Where does the character leave off and the player begin?
It may seem an initially silly question, but I am serious.
I've spent a great deal of time thinking about this over the last few months,
and I am by now well aware that my answers on the matter are not the same
as everyone else's.
Although GemStone III was my first introduction to roleplaying,
I actually picked up more of my roleplaying style from the three-and-a-half
year break I took from GemStone in which I spent a great deal of time playing
in tabletop and LARP games. Tabletop roleplaying refers to roleplaying
games in which rolling dice substitutes for the work that the computer does
in Elanthia; some tabletop roleplaying games include AD&D, Shadowrun,
In Nomine, White Wolf's World of Darkness games, and the old, abandoned system
known as Rolemaster-- which was the first incarnation of GemStone. While
there are systems to calculate combat damage, proximity, the effects of spells,
and so forth, tabletop relies very much upon the skill of the GameMaster
in describing the world and the situation-- no room descriptions and no combat
messaging (well, save perhaps in Rolemaster) save the ones the GameMaster
pulls together in advance or on the fly. It relies very heavily upon
the GameMaster and the players to describe the situation. There are
typically three to eight players in a tabletop game and one GameMaster to
deal with everything they do. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing,
and live-action roleplaying goes a step beyond tabletop in that live-action
roleplayers abandon the dice. LARP is actually closer to Elanthia than
tabletop gaming is, because, in tabletop gaming, days or months can vanish
in the blink of an eye with the words, "My character spends the next five
days researching, what do I learn?" or something akin. In GemStone,
we go through every facet of a character's life, unless something is "backstory
within the game" (such as an alchemist's research, a farmer tending his fields,
or a seamstress's hours at a sewing table, for three roleplayed cases of ongoing
behind-the-scenes work); we know every struggling step towards greater power
and we know every time we fail. The social interactions of LARP very
much resemble the social interactions of GemStone III, albeit with a smaller
player base by far. The particular LARP variant that I favor is a game
by White Wolf Publishing
called Vampire: The Masquerade (Mind's Eye Theatre).
In Vampire: the Masquerade, players (appropriate to the
title) play... vampires. The setting is a punk-gothic world, which basically
means a darker, supernaturally tainted version of modern America. Advancement
within the game is linked directly to whether or not the person is in-game;
failure to interact means failure to advance, and people advance at the rate
of one experience point a night. Our particular game meets every Saturday
night. Vampire society, as it has been designed by White Wolf and particularly
as it is implemented by the players of the game in which I participate, is
vicious, cruel, backstabbing, and routinely monotonous except for those three.
Innocents are walking tools, and rarely stay innocent long; nice guys routinely
finish last; might does make right. Characters who keep their
heads down generally last but do not get anywhere. Characters who stick
their necks out either achieve power or have them neatly lopped off for them.
Everyone else is appropriately seen a threat by alert characters, and the
characters all but play chess with mortal politics. Character turnover
is frequent, and the primary reason for player turnover is quite simple:
another player character kills your character for interferance in his or
her goals.
In a system like this, while I very much enjoy playing,
I find that I can't get too deeply attached to characters. Either
the character is going to a) have horrible things happen to them, or b)
be a truly manipulative, self-centered character that I have a great deal
of trouble empathizing with, or c) be insane or very near it at the beginning
of the game. As a result, it is very easy for me to remember I am not
my character and that my character is fictitional-- it's hammered routinely
into the head of every LARP player. A character who lasts a year is
very long-lived (due to death and a high turnover rate from lack of reasons
for characters to stay in the vicinity... and often pressing reasons to leave
the city, sometimes directly linked to someone else's death. Did I
mention this was a rather bloody, backstabbing game?)
Tanager is not a LARP character, nor do I treat her as
one. For starters, she's lived longer than any of my LARP characters;
for seconds, she's achieved more than any of my LARP characters; for thirds,
I've spent longer playing her than any of my LARP characters; for fourths,
she's, well, computerized; for fifths, I like her more than I've liked any
of my LARP characters... and, for sixths, she's moving up from the worst down
point that will ever exist in her life as opposed to being locked into a
downward spiral. (Tanager's background was something of an internal
challenge-- she entered Icemule Trace at the worst point I could imagine for
a character without the character being catatonic or insane... partially amnesiac,
locked in a spiral of self-hatred and grief, convinced of her own worthlessness,
and hunted by secular and religious authorities... I've never been particularly
kind to my characters; it keeps their lives interesting.) Compared
to my last three LARP characters, Tanager is incredibly fortunate in how
her life has proceeded since her point of creation. ...but I digress.
