Lessons Learned from a Year Listening to the Fiction... this post and the article it links to are deeply, perennially relevant

Oh this is a fantastic read, thank you, and puts into words some thoughts I’ve had trouble giving substance to.

public_trans_it: it really really is such a good post and article!! i'm glad it was helpful for you too, i first read it i think a year or two ago and it was such a huge relief to see it articulated so well and validated and framed in those terms

whatever brand of plurality stuff i've got going on is one that's like... a minefield to Potentially Fuck Myself Up Real Bad if i try to approach it in ways i see a lot of people talk about doing so (which are perfectly natural and work for them!). but if i try to treat it solely as a Creative Urge and/or playing dolls thing, even with extra prompts or

whatever for inspiration/guidance, i just get more and more distressed bc Something's Not Right Here I Need More; whereas pretty much the moment i treat it as a plurality thing even a little, it is a massive relief and resolves the feeling with the quickness. best way i can describe it is when you need to yawn but you can't seem to do it quite deeply enough

and then the moment when you finally manage it. it's one of the reasons i've been getting more into solo ttrpgs and trying to design ones that work for me lately tbh; turns out they're actually a good way for me to measure 'no really this is not just a matter of creative restlessness, you're holding a plurality stress position here,' while at the same time

also kind of... helping me focus and clarify it, if that makes any sense? kind of flex and draw my attention to the part of my brain that does that, instead of forgetting that that's A Way What My Brain Might Do because out of sight out of mind. and helps with feeling out the legitimate interplay between my plurality stuff and my creative urges/focus

hence why i keep making hacks/systems that involve NPCs interacting with each other independently of the PC lmao

which is a lot of words but hat of solidarity 🤝

Oh that absolutely makes sense to me! In fact if you have any solo game recommendations, I’d love to hear it, because I have been looking to try the same.

I will say it’s made my life SO much easier when I started treating masking not as an activity that is a necessary evil, but instead as a separate person who inhabits the same body.

And I don’t think that’s a unique experience in the least, given how many autistic and trans people I see who seem to have to deal with some form of plurality. But if you have to spend a large chunk of your life pretending to be someone else, it makes sense for that identity to develop into more and more of its own person.

Which also makes it unsurprising that writers also get the same thing with the characters they make.

But really, we just need to develop better language around it, as the article mentioned. Saying that as someone who has alters ranging the full spectrum from “Basically just imaginary friend” to “full trauma response with an amnesiac barrier in place”.

Because talking about any of them is extremely difficult with how limited the language is.

oh man i'd never even thought about it in the context of masking before, that's really neat and i'd love to hear more if you feel like sharing at any point :0 both because interesting by itself, and because it sounds interesting to compare against my own stuff in the context of finding language for distinctions + variations of experience

i'm a little out of it rn because i took my meds way too late today + only just finally caffeine'd, so i may have to come back to it in a bit to expand on how my own plurality stuff has played out up til now- spoiler alert: there are Many Factors, and i think it might be both endogenic and traumagenic- but it's nice to have a chill space to talk about it!

also for solo RPG recs, the first one that comes to mind is Over the Mountain by marchcrow! it's a slice of life about moving into a mountain town and getting to know the place and the people there.

it's got one of the best balances i've seen so far re: giving the player room to improvise without going 'now draw the rest of the owl,' and it's made specifically to let you play a campaign that's as long or short as you want. i've found a lot of solo rpgs tend to be either hyperspecific and really restrictive with the stories you can tell, or 'aight here's

a five-word prompt, now come up with your own premise and write 3k+ words from it. good luck,' and while i'm glad that works for some folks i get frustrated sometimes at how that seems to be the only kind of solo game i can find out there. OtM handles it really well imo, and so do marchcrow's other games that aren't hyperspecific ones. (and even then,

they're made to be widely applicable to stories you might want to tell with them, like the 'your character is Pissed and wrecks a room for catharsis' one. a lot of solo RPGs tend to kind of feel more like the author wrote a short story and you're just copypasting names into it, which again is fine if you enjoy it! but it's not what i'm looking for At All)

i also admire the hell out of the creator because they've made a point not to charge for any of their games, and to make games you can play without needing to spend a bunch of money on it, because they remember being too poor to have access to tabletop gaming; and while there's nothing wrong with being compensated for game dev work, i can respect that.

i think the main issue i've had with OtM so far is that because it's geared toward slice of life with fantasy elements, it's not as easy to tell stories with the kind of stakes and action i'd like to, which is why i keep making hacks of it and am slowly stitching them together into one system. I Need Otherworldly Murder Mysteries and Danger Squirtle

as mentioned their other games are cool too, including the one that's designed to fit on a business card, but OtM's my favorite so far

@CarnivorousMoogle - [ ttrpgs, game dev ] BANGS HAND...i went ahead and made a separate plurk since SOLO RPG DEV MY BELOVED and once i get started on it there is no power that can stop the ball rolling short of getting distracted

I actually have starcrossedsky: to thank for making the connection between masking and plurality, thanks to him introducing me to the term ‘worksona’, that kinda fake personality you put on for customer service purposes. It’s just a form of mask, and I realized the same applies to other forms of masking.

So once I learned I had DID, I just kinda turned that lens inwards and tried to examine other aspects of my own personality through it.

Thinking of my masks as different people instead of as actions I have to preform that go against my nature has been super helpful. Especially from the trans side of things.

Presenting as male is far less of an issue now that I have the ability to turn onwards and take the aspects of myself that are comfortable with being male, and ask them to front and deal with things.

It’s allowed a lot of exploration of how I view myself, and what I even define as ‘me’ at all.

*turn inwards

I’ve honestly found that I can ‘weaponize’ a lot of my alters in this way, and turn them against my own issues. Thinking of parts of yourself as other people just kinda makes things easier, cause in general (at least in my experience) it’s easier to help someone else instead of making something easier for yourself.

I only barely woke up and am kinda rambling so sorry if this isn’t making a lot of sense.

I also kinda struggle to talk about this stuff openly in any real detail because unfortunately I have a lot of internalized ableism still, and feel like I’d be getting judged for anything I say. I can barely even think about it without those kinds of thoughts intruding