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Frankly, roleplay’s always been a bit of a cornerstone of my life–but funnily enough, until recently, those Minecraft Roleplay (MCRP) things were basically the only way I’d go about it. Took a bit of friendly bullying to get me to properly get into tabletop (shout outs to The Other Side). But man, MCRP type shit was effectively an abusive relationship. A friend of mine that I met at the ripe age of like…12….? while on an MCRP server once referred to the field of drama perpetually surrounding it as ‘mineman nutslapping.’

It’s all very silly, when you try and look at it in retrospective–but the way the field works, it becomes a bit all consuming while you’re in the midst of it. Nowadays? Shit like Osria* is just ‘that server where I quit because the owner wouldn’t let me ban the racists.’ Back then? It was basically my second job. Was also the place that managed to get me to quit the scene altogether, after having been in it since like 2012.

An aside on Osria, for those unaware what it is.

Osria was a minecraft roleplay community that ran from like…early 2023/late 2022, shutting down a few months ago. I was an admin on it for a while, but left due to disagreements with the owner over banning two players who were toxic lil assholes with a bit of a racist streak. Overall a relatively boilerplate fantasy setting, had some great DMs and a few pretty solid roleplayers. My friend Jero wrote a neat as hell system for it called Voyager that I like to think was pretty damn innovative, which apparently got nixed for some 5e-esque slop not long after a bunch of us left over the racists. In general, a very weird experience.

I could probably write a whole blog post about that place and its insanity, but I’d really rather not. That shit fucked me up for a while.

The medium as a whole is a bit of a mess–but it is interesting. And that’s, well…why I wanted to yap about it. Tabletop has a bit of a habit, in my experience, in playing out just the action. MCRP is at its core more of a slice-of-life experience, more akin to play-by-post stuff found on forums, or the increasingly common Discord Text RP type stuff. Rather than play some big name adventurer (or someone apeing at being one, eventually), there’s a tendency to try and ground the character a bit more. Rather than requiring a character with any utility that allows you to interface with the “pillars” of tabletop (whether that be combat, exploration, or social interaction), folks would play way more ‘plausible’ sorts of characters.

I’ve played an archaeologist (albeit Kaula became more and more of a thing as I’ve continued to play her–more on that later, I suppose), a noble inventor, a wandering man in search of religion, a cowboy, and all manner of other weird shit–while roleplaying with doctors, housewives, the occasional town guard, etc etc etc. Sure, plenty of people played their personal sparkledog, samurai ninja pirate warrior, or archmage of fucktown, but those tended to be the outlier in my experience–or I at least did a good job of scaring the majority of them away by playing certified weirdos, lmao.

The vibe relies on you dumping in an inordinate amount of time, as it flows almost like a slice of life anime. Shit happens, and sometimes you just weren’t there for it. Sure, there’s the more traditional tabletop’y stuff by way of DMed events and what not. But in my experience those were like…the excuse to be there. All the stuff in between was what kept ya around. Time flowed way similarly to just. real time. So it rewarded being around all the time. I literally installed an app to access the server from my phone so I could keep up while at work. I’d miss sleep to finish up roleplay.

Shit was a lot.

It is a fundamental part of my childhood/early 20s, though. I’m glad I don’t do it anymore, because it was frankly fucking all consuming–I’d barely even play actual games when I was in the heat of it. Imagining me but not having a Fallout mod binge every few months b/c of some boilerplate standard fantasy shlock roleplay setting (but in minecraft) now is like. foreign.

So going back to look thru Ceres–which did manage to avoid a lot of those weird parasocial (for lack of a better word) tendencies (probably to its slow simmering downfall)–is a bit comforting. Most of these servers I played on (to name the ones I remember; Age of Citycraft, Rise of Kings, HollowWorld, Afterfall, Osria) had pretty insanely involved drama always woven into the fabric of it. This isn’t me saying Ceres was without drama, mind you–shit was still weird. But I think because the roleplay was a bit closer? it didnt hit as insanely most of the time. Most of these places relied on very open, freeform, faction’y roleplay–while Ceres was just one group, one faction, etc., so there wasn’t really much of a competition.

This was, again, part of Ceres’ downfall–there was a persistent complaint from new joiners to the server that they just couldn’t manage to breach the ‘clique’ of it all, and get integrated with the server. But I dunno. For those of us who hung around it was chill. Sometimes entrants were occasionally able to slip into the day-to-day melange of it all, and they were welcomed with open arms–we weren’t ever really unwelcoming in my opinion. Just kinda weird. And admittedly, having a sci-fi server in a sea of fantasy servers (…admittedly, fantasy is natural for a platform like minecraft. maintaining a sci-fi setting in minecraft was nightmarish.) was a way higher cliff to climb for getting into things. It was unconvential, filled with fuckin weird individuals, and ran by a mentally unstable highschooler–it wasn’t bound to be the next big thing. It was messy. I say this with all love and light in my heart, it was like a disfunctional school newspaper that the principal wanted to get rid of but just couldn’t.

But, between that slurry of shit, we did make a lot of really cool shit. The setting of Ceres is weird, and peppered with all sorts of ahead-of-its-time type commentary (some of it feels like it’s on the nose now, and has needed toned down–when back then, it felt like it was all fucking weird and new and innovative to us–which you can maybe blame on rose tinted nostalgia goggles as I’m looking back at it). We wrote lore documents, wholesale stole stuff from popular media (“because fuck it, who cares, we can’t get sued for this shit anyways”), and often times left shit as a wholly word-of-mouth thing (whether it was b/c we were lazy or trying to be ✨enigmatic✨ was a coinflip every time).