While Tanager is not a LARP character, I still treat
her with incredible detachment when I speak to people out-of-game.
I sat down to compose these few thoughts on the matter because several people
have found my detachment startling if not upsetting. Aspects of Tanager's
personality are aspects of mine-- if they were not, how could I portray her
properly?-- but, innately, Tanager is not me. Her likes, her
dislikes, her emotional responses in a crisis, the way she moves, the way
she speaks-- I control them all, but it is akin to controlling the actions
of a character in a story that I write, save that it is an incredible multiple-person
collaboration with no predetermined ending.
If there is one thing I would wish anyone who roleplays
with me to understand (thinking specifically of player-driven plot, not
just day-to-day interaction) it is this: As long as everyone is
all right out-of-game with the roleplaying situation, everything is fine
. If someone is upset OOC about an in-game situation, then it's time
for everyone involved to back off and take a good hard look at the situation.
If someone deceives someone else OOC about a game situation, then it's time
to really consider whether that person is a good person with whom to roleplay.
Of course, there's a simple solution to all of this...
if you do not have any OOC contact with anyone your character knows in-game,
then it is virtually impossible for you-- or anyone else-- to have a problem
separating you from your character. Every now and then, I see a situation
occur-- or I am part of one-- that makes me think that I wish I followed
this principle... and then I get contacted by the player of someone Tanager
knows and we chat a bit, and I feel a bit better. I guess it all does
work out, in the end... as long as everyone's on the same page.
Lately, there has been a decent amount of controversy over Tanager's status
as a performing minstrel who is not a professional bard. A small amount
of this controversy has been on the message boards, a slightly greater amount
has arrived in my mailbox, and a greater amount than that has reached the
ears of friends who have warned me about the gathering storm.
When I created Tanager, I did not expect this to happen--
I had no notion that she would make a name for herself as a performer.
If I had intended to create a performer, I would have rolled her up as a
professional bard... but I was returning to Elanthia after an absence of over
three years, and neither of my former primary characters had possessed any
interest in performing. Even if they had, I would not have known where
to go or how to establish myself.
I first encountered Lord Dagor's Minstrels at Silvergate's
Winter Gala in Eorgean of 5100 (or possibly Lormestra of 1501, I am not
certain.) Having seen one and only one performance prior in Elanthia,
and that at a wedding, I was quite floored to see what a craft had been born
of it in (as I thought) my absence. (Since then, I have learned that
performance has always been alive and well in Elanthia, and that I simply
ran in the wrong circles to be aware of such matters... but that was not
how I knew it at that time.)
Outside Elanthia, I have always been a writer.
Inspired by the poetry in the back of the Valdemar novels by Mercedes Lackey,
it has long been my habit to write in-character-- watching Lord Dagor's Minstrels
encouraged me to do so for the first time as Tanager. The first two
were hesitant romantic pieces that no one ever heard for a very long time...
but the third was a song called "Rurk, the Troll Chief's Daughter" (which
may be found here
) and which started me on my road towards becoming a known performer in
Elanthia. I wrote the song to perform at River's Rest's Halcyon Festival,
but I was surprised to discover that what I'd taken on the schedule to be
a competition requiring pieces prepared in advance was actually an improvisational
competition. No matter; I brought "Rurk" back out for the Dra-Gong
show at Aspis's tenth anniversary celebration. I'd written it, after
all, and it was going to see daylight no matter what it took. Shortly
after, Dagor came looking for me... and the rest is history.
I did not create the character of Tanager with the intent
of intruding on bardic space with my roleplay, though I perceive that some
feel I am doing precisely that. It may be the influence of playing DragonRealms,
but I just don't feel that decisions made in the character manager should
dictate roleplay-- it leads to cookie-cutter characters. I do not
lie either IC or OOC about her profession; anyone who asks will learn that
she is a professional wizard and an amateur bard. I debated for a long
time over the possibility of rerolling Tanager, but I have finally decided
not to do so. Stripping Tanager's elemental magics away would be just
as damaging to the character as stripping her music away.
