PLEASE DON’T HURT ME RP’ER MAN.

This post is a direct result of Bricu’s question here.  The topic?  Couples in the RP arena.  First the necessary disclaimer:  there are exceptions to every rule.  For every not-so-shiny thing I have to say, there’s a paragon of normal out there that will prove me wrong.  To those people, I salute you, admire you, and beg your indulgance.

So let’s start off right, with a story.  I have a character.  Said character was someone else’s NPC, and I took that NPC and made it my own.  I worked on a backstory, did some fact spinning, and came up with An Idea.  Sometimes, they surprise you.  My girl was a lot more fun than I’d intended.  Other people took note of said fun and started weaving stories with mine.  One person became The Potential Romantic Interest.  

Things were going swimmingly!  My character had a strong voice and a little flirt going on.  The flirt wasn’t too serious yet, but it was enough to make the character smile a lot and thus, me smile a lot while playing her.  Then TEH WEIRD happened.  My character’s RP interest had a spouse IRL, and Spouse made a comment about our RP in a shared channel that made my brows shoot up to my hairline.  It wasn’t anything overtly nasty, it wasn’t even really an attack on me so much as a passive aggressive comment about how I got to X character ‘first’, and therefore Spouse was claiming another NPC as their romantic interest so /hands off to everyone else/. 

AWKWARD.  Why so bad?  Well, these folks are married and I felt like I’d interfered in something outside of game, like I’d ruined something for at least one of them.  There are boundaries in an MMO a lot of us try not to cross.  Putting an upset in someone’s Real Life Plans when married folks are involved?  Happens to be one of mine.  I won’t have my pixelated imaginary friends screwing up someone’s night. 

Now, a few things I should say before I press on with how I handled this.  I knew/know Spouse outside of this RP interaction.  Spouse is generally a good person.  Spouse probably did not mean to make me that uncomfortable as Spouse is not malicious.  Spouse is – in general – very quiet, though, which is likely why the comment hit me as hard as it did.  This was not a person who said a ton, so when Spouse voiced “You got to my significant other’s character before I could” – yeah, I took note.  I couldn’t help it.

Pushing on.  How’d Yva handle it.  Well?  It’s admittedly made things difficult for me.  My character was in the early stages of her development and I’d really started to wrap my mind around her.  IC’ly she wouldn’t know she shouldn’t pursue the gent in question,  OOCly, I couldn’t do it.  I wasn’t comfortable anymore, and no matter how many times I told myself there’d been no impropriety on my part, I still felt like I’d done something wrong.  After much angsting, I approached the RP’ing couple, I apologized for trespassing on RL plans with my rp.  I was assured by player-of-my-character’s-gent that I’d done nothing, things were completely cool and I should talk to Spouse for assurances.  I promptly spoke to Spouse.  Spouse apologized for the weirdness (thank God) but then advised me that there was a real life miscommunication about RP and I just happened to be caught in the crossfire.  Great!  I was off the hook!  But wait, I’m NOT okay with this because you put the onus of your misccomunication on me.  The issue had very little (see:  nothing) to do with me, but somehow, it ended up being about What I Did To Screw Up Your RP Intentions.   Mind you, I still adore the folks involved in this little debaucle, but . . . mmm.  I won’t deny some hurt feelings on my part.

Anyway, the end result of this tale was that I stopped logging my character for RP so things just dwindled down between the characters naturally.  I’d talked to the people involved, I was proactive in ensuring that I still had a good relationship with the couple OOC, but I wasn’t going to risk being A Problem Factor again.   Sadly, it destroyed this character for me.  One thing I’ve noticed about new toons is you build momentum – you start with a very loose idea and you sketch in the details over time. Your stick figure concept becomes a beautiful interesting person through rp interactions.  Running into this STOP so early on destroyed any momentum I had and my interest in her waned. 

So to the couples that both RP, a few requests from Someone Who Got Accidentally Railroaded:

• If you have real life expectations, hash them out before you log on.  I think it’s fabulous that you both play an MMO, I think it’s more fabulous that you RP, but please – PLEASE – make sure you communicate with each other so other people aren’t caught in your Online Strange.
• If you have an issue with something your spouse is doing in game, for whatever reason, put the responsibility of “fixing” the situation in the proper hands – ie your spouse.  There were fifty thousand IC ways for my character to phase out of Romantic Interest’s life, but instead of handling it properly, I had to use the OOC beat stick.  It killed the fun for me. 
• Address things privately.  Putting things like this in a public channel where two dozen people might be staring at it?  Not so great.  It does not foster great relationships.
• If you have a WoW playing spouse and you’re about to engage in RP, take the twelve seconds to consider whether or not this RP will in any adverse way affect your significant other.  Sure, you can log off for the night to get away from crazy pixelated people, but you can’t log off from marriage.  Not easily anyway. 

I could go on and on about this, but I think for now I’ll leave this as is.  There are many other things to be said – I didn’t even touch upon What Happens When One Person In A Couple RP’s And The Other Doesn’t – but that seems like a topic more deserving of its own blogpost.  Perhaps I will address that one day.

Ta!

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