What’s interesting?

This question has been haunting me a lot, recently, and I think it would do me good to try and actually address it in regards to roleplay. I think it’s important, though, because I think the level of interest you have in what you’re roleplaying directly affects your ability to actually roleplay. This is a most troublesome issue indeed because all over the place, no matter where you go, you see nearly all the RPers present struggling to maintain activity, usually coming or going in bursts of several months. Because roleplay builds upon itself very heavily, this proves to be incredibly problematic for accomplishing any sort of long-term character or plot building, and ultimately leads to dysfunctional roleplaying communities that move very little.

Okay, so why do people just… stop roleplaying? I would argue it’s because what they’re roleplaying simply isn’t interesting enough. It also takes a reasonable amount of effort, but I’ll talk about that later. I’ve talked about this a little bit with roleplaying on compulsion as well as my thing on special snowflakes, but I’m going to try and focus on it now, so let me see if I can break it down.


People naturally are not going to go out with the intention to write boring roleplay, but it happens most of the time. I think the first thing that needs to be understood is that while you might think your *character concept* is interesting, it doesn’t mean that the character itself is interesting to roleplay. You might think it will be fun to roleplay a super powerful mage who can command all the elements, but when it comes down to it you might find that your posts are hard to complete. You might find posting feels more like a chore than anything else, even though it’s supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable.

This is kind of the purpose of all the critiques I proposed to the character sheet process. I’ve got a bunch rules I can come up with that I think are the “right” way to roleplay, but at the end of the day what’s important is that you’re having fun with your roleplay. Lots of people stop having fun and simply stop roleplaying altogether. This should stop! My challenge is for people to take a closer look at what they’re roleplaying, and ask themselves: is it as interesting as it could be?

One of the major mistakes in my opinion that people make when making roleplaying characters is they design them like they would be interesting to read about in passing about in a book, or see in a movie maybe. Most of the time they understand they’re not roleplaying the major spotlight role, but they want to be one of the cooler side characters that are the most memorable; the issue with this is that it turns out to be way less interesting to roleplay. People try so hard to make their character sheets interesting that they find the roleplay to not be interesting at all.

I’m of the opinion as well that for RP to be actively interesting it’s absolutely crucial to be able to explore the character while roleplaying. If you have a character who’s destined to be too-cool-for-school then you’ve kind of already… done everything. Your RP will just consist of roleplaying someone who’s cool while actively trying to impress other people. It gets old pretty quick, even if you don’t realize it.

This is one of the main reasons I often argue it’s a good idea to roleplay someone contrary to yourself. If you’re focused on figuring out and exploring the character, expanding and building them, then you’ll be less focused on just trying to go for cheap pleasure and entertainment. It also helps in being less attached to your characters. On that note, I think it’s also important to say that I’ve found realism to be one of the most interesting aspects RP possible. I focused on this a lot, especially with my character design ideas. When you’re focused on keeping your characters consistent and real, they seem to come to life a lot more, and are consequently a lot more fun and interesting to roleplay.

Relative to most of what I’ve written, this is relatively short, but I think it might even be longer than it needs to be still. Like I said before, though, my challenge is ultimately that people would re-evaluate how interesting their characters really are, and maybe try some things to get the roleplay itself to be more interesting. It’s not the man who can make a nation bend knee to him that’s interesting to roleplay, it’s the shopkeeper who can’t find his place in the world and is struggling to keep his family together, or whatever. Sometime the more naturally mundane things prove to be the most fun to roleplay, because you have so many possible places you could take it. Most importantly, though: have fun, and keep going as long as you can. Roleplay only gets better the higher you build it.