Post/Author/DateTime

Post

Boshi 08-14-07, 11:33 PM

Over the last few years for about half of my characters have been a blast to play and I roleplay all the time with them, for the other half most of the time I just make seem to end up having them do whatever is most mechanically efficient and I slip into rollplaying for the majority of the time no matter how much effort I put into giving them an interesting backstory/personality. When I thought about this I came up with an idea about how to make characters that are easy to roleplay. I'd like to share that idea and see what other people do to make character personalities that are easy to RP. Basically rollplaying is making whatever is mechanically the best decision that you can think of for any situation. Because your brain thinks the same way all the time if you have your characters always do what is mechanically the best decision, they'll all start to act the same after a while, which is bad. So if that is rollplaying, for me at least, the best way to get myself to roleplay is to consciously embrace irrationality. Basically figure out what kinds of decisions would your character make that would not be tactically optimal and have them be how to connect your abstract character concept to the concrete game. For example I once had a half-orc character whose basic concept was that his family had been killed by adventurers when he was a kid and who then wanted to kill the orcish children. However once of the adventurers took mercy and let the kids live. Based on that I made a character who was very much an greenskin (proud, violent, tough, etc.) who wanted to help other greenskins but who had a very strong sence of mercy. I then thought about the sort of decisions that this character would make that would not be tactically optimal: -He would rely on non-lethal forms of combat (grappling/non-lethal damage/sundering/intimidate) against humanoids even when just killing the enemy was more efficient. -He would not be the first to strike in combat unless it was against people who had previously attacked him or unless they were non-humanoid monsters. -He was very loyal to his friends and would do his best to kill those who tried to hurt his comrades, (within reason) even if it meant running across the battlefield and provoking an AoO or two. -He would always be at the forefront of combat and always do his best to win glory, even if less glorious means were less efficient. -He would always go out of his way to protect those he viewed as innocents and would accept surrenders. -He would do anything in his power to prevent the slaughter of enemy cannon-fodder, even if just slaughtering then would be easier and even if this meant angering allies (for example in one adventure he defected to an orcish army and fought on their side long enough to become an officer, at which point he got the soldiers under his command to desert in order to save them from being slaughtered by the elves that the party was allied with). -He would use intimidation/threats/browbeating even if a less direct means of negotiation was prefereable. -He would love the Enlarge Person spell (good for his ego) and would constantly try to get the party sorcerer to cast him on it in every imaginable situation. Damn fun character to play, nothing quite like a 7'6" half-orc with charisma as his second-highest stat and a massive intimidation modifier :) I find that thinking about what sort of things your character would do that would be tactically inefficient is a great way to help stay in character and it works better for me than focusing on abstract personality traits or goals since it is more concrete and helps me to stay in character even in the heat of combat when there's always the temptation to just care about the numbers (otherwise you get a lot of people who RP outside of combat play combat as a purely tactical wargame, which I don't much care for). What works for the rest of you?