Roleplayers Love Feedback

Roleplayers love feedback. It’s true! But I don’t mean critical feedback, where you go “I really liked what you did here, but this could use some work” I mean feedback in the communication sense. Presumably how this works, according to modern experts in communication, is that feedback is the response to a message sent by the sender. It’s a good thing we have armies of PhDs and experts to analyze our communications and decide that, indeed, effective communication requires a two-way path.

And yet, this may seem obvious, but so often we absolutely miss it, especially in roleplay. In fact, we miss it so much of the time that when a roleplayer actually gives another person “feedback” in a roleplay, it’s a huge deal. When I think of the greatest moments I’ve had in roleplay—or other people’s moments they’ve recounted to me—it never involves just one person. It’s always about the tradeoff, the exchange of information between two people that creates something memorable.

So if this is so powerful, so pleasant and so memorable, why does it seem so rare?

Written Character Histories are Evil

At the very beginning of this blog I talked through all the major points people run into on character creation. I started from conception to appearances, then histories, and finally personalities, but I’d like to revisit the history section today. When I first discussed it, I pushed away from the idea that many larger roleplays press, which states that longer histories are indicative of a more thought-out character. To a gauge a character’s depth on the author’s ability to summon an encyclopedia’s volume of information for their 20 year old character is obviously dumb, but it may be worse than that.

The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that character histories are, in fact, quite evil. When I say character histories, though, I should be clear that I mean written ones. Every character, even if you roleplayed a creature created immediately before the RP, has a history or biography. You, as the writer, should know your character’s history at least loosely, but I think asking roleplayers to write one up is a mistake.