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.
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.
Challenge Accepted: Easy keeps you going
First time, yes, full challenge. Subsequent times? Thanks, I’ll just faceroll it on easy.
There are some people who are just not going to have fun with a game if it’s not a challenge. That’s a given, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s part of how games work, and it’s an important element to keep in mind. Games cannot be designed to be all easy, all of the time, or the developers would be saying that they didn’t want the money of a sizable chunk of audience members. And that would just be silly. We need to have challenges in games, things that are difficult to overcome, stuff that can’t be cleared in one or two quick moments of play.
But in the long run, it’s going to be the easy stuff that’s more beneficial for any game.
This sounds contradictory. After all, the people playing a game for the long haul, whether it’s single-player or multiplayer, are going to be the people with more practice. These are the people best suited to facing challenges, and more to the point these are the people who most likely want more challenge. How can easy content be more useful to a game on a whole than difficult things?
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.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 