Precious and Fragile Things

I bet you thought I forgot about this. I haven't, I've just been busy with life and uninspired. These posts are tagged for your convenience.

Character Creation: The Importance of Personality

You've read about the setting, you've got at least a vague idea of what race and job/class you want, and maybe you've compiled all your stats or are in the process of doing the math. Now comes the big question:

What kind of character do you want to play?

It's easy to say you want to play a warrior, but what kind of warrior do you want to be? Do you decapitate first and ask questions later or do you only draw your sword only when it is necessary to save a life? Are you a new recruit eager for some action or are you a grizzled veteran who has experienced the horrors of war?

Leaving aside your job/class, has your character ever been in love? If not, does s/he have a desire to fall in love someday? (Think about that question especially as it can tell you so much.) Has s/he lost someone near and dear? Is s/he happiest around a group of friends or does s/he prefer to be more of a loner? Answering questions like this are good ways to shape your character's personality. Personality gives dimension to what would otherwise be a flat and boring character. It tells us what a character might do in a given situation which makes role-play come that much easier.

Looking at the campaign/game setting can help you figure out some key personality traits too. If there's been a war or a natural disaster that occurred in your character's lifetime, it might be a defining moment in his/her life, especially if that event wiped out about 90% of your race's population overnight (I'm looking at you, blood elves). Someone raised in the aftermath of catastrophic devestation might not be as well-adjusted as someone else who spent their life in a loving home. Just make sure not to overdo the tragedy angle. Maybe you lost a friend or a relative and your parents are dead!, but try not to fall into the trap of being the only survivor of an attack no one could reasonably survive, or don't make this singular happening the sole defining incident in your character's life. Even traumatic events are only slivers of time that shape us.

Be wary of being too dark. I love a good dollop of angst in most all of my characters, and many of them are tortured souls one degree or another, but there is such a thing as laying it on too thick and it's hard to role-play with someone who is a Debbie Downer all the time. Also, if your background is gory and full of abuse, it might understandably turn off perspective role-play partners. Some otherwise great role-players seem to turn this into some sort of masochistic contest of whose character has more woe, and that's less than fun and distracts from the plot.

[Side-Note: Rape as part of a character's backstory should be handled with care, though I might suggest you drop that idea altogether. Mostly it's a personal thing of having seen way too many people use rape as an easy way to introduce strife, but the reality of rape hits too close to home for many players and seeing it used as a cheap tactic to garner sympathy can be aggravating at best, triggering at worst. It can be handled realistically and with respect, though experience tells me this rarely happens.]

On the flip side, you might want to be Susy Sunshine to counteract all the emo you will likely encounter. Maybe your character has had an easy life, loving parents, and even a pony, or maybe s/he lost everything in a flood but has made the decision to put it behind him/her and soldier on. S/he is not going to let the darkness win, by golly!

Whatever you decide, be consistent. Unless you're several characters sharing one body (which has been done, surprisingly well at that), you're not going to one day love chocolate and the next day hate it (well, that isn't taking into account the occurence of a sudden horrible chocolate tragedy). If something is causing enough conflict to disrupt the game, sure go ahead and look at what can be done to help remedy it, but otherwise expect the characters to have conflict. No group of people can come together and be the best of friends right away or even all the time, and if your character abhors broccoli then the other broccoli loving character is just going to have to deal with your dislike of said vegetable.

Up next: Character tropes and how to use them, or not use them. Hopefully it won't be another four months between posts. Then again, I'll be visiting TV Tropes, so no guarantees I can pull myself out of that wormhole.

I admit it, when it comes to role-play, I have an ego. I'm not saying I've descended from up on high to show you pathetic mortals how it's done, but I am saying that I'm confident in my role-play abilities and, well, I've got mad skills, yo.

You know the thing that makes me a good role-player? I've made mistakes. Biiiiiiig mistakes. Real whoppers of mistakes. There are some logs here on my hard drive that make me cringe and whimper to read them...if I ever read them. About the only thing I've never done is have violet eyes or green hair. Oh, wait, Nekane did dye her hair green once or twice, but that's a bit different than naturally green hair, right? Ahem. And we'll forget about her glowing eyes when she was summoning because that was the materia's doing. Stop looking at me like that!

I've also suffered through some pretty horrendous role-play inflicted upon me by others and I've learned from all of it. So, I may not be the best thing since sliced bread (And what makes sliced bread all that awesome anyway?), but I do know quite a bit about What Not to Do when it comes to role-play and I thought it might be fun to try and write a little advice column-ish posts about role-play. I figure I can cover everything from character tropes (i.e. The Tortured Soul, The Secret Princess/Noble/Descendant of Some Ancient Race, The Well-Intentioned Idiot*) to the fine line between In Character (IC) and Out of Character (OOC) knowledge. Most of my role-play advice will be aimed at those, like me, who role-play online whether it be via forums, MMOs, or IRC, but some of the advice will be universal. If nothing else, I'll be writing something that might maybe be interesting and fun which means I'll be less bored. If you're really unlucky, I'll even share some of my more hilarious and/or embarrassing role-play moments.

To get started, I'll tell you the one rule that I have found to be absolutely essential to any role-play I've ever participated in:

Have fun. That's it.

I know it seems so simple and you're going, "Well, duh, Jade," but you'd be amazed at how easy it is for people to forget this rule. I've done it, my boyfriend has done it, our friends have done it, etc. Every once in a while I'll preparing for a night of role-play and I'll find myself suddenly wistful for a dentist chair and a dental drill, without any novacaine. This is usually a sign that somewhere in the campaign/plot arc, something went awry and it needs to be addressed. It usually happens when there's so much focus on the story as opposed to the people who are making the story happen, and you forget that in admist all the serious business, you're supposed to laugh too.

This is also known as the point when, if I'm the GM, I make giant monkies that fling feces at characters to inflict status conditions. Or maybe I animate a gazebo that's weak to fire. Then again, there's the time when a moogle loved a viera and...you don't really want to ask too many questions, okay? (Yes, all of these are examples of things I have done in various campaigns I felt were being a little too serious and needed a little break. Ask my players.)

In games where I'm just a player or the focus is strictly role-play, I'm all about communicating to the person in charge or to the other players and I talk about what's working versus what's not working for me. Odds usually are that I'm not alone in my feelings, and sometimes others have picked up on it as well. And at least once it's meant doing some drastic alterations to the campaign (as in, splitting the party into two separate groups), another time it meant me abandoning a character idea because it just wasn't working at all. Yes, it's a pain in the butt, but if the end result is me having fun again, then it's worth it.

And that is the one major theme of what this series of posts will be about: Making your role-play fun. Oh, and making you a kick-ass role-player.

* = Oh, and no, I will not be linking to TV Tropes. Why? Because I intend to actually get something done and I can't write if I'm lost in the blackhole that is TVTropes. If you want to go look for your own Tropes, fine, but you won't get me lost in that website.