Roleplaying in games

[shirenuファクトリー]

I shall babble about my own RP difficulties in the first post, but basically, use this thread to babble about your own experiences roleplaying, ask questions about it, or comment on others' experiences :3

My favourite genre of games is RPGs, but somehow I've had trouble actually roleplaying in these games. I've read guides on how to create a believable RP character, I've read other people's descriptions of their characters with their back stories, and I've attempted to develop my own. But when it has come time to play, I've been somewhat at a loss at what to do.

Then I started watching Many A True Nerd's No Kill playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas on Youtube (it's great, by the way). At the beginning Jon says he will roleplay as a character that is against killing and then lists some rules that he will be following during the game.

And that's just it! A game is based on a set of rules, a limited set of actions to choose from. Its story is a simulation, not a representation like a movie or a television show. I had fallen to the trap of trying to approach roleplaying in a game from the viewpoint of traditional narrative means by writing an extensive backstory for my character, when in reality I should have approached the matter from the viewpoint of FUNCTIONALITY, practical decisions. Knowing that my character e.g. had an abusive father does not help me decide what to do when a bandit is running at me swinging his sword.

So rather than me needing bullshit like "her favourite colour is blue and she likes cats and she had three brothers growing up!" what I need is an approach stemming from functionality in-game. Rather than "she is a coward - so she will flee from battle" I need "she flees from battle - because she is a coward". Function first, story after, and that way I might actually know what to do in practice when shit happens. Damn.

This is all based on conversations that have long been taking place in game studies and game theory, actually - to develop methodologies, taxonomies etc. for discussing games and the narrative in games because methodologies for analyzing narratives in literature and film are no good here, since the traditional media are fundamentally completely different from games. And I've just now realized how I had fallen into the same trap as the early researches of game narratives by forgetting the fundamental difference between games and other means of story telling. Games are based on mechanics, experiences limited by set rules in a certain space, not on pretty words written down. This doesn't mean that there isn't room for narrative in games, just that it's ~different~. lol

Maybe I'll give roleplaying a chance once more some day approaching it from this more practical viewpoint that can then develop into a story - my character could still have had a tough childhood and her favourite colour could still be blue, but it would have to be tied to a game play mechanic somehow!

Something like Lotro could probably benefit from a more developed backstory since you are expected to talk to other players, but even then you need to know in practice how your character would react to certain situations. Maybe if I figure out this RP thing, I will be able to give a try to RPing in Lotro one more time... My previous attempts were embarrassing I was not able to talk to a single character.

But that's enough about me.

Have you ever tried roleplaying in a game? How did you do it? Did you find it enjoyable? Was it in a single player game or a multiplayer game?

[Tuffty]

Can't say I've ever roleplayed as another character before. For the most part, I play a game to completion once then move on and I find I try my best to be immersed into the game by playing as myself, so any moral choices or decision making I have to make in the game speaks to possibly how I would choose, in that given situation.

The closest I've felt to roleplaying is funny enough, GTAV. There's 3 different characters to play as and seeing what I know from their personalities in the cutscenes I made a conscious decision to reflect that when I play. So Franklin likes to keep his head low as a pacifist, Michael keeps to himself but will act out if he's crossed, whereas Trevor acts like the GTA games of old where he shoots, kills and rampages across the city. Thought it was a pretty cool way of Rockstar handling the valid complaints of the narrative dissonance in past GTA games (especially GTA 4) where the protagonist would always bemoan acting violent but you as the player could then go ahead and massacre so many.

The Walking Dead is a good one too. A lot of it is built around making quick decisions but also knowing that what you do will have an impact on Clementine, your surrogate daughter. Not having a child myself, I wondered what choices I would make, as a parent, in this harsh post apocalyptic setting. It was a very interesting and emotional experience.