I found a passage today while reading The Black Gryphon
(by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon) that seemed to reflect my feelings
on the situation. While the elements of the situation are different...
I understand Amberdrake's reaction very well. It is not identical to
my own, but it does coincide in some ways.
Gesten snorted scornfully.... "(W)hat
about all the folk like that damned Healer? The ones who look down
their noses at you, think they're better'n you, and say rotten things behind
your back? How're you going to stop a whispering campaign against you?
How're you going to deal with people who slander you?"
Amberdrake shrugged. "I'll do what
I always do. Find out who they are and what they're saying. Once
I know who the dagger is likely to come from, I have options. I can
duck, I can find something to use as a shield, or I can tell the right people
to deal with my detractors from a position of authority without my getting
personally involved."
Gesten growled, and it was clear that
he was annoyed.... "Mostly, you duck. And they go on thinking you're
weak. Worse, they figure you've just proved that they're right,
because you won't come after them!"
He thought about that carefully for a
moment.... "That's true," he said at last. "But as long as what they
say and do does me no real harm, why should I care? As long as
I know who they are, so that I can guard against real harm in the future,
there's no point in dealing with them on any level. And it makes them
happy."
Gesten's mouth dropped open and his eyes
widened. "I don't believe I just heard that," he said, aghast.
"That poison they spread-- it's like stinky, sticky mud, it sticks to everything
it touches and makes it filthy, contaminates everyone who hears it!
Worse, it makes other people want to spread the same poison! Why would
you want to make them happy?"
Amberdrake turned back to his little
friend, and sat with a sad smile on his face. "Because they are bitter,
unhappy people, and very little else makes them happy. They say what
they do out of envy, for any number of reasons. It may be because I
lead a more luxurious life than they, or at least they believe I do.
It may be because there are many people who do call me friend, and
those are all folk of great personal worth; a few of them are people that
occupy high position and deservedly so. Perhaps it is because they
cannot do what I can, and for some reason, this galls them. But they
have so little else that gives them pleasure, I see no reason to deprive
them of the few drops of enjoyment they can extract from heaping scorn and
derision on me."
Gesten shook his head. "Drake,
you're crazy."
(The Black
Gryphon , p. 364-365)
Like Amberdrake, I am puzzled and saddened by those
who speak against me behind my back. Unlike Amberdrake, I do not take
martyristic pleasure from turning the other cheek. I'm sometimes not
very good at backing down... as this writing itself shows.
While I respect the work that Mitra, Warden, and others
have done to help the bards of Elanthia, I do understand the complaints of
bards over their training points and their buggy spells-- when debating the
issue of rerolling, I rolled up a bard or two on the side to experiment.
It's even harder under the new 620-point character creation system than
it was under the autoroller. As a bard, I would never be able to help
my bardic friends to do anything more than what is currently within their
capacity-- I could take some of the mana requirements off their shoulders,
but that would be all. I'm also not very good at a swinger's hunting
style... there is a reason why my three primary characters have been, in
order, an empath, a sorceress, and a wizard. I came to the conclusion
that, mechanically speaking, Tanager would be a mediocre to lousy bard, and
that I would lose some of the mechanical things that I most enjoy about the
character-- disks, familiars, and so forth.
Tanager will never be able to loresing, Tanager will
never be able to master an instrument, and Tanager will never be able to
call on any of the quite-often-incredible (when not buggy) magics that come
with spellsongs. These are all things I regret, and regret deeply,
both IC and OOC.
If Mitra or any other GameMasters comes to me and says,
"Tanager, can we please talk, we'd like you to change your ways for this reason,
this reason, and this reason," or, "we'd like you to stay out of this because
it was intended to be something for the bardic profession", or anything else
in that vein-- I will vanish from whatever the issue is at hand like a ghost
in the night. I respect the bardic profession greatly, and I have been
honored to be accepted as a part of the bardic community by so many of its
members, and I have no wish to detract from that community rather than supporting
it.
I deeply regret that there are those who feel that I
already detract from bards and the bardic community, but I simply can neither
agree with their views nor alter them.
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