Telling Stories: That’s what I want
The most tragic cases of roleplaying boredom that I’ve seen are the ones that could be averted simply by letting your characters do something.
“But I do let my characters do things!” you protest, despite the fact that I’m not necessarily talking right to you at the moment. “I go to every roleplaying event! I hang out in agreed-upon hubs! I have a whole lot of backstory! I’m just bored with just sitting around and chatting!”
Exactly. Because you’re not doing anything. Because you’ve somehow mistaken presence for participation and forgotten that the key to roleplaying isn’t showing up to someone else’s event but in having your own things that need to happen. You lost sight of your characters having agency in their world and being the architects of their own fortune and (frequent) misfortune, and as a result all you’re left with is derping around in a bar waiting for someone else to act.
Telling Stories: Enhance both experiences
Tabletop roleplaying isn’t the same as roleplaying with people online. And not just for the obvious reasons where you can’t all be sharing a pizza around a table and spend a bunch of pre-game time chattering about whether or not you enjoyed the last episode of whatever television shows are airing now. Is Game of Thrones still a thing? I don’t have cable.
But really, even beyond the obvious gaps of personal interaction, there are a lot of differences between a gathering in the real world and just roleplaying in an MMO. The systems are different, the environment is different, even the way that the games play is different. It’s a lot easier to roleplay in the middle of a dungeon when the entire world stops and starts based on what the player characters are doing, after all, compared to your average online game where the game is going to keep moving whether you like it or not.
But that’s the thing – there are some good lessons to be learned from online worlds that you can apply to your tabletop sessions. So don’t discard one out of hand! A bit of time in an online game can make your game that much better.
Telling Stories: A little special goes a long way
You want your characters to be special. That’s fine, that’s understandable, that’s even commendable. So you make your first character a half-dragon spawn of the realm of faeries, and…
Well, no. No, we’re already clocking out, and no, it’s not just because you’re doing so in a game with neither dragons nor faeries. It’s because your character is too special. Your character has broken the Specialometer. It’s impossible to relate to them any longer, they’re just too special for us to properly internalize what their deal is.
So let’s talk about people who are special in small ways. About picking out one or two obvious things that aren’t common and then building a character around that rather than trying to be The Most Unique Snowflake Ever. Because wouldn’t you know it, being less special can actually make your character feel more special in the long run than being a half-dragon faerie spawn. Unless you’re playing a superhero game, maybe, but even then.
Telling Stories: Adult themes and porn
Let’s do something that I couldn’t really do back when I was writing Storyboard; let’s talk about sex.
I’ve touched on the subject before, but only broadly. It’s hard not to. But it’s also the elephant in the room, something that’s hard to talk about without it seeming as if that’s all you want to talk about. Thanks to the people who use ERP as a free license to be as screamingly creepy as they could never be in the real world, no one wants to talk about it, because who in the world wants to be associated with that?
But it’s part of the territory. Hell, it’s part of the community, something that it’s more than likely you’ve worked around even if you didn’t know it before. So let’s talk about it, because it’s important and relevant, moreso than the roleplaying community as a whole likes to acknowledge. Despite rumors, being involved in ERP does not automatically mean you are a supercreep, nor is it an activity solely reserved for people using it as a surrogate relationship. Heck, you’ve quite possibly brushed up against it yourself.
Telling Stories: Fitting in the circle
I was introduced to the idea of character circles a long time ago, in an essay about writing Transformers fanfic of all the things in the world. Needless to say, that’s not my usual go-to source for writing advice or roleplaying advice, but it’s still a good idea, and it’s one that I’ve internalized over the years as being extremely useful for both. Especially if you’re dealing with characters who change a lot over time.
Let’s be honest and admit that characters in roleplaying can be somewhat… fickle. They’re probably being consistently played by one person, yes, but your moods change, circumstances change, and what seemed like a perfectly good idea with your character yesterday doesn’t seem like one today. Over time, you get a feel for what your character will or will not do, but that doesn’t change the fact that sometimes you just make a call and it might be almost entirely arbitrary. What you need to describe your characters isn’t a biographic listing of characteristics; what you need is a circle.
Recent Work
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Chocobo Dash
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Eliot Lefebvre 