Telling Stories: Thinking like a television with your characters
Playing my main character in Star Trek Online has been illuminating. She had her own gig for several seasons, and it was interesting, watching her go from a fresh-faced Lieutenant to a Captain through sheer pluck and determination. Season 1 was mostly about her sorting out her crew and how she related to officers frequently trained not to accept a Cardassian in command; season 2, meanwhile, was much more focused around her past and what she actually intended to do with her command. It wasn’t until season 3 that she really started exploring how she interacted with other officers, developing friendships and rivalries; but she left a lot of that behind when she climbed just a little higher. Now she’s in season 4, and she’s learning that it’s quite lonely at the top of the ladder, and perhaps not as focused on what she actually finds important.
Obviously Star Trek Online focuses its updates into what it calls seasons, but just as obviously not what I’m talking about here. Organizing your character’s past and present into seasons and story arcs can be a major boon to playing your characters while keeping a strong sense of their development over time. Even though much of the time you’re going to be imposing order after the fact, it’s still a good way to organize your thoughts and get a good sense of the past without becoming overly bogged down in details.
Telling Stories: You’re not that girl
Roleplaying is, in part, the act of getting into your character. You kind of have to. Like an actor stepping into a role, you become this character, start understanding how they work and what they want, try to produce a coherent picture of what they’re all about. You want to get to a point where the character’s actions are as natural to you as your own, when you rarely have to think about what your character would do in a given situation because it’s almost entirely self-evident. Which makes it just a little strange when you have to also step back and remember that this character is not any part of you.
Perhaps that’s stretching it – you always invest a bit of yourself in your characters, obviously – but you are still separate. You aren’t the same person. What happens to the player is not dependent upon what happens to the character, and even just speaking from experience there are a lot of things my characters do that I’d never even consider. So let’s talk a little bit about creating that space and pushing back against identifying too much.
Telling Stories: Being polite to roleplayers
So you don’t roleplay. Maybe you did at one point but don’t any longer. Maybe you never have and are curious, but are a little put off by what seems like arcane terminology and the looming threat of skeevy behavior. Maybe you’ve never cared to but just don’t like being a jerk. Maybe lots of things. The point is, you’re not roleplaying, and you come across people who are actively roleplaying, either because you intentionally chose a roleplaying server to play on or because you just found it lying there.
Because you fulfill the basic requirements for human empathy, you don’t want to be a jerk. But how do you do that? How do you interact with roleplayers, possibly even observing them, without being a twit or in some way damaging what they’re doing? As it turns out, it’s not that hard. So whether you’re just on the outside of roleplaying or you’re deeply invested and want to show this to others, let’s talk about being polite to roleplayers when you aren’t one.
Telling Stories: We don’t like your kind here
Some games just don’t want roleplayers around, it seems.
Guild Wars made a point of not letting players stop running no matter what; Warhammer Online made the same mistake. Several console-based games make things like walking and chatting more difficult than they need to be, discouraging people from roleplaying even further, and some games like Defiance barely give you a spare moment to stop and chat about local politics anyway. It makes things a lot more awkward, because it’s one thing negotiating around other players who don’t like roleplaying. How do you deal with it when the game itself doesn’t want you around?
Like always, there are no hard and fast answers, but there are approaches you can use. Very few games are made with the intent to stymie roleplayers, but several make the mistake quite naturally. So let’s look at what you can do when the game’s built in such a way that you certainly don’t feel welcome
Telling Stories: Roleplaying and character pets
If you know me, you know that I’m a pet person. To be very specific, I’m a cat person most of the time, but I’ve got a deep and abiding affection for animals of all sorts. Having pets is a big deal to me, and I don’t feel nearly as happy without a few of them in my home. Which says something about me right off the bat, just like the fact that I have two cats mewing their way through my home says something different about me than if I had two dogs or two birds or two ferrets.
Pets are one of those character traits that we don’t tend to think about when it comes to roleplaying. It’s kind of understandable why; we dote on our pets in real life, but unless you have a particularly unusual one we don’t really focus on our critters. But a pet says a lot about you as a person, and there’s every reason why your character’s pets or lack thereof can be a major character element. Read More…
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 