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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeajea" data-source="post: 4258447" data-attributes="member: 37238">Hello boys and girls.I shall begin by stating that what follows is but my thoughts on a subject that I've pondered about frequently. To frame it correctly, I should make clear that this isn't a major gripe, and I want to avoid sounding arrogant as I say it – though I apologise in advance for failing to do so. This is a pet annoyance, you might say.So, I’m in chat right now and I noticed a certain proliferation of screen names unknown to me; this is, I reason, no doubt both because a number of you beautiful ladies and gents have been making new characters, and also because we have one or two new additions to our family. How nice! It’s always good to think ISRP is doing well.However, as it happens right now, I can only spot names I'd never seen before – with the exception of an old friend of mine by the name of Rajak. You know, that ol' bean. And, of course, I gravitate towards him. But as my mouse hovers over the room changer drop down menu thing, I think... why? Why am I going to talk to the only person I already know? Why don't I go and talk to one of these new characters? There's certainly enough of them around, and lots of them are bound to be interesting in their own right.Then I realise why; because I see new names all the time. I remember that I used to forge new friendships and relationships frequently, but also that I stopped doing so quite some time ago. I’ve started roleplaying by arrangement only, by asking particular people on my MSN list to come in with particular characters. These days, I don’t often feel like hanging around and meeting randoms; I seek out the friends and I stick with them. In fact, I’ve formed a clique and I’m sticking to it.But why? Why does seeing new names all the time cause me to do this? Well, because I can’t be bothered to keep up with them all, particularly when I can’t be sure whether any given name will be around for longer than a couple of weeks. I have a policy, it seems, of only making any kind of effort to know any given character if I’ve seen it around. A lot. For a long time. I do this, I think, because I want to protect myself from doing interesting things – from making a lot of effort in my roleplay – that will be lost to the void anyhow because the other character isn’t going to stick around. Some part of me feels like it’s a waste of energy. How stupid is that? What, these characters aren’t really worth my time? But I’ve been doing it unthinkingly for years.  Of course, my case is special because I am, sadly, void of a good memory and I frequently forget not just things I do or that my characters have done, but people they've met and how they met them. Actually, I forget a great many things, but these are the relevant things here. Relevant because I often forget I’ve seen a name before. They’re all just so much background noise to me, so even when I see a particular name around a number of times, I still don’t really go and talk to them.I find this very sad. No, not the state of my memory (although that too), but the fact that I feel deeply disinclined to get to know new characters and players. To illustrate the absurdity of my own condition, I note that I recently discovered a player who'd been on ISRP for eight years alongside me - who I’d never interacted with! Imagine my surprise and shock! Me, who has likewise been on ISRP for some eight years or something. How did I miss another permanent ISRPer?But I realised that there are many characters I don't touch, and for no good reason other than apathy - a lack of willingness to learn the names and personalities of characters when I’m unsure whether they’ll still be around in a couple weeks’ time. It seems pointless, somehow.So this in turn got me to thinking; why do players like to make so many different characters? Why is it that lots of people don't people stick to a single character or small set of characters? I’d welcome any thoughts or musing on the matter, or indeed responses from people who have this particular habit.For my part, I can say from personal experience that I've found focusing on my comparatively smaller list of characters rewarding. It seems to me to be easy enough to make some exciting new concept or other, but my personal preference is to see how intricate an alter-ego I can create, how realistic – and crucially for me, how distinct from one another – I can make my characters. I’d like to think that Jeajea, Lyzar, Mark, Javal, The One, The Fleeting Shadow, Adept Mortisha and so forth... are all separate, unique, interesting characters. Of course, in reality that’s not a thing for me to judge but for others, but it certainly is a personal goal of mine.I could perhaps be accused of taking things to extremes and overdoing it. We’re here, after all, not to make some grand artistic gesture but rather to relax and enjoy ourselves. This is meant to simply be harmless fun, isn’t it? So to pre-empt this accusation, I’ll note here that I get more out of ISRP these days if I go to great lengths to take having fun seriously.  I do consistently see all these shiny characters that are then dropped after a few weeks when the cool factor has worn off, or if they hit a spot of trouble and the player can't be bothered to work through it. So the character just dies or vanishes without a word… and I guess I feel that things lose continuity. Do you get what I mean? Not that I'm in any way suggesting that you should stick doggedly to some character concept that is crap, nor that you shouldn’t go out into the wide blue unknown and experiment as far as the setting will take you. I also certainly don’t want to suggest that you’re doing anything in any way wrong if you're such a player who likes to have many cakes on the go, so to speak. Rather, I’m trying to point some things out about how ISRP works, in my view. I would very much welcome any thoughts, comments or responses any of you might have – just hit reply and lay out your own thoughts or experiences on the matter. Else, thanks for making the effort to read this and I hope you understand what I mean even if you don’t entirely agree with me.I will leave you with the final thought that, in medicine the so-called proliferative phase is what happens once your body had managed to clot a bleed. It’s the process of healing. See what I did there? With the best of intentions,Jea’s player.</blockquote>

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