Telling Stories: Repair tools
So your character got just plain screwed up.
I’m a big advocate of the idea that however bad things might get with a given character, you can accept the imbalance and move on. Like a cat, characters don’t need a great deal of herding. But just like you may have to eventually address the fact that your outdoor cat stinks to high heaven and does need to be washed, eventually you might have to sigh, grit your teeth, and realize that something is rotten in the state of your character. You’re going to need to repair.
Fortunately for you, there are tools in place to help you do just that. Somewhat less fortunately, those tools range in overall utility from being super helpful to being kind of severe. So let’s talk about your tools, the long-term effects of using these tools, and try to provide a framework for deciding which option is right for correcting your particular problem without the usual costs of labor.
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: Letting the mechanics speak
The down side of roleplaying in any sort of game with solid mechanics is that the mechanics creep in around the edges. You don’t get complete control over your character concept – once your abilities start tying into mechanics, you have to start parsing what the larger mechanical implications of your choices are. Even if you have a perfect concept, it might either be overpowered or underpowered, it might not be easily possible, and so forth.
This is also the bright side.
Roleplaying forces you to fling your character concept not just against the stories you want to tell but also the realities of the mechanical environment you play within. In fiction, all you need to do is write a story wherein your characters are presented with choices and challenges that they can overcome as appropriate. In roleplaying, all of the ideas about what your character will be run up routinely against the reality of what the game finds acceptable and what the mechanical implications of those choices will be. And that usually serves as a great way to refine your character concepts.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 