AWKWARD ZOMBIE

After noting to myself that we have several adept roleplayers in our small, strange community and after shifting through five pages of old threads, I figured that this little ditty might be one of my better ideas.

This hear thread is pretty much the table everybody gathers around to share their experiences, secrets of the trade, details on style, characters, back stories, ect., and remember, we here at AZ just love to pull at each other's chains, of which I highly implore.

Note: I would appreciate it if you kept any actual roleplaying on this thread to a demonstrative minimum. As in just a quick example of how it goes on, how the character acts, and all that other bullcrap. Remember, this here is a general discussion, not the actual thing.

With that said, let the clusterfuck begin with a simple question: What part do you usually (prefer to) take up during a roleplay? The villain? The big daisies hero? The comic relief? The wise sage? Or maybe some jerkass who got dragged into this by your buddy?

Depends on how the rest of the people are playing. Is everyone trying to be a soldier of justice? Then the most interesting thing is playing against them. Is everyone being the incarnation of evil? Then I'm going against them as my own flavor of justice. I like to give them odd powers and abilities as well, things that put them at a disadvantage in combat but can be powerful in the actual roleplaying.

Personally, I usually end up playing the wise sage on the side of the hero, mostly due to the previous experience my characters usually have, but I like to mix things up a little. Sometimes I'll take up the loose cannon, the timid sidekick, or even the giant douche who wants to rule the world at everyone else's expense. All of these come with varying levels of success, but they're all fun nonetheless.

I don't have any particular "role" I tend to take up, since most RPs I end up joining aren't built with archetypes or an overarching plot already in mind. I usually prefer to just pick a setting and let/have people make characters as they will so their motivations are what drive the plot. Plus, my characters are all differentiated people-- on the one hand you have, say, the Pokemon Trainer version of my author avatar, Wry, who is pretty much me most of the time. On the other hand, one of my most beloved characters is a serial killer who uses necromancy to tear the animating force out of sentient undead, both to keep himself alive and because he's addicted to it (even though it hurts to "overamp" himself that way). He's pathetic and amoral, the twisted result of the "normal" version of that character having things turn out differently for him in the long run, and completely bent out of shape by the end of his story. Something demonstrative of him might be this:



But then you have this. And a whole lot of people in between "amoral wretch" and "ADHD-riddled optimist."

if this doesn't turn into acj i'm gonna be so disappointed

I have no idea what acj is.

Been debating starting up a tournament-style RP though. A very loose one, with a topic for fighting and a topic for people to chat IC between fights/schedule fights/rig fights/steal shit from each other/etc.

I like to play antiheroes a lot, but I haven't found many roleplays to join outside the one that already exists with my online friends. I've considered joining a few rp boards, but I haven't gotten around to it quite yet.

I tried roleplaying on a bit of an 'amateur' site that only had a small section devoted to roleplaying and I almost instantly regretted it. Some roleplayers were too lenient in their posts and made replies less than ten words long, and others insisted on two complete paragraphs for every single post--no exceptions, even for dialogue. And the selection of roleplays to join were...rather deplorable. Many were much too open, with no forethought in a developing plot of any kind, and some were just dumb. There was an entire roleplay devoted to characters of the 'Mary Sue' category.

That's a big part of the reason I usually just RP with contacts I already have. I really enjoy character and setting driven plots, but I agree that too little direction ends up generating a stew of insipid characters that don't end up doing much. You can only have so many ancient demons in the bodies on young people or demigods and etc.

Most of the time when I sign up for a roleplay I do my best to give my character a well-thought-out but not overpowered ability. It's something that's useful for the plot, and it wouldn't make my character ridiculously strong or all-knowing or anything.

Then what does everyone else do? Give their characters amazing demigod abilities, like this one girl with FIRE POWER and color changing eyes who had three different forms and could do all sorts of unrealistic things with her fire powers even if the things weren't related to fire at all.

I think it was that character who clinched it for me. That was the last time I tried to roleplay on that amateur site.

I've been considering making my own roleplay on that site. Though I would be much more strict with the character applications.

I try to pick out abilities that are both fun and unique. Like a shaman who purchases body parts from living people to use in combat or an experimental escaped subject who fights by ingesting magnesium and manipulating it.

Yeah. To be honest, I tend to avoid combat-RP in big group settings like the plague; I dislike the overwhelming tendency on most sites for players to fail to differentiate IC conflict with OOC conflict. Not to mention that it also tends to devolve into "nuh uh, because my guy has wings!" style squabbling. If conflict is going to happen, I prefer to have it be a plot element that I and the other player have basically predetermined instead of something subjective that gets argued over.

