Your Real Self? Or Not?

[ProfessorCirno]

Either/or/don't pay much attention to it

I play all kinds of characters. ALL kinds. Now, granted, there are a few personal taboos I won't cross with my own characters, and I generally try to play interesting characters that don't destroy the game, but I've run the gamut from Lawful Good to Neutral Evil (CE tends to be a bit much for my tastes) and back dozens of times with all kinds of races, character archtypes, classes, and what not.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

 

[chronoplasm]

I actually had a DM once who forced me to play my character as myself as he saw me.
He insisted that I play a rogue, since I have a "rogue body-type" (we weren't LARPing, so I don't know what my body type had to do with it) and since I have a more rogue-like personality?
He then proceeded to dictate my characters backstory to me and everything.
I went with it because it because I figured was better than playing no D&D at all and doing nothing that Saturday night. Boy, what a mistake that was.
The game sucked. The DM did not have a firm grasp on the rules and he pretty much railroaded us the whole way through. When we didn't go where he wanted us to go and do what he wanted us to do, he punished us with large groups of Gnolls (too much for us to handle; we ended up with a TPK).

I actually don't like to play characters that are similar to myself. I want to play as a man (or woman) who is big, tough, confident, and wears a belt of skulls and big spiky shoulder pads.
I favor the barbarian class, because if I'm going to be a character in a fantasy world, I don't want to be a scrawny, effeminate starving-artist,

I WANT TO RIDE DRAGONS

AND EAT HAMBURGERS
MADE OF DRAGONS!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

So, do you play yourself in another guise, or someone completely different?

Short answer? Yes.

Long answer?

I have probably made myself into a PC in another guise a few times, but more often than not, I play some other personality. In at least one game I was in, we had to stat out our RW selves as a starting point.

The most common aspect of myself that I keep infusing into my PCs are (in order):

1) My intelligence. I often play very smart PCs. In modern or sci-fi settings, this is easy, and often pays dividends. Its a bit tougher playing a brain with FRPG-type info. I mean, I might know a ridiculous amount of stuff about RW turtles, but how much do I really know about the DM's homebrewed critters?

2) My sense of humor. Of all of my personal habits, its the hardest for me to suppress. When I do, it sometimes disturbs the play of those who know me best, especially if they like to play off of my quips. Think of it like someone expecting a certain support structure to be there and finding it absent.

3) The physical strength at my healthiest. I'm no superman, but at my peak, I was a lot stronger than you'd think. At 5'7" and 193lbs, I could bench over 300lbs, could do 3 sets of 10 reps of 700lbs for leg press (the gym machine's full stack), and could jump high enough to touch a basketball hoop with my fingertips (but couldn't dunk).

4) My ethics. I play a wide variety of PCs, but when I play someone who is my ethical echo, I really play it up. Occasionally, I do the same when I play my moral opposite.

But other factors?

Physically, I generally play types who are radically faster, tougher or weaker than I am in real life.

Mentally, I play idiots and savants, leaders and wallflowers.

And roles? I'll play anything.

 

[roguerouge]

I think there's a mild conversion effect; after all, if you are what you do, think, and feel, it's natural that there's some cross-over. "You are what you pretend to be." Kurt Vonnegut.

 

[Wombat]

Over the years I have seen that certain systems tend to pull people towards playing "themselves" while others pull people towards playing "the other".

I see very few people who play D&D, for example, playing themselves -- they tend to play heroic images, quite often drawn from books, movies, cartoons, and the like. This also seems to be true for many other fantasy based games.

On the other hand, many people who play WoD often make characters that are versions of themselves, at least an idealized version. I've also seen these with certain superhero games.

For my own part, as GM, I rarely recreate myself in full, simply because I have to create so many secondary and tertiary characters.

 

[Mark Hope]

Sorry I missed this thread before it got to three pages ...

In short, I believe that it is impossible to play a character that is not yourself.

Everything that your character does, thinks and says is coming out of your own mind, and is derived from yourself. We are incredibly complex creatures and our personalities are broad spectrums of attitude and action. We do not act out everything that is within us (conscious or otherwise) but those things are part of us all the same.

As an example, if you learn about theft, murder or torture, that knowledge is now part of you. Ideally, you choose not to act in a similar way in your daily life, but those things are in your head now. Kindness, heroism and love likewise. This is how we learn how we want to be: by experiencing something, internalising it and deciding whether we want to do the same.

Of course, my argument defines "self" as all that you do, know, and understand. There is more to your self than your words, thoughts and deeds. There is also that which you do not say or do (or consciously think).

As gamers, this gives us a vast wealth of experience and potential to draw upon when playing characters. I agree that this definition and argument are somewhat broad, but I really do think that any divisions between player and character are - in the final analysis - wholly artificial. Our character's actions come from our own minds. What is that, if not the seat of the self?

 

[nightwyrm]

I play who I think I might want to be if I was facing those fantastic game situations and not constraint by modern social expectations and norms.

I don't really think I can play someone completely different from myself, but I can play someone with characteristics drawn from aspects of myself that normally would never surface in everyday life.

 

[Mark Hope]

I don't really think I can play someone completely different from myself, but I can play someone with characteristics drawn from aspects of myself that normally would never surface in everyday life.

This exactly .

 

[steenan]

Much depends on the game and the play style.

In an immersive game nearly all characters share at keast part of my personality or temperament, but they differ widely in morality and outlook. I may get into a character with strange perspective, goals and values I don't agree with, but not one that behaves much different than me. None of the characters is "just me", "perfect me", "twisted me" or something like that, but there are definite similarities.

In games where I play a character without immersing my PCs are less alike me. Some are quicker to act than to think and very extraverted in either agressive or playfull fashion. Some - driven by deep emotions they cannot themselves name, often unsure of their own goals. Others - calculating masterminds who see value in noone, even in themselves. There were even stranger examples.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I've played a fanatic Libertarian, a charismatic idiot, and a smooth-talking, upper-class swashbuckler. In real life, I am not even close to one of them.

True, when I was a less experienced role-player, the characters often were fairly similar to me - but I'm gradually moving away from that. I find it a useful mental exercise to get into the mind of people radically different than I am.