On the Death of IRC RP

Damn, this has been a SRUS blog for the past couple of updates, hasn't it? Not even a Femslash Friday this week. Anyway, today I'm gonna post on a non heavy subject-the Death of IRC Roleplaying.

IRC RP is where I really cut my WoD chops; I played in #vampirepub on DAL and later #vampire'stouch on Sorcery. Neither was an exceptionally awesome place to play, but I met some exceptionally awesome people and had a reliable cadre built up of good players. I've dropped out of the medium some time ago, but every once in awhile I peek in and see what is going on in the IRC RP world.

IRC RP has always been a quasi shameful business; even among gamers, you won't find many that will admit to playing on IRC, and the reason is that it has always been a thinly veiled road to kinky cybersex. That doesn't bother me; given what I admit to doing IRL, talking about cybersex is pretty tame. But I've never been in the "Get to the fucking" camp; I played a character and ran storylines, goddamnit. Still, that factor has always been present and I want you to be aware of that while I talk about the channel I moseyed into last night.

Anyway, in the past three or four years the medium has really died down; popular channels used to range towards 25+ players and most of them are down to a dedicated camp of 3 or 4 now, when they exist at all. The trend, based on what I can glean from lurking, appears to be towards crunchy dice based channels rather than loose freeform channels. But I found a large channel on Sorcery last night, one with 15+ players and a freeform setting, so I thought I'd try my hand at it. I didn't quite realize that it was a fucking only channel at first, but even so I figured that I could make it work with some good storytelling and a nice loose environment to work my will on. Hell, even the setting was loose-some kind of Honest Jon's inn at the end of all worlds.

So yeah. My Nephandi, that loveable rogue, wanders in...and for two days watches people fuck in various gender combinations with varying levels of actual RP ability. I mean seriously, there wasn't even a conversation involved-just piles of people fucking. Some of them were supernatural WoD type characters, but those details were side notes-it was really about the fucking. Multiple bubbles of side by side RP with various people and groups fucking. A setting with the potential for awesome multiverse storylines, with all the associated questions of paradigm and sanity, and all anyone ever did was swap corpse DNA.

By the time I was done and washed my hands of the whole business, my nephandi was convinced that he had wandered into some sticky, vag scented hell where no one would acknowledge his presence or understood his questions or really did anything other than pile on.

This isn't a new problem; to some people RP has always been a thin justification for cybersex. But holy freaking god, do I miss the old days, or at least the old people. Sure, sometimes the stories involved fucking, maybe there was even some one handed typing involved, but for fuck's sake, there were stories and people cared about them.

I wonder if old porn stars feel this way about new porn?

In any case, life isn't all bad here in Babylon-Amanda found a quarter of shrooms while cleaning and my Ninja Pants are on sale at USCAV. On the whole-can't complain.