ArenaSnow — Roleplayer Guild

<Snipped quote by ArenaSnow>Or people could use their brain for critical thinking instead of being dependent on having every little detail given to them like free samples of crack.@Burning Kitty

Once more into the loop. Or you could just cut the crud and articulate yourself properly without leaving room for people to easily misinterpret a bad sentence, and if you do it anyways, have a slightly less bitchy attitude about it.

Yeaaaaaa no.

In your first few paragraphs, you said yourself that you don't like playing other people's characters because there wasn't enough material to work with. If an RP is half over, you can't possibly expect anyone to care as much about the new guy as they do the character who's ceased activity a month ago into a year-running RP. Sure, the easy thing to do is to fade out characters with a generic death, generic get sick, generic dismemberment, what have you. But it's never that interesting. Because most of the time it's predictable.

That type of treatment can be done well, but I've found it's more interesting if I take control of the characters for a while. Sometimes they die right away, or sometimes they live until the end of the RP. the players don't roll their eyes every time an imminent ailment/death/quest splits up the party. And if I'm going to control them, why not let someone else do it?

Also, the really cool thing about characters is that they can change. Is the character too cheerful? The loss of a friend or a horrific accident can change them. Is a character too edgy for your liking? Try to reverse engineer that attitude by making them fall in love or otherwise replacing what was lost.

I don't run RPs to be hassle free, I run them to create memorable experiences.@BrokenPromise
I can only throw opinions, and if that system works better for you, roam free. There are easily argued merits for either way you slice it that boil to preference in the end.

But I would contend that you'd need to put a good bit more effort into doing your way properly than having a roleplay conductive to easy ins and easy outs in the first place. If you can put that kind of investment in, and not see the game crash from logical errors, then more power to ya.

<Snipped quote by ArenaSnow>

You are assuming things are read in the order you say. Now try the intelligent way.

Read the plot summary.
Find premade characters.
Decide if the plot is worth it.
If the plot is worth it, read the characters.@Burning Kitty

If you want to talk about the intelligent way, convey yourself better in the first place.

It was this potential I had mentioned though; I do believe that if players join an RP while knowing they are limited to a specific set of characters to chose from, it's likely they may end up more invested. This idea assumes that people enjoy the act of role playing, more than the act of creating characters. Creating a character, when contrasted with actually acting that character out over a long period of time, is something easy and enjoyable that people can do. I would say that a great deal of people on this site enjoy creating characters much more than actually fleshing them out, or playing as them for long period of time.@tex
Fundamentally, I think a discussion on this point will merely end at us agreeing to disagree on the merits of character sheets/building characters as a means of getting the muster of a player before the actual gameplay. At that point, an argument could easily be made that effectiveness boils down to the individuals involved, and from there the topic could only continue by discussing what course seems more likely to result in success over the other. I'll try and avoid that outcome and say that the act of creating a character, for me, is fundamentally built into the act of roleplaying. By having a character built that I can invest in, a character that I'm intimately familiar with as compared to a character where expectations of presentation are hoisted on me, I'm better able to do the act of actually conveying thoughts and proceeding with a story. But that - and indeed, the second part of what you quoted - is how I worked. The rest of the matter is me trying to project my experiences into getting a gist of how people in general work.

At a simplistic level, the first statement you quoted was my assumption that people will be more likely to invest in a roleplay by actually making something for it as compared to a 'pick up and go' which leaves players with virtually no background investment and thus little reason to think twice about going away. This changes by person, of course, but in my experience it is more likely for someone to stay if they do something that involves investment - in this case, making a character sheet - than if they simply do not play a part in the initial creation process. It's why I consider drop-in the most turbulant form of roleplaying as compared to something where you apply or otherwise prove yourself to enter. At the GM level, I think it actually helps vetting when a GM has a very basic idea of what the applicant is capable of at the design level as compared to someone just saying 'I want this character' and no other safeguards are put in place to indicate they can properly present the character.

You could circumvent this and say that perhaps a writing prompt, some piece of practical in character roleplay, would help. I would agree if that was your case. I'd follow by saying that it would still miss something at the design level, as I believe the sort of character people submit is telling for the person's intentions. It isn't foolproof, and sometimes it's totally inaccurate, but in light of no perfect solution to the vetting problem beyond finding people who you trust and just making a private group with them (I'm partial to that these days anyways), I figure you have to settle at something. Apologies for going on a GM tangent to all this.

I assert that it's for this reason - Character creation is fun and easy - that there's an endemic of people losing interest forum wide. The characters they create may be the only things that they're invested in, even if they're usually inspired by a particular RP. But since they have no hand in the functions of the universe they're role-playing in, they're far more likely to bail.

	Now this might sound selfish...But that's because it is.@tex
Character creation is only as fun and easy as you make it. I make it into a form of work by theorizing too long about how a character works. Some casually spend time thinking about what their character will do. Others are totally lazy arses that rip off a character that looked good in another thread. There's many ways to approach character creation in that sense.

Having prebuilt characters I do not see as a viable counter to the idea of making one's own characters in the context of what you're arguing. A character already built for you is even less investment than being obliged to make some sort of character in the first place.

At the end of the quoted paragraph, you mention having a hand in the 'verse being roleplayed in. I think that is honestly another discussion, but I'll word vomit on that point anyways. I think a hand in how the roleplay works is perfectly viable, and I think giving players an opportunity to contribute to that is a good way to stir up investment. I'd also say it's not really relevant to the issue of characters being built beyond players vs characters being built by GMs, beyond me saying - if players are given a hand in the creation of the roleplay's dymanics, why suddenly move to GM made characters instead of making your character on top of other things you've contributed to the roleplay?

This is also why 1x1's are so successful. They're more often than not, a collaborative effort in both character creation, and world-building. This is also why the idea of predetermined characters has some merit, as it retroactively weeds out those people who aren't actually all that interested in role playing, but rather, character creation.@tex

You have me until the line about predetermined characters. I cannot connect how players are given vested interest in the character creation (ideally, the player proposes a character concept, and the partner says 'yeah, this looks cool, but I'd say this') and worldbuilding process, and then you saying predetermined characters having merit. Predetermined by who in 1x1s, exactly? And to what extent are we predetermining the characters, and not just their roles (ex, "we should play a knight and a princess because they fit this plot, the princess is a queen bitch and the knight is a gruff guy who's there to tame her"). In the example I quoted, I think you'd move beyond premade characters and instead go into premade roles. It stretches into personality, which I don't like to predefine, but at such general levels I do think it's fine. I don't see where a partner would take jurisdiction of both sets of characters played in a game and end up deciding more than that for both of the players, at which point it really does become an effort where predetermined characters are a thing.

On the matter of roleplaying vs character creation, I'll try to be short and just say this - character creation can be as simple as providing an outline of what you want to do, and then sticking to it. I don't believe that takes a great deal of investment, and I think there's a problem if a roleplayer is unable to do that much.

It's also worthy to note that Roleplaying and Writing are NOT mutually inclusive. Some people enjoy Writing more than they do Playing a Role.@tex
Certainly, but neither are they mutually exclusive. It is a matter of balance. One who specializes in A should have a broad knowledge of B. a Roleplayer should be able to Write well enough to convey his creative concepts as far as a character goes. Again, this doesn't need to be complicated. To go on a bit of a tangent, a Writer should be able to Roleplay, just a bit, so that the characters are less obviously the construct of the same person with the same personality, and thus look like they're just the same thing bouncing off each other in an echo chamber.

ArenaSnow Banned

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