Telling Stories: I wish I was
At its most basic level, all roleplaying is a form of wish fulfillment. Sure, you may not want to be your characters, but you presumably enjoy slipping into their heads for a little while. It’s a chance to step out of yourself and engage in behavior you never would in a normal setting, whether that behavior is something you’d personally find reprehensible or just something different from the norm. (Slaying monsters, for example, does not form the foundation of a solid career path in modern society. I’ve checked.)
That doesn’t mean it’s always a good thing.
Wish fulfillment is a tricky thing to discuss when it comes to roleplaying precisely because it’s always there, even if it’s usually a background issue. You can’t pretend it has nothing to do with your characters, but you also don’t want them to be nothing more than pure self-serving fantasy engines. So let’s talk a little bit about wish fulfillment in games, how it works, what you can get out of it, and how you can avoid making your characters into the gross sort of wish avatars.
Telling Stories: What you don’t see when looking in the mirror
If I had to point to why I enjoyed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine so much, I could do worse than pointing to the episode of “Waltz.” In some ways, it’s very much a bottle show – the captain of the series and the character who’s been long set up as a villain facing off against one another and simply letting drama develop. But I particularly love the amount of insight it gives into that villain, a look into the mind of Dukat. We have a character who is sharply analytical and has looked deep within himself to figure out his flaws, only to come up with a conclusion so far from redemption that his subsequent actions are at once deplorable and expected.
And it also gives chilling mirrors of any time that the viewers tried to self-analyze.
The thing about introspection is that it’s tricky to do properly, because as the audience and the author we have a different perspective. We can see what characters are doing wrong when the characters themselves often can’t. So that raises the interesting question of how much introspection is too much and how to put yourself in the right place to see what they would see.
Challenge Accepted: Meta challenges
I just can’t stand being told I’m a horrible person too many times in a single day.
As long as we’re talking about challenge, we have to also talk about the things which create more challenge that aren’t a function of any part of game design. They’re not elements of poor design, they’re not fake difficulty, they don’t fall under the header of things that appear to be challenges but really aren’t. Yet they’re still challenging, and they can still knock you flat on your rear just as surely as a genuinely challenging bit of content will.
This is a collection of what I call meta challenges, challenges that are very much there but also have little to nothing to do with the actual challenge level of the game. None of them are coded into the game, but all of them are elements that make playthroughs more difficult, often stalling players entirely despite the fact that they’re obviously not a part of the core experience. Some of them brush up against fake difficulty in a few places, but all of them are still distinct from it by not providing a challenge to every player, just some players.
Telling Stories: Your flaws weave a tale
Let’s start this off with a trivia question: what’s the difference between Iron Man and Batman, other than their powers?
If you think about it, they’re closer than you might think. Both of them are inheritors of immense fortunes while being brilliant in their own right. They both created weapons to fight against injustice and horrible things – sure, Iron Man built a suit of armor while Batman made himself a weapon, but the only reason Batman doesn’t have an armored exoskeleton is because the writers choose not to go that route. Yet you know the characters are very different in so many ways, despite their similarities.
At the core, it’s because of their respective flaws and weaknesses. For all their similarities, Tony Stark’s weaknesses do not belong to Bruce Wayne and vice versa. It’s sort of a supertype of avoiding cabinet flaws as I discussed two weeks ago, wherein a given flaw is directly related to the sort of problems that a character has and what sort of story the character works within.
Telling Stories: Get wasted
Show me a game setting without drugs of some kind, and I will show you a setting that is either intended for young children or one that has not been adequately developed.
Pretty much every setting has alcohol, and The Secret World by definition has all of the usual real-world chemical cocktails. Final Fantasy XIV has somnus, milkroot, and presumably moko grass (it does turn into hemp, after all). WildStar features beer and cigars as more or less background elements. World of Warcraft has bloodthistle, and blood elves in general. City of Heroes had superadine on top of real-world drugs. That’s just scratching the surface.
Odd though it might seem, drugs are pretty important in roleplaying, even if you’re not playing a character who actively has a problem. The cultural impact and overall implications have a major impact on your character no matter what, and you can use them to add a fair bit of nuance to your portrayals. So with the understanding that you as a player should probably not be taking illegal drugs, let’s talk a bit about using drugs in RP.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 