An interview with
Astrolinium Why do you roleplay?Ever since I was little, I’ve loved telling stories. Roleplay is the best way to tell stories, because it’s kind of like sitting around a campfire at summer camp with your friends and you each tell a bit of it and then hand it off to the next person. People can do incredible things when we cooperate, and that’s what roleplay is – cooperative storytelling.
How long have you been roleplaying on NationStates?Since, oh, 2011-or-so? Not consistently, anyway.
Do you roleplay in the II/NS or other diplomacy subforums?At times. I’ve been other there more of late, to be honest, because it’s easier to just plop something into a “What’s Your National Animal?” thread really quick than to commit to something longer, and because there’s more 1-on-1 roleplay over there, which is easier to work around my busy schedule.
Can you tell us a little about any roleplay games you OP or participate in as a player? Well, I’m not in anything in P2TM as of current, at least not until Agri shifts his ass on Shadow Ops, but I used to OP Doctor Who. We won awards for Doctor Who, you know, and it was a great time. We had a really small group, which was interesting – it made it easier to manage and keep things going at times, but then when somebody had other commitments, it also made it really hard to keep rolling along. If I ever find myself with a truly disgusting amount of time, I might reboot it someday.
Do you belong to any RP organizations? If so, do you feel they serve a good purpose?I don’t. I suppose you could have called those of us who participated in the Nightkill’s Shit RPs – that’s a formal name for them, we had a TVTropes page and everything, I think it’s still there – a loose group, but there was nothing formal about it, there was no solid membership, it was just, you know. Friends doing things together. I think most of our modern RP organizations fundamentally stem from that sort of thing, and they serve a great purpose, especially in P2TM. I think, when you’ve got people you know well and consistently tell stories with, you learn from each other and grow with each other a lot better, as writers, as plotters, as people, even. Me and the other Nightkill’s Shit folks, hell, they’re my oldest consistent friends, counting the people I know in Meatspace. We don’t really roleplay together much, but we still bounce things off each other and we still help each other grow as people.
What is your favourite thing about P2TM?That it’s not F7. More seriously, like, it’s ours, and the crowd that’s sort of the “leaders” are really solid people. There’s a community of people who want to drive each other to do better and who worry. Like, there’s been some talk now and then about what should be done to encourage more and better and more creative roleplays, and the fact that the community worries about that in the first place speaks volumes about its quality. There are a lot of places that would be content with everybody going off into their own cliques and ignoring each other and doing the same things over and over again, but not P2TM.
What changes, if any, would you like to see in P2TM?I think that, from certain groups – and I say this, mind, as someone who admittedly hasn’t really been around all that much recently, so take it cum grano salis, but I think there’s maybe too much pressure to be a certain way, to be “good” writers, and while that’s well and good, I will say that being in F7 might have encouraged folks to care less about how good what they’re doing is and to care more about just getting the damn post written and have fun enjoying the whole thing. There are drawbacks to the statelier pace the whole thing moves at now that we’ve escaped the horrors of Auto-Prune.
If someone from another subforum, such as F7 or the Diplomacy RP forums, wanted to be part of P2TM, what's the best way for them to go about it?Jump in. Find an open roleplay and make an app. It’s not that different, really – there’s some different standards, but, like, NationStates as a whole is very standardized from forum to forum in how apps are structured and what basic format roleplays are in (I think I’d be tempted to file a report if someone were to start trying to put their actions in double asterisks on any part of this website, you know. That sort of thing). So just, y’know, go for it. Don’t worry ‘bout a thing, ‘cause every little thing’s gonna be alright.