The Secret Sauce, Part 3

Kicking It As Old-School As Possible

Welcome once again to The Secret Sauce, Dorkadia’s irregularly scheduled trip into the winding depths of roleplaying. Last time around, we went through some basic parts of the RP toolkit – community, setting, system, and character. The things you need to consider when you’re getting started and figuring out what’s going to be fun for you.

But any game or hobby is going to have its moments when it’s less fun. The goddamn mast just won’t stay on your model ship; you’re playing the worst pickup basketball of your life; every monkey you clone comes out with extra eyeballs or no skeleton. Roleplay’s no different, especially because it involves other people, with their own ideas and goals and expectations, and those just screw up everything.

So let’s go through a few common pitfalls and how to spot, avoid, or dig yourself out of them. The #1 answer, of course, is the same as it is for anything else – talk to people and don’t be a douchebag about it. But unless you’re in a perfect RPG community where everyone has the same expectations of the game, acts like a mature, reasonable human being 100% of the time, and communicates with total effectiveness*, you’ll need to be ready for this.

*If this is the case, I am sorry, but you are dead and in nerd Valhalla.

Mixed Expectations

In Part 2, I talked a bit about setting & system choices, and finding the right venue. But what happens when your interpretation of the venue clashes with someone else’s? This is a pretty common snafu in open communities, the larger the community, the more likely. In an MMORPG setting, the world can be so big and sprawled that little details of life and history end up getting filled in by characters who are interested in that sort of thing, and they can contradict each other.

Say, you’ve come up with some super-cool details for your character’s childhood in [Generic Human Kingdom #3], and extrapolated the game’s thin description as “The Ones With the Boats” into being a nation of seagoing traders, renowned the world around for canny dealing and exotic goods. Only your buddy rolled a character from the same place, same time, and his idea is an island full of militaristic semi-Vikings, taking what they can by piracy and raiding.

Or it could just be a tone issue. Maybe you’ve got a guildmate* in Lord of the Rings Online who’s got this whole elaborate, tragic backstory for their Gondorian sword-guy and you just kinda wanna have fun wandering around as a hobbit exploring this brave new world. Every time you try to interact, it’s a huge drag listening to him mope, and meanwhile he can’t get any traction on this plotline without being interrupted by Wacky Hobbit Antics.

*They’re called “kinships” in LOTRO, but “kinshipmate” sounds like you and your cousin got press-ganged at the same time.

This is a lot easier to resolve when it crops up in any closed community with a GM-type figure or figures. Ask them what makes more sense, and if the answer isn’t something you’re interested in, develop a compromise. (“Why can’t they be both fierce pirates and clever traders? The real Vikings were!”) Your GM is the arbiter and has the final say, but part of the GM’s job is helping players find their fun, and meet you halfway. To a point. If you join a Dark Sun game and go “Man, I’m not sure about this murderous desert planet thing, can’t I be from an island?” then your GM cannot help you.

In an open community, it’s on you and the other subjects of the disagreement to solve the issue. If you just have two very different ideas on what X, Y, and Z are in this world, then your characters read different history books, and there’s an in-character conversation to be had there. Or if that’s not fun those are topics you just don’t need to discuss in roleplay. Similarly, if you want to play a magi-punk cyborg disguised as an orc, just don’t bring it up around your friends who want a strictly Medieval Fantasy kinda experience. It’s like asking your grandma about marriage equality. (Unless your grandma is rad.)

Avoiding the subject may not be top-notch problem-solving in the real world, but for secondary world hobbies, it’s pretty great. Nobody needs that headache. Roll secondary characters with different tonal expectations; maybe your friend will have fun with Hobbit Hijinks. Or just spend your ingame time together running dungeons and keeping the RP to a minimum, and don’t get into storyline commitments. This hobby’s enough of a time-sink without doing stuff you don’t find fun.

IC/OOC Boundaries

I said it before, in both parts 1 and 2, and I’ll say it again: you are not your character. And furthermore, other people are not their characters. If you want to play an intolerable little shit of an elf princess, that can lead to some interesting roleplay, but you are also going to want to keep in OOC communication with the people you’re driving insane and make sure that this is, you know, fun for them. Be ready to walk it back or just disengage for the time being.

