Telling Stories: I’m not calling you a liar
If you’ve never played Dragon Age II, you missed out on some great lying. The whole story is told with the framing device of Varric Tethras being interrogated, and his interrogator knows full well that Varric is a liar. What she has to do is sort out which parts are outright lies, which parts are exaggerations, and which bits are the truth.
This, I think, is the goal of pretty much everyone who roleplays a duplicitous character. And it’s hard to get to that point, because you need to be a liar who’s just trustworthy enough that no one knows where the lies start and the truth begins. It’s forever a fuzzy line, and while no one can quite trust your character they also can’t discard the possibility…
It’s hard to reach that point, though. Much more often, you just wind up with a character who no one trusts and quite possibly isn’t a whole lot of fun to play. So how do you make a better liar? How do you make a character where everyone knows they’re lying, but everyone still wants to hear what they have to say?
Telling Stories: Don’t be so hard on your character
Don’t be hard on your roleplaying characters.
I don’t mean this in the sense that you should give them all whatever they want and make their lives uninterrupted parades of joy, because that shit is boring. No one wants that. Your characters should constantly be facing hardship, struggling, getting knocked down and getting up again. In that sense, you should be brutal to your characters, relentlessly hard on them, unceasingly on-point about what they’re doing right or wrong.
No, what I mean is that you shouldn’t be so hard on the character you made. And yourself, by extension. Don’t berate yourself because your character isn’t as good as they could be, even if your original concept was as gut-shatteringly stupid as “Goku but in World of Warcraft.” Don’t beat yourself up over poor early roleplaying or changing your character over time or having to toss out some retcons here and there or any of the above.
Telling Story: I’d like to have an argument
I have never talked with anyone about really good in-character arguments that I’ve had in an online game chiefly because I am sure that’s the first step toward sounding like a crazy man.
“Oh, yeah, this argument was great. I was really worked up and angry by the end of it, I really felt like I was actually arguing… what? No, no, I wasn’t really arguing with anyone, I was just pretending to be angry at my friends about things that never happened. And it got me angry in the real world! It was super.”
All joking aside, if you’re invested in the character you’re playing and what’s going on in the game, yes, you’re going to wind up transferring some emotion from the game into the real world. As a result, it’s a tricky place to be. You want arguments in-character to ring true, but you also presumably don’t want to have an actual argument with pretend people in a pretend game that you at least theoretically play to enjoy yourself. So how can you make sure that your in-game arguments are 100% focused on in-game emotions and not real ones?
Telling Stories: Making a guest appearance
Your character is the protagonist of their own story. If that’s not the case, then go play whoever the protagonist is, because they’re the one with interesting stuff happening. That doesn’t mean your character has to be the super-unique lone heir to some fantastic legacy; it just means that on a list of people who are moving forward in the story, your character should be up there. What’s the point of making your character just an also-ran?
Most people don’t have that problem, though. In fact, most people make characters who have tons of stuff going on, backstory, biographical elements, crazy stuff. Which becomes its own problem when you take into account the fact that if your character wants to get involved with other characters, you want to do so in a way that’s both respectful of the other person’s story and yet still influential. So how do you walk into someone else’s narrative without being either disrespectful or utterly forgettable?
Telling Stories: No repeats
There are times and places where repeats are perfectly fine. A lot of radio stations in Connecticut seem to advertise “no repeats” as a badge of honor, which is slightly less than heartening when you realize that these stations have perhaps ten worthwhile songs in their rotations. Nor do I expect most television shows to provide me with a constant drip of new entertainment year-round. Heck, half of my knowledge of Law & Order comes from catching enough out-of-order repeats that I eventually began to piece together a coherent whole.
Roleplaying is not a medium which is kind to repeats, however. I would go so far as to say that repeats are actively detrimental to roleplaying for a number of reasons. They’re tempting, at times, but in a medium which relies upon your ability to craft an entertaining story with other people, handing over a story people have already seen just feels like going through the motions for no real benefit.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 