So I typically reserve the first paragraph of my articles to
talk about myself or the blog while introducing the new topic. I’ve felt for a
while like black on black was kind of depressing for the blog, so now I’ve
finally transferred it over to something a little brighter. Hopefully it
represents the mood I have while writing this! Roleplay should be fun, exciting,
and not dismal and tedious. But how? Sometimes it certainly doesn’t feel like
it, as I’ve been so consistent on bringing up. Today I want to talk about an
important element of this: roleplay should be new.
As I’ve pointed out in the past, roleplay offers a number of
unique opportunities in and of itself; these things make roleplay a truly
unique form of literary and narrative style. I’ve brought up in the past few
articles that roleplay is unique because of its innate inclusion of other
writers into what I would call a Shared Universe, where your literary additions
to the story (hopefully) affect more characters than just your own.
I’ve talked too about how roleplay is unique because of
where drama comes from—in the moment—a significant divide from the typical
standard for fiction. Perhaps the closest comparison to another form of
narrative is that done in theater or film, but ultimately the two are still
different by a single notion: an entire roleplay thread or scene can be
incredibly interesting and engaging while simultaneously having no climax. It’s
not to say that climaxes have no place within roleplay, but in a sense this
idea is immensely freeing for the roleplay style. Because drama (and the
enjoyment from it) springs largely from in-the-moment actions, a climax is not
required for a roleplay to be effective. For once, the writer actually has a
choice.
There’s another point worthy of bringing up, one I’d relate
specifically to fan-fiction, thought it could apply to novel writing if we’re
talking about the second or third sequel, perhaps. In roleplay, the beginning
of the story really ought to start right there: the beginning. When writing a
fan-fiction or a sequel, the author has an advantage of having (for the most
part) a relatively defined universe with moderately developed characters. If
I’m going to write a Harry Potter fan-fiction that features Arthur Weasley as
the dominant character, I already have a large reference supporting the
character of Arthur Weasley. While he’s not a main character in the seven Harry
Potter books, his character is still certainly already defined by the end of
it, which means I don’t have to. I
don’t have to define the character or the world, because J.K. Rowling has done
it for me. Instead I can focus immediately on the story and new, original
characters. Sweet!
But roleplay is different. In roleplay your world is defined
in advance, but your characters, in fact, are not. Usage of canon characters is
rare for a purpose, usually, so we’re left with a defined universe but an
undefined set of characters. We have thousands of different places to run
different stories, being able to change up the same idea with different races,
genders, and so on. The world has become a sandbox! But we have to define the
characters still, and some people think that a character sheet is enough to do
that.
It’s not.
You can write as long and as hard as you want into the
character sheet, write a stupidly long and uselessly detailed history, but at
the end of the day this will never compete with actual roleplay. Why? Because
it’s a different literary style, and it has its own tricks and turns—the
incredible part about that is you can’t even do anything about it! Ever written
a detailed, thought-out character sheet, and then you go to roleplay it and it
comes out completely different? You find yourself not focusing on the things
you said you would, and your character develops a life of its own.
Enter the wonders of the roleplay. For the first time your
character’s life is not just a monologue or a soliloquy, it’s a living
engagement and interaction with another force outside of your control, and it
will test your ability to keep that character rooted where you want them. While
it can be frustrating at times, ultimately this must be considered an awesome
thing, as it allows you to take your characters to a new bold, level that you
could never achieve with another literary style. Yeah!
So that’s a major break from fan-fiction, and I think it’s
both important and awesome. However, there’s still another genre of narrative
that I would argue is misused on a regular basis. Let me be abundantly clear on
this one:
Roleplaying is not just a text-based video game. That’s what
Dungeons and Dragons is for.
I’m talking strictly single player or limited cooperative
games here, since MMOs and the like often simply get roleplay inside the game
itself. Games are inherently different than roleplay, as games involve fewer
people (many just one person) involved in the story-making process, so your
scope is going to be obviously much smaller. Furthermore, because of how narrow
the scope is, your character will obviously (because they’re the only notable
one) be extremely powerful or at least above average, because who wants to play
as an Average Joe all by themselves? There’s no drama, unless you’re writing
romance or something.
Many people mistakenly use roleplay as simply a text-based
video game where they can control the parameters of the game without, say,
having to be a game developer. People essentially treat it like a DnD campaign,
and as a result you get a lot of people running a self-serving roleplay who don’t
play well with others. To think of roleplay threads as simply different DnD
campaigns or new DLC for whatever game it’s based off of is a huge problem. All
of a sudden you have a hundred different characters vying to change the world
and be a hero—just like in the game, you know—and you lose out on all the
things that make roleplay unique and awesome.
What’s even worse, though, is the consistency you’ll find
yourself getting roleplay. After all, trying to treat it like DnD or even worse
a video game is always going to result in second-rate
quality. I mean, really, that’s what it is: a crutch while you wait for
something else. Waiting for the next Halo game anxiously? Let’s do a Halo
roleplay, and make it like a text-based, carbon copy of how the game runs. I’ll
play the Master Chief and you can play the Arbiter until… ah the game’s finally
here, there goes the roleplay forever. Because after all, why in the hell would
I play a crappy version when I can get new content from the game? (Or maybe
some other sci-fi or FPS game)
Roleplay will always be weaker (and shorter-lived) when it’s
tied to something external like a video game, the activity of your DnD group,
or, best of all, your emotional happiness. Besides, roleplay is so much better
when it’s disconnected from those things, so why even run that cost?
Now, at this time I should make another thing clear. If you don’t like roleplay unless it’s just an extract of a video game then YOU DON’T LIKE
ROLE PLAY. If you don’t like the genre for what it is, stop wasting your time
and stop wasting the time of the other people you roleplay with. I’m not trying
to be mean, but seriously, you will just never really enjoy RP, and you should
probably just stop. Similar to that, if your roleplay looks identical to all
your fan-fiction, why don’t you just write FFs instead of trying to roleplay? It’s
more satisfying and probably a better use of your time.
Roleplay is uniquely different than other genres of literary
style, so treat it as such. (It’s awesome that way)
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