I'll be the first to admit I haven't had a ton of experience with pen and paper RPGs in the past. In high school there were a couple of valiant attempts to get World of Darkness or to a lesser extend D&D campaigns going, but ultimately they fizzled out as we were all to distracted combing our emo flops to focus on a campaign for more than two or three session. While my exposure was quite limited, I did really enjoy the whole experience despite (or because of?) the high levels of absurdist trolling and dicking around. So when I one of my good friends (HTMC) invited me to join his D&D group I was definitely interested and not quite sure what to expect, so I'll share some of my initial reactions and reflections before I start chronicling my PC experience.
The biggest thing I realized right away is the having a good GM is everything. They are the ones weaving the narrative into the world and (hopefully) creating some sort of connection between the world and the player: ultimately, I think campaigns falling apart can generally be attributed to failure on the part of the GM to create a compelling world. Thankfully, this hasn't been my experience thus far as both campaigns I've been involved with have kept me pretty obsessed. Take the "New Veras" D&D campaign I've been involved with. Normally, I'm drawn to sci-fi over fantasy because with sci-fi, I can cling to my sad little fantasies of playing Commander Shepherd of the Normandy in real life by rationalizing way off in the future this may be possible and, come one, aliens might exist! However, the GMs for this D&D campaign managed to create a world I am legitimately invested in and develop characters that have distinct personalities and are genuinely easy to care about. I didn't realize it until I started playing Dark Heresy, but as a player, i find that having player actions genuinely shape the world and there being some sort of "hope" that things can be changed has a big effect on the immersion of a campaign for me. I think this is my main complaint about 40k in general pretty much regardless of the GM's actions; the whole universe is constructed in such a way that every victory or loss is just a drop in the bucket as the the galaxy is doomed to keep fighting and being shrouded in sadness and pain for eternity (and I do understand the rational behind that; what is the point of marketing a game where the primary point is war/battles if you can run out of war/battles). I will save further comments in this area until I actually get the opportunity to GM myself so that I limit the talking out of my ass aspect of this but the TL;DR is that a good GM is everything.
One thing I discovered pretty quickly is that roleplaying is a lot more difficult than I initially thought it would be. I don't mean this in the sense that the rules or complicated or that it is difficult to figure out how to play, but actually effectively playing a character is a unique challenge for me. I suppose it isn't too surprising seeing as how my mad acting skills and wicked awesome introversion failed to land me a part in even the campiest of middle school plays, but I figured my general affinity for bullshitting my way through real life would come in handy. When roleplaying however, I have trouble working through the abstraction of my thoughts from the characters thoughts with verbal diarrhea becoming the inevitable result. This is an odd little conundrum for me, because on one hand, I managed to convince my dorm freshman year that I was a senior who had transferred from U of O, yet on the other I had trouble coming up with more than three or four lines of dialogue smoldering with generic rage when confronted with my NPC archnemesis, whom I legitimately despised due to his damned forced movement attacks. However, I think ultimately I was mistaken when I believed that being able to lie is synonymous with being able to act: acting implies that you trick yourself into believing something, lying is just making others believe.
This leads into my next point; despite what those of you who know me might assume , I suck at playing evil characters (haha I'm an asshole I get it). For some reason, I write backstories in such a way that I come out being evil. This has never been my intention going into it, but by the time I finish my rambling prologues I feel that justifying my Kobold psion (named Frug: yes, I know it's an awesome name) as "good" when his back story includes killing children, orphans no less, is a bit of a stretch. That being said I always seem to have trouble coming up with what and evil, or at least mildly anti-social, character would say in mundane conversation. I mean, just sitting and having a chat seems decidedly not evil unless you have Inception-esque levels of deception involved, and just being an outright dick seems too simplistic, and I personally think being evil is a much different behavior than being an asshole. As such, my manifestation of evil behavior becomes a near cartoonish caricature that prominently features hatred of NPCs and not so subtle attempts at betrayal (some have described me a "trollish" and a definitely see the validity of the critique, especially since I have actually run from a room screaming, "Trolololololol"). Maybe my problem is that i am not good at creating characters that are within my means of effectively executing, maybe the "in-character" aspect of roleplaying is just my weak spot. Either way, it's a limitation I'm aware of.
I will end the rambling ranting here, as my ability to create coherent thoughts has been severely impacted. Needless to say these few point should serve as lens by which to interpret and of my further posts regarding RPGs due to my limitations and inexperience.
No comments:
Post a Comment