// GUH I really, really love reading your rp blog posts. The descriptions of Morry interacting with his new house are just gorgeous. <33 the way your descriptions give texture and scent to the world... I definitely keep your RP in mind as inspiration while trying to do some of my own; since you're playing through the game, I'm curious - do you write the posts as you go, or all at once after you finish playing? How much do you RP while playing, and/or any tips for doing so? Thanks!! :)
Oh wow, thank you so much! I’m very glad you’re enjoying it, and I’m really honored that I can help your RP!
To answer your question, both: most of my writing is done ingame as things happen or ideas occur to me, using the Take Notes! mod. Sometimes, though, I’ll get distracted with, you know, actually playing and only write small shorthand notes to myself — things like “met (so-and-so NPC) in (this place), they said/did (x), i think (y)” — and I’ll flesh them out later. Sometimes while I’m doing the fleshing out, extra things come to mind and I’ll write a few entirely-offgame posts. But in general, I do find it a lot easier to use Take Notes, since I’m never stuck for ideas: if I can’t think of something, I just play for a few minutes and something’s bound to happen pretty much immediately to spur an idea or two.
((EDIT: I'll pop the rest of this under a cut for length))
While I’m playing, I try to stay as in-character as I can, barring things like fixing bugged quests and ignoring the entire dovahkiin part for plot purposes (Moraelyn’s fond of linguistics and can stab things really well, that doesn’t mean he’s Dragonborn though). So the playstyle ends up a little quirky depending on how Moraelyn would act: He doesn’t like to steal things, he’s been basically homeless for two hundred years so he tends to carry a lot of stuff with him, he likes to cook so he tends to grab all the salt and ingredients he can just for the sake of having nice food but has a violent hatred of apples and garlic (refuses to have any in his house, even) so that gets taken into account. It makes gameplay challenging (and my carryweights almost always tick over past the 750 mark despite wearing pretty much every bandolier and backpack possible) but more rewarding, and helps make writing a lot easier.I will admit, though, I have a lot of “lalala he never heard that shut up” moments during gameplay for the sake of RP plot pacing. And sometimes I’ll write an event that clearly could not happen that way during gameplay, like with sparing the Argonian assassin, because the game is limiting and I have better ideas sometimes.
Hmm, tips for ingame RP… I find a few certain mods help if you’re taking a character in a particular direction, for example Moraelyn is really REALLY interested in books so I have a mod or two that adds in books from all games (plus a few dev-written stories from the Imperial Library website) so he’ll have books to find that would be contemporary to him. Moraelyn is also particular about his appearance, so there’s a few added armor sets like Immersive Armors that help with that. My poor computer is not very good and rather old now, so I can’t yet put all the mods I would like on it, but Little Vivec is courtesy of a mod called Moon And Star, so if you wanna visit the cute little town I keep taking wildly large plot liberties with, you totally can.
Outside of mods, just try and have a good background for your character first: work out who they are and where they’re from, what they’re doing in Skyrim/Cyrodiil/Morrowind etc. Once you have a good idea of who they are, just try and keep your actions to whatever you think the character would naturally do and how things would affect them. It might seem tricky at first, but you get used to it really fast, and pretty soon it’s a lot of fun. At least for weirdos like me.
Gods, that is.. a lot of words.
I hope that helps, and I look forward to reading your work!
PS: Do you have links to said RP, or am I following it already without knowing it's yours? That happens to me sometimes.