Games are interesting like that too, because it's not just following the game's own narrative that creates the story. Some games have the very basic narrative foundations laid out and then ask you the player to seek it out for yourself in the environments or level design (Dark Souls). Some of the best experiences a gamer can have is not just in scripted moments, but moments that happened in the game itself and for me, some of the most memorable come about when playing with other players. The most recent example I have is in the Destiny beta. I was on the field fighting a group of aliens. Got them down to one, but I was about to die and the last alien was gunning for me as I was backing up and reloading. The consequences for death in Destiny aren't important, you don't seem to lose anything and just restart from the beginning, but even so, I didn't want to lose. As the alien got closer and I was waiting for my death to come, I heard a gunshot in the distance, then the alien just slumped to the ground. I looked over and saw another player had come to my rescue and sniped the alien. I imagine that's where the draw for most people is in MMO's, to have these kinds of experiences with friends or random players.

[pikapikapika]

I know this is kind of different from what you mentioned, but sometimes I'll make up a little story of my own if the game's story is lacking, or if I'm bored.
One game was a racing game where everyone was an android because their skin looked so plasticy and unreal, but I couldn't keep it up lol.

TWD is a game in the 2nd season where it's hard to stick with one "character" since there's so many times where the game is like NO, IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN THIS WAY REGARDLESS, I had fun doing that in the first game like Tuffty mentioned, but this one is killing the fun

I'm actually by accident on the unofficial roleplaying server for Final Fantasy XIV, so there are many people around talking with " " around their words and hanging around some of the cities having weird conversations lol. On my main character I don't bother doing any of it, but my secondary character who is female, I will kind of, I'm too scared to actually talk to anyone much but I will do emotes and other things to just be in character. Like putting my helmet on before a dungeon and stretching, that kind of stuff . Of course since she's a female character and on the internet, she does get hit on, which makes me regret even talking at all most of the time D: Eventually they give up when they start asking stuff like "where are you from?" and I just answer with the game's city and return to being quiet and not doing much.

[J-Triumf]

I actually used to do this a lot as well when I was younger, sometimes in a similar vein as pikapikapika in that I would attach my own characters and stories from my own mind to certain racing games; Top Gear 2 for Super Nintendo comes to mind considering how bland the environments were (featureless landscapes with a "recognizable" background to indicate where you were in the world), and with the final track of the game being set in San Francisco (you can tell it's San Fran because the track is completely shrouded in fog! ) my plots for that game tended to be about finding one's way home from either a fun road trip or some kind of escape from captors/enemies. Similarly with Stunt Race FX, the order and nature of each track lent itself to inspiring some journey plots in my head, especially with how much livelier and cartoonish that game's aesthetics were compared to the "realistic" TG2.

I think the games where I really took off with this were pro wrestling games. Besides trying to come up with my own angles and feuds with the existing real-life wreslters in each game, the bulk of my fun came from creating my own wrestlers, experimenting with different outfits and physical traits then defining their personalities with their movesets and taunts, while simply solidifying any back stories or connections with others in my mind. But I think I stopped with the whole angle/feud thing when I started playing WWF No Mercy: when I first got the game I was excited by the idea of my own wrestlers automatically coming to the ring with actual belts you could win in story mode, but the infamous save file erasure bug prevented me from pursuing that endeavor and I settled for just seeing what kind of crazy characters I can create and just playing them in survival mode, which became the only way I could unlock stuff in the game. I carried that latter habit with me in later WWE games, not bothering with any headcanons, simply just plopping crazy characters in the ring, before fading out of wrestling fandom altogether.

NBA games were similar with the advent of player creation and free trading, but the lack of more detailed attribute adjustments in early games, combined with my own idealism and pickiness in my desired basketball experience, meant not going as in-depth with the roleplaying and being more akin to my later WWE game habits, just plopping random created players onto the court and playing the same way over and over. But with later games being a bit more advanced I kind of went the opposite direction of my wrestling game experience: NBA Street v3 not only had a really robust player creation system (tons of streetball moves, different ways to wear clothes, etc.) but also court customization as well, so I actually planned out some possible characters and team combos to play around with; unfortunately some changing priorities in real life at the time meant never getting around to following through with all that...but I still hope to revisit that game sometime. I know the recent NBA 2K games have actual roleplaying features (My Player, etc.), so perhaps I'll give those a shot as well eventually.

Note the lack of actual RPGs in my gaming experience. I'll touch up on more examples once I can better remember them.