On Role-play: Components of a Character
Posted by: Mylor Clearspring on 2006-04-19
Category: Roleplay
First and foremost, separate your OOC persona from your character persona.
If you play yourself, you fail to role-play, and you muddy the situation for people who are trying to play characters with depth.
DG’s OOC rules address the most obvious OOC play: posting words or ideas that have no place in Valorn, or outlandish things with no basis in play, e.g. “Bodo spins until he is a blur and then vanishes.” Those are usually easy to understand and to spot.
It takes more commitment and comprehension to create a character, the “role” in “role-playing”, and to stay within that role. It is like playing a part in a play without a script. It’s pretend. As such, do not get upset when another player in character insults your character. Do not act on information that your character would not have, such as what another of your characters might know, or what you know from OOC sources for which there is no sensible IC representation. These limitations define a role as much as all the possibilities that you explore within it.
Many new role-players start without a history or distinct personality for their characters, and so they project themselves with the character’s name rather than creating a role to play. This leads all-too-often to OOC emotions, reactions without IC motive, and confusion for other players trying to interact in a fair manner, so I advise against this approach. Nevertheless, I recognize that it will happen, so I will address it. Even if you start your character as having a personality and history nearly identical to your own (which ignores the likelihoods of a world like Trinald vs. the realities of Earth), the character’s experience diverges from your own the moment he begins to move, act, and think within the game world. He might start like you, but he should not remain the same as you - unless you also are: exploring a medieval-type town, swamp, and forest; learning how to fight against giant rats, wolves, thugs, blobs, and demons; witnessing magic; and reviving after death.
By the way, if you’re doing those things in real life, why bother role-playing?
Second, create a character worthy of being a protagonist.
Have a history: parents, family, childhood, adolescence, pets, friends, rivals, enemies, mentors, protégés, etc. Your character is who he is because of his past. Without a past, he has no reason for being. Roger Zelazny used the amnesiac cliché to good effect in Nine Princes in Amber because it allowed him to reveal the world and its cosmology to the reader and character with simultaneous drama and wonder. Most other attempts in film and fiction fall short of that mark. In role-playing, I have never witnessed this cliché serve a character better than a basic history would have.
Know your character’s physical appearance. Looks and physique influence a person’s experience and development. Even if other players do not read a physical description of your character, it is possible through posts and through tone to project prominent physical characteristics. But if you do not know what your character looks like, no one can.
Have likes and dislikes, a sense of humor or lack thereof, fears, strengths, vulnerabilities, and flaws. Just as limitations make role-playing (or any endeavor) a challenge, vulnerabilities make characters human, and flaws make characters memorable. A friend of mine has pointed out that Superman would be a dull character if there was no kryptonite, if he had no feelings and insecurities with people, and if he did not struggle with the burdens of his power.
Give your character mannerisms and favorite expressions. Acting includes visual elements: costume, appearance, voice, and motion. If you tilt back your head and rub the back of your fingertips along your jaw a couple times, people stand a chance of picturing Don Corleone. DeNiro did it in Godfather: Part II because the close-ups of Brando doing it had made the mannerism important to the audience’s recognition of the character. Role-playing is primarily verbal, and online role-playing is entirely written. I think the portrayal of recurring mannerisms and/or expressions are a powerful device for impressing upon others and yourself your character’s individuality, and perhaps more powerful in written role-playing than in person because they cannot be missed.
Communicate in character. Interact. Converse.
In online play, there is no portrayal without posting. Posting about actions, postures, and gestures while avoiding dialogue can succeed in portraying a silent-type, but a lack of posts will fail to portray anything. In face-to-face role-playing with a game master, you can get away with playing a character who stays aloof but who makes things happen through intrigue. But even then, I think a player misses much of the fun if he does not engage someone in conversation from time to time. As with a behind-the-scenes type of character, I think the silent-type in a live chat format requires extraordinary effort and skill to avoid missing the interaction.
Role-playing is like interactive screenplay writing. If you just play a computer game under a screen name, then you are not role-playing. That’s fine if it is all you want. There is plenty of fun to be had from Nintendo, Playstation, PC games, and online games that set up a world for exercises in strategy, hack and slash, and/or shoot ‘em up. But do not confuse such exercises with role-playing. Nor are you role-playing if you develop a character who does not interact. If you develop the character and a story without influence from the setting, events, AND the people within it, you are not role-playing, you are writing. I think the same about players who concoct a storyline and follow it regardless of circumstances and other characters’ attempts to interact.
Have motive.
Why is your character where he is, doing what he does? If it is not where he wants or what he wants, what obstructs him? In life, things do not always happen for good reason. In good stories, events do have reasonable cause. Role-playing is about making stories. Good role-playing is about making good stories.
I believe John Gardner’s assertion regarding novelists applies to role-players equally well. For a role-player “to treat his characters as innately inferior to himself, to forget their reasons for being as they are, to treat them as brutes, is disgraceful.” (unpublished preface to The Art of Fiction, as appearing on jacket of On Writers & Writing)
Develop the character and the character’s relationships. Have an arc.
Over time, a character should evolve. The character should care about some things or people, positively and negatively. Conflicts should arise and be resolved, positively and negatively. A character should grow or contract somehow. Face fears, overcome doubts, mature, gain strength; or accumulate fears and doubts, regress, become weak.
Keep your cool.
Put yourself into the character, learn to think as the character, but remember that it is a role. If you know OOC that a particular subject is upsetting to another player whose character is present, balance between being true to your character and being courteous as a player. For instance, if I knew that a player lost a brother in real life through untimely death, I would not focus conversations on my character’s memories of his brother who died young. If it was already established in my play, I would not deny it, but I would not focus on it in the other player’s presence if I could help it. If it was something I was introducing anew and only then realized the upset this could cause, I might drop it from the character, inform other players OOC that I was doing so, and express my sorrow for the unintentional upset I caused. On the other hand, if a player gets upset because my character likes bears and another player takes Stephen Colbert literally and considers bears a dire threat, I would consider it the other player’s responsibility for handling his OOC upset. And if another player’s character maligns blustering know-it-alls, I know I should not take personal offense. So while I expect people to separate OOC from IC and I expect myself to separate the two, some issues supersede my standards of role-playing. It is more important for me to be what I want than for my character to be what I want or he wants.
Like most skills, role-playing can be learned and practiced, but like most creative endeavors it cannot be taught; it can only be guided and directed. It comes easier or faster to some people, but I believe good role-playing is attainable by anyone with an imagination, and everyone has an imagination. I hope some of the above manages to give direction to at least one person who desires good role-playing. And if all else fails, imagine yourself a good role-player and go from there.