whimsicaltwine

(Sorry if this is too much to ask, feel free to ignore me :3)

Hello! This is something I love talking about, not too much to ask at all!

Character bleed is when the line between who you are and who your character is gets blurred and you (for lack of bettwe words to describe this) begin to become the character you are playing. This is an especially prevalent conversation in the DnD and LARP communities, but it isn't really something I see people consider or know about in the MCRP space. It took me until early last year to realize how much of a crossover there is in terms of those three spaces, before then I viewed it as it's own thing entirely.

In DnD, one simple way to help differentiate you from your character is to narrate your actions in third person, rather than first. But for most of roleplaying, I find that it really helps to sit back and decompress after playing a character for hours. I'll listen to music that I specifically love, songs and artists that are not on a character playlist, just what I associate with me! (Flipturn my beloved) Journaling is also something I've found helpful, writing down stars and wishes for the session. Stars are things I really enjoyed, and wishes are aspects I want to work on more.

The one thing I cannot stress that I recommend enough is checking in with scene partners after a session is done, especially if there was a high emotion scene present, arguments/breakdowns/anything that could linger in the back of your mind after all is said and done. Just check in with them and say "hey! how are you feeling after that? anything you want to talk about or gameplan from?" Opening honest conversations for check ins helps to prevent internalizing emotions that you feel as your character- I feel it really helps to foster a safe environment. It can be difficult to shut a scene down, but in a LARP or TTRPG space, never be afraid to X card or step away from something if you feel it is weighing on your emotional or physical wellbeing. Your health and safety comes first over a game.

As for consent checklists, the tried and true one I love is by Monte Cook Games! It's a classic in the TTRPG community and can provide a great foundation for a session zero. I used it as a base and made a form for people to fill out, but ended up removing some of the preexisting topics and adding a bunch more to tailor it to the MCRP space. It gives a long list of topics with a red, yellow, and green box by each. Green means you're totally good with a topic, yellow means you'd like it veiled or not given in great detail, and red is a hard line of a topic you do not want to explore. It has a bunch of topics, some that most campaigns would never touch, but it's better to be expansive and cover all topics while saying most won't be in a campaign than to leave it more vague. For example, I included Religious Trauma because I knew my story would branch into that, so I wanted to make sure that I avoided anyone with my main backstory who marked that they were uncomfortable with those themes. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't interact at all, I would just know to be mindful when exploring my backstory around them!