But that’s only one form of IC/OOC boundary, and a fairly harmless one. The elephant in the room when it comes to online RP is, well, the stereotype of online RPer, who loses themself in the character and has a tenuous connection with reality. That can get weird. Say you’ve decided to explore the idea of an RP relationship (which is probably an entire article of its own); your naive but noble paladin is stepping out in some fashion with a snarky, flirty mage. However you write and express that is up to you, and between consenting adults.*

*Please make sure you’re talking to a consenting adult before talking about or engaging in anything you wouldn’t want your own teenage child doing. Seriously. Don’t be a creep.

The important thing is that it’s about your characters. The player at the keyboard behind that intriguing mage-lady might be married with three kids. Or she might have a boyfriend. Or he might have a girlfriend. Or she might be a very similar person in reality to her digital avatar, and unattached, and still not interested in taking this beyond a collaborative writing project. It’s good to take friendships out of game; I’ve met quite a few very good friends that way. But you need to be aware of boundaries, and be sure what they are, and set your own. I’m not saying that every WoW RP server or World of Darkness open LARP is a haven of creepiness, but there are people whose interest in this hobby is strictly rated M. And that’s fine, as long as that’s what everyone is into. Being up-front about your boundaries and expectations, and drawing a clear line between yourself and your character, is the best way to cut off weirdness before it happens.

This is, for obvious reasons, way less of an issue in closed communities where people already know each other or get to know one another through the game. If it comes up, it’ll usually be the old “My character wouldn’t do that” straw, or a heated IC argument (which can, admittedly, get a little uncomfortable when you’re physically sitting at a table pretending to have an elf-dwarf shouting match). Just be ready to take 5, grab some pizza, and disassociate fact from fiction.

STOP HAVING FUN, GUYS

This is a pretty brief section, but I think it’s important, and best appended at the end after several paragraphs of “don’t”s. It’s cool to take RP seriously. Anything you want to do well, you have to ascribe at least a little bit of gravity to, even if it’s a dorky-as-heck, publicly embarrassing hobby where you may dress up as a faerie king and run around a convention center playing rock-paper-scissors and getting annoyed at anyone who says “fairy.”*

*You can hear the spelling difference, if you try hard enough.

But there’s a big, wide, barn-door-sized difference between taking the hobby seriously and taking yourself seriously. To wit, look at the examples in mixed expectations. If you’ve gone to the trouble of filling in what the game designers left out, with a culture and history and salient facts for playing a character, that’s pretty cool. But if nobody’s actively throwing money at you for doing so, the primary purpose of it for fun. Improving your fun. Which means that when it stops being fun, and becomes more about protecting your investment (“NO IT WAS A PIRACY-BASED ECONOMY GODDAMNIT”) you need to chill the hell out.

I’m not saying that you should expect the great unwashed teenage masses of the world to run riot in your storytelling and aid and abet them in it. If someone logs onto your IRC channel and declares himself the son of King Chucklefucker, you might not want to spend a lot of time engaging with them. But maybe if everyone else starts declaring that they, too, are scions of the Chucklefucker dynasty, maybe it’s just that kind of night for roleplay. Let the cyborg-orcs and frat-boy hobbits have free reign for an evening. The plotlines will still be there in the morning.

And in a broader sense, just remember that there’s no point logging in, showing up, or signing on if you’re not going to enjoy yourself. Put a little work in, sure, but if you find yourself spending more time shutting down other ideas than helping explore them, maybe you need a break, a change, or a fresh start.

Well, folks, I think that’s enough Secret Sauce for more than a few meals. If any part of this actually convinced you to explore RPing as part of your gaming hobby, or change the way that you already do so, I’d love to hear about it. It’s a weird and wacky pastime, deserving multiple perspectives; that’s what makes it fun, after all. Taking the sort of imagination-driven fun we’ve been having since we were tiny, tiny children, and inviting other people to share it.