In my last entry I talked about Mary Sues for… a long while.
A lot of the feedback I got was along the lines of it being very negative,
perhaps pessimistic or even narrow-minded as far as types of characters go. I
would argue being faulted is largely required for a roleplaying character to be
interesting, but it’s certainly not the only way to add interest! Indeed, there
are a lot of really interest things to exploit to make your character feel that
much more real and engaged with the world they’re present in.
So today I’m going to consider one of those concepts that,
like many of the other things I’ve brought up, seems very obvious. A lot of people
don’t take this perhaps as far as they ought, though, and good intention dies
short of completion. This concept is the idea of In Character Perspective in
Roleplay. You could also call it “Seeing the world through your character’s
eyes.” This notion applies to all fictional writing, of course, whether it’s
simple things like character personality integrity or larger things character
knowledge.
Unlike some other aspects of storytelling, roleplaying has
the potential to take this to an entirely new level on a regular basis, and I
feel that most people miss this opportunity a lot.
