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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wednesday Boy" data-source="post: 5626461" data-attributes="member: 53678">I love the mute character idea and it can be an interesting roleplaying challenge as long as you go into it with the proper expectations and your party is on board and helps promote the idea. I've played two mute characters one was an L5R samurai whose backstory had them consciously choosing to be mute (out of frustration because my own verbal blunders got two previous characters killed) and the other was an R2 unit. And I've played in another SW game with a gamorrean PC. I should first caveat that if you want to play a mute character, you should go into it full bore and not give yourself an out. To echo DS:  That's not to say that playing a telepathic character who never speaks aloud isn't cool but I presume you're making your character mute for a roleplaying challenge. If you create a perpetual work around for being mute (telepathy, device/animal who talks for you) you ruin that roleplaying experience. My three mute experiences taught me that for a mute character to work well the major expectations you need to accept is that your character will not be a social character and you will only be able to convey minimal ideas. When I played my samurai I would use rudimentary sign language to communicate to the other PCs. If a mob was getting out of hand and someone was in trouble, I'd respond whistle to get the attention of the party, point urgently towards the trouble, and lead the way. On the other hand when that situation happened in our SW game the gamorrean tried to pantomime the cause of how the mob started to get out of hand and what he tried to do to quell it. That resulted in the RPG devolving into a game of charades and caused frustration for everyone.  Another expectation is that your character should be dynamic. Since your character's personality and demeanor can't be vocalized, you need to display that through descriptions of your demeanor and what your character is doing while others speak. And you should be willing to "move the conversation forward" by being more proactive. Since your character cannot contribute to lengthy discussions, you often have to be ready to act in order to get your point across to the others. Note that I'm not advocating being reckless or an instigator, but often you can contribute to a deliberation by physically doing something. And lastly it's good to have buy-in from the other players. Personally I don't think it requires very much effort on the part of the other players, nor does a mute character interfere with the fun of the other players. But it helps to have the other PCs play off of the mute character to help promote the character concept. My R2 unit character flopped as a mute character because some of the other PCs spoke binary (droid) and wanted to speak normally together (circumventing the purpose of playing an R2 unit). Likewise, the R2 unit didn't have an established owner so there was no PC to riff with by speaking for the droid at times. Sorry for the long post but hopefully there's some useful advice in there!</blockquote>

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