Characteristic Establishment, and Reformation, in RPGs and ARGs and PRGs

[Jack7]

I'm pretty sure more of "me" unconsciously emerges in such a character, because is difficult not to for someone who doesn't play much, when making everything up on the fly.

Depends on what you mean by comfortable. I have no problem playing characters that are as different from me as I can imagine (from the young, shy, naive runaway girl to the crippled bombastic protoplasmic alien and all points in between and on several different axes). My "true" personality only really creeps in when I'm tired or in a rush. Part of that influx of "off-characterization" is also due to my personal taste of comments relating to in-game stuff should be said by my character - so snark slips into my character when someone (including myself) does something ill-advised, but chatting about last night's new Mythbusters does not become anachronistic.

That's mainly what I mean. Take an actor for example, if he's in role for most of the work day for weeks and months at a time it's fairly easy to "assume" a new behavioral role to overlay his own natural one, because he's doing it professionally and intensely and consistently. But if you're assuming an artificial role every couple of weeks for just a few hours, whereas the mental strain might not be anywhere near as great, it seems to me it would be easy to slip back "into yourself often" through lack of practice. You're not comfortable with the pseudo personality in the way you might be if you were attempting to be that personality all of the time.

A characteristic I have been looking at off and on (and trying to add to my games) is Emotional State: mostly how stress will effect the character, this could be reflected in NPC interactions, initiative rolls (stress = quick to anger), to even plus/minus in combat.

I'm a firm believer in stress affecting behavior, especially in conditions like combat. Because I've seen it.

I do the same thing in game as well (use stress), but rather than roll it I sometimes try to evoke stress in the players by short but rapid and brutal assaults and ambushes to confuse them and keep them off balance and in danger in unexpected ways. This often leads to "real game stress" (that is to say things happen so rapidly the players forget the stress is entirely imaginary and so react as if really stressed). The stress they feel and the way they react is entirely psychologically induced, and voluntary for that matter, that is they self-induce it, with my help, but it works out well in game terms and the mistakes they make are not by die-roll but by situational miscalculation because they stress themselves. You might call it artificial panic induction, it seems real but it's not real of course, but they often forget this and react as if it were.

 

[Kzach]

As a wannabe writer, I am always looking to create conflict within my characters because conflict IS character. Other than that, I rarely stick to any particular type. In fact, I often surprise people with my roleplaying because it can be quite subtle and people don't realise I'm roleplaying until they see me roleplay an entirely different character.

This happened just recently where I was playing in two games back to back for several weeks. In one game I played a decidedly borderline evil (I wasn't allowed to actually play an evil character, but I certainly skirted that boundary for fun and profit) tiefling warlock, who was a bit of a seductress. She ruffled a few feathers in game and I got the feeling people were taking it a bit personally. I didn't worry about it, though, because the next session was with much the same group, and when they saw me playing a goody-two-shoes who was genuinely kind and nice to all the group and fought hard for party cohesion and actively protected and saved party members (as a mage no less!), they all clicked that I was just roleplaying.