This is a surprisingly frivolous bit of RP talk--RP chat, really. I've been RPing this fantastic relationship with a friend from AG (Casper, ftw, for those who know what I'm talking about...). For those who don't: picture mad, brilliant, obsessive scientist/researcher Squib + suave, sophisticated jewelry shop owner and criminal. 'Like a vaguely S & M Dorian Gray,' is I think how my RP partner described it... though we're trying to be delicate with the site PG-13 rating.

Anyway, we're enjoying it incredibly, and we've been supplementing RP with random funny dialogue scenes done out in IM. Reasonably normal, yeah?

Well, while we were working on our most recent scene, we decided it would be humorous to imagine the characters themselves, five years down the line, were making their lives into a movie and... um... playing themselves. In the scene we were just RPing.

So we IMed that for awhile.

Then we added ourselves in as the directors.

It's simply far too amusing.

I know someone else who's done something like this, but has anyone else? It's really tremendous fun. I recommend it to the insane and wannabe-insane alike.

I find it's really fun to imagine RPs as movies. It's part of the point of playbys, I think: to help with visualization. Naturally, I find great satisfaction simply in beautiful prose--I don't need the images--but it's a frivolity that's both helpful and enjoyable, and I always visualize what I read, anyway. RP is almost more like script-writing than story-writing sometimes, really--it's that back-and-forth. And, er, especially when you do IM dialogue threads.

Discuss...?

Oh, playing about with the fourth wall can be so much fun.

And personally, in my group we always imagine our games as being like a movie...up to the GM adding in little 'cinematic' scenes that are things going on that our characters are not involved in or necessarily know about, music cues, etc.

lol The only thing I've done similar to this is make little jokes while in role-plays when it comes to some epic battle "Cue the Final Fantasy Battle music" lol but this seems like a really fun idea. I will have to try and introduce someone to the idea and have a go at it :D

Oh yes, the fourth wall. All throughout high school before internet forums I wrote and very, very often broke the fourth wall. It was humorous though.

I did get in trouble on an RPG for breaking the fourth wall. I never went back, not because I got my feelings hurt or something stupid like that, but because they all RPed like this:

*dives and attacks [name] with flaming fist*

Which in and of itself is just another way to RP and I find nothing wrong with it. But when they were instructing me how to RP "properly," I got a bit annoyed and meandered away. No harsh feelings; they probably don't even remember that I ever existed since I wasn't there that long.

So yes, I enjoy breaking the fourth wall, though not everyone else appreciates it. I say that if the admin doesn't like you doing it, then it's not appropriate. But if it's just in IM, then that's cool.

LOL of course it's only in IM, we'd never actually thread like that! *aghast* But as a diversion--I think RP needs both serious, multi-paragraph, intensely emotional writing (not purple prose, of course, but real substance--simply because it sucks you in, it creates the scene) and, on the side, moments of rampant silliness. It's for fun, after all! Why not stretch the medium?

I wholeheartedly agree with you there. I've gotten in trouble for silliness despite the fact that I've also had very serious and intense threads.

However, I also don't see a problem breaching the fourth wall in threads if the administrator is okay with it. If he/she is not, then I'd definitely never do it. (Okay, except for once in a blue moon. Haha.)

Hahaha, I do that all the time! xD Man, aside from having some crazy IM RPs on the side that can be hilariously goofy one moment and then get kinda...deep and serious at others (and then we all go, "o.o Wow. Too bad that didn't actually happen in-game." Seriously, I have a character who, in IM-land, is friends with another character while in-game those two characters are still seriously at odds and haven't even been threaded together yet =O), well...we also do break the 4th wall like whoa.

Like yesterday I somehow wound up interviewing another person's character and then getting assured he wouldn't eat me. 8D And we often have our characters refer to us as their Gods. Many of those characters have a 'fear of God!' approach there, or even a 'God sucks. |:' attitude; we're not very benevolent Gods most of the time, after all...we're more of the scourging types of Gods. We've had our characters argue with us over plot points they're nooone too happy about.

That's only in IM-land, of course! xD If I saw any 4th wall breaking in RP-land, I'd cringe.