Roleplaying Games
I admit it. I've had bad experiences with roleplaying games. Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games once told me that the essence of roleplaying's appeal is the opportunity to be a hero of epic proportions, whose actions can change the world. But confronted with such an open-ended challenge, I fail to think of solutions to my character's problems. I always think of better solutions later, when it's too late. Epic world-saving is not a winnable scenario for me in realtime. I fail and fail and fail, which is stressful, and not at all relaxing.
The player can't just adapt to an unfamiliar universe overnight. But the player's character has had their entire life to do so, and is expected to be pre-adapted. So I experience what feels like amnesia. My character has a whole history that I don't know. Sure, I could make up a history, but it probably wouldn't fit what behaviors would really be appropriate to the setting. In a new word, I don't know how to behave under a new set of rules for reality. If, for instance, I discover tomorrow that magic works, I would have to react toward life the same way I shout at the TV screen, "don't go in that room, you're obviously going to get killed in there!" My best plan would be to vanish from my life, hide in a remote location where no one can find me, and cautiously explore how the universe differs from the one that I knew. I'd need to keep this up until I figure out how to have the level of competence expected of a child in that universe, and then the level of an adolescent. Only then could I think about beginning an adventure.
Book knowledge is no replacement for experience, because unlike computer games, group-social pen-and-paper RPGs don't give you another try to get it right. If you only had one attempt to get through the popular video game "Portal", you wouldn't get far on book knowledge, because your imagination would fail to come up with sufficient uses for portals. It starts to come as naturally as breathing later on, and then it says, "Now you're thinking with portals." The same can be said of magic systems, or hacking a computer a hundred years from now.
Until that happens, my roleplaying character does not have the personality and behaviors of a resident of a fantasy realm, but a man in his early thirties living in Michigan in the early part of the 21st century. It would be more like Scott Bakula in "Quantum Leap" than it would be like playing a role. I have to learn the role first.
I'm still interested in roleplaying games. What I would like, some day, would be a campaign in which my character is a normal person with no unusual challenges and no weight of the world on his shoulders. The stakes must start out meaningless. In the first session, quirky and humorous things would start happening to reveal the non-normal parts of the roleplaying setting. I would bungle or neglect the use of special powers, but this would be OK, because they are just as new to the character as they are to me. Good examples would be a cryogenically frozen corpsicle who is revived in the year 2099 in "GURPS Transhuman Space", or someone undergoing an Awakening in "Mage". They would start out as residents of the world I already inhabit, and grow into another one.
Comments
zifferent on Apr. 12, 2008 9:32 PM
Yet you're a drama (as in theater) person. You can act on stage, in a penguin costume, or while manipulating marionettes but not using dice and a piece of paper. How odd.
matt-arnold on Apr. 12, 2008 9:45 PM
The difference is a script. In costume, I don't have any lines, and the setting is in my own world.
drew4096 on Apr. 13, 2008 1:48 AM
If you are in the right campaign and your DM is doing his job right this should not be a problem. D&D addresses the issue, for example, by
having characters start out at first level - a bunch of nobodies with beginner abilities, simple spells, etc. along with whatever mundane history
the player fancies assuming. Thus you get used to your powers and learn to effectively use them as you progress in level. A good DM will tie
the gaining of experience to effective attainment of goals in the game. A beginning player character should have one or two things going for him,
some sort of edge that would make the character think, hmm, maybe I can do something with this, and start adventuring. But not too powerful an
edge nor too many abilities.
My advice therefore: start with a first level character rolled according to the rules, and find a campaign where he can pull his weight among
the other PCs (ie, 1st and 2nd level types).
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