret! We want to be in on things and support other characters’ stories. We also need new plots to be some how tied in with the rest of the setting. If it’s floating above the surface, current members don’t quite know what to do. The poor new member feels shot down or ignored and leaves.

The sluminess aside, here is when things work.

3. Gets talking and plotting with other members right away. Introduces themselves and shares some ideas. If there is something we are good at, it’s tackle-hugging new members. The A.O. members love seeing new characters and new writers and when they speak up in the c-box or through the Member Profile, writers jump at the chance to get them involved and fold them into our complex world. It can be daunting to see all the plots going on rapidly about us, but if the member takes a moment to pop in and say hello and talk to members about plots, not only will they instantly be involved with something fun going on, but the members and Curators find a way to help support the ideas the member had for themselves, the plots they wanted to explore. It’s like #2 but with more sharing and more cooperation. These members feel the most welcome, the most supported and the most involved right away. These members stay and become a part of our culture!

How can we be a part of making every new member a #3? I think it comes with us going out of our way to say hi and offer ideas. Send an unsolicited PM, or bug them on their IM. Read through their bio and think about what existing plots they might work in. Link them to the wiki chapter about the plot, summarize what’s going on in different things.

Like I said, this isn’t about describing new members’ bad choices or about the cliques at A.O. It’s not that at all. It’s about our unique community culture. What we value the most, seemingly above all else, is collaboration and cooperation. The sooner we can invite new friends into that idea, the sooner they will be a part of who we are.

Now I have all these questions about what other things stand out as important, maybe unique, parts of A.O. culture. What do you guys think?

Another one I can think about is that A.O. seems to lack that general internet snark. (We have our own Snarks and they are much lovelier.) Our c-box is warm and fuzzy and we don’t have ranting threads. We are very much the warm-fuzzy. Do you agree?

How’s The Weather Up There?

It recently came to my attention how important it can be to take into consideration a character’s height. I’ve always found it vital to creating a character to know how tall they are. When you think about it, our actual height has a large impact on how we perceive things. Being just shy of a midget myself (I think by only two inches) I definitely see things differently than how my husband whose a full foot taller than me sees things. Often we’ll be having a conversation and he’s trying to show me something or asks me to get him something and when I have to go up on my tip toes or grab the step-ladder he’ll laugh and say, “Man I always forget how short you are.”

Height also comes into play with how we interact with people. I had to think hard when I was writing up the romance interaction between Ayla and Xavier. Xavier is close to a foot taller than Ayla and so I had to take that into consideration when writing his actions, how he would have to crouch slightly or bend over more to kiss her or how Ayla had to get up on her tip toes to kiss him back. This sort of thing also came up a lot when Jessica and I were doing our Cillian/Margo thread since Cillian is definitely below average height.

I know that I always do my best to keep in mind how tall or short my own characters are but it didn’t hit me until reading the Staff Party thread that I don’t always think about the height of other characters. When Thea made note of Declan only being 5′ 4″ it really hit me that I had always imagined him being taller.

So because I got bored and like playing around with my paint and Photoshop programs I made this:

It really gave me a good feel for where my characters stand, literally.

Does anyone else think about this stuff? Do you think it affects your characters actions if they’re taller or shorter than the person they’re talking to? Has anyone else gone into a character’s bio just to find out how tall they are? (I do that all the time)

The written word

I was downloading fonts the other day (my new obsession) and I started to think about how we see our characters actually handwriting things.

Handwriting is a very important thing – it defines our personalities, to some extent, and it can be used as an important forensic tool in things such as ransom notes.

So I started thinking about my characters and how they write things…

The easiest character for me was Rita. I knew immediately what her handwriting would be like – neat,  little obsessive, and over-embellished. I was thinking swirls and all with her. Finding her font was more difficult, as it needed to be just the right one. I decided her writing would be quite compact.

For Quincy, I decided to go for quite a girlish style. Rounded and neat, as for a lot of her life she was a stay-at-home mum, so I assumed she would have had time to perfect her handwriting as she spent time writing to family. Perfection is a big part of Quincy’s personality, and this is displayed through her handwriting.