I guess a lot of it has to do with, when I was first introduced to both the idea of RPing and to online chats in general, it was on Groupboard, and at the time there was a really silly, angsty "war" going on about "RP styles" as some kind of one-uppy martial arts thing that boiled down to "the person who types faster wins," and resulted in a lot of "*doj*" "*hit*" being the action instead of thoughtful plot-building. There was also a really serious problem with people mistaking the attitude of a character to mean personal enmity and so after a while I just stopped participating in RPs as soon as people wanted to fight.

I totally agree on the powers consensus though, with the addition that how abilities are used is pretty important, not to mention how skilled a person is with it. The norms present in a story's universe also matter. Most people can swim but only a few people go to the Olympics; likewise, the average person you run into with a special ability may seem powerful compared to the traditional boring peasant, but compared to everyone else like them, they might be utterly below average. An example might be the watch whers in Pern; in their own canon, they're treated like utterly undesirable baggage that even their own handlers can barely tolerate as a matter of necessity compared to the beautiful, psychic and majestic dragons. Even among dragons, the "lesser" colors are considered something of a letdown. (Then again, their society is like, intensely stratified. It always struck me as kind of weird compared to other fantasy settings that the main characters are all very much harsh and even contemptuous towards what I'd say is 97% of the populace and that even that 97% are all constantly judging each other. For a world without much war, they are startlingly aggressive.) So I guess what I'm saying is, somebody with fiery powers looks super cool until you realize they graduated from fiery mutant high school with a D average, because that sort of sets the bar, doesn't it? At least in their own universe.

Combat can be fun though, if rules are set beforehand. That's what I'd do with this tournament-style RP, if I decide to work on it some more. Each fighter would get ten posts, alternating between, for a total of twenty, with the last ones being "finishers". Then other people in the RP would send PM's with their vote for who they think will win the fight. The most votes wins, end of discussion, they go back to the lobby/infirmary and the next queued fight begins.

Essentially I'd be focusing on the RP aspect of the tournament, with the town taking precedence for interactions. The tournament topic would be reserved solely for fights, but you only get to talk and meet other people in the town topic.

So, as Nobodya few people know, I'm the DM of a little DnD group. However, we need more members. It's 3.5 DnD, homebrew. It's a space session, although the whole magic and swords thing still applies. The best of both worlds! Everyone starts off at level 3. If anyone is interested, just shoot me a PM or something, and I'll hook you up.

Usually, I play a bit contrary to what other people are doing. I like simpler characters to contrast the usual onslaught of "her parents were killed so she became a top mercenary" or "He's the last of his kind, so he's the only one who knows the ancient art of psionic technology". Generally, my characters excel at something because they took it as a hobby and practiced at it at length to reach some goal. Not for revenge, but because maybe it was a dream of theirs to be a world class archer. As such, my characters tend to be a bit romantic and idealistic, which often clashes with the other more jaded characters. It gives a bit more meat to the experience, I think.

Currently though, I'm running a Pokemon Tabletop RP over skype with my friends. So far we've had over 20 sessions and are still going, and it's a lot of fun. I've woven an intricate plot, and it's amusing to see what they think is happening given the facts they have. Even better when they move in the wrong direction or don't get the information that would help them out at the time.

On the topic of combat RP, I'm the kind of guy who will tweak and joggle around details of the character for ages before I set everything in stone, likewise, the character's abilities get tweaked once in a while. For a magic character, this tweaking is easy, especially if that magic is based on one or more elements of the world. "Okay. This is the magic he's good at, this is the magic he can do but only because it's practical magic, everything else is out the window. These are his strengths, his weaknesses, along with that one weakness in his magic that'll most likely kill him." Tweak, pinch, balance, and mold for another six or so months, and you have one of my mages.

Characters without magic that are still combat characters are a bit trickier to work with, for me at least. I'm often stuck with one or two abilities which are usually related to each other, such as gun handling and gunsmithing, and a reason why he/she has these abilities. (Usually taught as a child, 'dyin' ain't much of a livin'', or genetic enhancement.) Anything else the character is good at doesn't aid him in combat, it just fits his personality (Gambling, and being a natural leader, to name an example.)

The reason my inner workings are like so is because I've been a part of multiple RP groups and forums who constantly have combat as part of the story. (Either that or peaceful, buddy-buddy moments leading up to a combat scene.) Like the one group I was a part of that, sadly, died quite recently, was set in a large starship built to explore the various universes and bring peace where it can. Sound familiar don't it? Naturally, being a large starship with combat capabilities, our little group found ourselves under attack, sometimes by the characters of other members, sometimes through a situation brought up by someone. This being a multi-universe RP, we had a number of different attributes to keep track of, but we still managed, with minimal to moderate problems.