I welcome any and all comments, concerns, feedback, or questions!
So I’ve been sitting at my computer for the past few hours thinking about how I initially was debating posting to twitter abut my recent nervousness about approaching or asking for RP lately. This got me thinking about the open forum because I remember it being popular for conversations such as these back when I was extremely active on-sim for over five years. After coming back after a long much needed hiatus to prioritize myself and RL, I really wanted to come back to explore writing and making stories that were unexpected, raw, beautiful and above all authentic. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of (and myself included would consider myself to be in) ‘circles’. And when I use this word, I’m referring to a small group of people that welcomed stories with me IC and friendships OOC so warmly upon my return to SL after our characters interacted together via twitter. While I’m not speaking badly about my own group or any other as they can be -really- comforting after evaluating it can kinda be like a double edged sword as for me it induces nerves when trying to interact with other groups and I am sure others feel the same way generally speaking.

The other day, I was speaking to a friend, reminiscing about the ‘old’ or ‘glory’ days of CD. Every day there seemed to be something going on. Turf wars, gang rivalries, crazies doing crazy shit or even fires happening almost weekly. In the midst of all of this hecticness, there were just characters trying to survive whether they were new to the city or townies. I was reading a past forum from March 26 “RP STATUS in CD - a survey..kinda” (http://thecrackden.com/discuss/topic/rp-status-in-cd-a-survey-kinda/) and one of the comments I read really struck out to me by Argento Nagata or Fyrfox Resident that,

“I see a lot of profiles with picks that demand creativity, demand more than just a hit and run rp… I’m talking about the gang-turf wars, and shootouts, where civilians would get caught in the crossfire. The random crazies who would walk the streets and kick things off for NO reason, just because their character is as nutty as a squirrel hoard…The gun or knife shoved in your face, for a mugging, as you walk home.”

And in addition to those points, kidnapping, torture, mental manipulation, drug dealers, black market. And I know of a few characters/storylines including things mentioned above but I’d really LOVE LOVE to hear more about these storylines and encourage people to get more involved with them as I myself am going to do.

I want to touch a bit on dark RP. This is a conversation I’ve had quite a bit of lately too. It’s SO easy to get caught up in relationships or erotic RP. Honestly myself, I’m a fan. It’s fun and I think it adds more depth to my character as she craves love and desires to belong (yet it never seems to last LOL). But I feel like lately there’s been a lot of association of dark RP with solely sexual aspects such as like rape. While I understand, CD is a dark RP which does include rape RP that I used to myself wrote with others into in my character’s story - for my sake as a player/writer I can’t do it anymore for my own reasons. But back to the point, upon coming back to CD I received -dozens- of requests to rape my character. I’m unsure if it’s just me, but I feel like from the vibes I got (and totally could be completely wrong) some people just enjoy that RP. Which is fine. But for me? I usually get the vibe it’s not going to be a complex story line or anything more than simply the act itself. Going off of this, I just wanted to reiterate that dark RP is more than rape.

While I know I’m speaking of a lot, I don’t want to come off preachy at all. In fact, I’m realizing that I need to follow through with my words myself more. It’s too easy to get anxious or nervous (it happens to me ALL the time) or caught up off-sim and think about old characters, the way things used to be but I’m realizing that in order to create the complexity of stories and such that I took for granted - it starts with us, the players. Taking one from the forum post “Making a fun story line” ( http://thecrackden.com/discuss/topic/making-a-fun-storyline/) posted by James Matfield, after writing this I feel renewed with the desire to -want- to keep trying and approach, approach, approach assuming that everyone in CD or for that matter in any other RP sim is there with the intent to create and write stories. If we wanted to write them alone, would we really be in a role-play community? So that being said, please please lets communicate about making new enriching storylines and see where our characters take us on this wild ride of writing together.