Someone has overdosed, so said the panicked man running down the street towards the infirmary. I follow, pushing through the red swing doors into the hospital reception area, and find a family huddled together in the adjacent waiting room. What happened, I ask. And I’m politely, but no less promptly, told to mind my own business.

They’re right, of course. Because if this scenario were to unfold in real life, despite my best intentions, random strangers are indeed entitled to privacy. I should admire their manners in such a moment of distress, truth be told. Herein lies my first distinction that separates hyper-serious text-only Grand Theft Auto roleplay, and the fast-paced, voice-based servers I’m otherwise familiar with.

New world order

I’ve spent years cooking up off-the-wall roleplay encounters in the voice-based GTA 5 roleplay platform FiveM, and have revelled in the breakneck speed in which most of these encounters unfold. From robbing banks while posing as a journalist to running a nightclub as an active vampire, FiveM, in my opinion, is at its very best in its immediate experiences, where spontaneity and on-the-fly exchanges make and/or break each set-piece.

With speed comes variety—roleplayers definitely take themselves seriously in the throes of VOIP-only spaces, but if something goes awry or doesn’t quite go to plan, the next tale is never far from the horizon. This is true of FiveM, alt:v, NoPixel, New Day, and the wealth of RP platforms whose servers tend towards all of the above, and while there definitely are players in it for the long haul, there is a strong element of pick-up-and-play to the majority of sessions I’ve ever experienced.

The opposite is true in text-only servers. I’ve long been intimidated by the seriousness of these spectrums, to the point where I’ve pretty much avoided them entirely. And while I’ve barely dipped my toes into the narrative-heavy scene at this stage, I’ve nevertheless been blown away by what I’ve seen so far. Stepping away from FiveM et al’s action-oriented roleplay, what I’ve found has been more thoughtful, more precise and more longer-form; where stories gradually develop and actions have genuine consequences.

The hospital example above is but one pretty superficial example, but I’ve played in enough VOIP servers to confidently suggest the same scenario would have unfolded like a high-drama soap opera.

As a plumber who recently moved to Los Santos following the death of his family, I’m currently pursuing an honest life. The allure of the city’s criminal underbelly is there bubbling away under the surface—this is GTA, after all—but my most enjoyable RP experience last week was installing a bathroom suite for a young student couple in Vinewood. It was a nice evening by the time I’d sealed the last fitting, so I decided to walk home. I chatted to a man busking on the edge of Union Square about the stock market. I went home and had an early night. It was lovely.

And so here I am, pausing the monotony of real life in the city of Glasgow to lose myself in the monotony of pretend life in the city of Los Santos. Perhaps it’s an age thing. Perhaps it’s getting older and realising that the unbridled chaos of vanilla GTA Online—where it’s sometimes difficult to walk 10 paces without being sniped or stabbed or blown to pieces by a flying motorcycle equipped with homing missiles—is sometimes too much. Perhaps it’s realising that the meme-inspiring, TikTok-fueling, fast-pace-favouring RP scene is fun but exhausting.

And perhaps it’s realising that there’s something endearing about being content just existing in a quieter slant on San Andreas—where today it’s about fitting toilets, and in six months it could be about owning my own plumbing firm and treating someone else to the pleasure of working for me.

In GTA Online I have an arsenal of guns and umpteen illicit businesses. In FiveM I have an unhinged personality and a thousand faces. In GTA World I have a backstory and a civilian’s dream.