Overall, working on rewriting/cleaning up the setting into something cohesive has been a fucking NIGHTMARE. And it’s made me love the whole thing more. It’s a conglomeration of all its people, and I can see their fuckin personalities peeking thru a lot of the old documents and discord chats I’ve dug up in the process.

An aside on my relationship with characters

This kinda gets away from where I wanted to really go with the piece, so I’m stuffing it in an overflow tab. I need to have some sort of standard for myself.

(Cue laugh track.)

Anyhow–it’s fun to see the way I write characters has stayed consistent in design, while still getting obviously ‘better’. Back on Ceres, I wrote characters pretty loosely. I’d start with some half-joke of a concept and bake it into something real.

Jules started as “shithead cowboy, racist against droids,” Cuddles was a loaderbot-turned-jukebox, Janus was just “evil CEO but you could reach to forgive him for some of it. but like. don’t.” Etc etc etc. Back in 2020ish, when I started RPing again on Afterfall, I wrote up Kaula–same vibe as a half-joke concept that I took some time to cook on. In her case, it was “archaeologist who is terrified of magic.” I had a few other characters in the post-Ceres-death MCRP stuff, but most of them weren’t ever really iterated on. Kaula was the one with staying power, as it were. Sabine/Alcott didn’t get a chance to do much (usually because people wanted to talk to Kaula more–she was the more ‘relevant’ of my characters, despite all attempts against that on my part, lmao) and my attempts at a fantasy-take on Jules was mostly an idle distraction from when I didn’t have the energy to play Kaula.

So the tiny little possum woman with an asbestos-lined tobacco pipe and a penchant for making herself get a panic attack b/c of her job became more and more of a weirdly tragic figure. I don’t wanna just ramble about that woman, but good lord she makes it hard to not monologue. My personal ultimate in ‘characters designed as a joke that got turned weirdly serious.’ Her gig as an archaeologist got her in the ear of a queen, then she got married & adopted a kid, started doing state politics–and then her spouse and child blew up in a magically generated atomic bomb. And then the server this happened on shut down. Needless to say I was a bit miffed.

Cue some random DND game where we’re asked to play “characters who are world renowned in their field,” only for the plot hook to be us all getting isekai’d. I decided to play Kaula & from there it became a Whole Thing of her just appearing in settings with trauma from the other settings. Nowadays she’s featuring in my friend Nora’s PF2e game as a tired archaeologist working with a for-profit archaeology guild slash soverign nation thing. Who knows where that’s gonna go, we just started the thing.

This isn’t to say my characters on Ceres were flat, or bad, mind you (…at least, I think they weren’t…)–Janus was a whole mess who was originally intended to be the ‘antagonist’ in a setting with a sort of ‘catastrophe of the week’ style mess rather than a whole hearted villain to defeat, but the players saw the sad little meow meow of a man and went ‘he’s ours now. we like him.’ So he just kinda got…woobified. At the time it bugged me a bit, but looking back it’s interesting to track how exactly that played out. And Jules eventually married an absurdly prominent AI-rights-activist n like. chilled out on the robo-racism. Cuddles the jukebox loaderbot droid became a station AI. So on and so forth. It just felt a bit more pronounced and intentional with how I’ve ran Kaula, I suppose. The folks on Ceres were more a natural evolution of playing the same damn character for like 5 years, which was interesting in its own right.

Anyhow–somewhat off-topic rant done.

At its core, MCRP thrives on this weird parasocial digging-in, wherein the player is like…becoming their character, living their life out, seeing as much of it as they could. And in much the same way real life works, if you’re not around a lot, you miss out. So it incentivizes this just…MMO level ‘grind’ wherein you hang around as much as possible, not necessarily doing anything, just. Waiting for something to happen. It’s fucking weird, looking back. I’d log on soon as I got home, sit around doing anything else but like. Have Minecraft open in the corner of the screen so I could eyeball the general chat & see who all is online. Roleplay is addictive, and I don’t think enough people particularly process that.

D&D is a more and more popular thing these days, what with the rise of Critical Role (couldn’t tell you shit about that, never got into it–why listen to other people play tabletop when I could just go do it myself). In doing so, I think the whole…oddly parasocial bend to roleplay is downplayed. Parasocial isn’t a totally dirty word here, mind you, I want that to be clear–in this context, it’s more a matter of how these things work out. You’re dumping out a chunk of yourself into a social situation session after session & developing a set of relationships entirely disconnected from your actual being. Roleplay invites that & for a lot of folks becomes a touch maladaptive as a hobby. Folks get attached to these characters, and it becomes a part of their life. Nothing wrong with that, at the core–but I think more folks should be critical of just how ingrained it becomes for them. Otherwise you end up kinda fucking your mental health up a touch–at least in my experience. It’s all very addictive, the sort of thing one gets wound up in very easily.

I dunno. At the end of the day, I’m far better off for having moved on from the full tilt MCRP hell-days & shifting to a more traditional tabletop setup. No shade to anyone who still does MCRP, it’s fun as hell when it works out right. Just–not good for me or my mental health n what not. Can’t let that ol parasite back in. Either way, as far as posts go, this is by far the rambliest of them I’ve put out. Good ol stream of consciousness. But considering it’s been 2 years since the last one, who fuckin cares. It’s my blog. I get to yap how I want.