Telling Stories: Safe and sound
I would really like to tell a story wherein the roleplaying community is notably different from the raiding community or the PvP community or any other community and isn’t filled with all sorts of creepy players who will make you want to stop playing altogether. The only thing preventing me from telling that story is the fact that it’s not true.
Let’s face it, roleplaying isn’t exactly like any other community, but it still has those hallmarks. There are creeper and weirdos who will make you awkward, people who have no sense of personal boundaries, and a varied assortment that will make you feel some combination of unwelcome and frightened until you just leave. It’s not unique to online games, either. For some people, roleplaying just seems to lead straight into creep-ville territory. It’s gross and unpleasant, but it’s true.
I am going to assume that no one reading this wants to be a big creepy jerk who drives people away from their game of choice, although whether or not you achieve that goal anyway is another discussion. Today, I want to talk about keeping yourself safe and comfortable, though, and it’s a good idea to make sure that you don’t violate anything contained herein if you’d like to avoid being super-creepy. Yes? Yes.
Telling Stories: Keeping the faith
Whatever you believe in your day-to-day life, religion can have a substantial impact when roleplaying. It has some real meat to it, as a topic. There are a lot of ways that you can portray a religious character, a lot of options offered by the game when it comes to how religion is handled, a whole lot of different permutations available. It’s also a thorny issue to discuss, since discussing religion as a category tends to overlap with religions in the real world, and that’s an uncomfortable series of land mines no matter what you believe.
That also is part of why religion is such a powerful force in roleplaying, though. Religion is tied in with your identity, a combination of things that you’ve been told and things that you believe that are tied intimately with your personal identity. Your religion in real life (or aversion to same) informs part of your identity. What your characters believe is just as important to them.
Telling Stories: Breaking into the middle
When I first went to college, I had a very simple goal: do better there than I had in high school. I had a sound guideline to help me establish that, as well. I figured that if my first instinct about what to do in any situation had resulted in acting the way I had all through high school, clearly the best course of action would be to gauge my first instinct and then do the opposite in any situation. Thus, when I saw a pretty girl and a guy chatting at the first meeting of the school’s anime club, I decided the logical course of action was to walk right up and invite myself to the conversation.
The result? Well, the pretty girl wound up marrying me and the guy roomed with me in college for several years and is still a dear friend. But that was lucky, since my behavior was so screamingly rude that I’m relatively certain I should have been sent to Behavior Jail. But of course, how else are you going to insert yourself in a social situation when roleplaying? Yes, there were dozens of other options open to me as a person in the real world, but if you see interesting roleplaying go down, how do you take part without making your character a rude, abrasive jerk?
Telling Stories: Catching up mechanically
When Final Fantasy XIV releases Ninja, it’ll be a nice day for me, particularly singe I’ve been playing one for the past four years. No, not through an unholy amalgam of abilities put on my bar in service to a rather strange overall cause, but in-character. My character should, by all rights, be dual-wielding and hacking things apart, then slipping back into the shadows. That’s her entire deal. This is not a bold new direction for her, it’s more like an acknowledgement of where she’s already been.
Of course, I’m also lucky insofar as this is a game where it’s very easy – encouraged, even – to swap between classes on a regular basis. The only setback this will pose is that I’ll have to put a bit of extra effort into assembling her weapon and armor sets, something I can probably start doing with the next major patch anyway. But it still raises the question of why she hasn’t been doing this on a regular basis before now. How do you handle it when the game finally catches up mechanically to the place you’ve already been?
Telling Stories: The attraction
Anyone who thinks that sexuality doesn’t define you as a person has never been a teenager.
I don’t mean that as a positive or negative thing, but as a statement of fact. Sure, my experience as a 16-year-old boy staring at girls and being very interested in them isn’t the sole defining characteristic I have as a person, but it had a lot of influence on my development as a person. It informs some of who I am now as an adult, half a life later. It affects a lot of the person I am, and my comfort level with it affects the things I’ll do and talk about.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure that no one reading this is terribly interested in a detailed self-analysis when it comes to my particular bedroom preferences. That’s not the point here; this is a roleplaying column, after all. It’s about the way that your character’s sexuality can influence your character, and how broad a field that can be overall. There’s a lot going on there, and even if you don’t intend to have your roleplaying circle around it, it’s worth addressing.
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 