Point for discussion....

[avevale_intelligencer]

I have a problem with roleplaying, and it is this: I roleplay.

The object of roleplaying is to create a character different from oneself, and I have had some success at doing this. At the same time, I’m somewhat limited by my own nature, and there are some kinds of character I cannot, or will not, play. For instance, I’ll never play an evil character. I rolled one up once, but he was too messed up to be fun to play either for others or myself. Also, I’m a devil for consistency, in my own limited way.

Example. I started a bard character back in the days of Advanced D&D first edition. For those who aren’t familiar with that system, a bard had to start out as a fighter, get to sixth level or thereabouts and then start again as a first level thief. Once he got to the same level as a thief, he was at last allowed to start yet again as a first level bard. (One DM interpreted this to mean that till he got to actual bard level he wasn’t even allowed to have a reasonable singing voice…) If you wanted to be a bard in those days, you had to be determined and careful. So my bard character rapidly became an obsessive paranoid. He always ended up de facto leader of any party, not because he wanted to be, but because he couldn’t trust anyone else not to land the party in trouble. He hated magic, he hated undead, he wasn’t really keen on adventuring but he did it because he had to. He got as far as first level thief before we moved and I stopped dungeoning regularly, but he stopped being fun to play long before that…but that was how he had to be. I couldn’t see any other way he could logically have developed.

Anyway, now I am trying out this new roleplaying environment (EVE Online), in which character death is apparently quite frequent, but not a problem because you have a clone in storage somewhere, which gets activated upon your demise. True, it doesn’t necessarily have all your abilities, and your ship (which is almost certainly the most important and expensive possession you have) is gone, but at least you’re alive to start all over again from the bottom. Other players I know have died many many times, and are quite laid-back about this, and they feel the character would be the same.

I totally and flatly disagree. This may be my limited outlook showing through again, but I do not believe that a sane human being would ever become laid-back about dying. It’s a traumatic and painful experience, whose roots go right down to the animal core of our being, and no amount of intellectual knowledge about clones and such will make it any less terrifying a prospect. After all, while the new clone may believe itself to be the same person, there is no transfer of consciousness (as far as I know) so for the one dying death is just as final as it will be for any of us out here.

To me, you see, the character should not know s/he’s a character. Their lives are real to them, and that is how they have to be played. When they’re trapped in their lifepod, seeing the missile coming that will blow them into frozen globs of organic gunk floating in space, they won’t be thinking “that’s all right, I’ll be back in a minute or two, swear for a couple of minutes and carry on.” They will be thinking “I AM GOING TO DIE!” And this rational fear of death will have an effect on how the character develops. Anything else is either a mark of insanity, or of inconsistent roleplaying.

This attitude of mine, of course, means I don’t enjoy roleplaying nearly as much as others with whom I’ve played. The character I’m playing now has run halfway across the galaxy because he made a stupid mistake and endangered his own life and that of another character. The other character’s player cannot understand why I’m playing it this way, why my bloke can’t just laugh it off and carry on as normal. I can’t see how a sane human being, which is what I’m playing, could react any other way.

So: what do you think? How do you play your characters? How do you feel when they die? How do they feel when they think they’re going to die? Does it matter?

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I feel strongly enough about character death that I won't play games in which the GM is willing to kill off characters randomly through the luck of the dice. My character is my contribution to a group story. Sometimes it is best for the story for characters in it to die, but it should, like in any story, make dramatically satisfying sense when they do. I'm known (and teased often) about voluntarily doing really evil things to my characters' lives, including killing them off on purpose in dramatic fashions, but I don't want it done without my participation in the storywriting process, or in a way which doesn't give me anything fun out of it. And my character reacts, when death approaches, as if they have only one life and it's going to go away now. Sometimes that means terror, sometimes it means a blaze of radiant determination and self-sacrifice, sometimes it means the sweet anticipation of heaven, sometimes it means sunken apathy when everything else is gone anyway, sometimes they're too busy thinking about the job they're doing and before they can spot what's coming, they're gone. Depends on the situation and the character.

That doesn't mean I expect the GM to give me leeway to do any damnfool thing I want and still have my character live through it. As a GM myself, I usually serve notice at the beginning of a campaign that I will kill off PCs under two conditions: the player's desire, or persistent gross stupidity in the face of warning. I try hard to craft my statements about the situation so that players (and preferably also characters) will grasp when a course of action is suicidal and stay away from it; when all else fails I have been known to say flatly, "You can try that if you want but I honestly do not see a realistic way to have your character survive the experience."

From the player's end, sometimes those warnings give me a dilemma. There are characters I've played who, even if *I* don't especially want them killed, would not be smart enough or cautious enough to stay out of the clearly suicidal situations. Usually if I'm desperate to keep the character I'll ask the GM's help in figuring out an excuse, but otherwise I'll just say, "He's going in anyway. Yeah, I know, I know. If you kill him on this one I won't kick about it." Then it's up to the GM.

The flip side is also often true -- a character of mine is more cautious, being sensibly careful of their skin and not being aware that there is a GM who is looking out for their survival if they're even plausibly rational, than is convenient for me in the quest to get them involved in a juicy and entertaining adventure. Again, I usually ask the GM for help "baiting the trap," finding some reason why my character would want or need to go in despite caution, or would not see it as quite as dangerous as it is.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Well, I've not had that many characters who approached death with a radiant glow of self-sacrifice, but apart from that I agree utterly. Mine go into adventures because (for whatever reason) that's what they have to do.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Mostly, so do mine. I've had a couple of weirdos, though. :)

[cleverthylacine]

You know, I don't play in games like that either, mostly because there is no point in developing a character if they're not going to survive more than a few episodes. I don't understand quite why games like that are fun--unless it's PARANOIA, which isn't serious, or Call of Cthulhu, where survival IS victory.