Mastodawn

Rowyn Mar 27, 2024

Also, today marks my 1 year anniversary of playing Apothecaria, and a year of having an entry to post every single day.

(There have been several days when I forgot to actually POST the entry that I had ready to go and ended up posting it the next day along with a second entry, granted. 😅 There's a Discord where I also post and they've gotten an entry every day. The Flickr archive gets even more erratic updates than .art, fwiw)

Author-ized L.J.Mar 27, 2024

@rowyn that is some impressive persistence!

Rowyn Mar 27, 2024

@ljwrites yeah, never thought I'd be making daily illustrated entries for an entire year for a *game*. 😂

Author-ized L.J.Mar 27, 2024

@rowyn does the creator know? I know I'd be all kinds of flattered.

Rowyn Mar 27, 2024

@ljwrites They have a discord and I post on the discord about my journal every 100 entries or so.

@rowyn amazing xD Do they comment on it?

@ljwrites Nah, they never comment on the journal sharing channels. Not sure if they look at the channels or not.

@rowyn Do you think yours is the longest-running, or do you see even longer ones? xD

@ljwrites I don't know, actually? Most people who share journals share new ones rather than folks updating about their progress on an existing one, and I don't follow the discord closely any more. (There was a bunch of AI art for a while and I just muted the server.) Pretty sure there are people who've been playing for longer and ones who've written more, tho. Apothecaria is one of the better-known/more popular solo RPGs.

@rowyn It's awesome that people keep up playing for so long, this is like those multi-year campaigns of legend but solo :D

@ljwrites I used to run multi-year campaigns, way back in the day, but those were not as consistent as my Apothecaria game. :D

Author-ized L.J.

@rowyn Yeah understandably! I think the longest campaign I ran was for a year and a half.

@ljwrites I only vaguely know how long my multi-year campaigns went. There was a shared-GM superhero setting that I played in college and for a year or so after graduation, that was probably involved with for 4 years (but that started before me and continued after me with other GMs).

Another shared-GM setting was Sinai, which, omigosh, is so well-documented that I can see how long I was involved with it--2 years. http://sinai.webconnections.net/library.php?gmthread=Rowan . Also ran long before/after me--at least 13 years.

Log Library: Logs GMed by "Rowan"

@ljwrites And then Mirari, which ran for about 2 years with me and a co-GM, @Tuftears, and an assistant GM, Greywolf.

And a few games after that -- the Just Trust Me game, A Game of October, and a World Tree game, that each lasted like 1 to 3 years, I think.

Tuftears Mar 28, 2024

@rowyn @ljwrites *purrs* Good times. ^.^

@Tuftears @rowyn holy crap, those were some long games! There must be so many memories.

@ljwrites @Tuftears So many! From Sinai onwards, almost all my roleplaying has been online and in text, so I have complete copies of many of the games. They're So Long. o_o

@rowyn Oh wow, text games! You don't see those as much anymore. I remember them being more common in the 00's because of bandwidth and hardware constraints. Kinda wish there were more of them, they have a very different energy than either spoken games or asynchronous written games like Play by Post. @Tuftears

@ljwrites I love written games much more than live. They feel way more immersive to me, because I'm not distracted by how the participants look/sound/perform, or by the GM trying to play multiple roles at the same time. Play-by-post is actually my favorite mode, though. Synchronous play gives me performance anxiety these days. :/

@rowyn Yeah valid, there's a lot of time pressure in synchronous play whether spoken or written. Plus, setting up the time to play all at one time is hell. I played some good PbP games (on wiki) and always kind of want to dive back into one. I can't seem to keep up on PbP of games meant to be played synchronously, but have a better record for PbP on asynchronously-designed games and rather miss the experience. I guess joint journaling games would fill that niche nowadays.

@ljwrites joint journaling games sound pretty fun!

I love asynchronous play-by-post. I used to start one every year or so with one particular friend who loved the format and anyone else we could rope in. Sometimes they lasted for several months and sometimes they petered out after a few weeks. That friend was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2020 and passed away last year, though. :(

@rowyn awww I'm sorry about your friend :( I'm glad you had those fun times with them while you could, though.

@rowyn @ljwrites That's always a bit of an issue with synchronous, but I confess I do miss the days of being able to get friends together weekly for those campaigns. These days playing Baldur's Gate 3 or something like that with friends online fills that need a bit.

@Tuftears yeah and I guess that's another way games have taken up some of the tabletop niche, because they can scratch some (though by no means all) of the same itch at a fraction of the effort. @rowyn

@ljwrites @Tuftears Yeah, computer RPGs are so different from TTRPGs, and so much easier. o_o

@ljwrites @rowyn Computer game developers: "Hey, WE put in a lot of hours making that!" (much pouting)

@Tuftears @rowyn yeah, they put in the hours so end-users don't have to xD

@ljwrites @rowyn I always wanted to be a computer game developer when I was a wee kitten, but these days I'm really not sure I'd be willing to put in the insane hours and dedication needed. 😹 Writing seems more rewarding at this time, at least for the sake of getting something out the door in a reasonable timeframe.

@Tuftears @ljwrites Yeah. I've always wanted to do a comic, but it's so much faster to tell a story in prose.

I would like to write an interactive fiction game some day, though. Just an old-fashioned, no grinding, "pick choices until you get to an ending" kind of story. Maybe with some illustrations, like Apothecaria.

@rowyn @ljwrites There are some good "low coding" choices out there that I'd probably do if I had a sudden yen to make an interactive fiction game... But working through the choices and braiding the narrative sensibly makes it a real step up in difficulty over straight-up writing.

@Tuftears @ljwrites Yeah, if I were to try it, it'd have to be with a short-story-length idea rather than my usual novels.

@rowyn @ljwrites "Short-story-length" idea attempts to grow! *rumbling noises, ground shakes*