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Okay, this thread is for discussion of what I always found the absolute most joyful aspect of RPGing, that being the point where one goes completely into the character one is playing. For me nothing in RPGs beats how it feels when your character starts to surprise you, showing you aspects of their personality that you didn’t consciously put there, till something far realer and more interesting than the notes pencilled on your character sheet emerges, especially when the character that does emerge has very little in common with the character you believed yourself to be creating. Simple sharing of treasured memories of brilliant character development moments is warmly welcomed but deep discussion on any aspect of the art and experience of immersion in one’s RPG character is also encouraged.
I’ll start by describing one of the most powerful character development moments I’ve ever experienced, I’ll need to go into a little detail about the world we were playing in, but I’ll try to keep that brief. It was a world based on modern day earth 20 odd years after a magical apocalypse, inhabited by normal human beings and by elementals. Elementals started out human but eventually became completely alien as they gained more mystical power, player characters could be human or low level elementals, elementals got shedloads of power but always ran the risk of being taken over by the GM if they went too far. It’s important to remember that the elementals were not supposed to be evil or malevolent, just not human.
My character was created as a human and as a stereotypical lantern jawed, goody-goody hero, with his one character twist being that his childhood sweetheart had become a water elemental several years ago and finally sodded off and left him to be one with the river after he’d poured several years into trying to force a doomed cross species relationship to work. When creating him I saw him as being a slightly melancholy but essentially decent young man, and I imagined his destiny would involve being one of the people to finally bring peace between humanity and the elementals. However it was not to be, as I played him I found him being initially cold towards any elementals he came across, then unkind, then aggressive, then hateful, then violent, and before I knew it my goody goody hero had morphed into an almost unrecognisable bitter, twisted, racist murderous bastard and the most enjoyable thing was that he was most of the way there before I even realized it. In some ways I was quite horrified to find myself playing such an unpleasant piece of work, but on another level it was fascinating and there’s no way I’d ever have deliberately created such a character to play, at least not in a game I wasn’t GMing, so the only way I was ever going to put all that much of myself into such nasty son of a bitch was to get there by accident.
So as I say, any comments anyone wishes to pass about getting really into a character gratefully accepted, whether it be brilliantly intelligent and incisive essays on the psychological and or philosophical aspects of the subject, or just something along the lines ‘one time my character did this cool thing and it was cool’ it’s all good here. |
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