Roleplay Perspective

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.

In a normal story—let’s just stick with a novel for simplicity—the audience is often approached with a completely unfamiliar world. Whether it’s the Lord of the Rings or perhaps Harry Potter or even the internet’s favorite Twilight you have a foreign world, in varying degrees, that needs exploration. This is usually done through a protagonist, often someone who starts from humble beginnings, and approaches this world they’ve been excluded from until the reader joins their journey. Like the protagonist, the reader is usually unfamiliar with the world too, and they learn about it through the eyes of the protagonist so it’s this sort of magical adventure the two of you are having together.

So what makes roleplay different?

In roleplay the game changes entirely. Because there could be hundreds of characters written by different authors all at the same time waddling across a world, it must be predefined. This is one of the main reasons why having a protagonist typed character serves so little purpose other than the writer’s immediate gratification with the smallest effort possible. The world needs to be defined in advance, so we don’t actually need a protagonist to lead us into the world—we already know the world. Freeing us from the burden of needing a protagonist is an incredible opportunity. The only time you could see this type of fictional freedom would be if an author had a series of ten or more books, and the world was so well known they could embrace any soul at any time and get a unique and detailed look at what was going on.

Instead of being locked into two perspectives, protagonists and antagonists, we can view the world from a million new angles, every one of them yielding unique responses.

As the overused phrase now goes, though, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Before you wash your hands of this error, look over your own work with due scrutiny and ask yourself, “Does my character ever have knowledge simply because I do?” This is a tremendous trap people can fall into, ranging from “This character knows the history of the last 1000 years, even though they’re not a historian, because I know it” or it might simply be “This character is not confused about a political structure in this city, because I understand it.” Whether it’s the jerk-off who’s character just so happens to be a know-it-all, or whether it’s simply a character that responds incorrectly to new information because it’s not new to the writer, it’s really easy to miss this train before it’s too late.

This is an easy thing to mess up, and it’s not absolutely vital that every post is pristine, but the reason I bring it up at all is because we can turn this danger into a mighty weapon to our advantage. Because we, as the writer, know much of the world (and the parts we’re ignorant in too), not only can we safeguard our characters from meta-gaming, we can plan to use it to our advantage.  

Consider the possibilities this opens. Suppose that your character, perhaps a young man who’s lived his whole life in the mountains, now needs to visit a city out of necessity. He’s nervous and excited about the whole thing, but he’s barring his teeth to make sure he doesn’t get overwhelmed and can succeed in this new world he’s about to step foot into. Immediately you, as the writer, have suddenly just gained a thousand different opportunities to harass, confuse, aggravate, threaten, amaze, enchant, or any other thing you could think to do to your character.

Perhaps this young man runs into a cutthroat for his first time, or perhaps a beggar, or maybe even a prostitute. For the first time in his life he sees buildings that tower over his head, walls that weren’t just meant for wolves, and men who could burn money for kindling. This is a great opportunity to explore and build the character while simultaneously telling a story.

In standard fiction, the story is often of a huge scale with characters embarking across a nation or dethroning a god or whatever, that the ultimate character exploration and building comes out of large, dramatic events and experiences that the character often explores retrospectively. Responsible for everything that’s going on, the author doesn’t have time to catch every single thought or hesitation but is forced to bundle it all up into a concise story you could tell around a campfire before everyone fell asleep.

Roleplaying, though, provides another option. The story is real and actively taking place as each author pushes up against another author, taking a stab into the reality that surrounds their characters. While a typical story is focused primarily on having a good outline, a good roleplay could be one that drags a character into something new and unique, changing the person forever. By exploiting the perspectives, the character becomes that much more real and that much more entertaining to write and to write alongside.

One of the magics of roleplay is that the enjoyment comes not primarily for looking backward but from looking at the immediate situation. A lot of roleplay is written in the present tense because of this, though many prefer the past tense out of habit. Some of the most interesting things you can do with your characters surround the nuance of each moment and response.

So consider where your character falls in this predefined world. With that in mind, take it a step further and consider the effects of intersecting parts of the world into the character’s zone, revealing things he was previously unaware of and seeing how it makes him feel and respond. The possibilities can build and explain the character while taking the story down unusual but interesting paths you would never see in normal fiction.