Felix is a bit quirky. His font was going to be slightly irregular. When performing this exercise, I suddenly discovered new things about my characters that I didn’t know before; with Felix, it was that he is left-handed. When I write, I have a habit of tilting my paper to the left-hand side, therefore putting a right-hand slant on my writing. With Felix, I decided the opposite was needed, so I went with a font that had a left-hand slant to show off his slightly odd nature. I also thought that maybe he’d be the kind of person to write in part capital letters, part lower case. This kind of bugs me, but I thought it would be perfect for Felix – because he is the kind of person who would do something intentionally if he knew it got on someone’s last nerve!

Sam is a scientist. First and foremost, this was the information I said was important. Scientists aren’t known for their neatness (I should know, being a scientist myself, though I go against the grain having studied English for many years before I switched – but I do work with a lot of messy scientists!). Unlike Quincy, Sam doesn’t care for neatness. In her line of work, if something needs written down, it needs to be written down fast. Her handwriting is slightly dishevelled giving the impression of someone who takes no pride in their writing – it’s just that she has more important things to do with her time!

Finn’s handwriting needed to be a little less careless than Felix’s. Being a businessman, many people see his handwriting on a daily basis, and he believes that his handwriting can often make a lasting impression before someone even meets him.

Ava’s handwriting…well, I had a few issues with this one. I wanted her handwriting to be neat and controlled, showing the strict regime upon which she had been raised. I was desperate to have one of those girly-girly fonts with hearts above the ‘i’ instead of a dot, but I had to come to my senses and realise that it simply did not give a realistic impression of Ava. She is certainly not the kind of girl to put hearts or crosses in her handwriting. I went with an elongated font, which reminded me of how I used to write as a teenager.

Augustus – well this one was fairly easy too. He needed to have messy, scrawly handwriting – messier than Felix’s and Samia’s put together. I felt that the scrawliness of his handwriting would show his unwillingness to commit to anything in life, and his flighty nature. It also hammered home the point that his sport was more important to him than anything else, and that reading/writing doesn’t come easy to him. His learning took a setback when he was younger due to the split of his parents, and this is one of the outcomes.

I’m curious to find out whether other people have thought this sort of thing through (I know a few have) and whether you think it is an important part of discovering who your character is? Do you choose your character’s handwriting, or does the handwriting choose the character? For me, it is the latter, as I knew exactly what kind of handwriting each of my characters needed when it came down to looking for them. Each font I chose stood out like a sore thumb as ‘the right one’.

Accents and Dialects

I can’t remember what motivated me to look this up, but a little while ago I decided to try and figure out what Fauna’s voice sounded like. I found this really nifty, very helpful website called Sounds Familiar? Accents and Dialects of the UK.

I admit, I’m crap at geography, especially in places that I’ve never visited before. The reason I initially chose Dolton, North Devon as the place Fauna grew up was because I wanted a small town, and it was listed as a “nice town to see” in one of those guides to England, haha. So I hadn’t thought all that much about how that would affect her accent or what phrases she might use until recently.

So I ended up listening to an example of a girl talking in the general region where Fauna grew up, and I found it so interesting! Then I went and listened to an example for Aileen’s voice (she was born in Edinburgh) and looked for Eirene’s (Surrey county) but couldn’t find it.

Other interesting sites I found helpful include:

• IDEA: Dialects and Accents of England
• BBC Voices
• The Best of British Slang

Something funny that happened in a thread recently was when Kitty Li was teasing Fauna, and called her a country bumpkin or something to that effect. It cracked me up, because apparently people born in the South-west of England have a ‘rural farmer’ stereotype attached to them, so it made me wonder if Kitty’s writer knew about that. Fauna’s reply was all offended, thinking that she hadn’t used North Devon phrases for a long while, haha.

Do you always think about where your characters are from? I mean, most of them are from the UK, but do you consider specific cities or counties? Do you try to change the character’s speech pattern, accent, or phrases to reflect this? I’m just curious. And for those of you not from the UK (raises hand) do you find it difficult to remember to use regional phrases and terms? I try to sprinkle them in there, but I don’t always remember or know what word would be used realistically. Still, it’s fun to try!