Personality, or Where I Ramble About My RPG Characters Like A Boring Gamer

[chess]

marnanel asked on his journal 'What actually makes up a personality?'. This set me to thinking about my RPG characters, on account of the social pressure that happens to make each RPG character you play have a distinct 'personality' seperate from others you have played (especially when bringing a new character to an established campaign when your last character has died / otherwise become unplayable).

Basically all of my RPG characters are me, because I'm lame like that. Those who weren't haven't really worked out for me.

Psiri is the personality I use when confronted with an unstructured group activity at which I am not obviously worse or worse-suited for leadership than the other members of the group - pushy, a busybody, always proposing a solution, attempting to do everything, fundamentally insecure, sulks when things don't go their way. Attempting to gather all possible information, but at the same time jumping to conclusions as fast as possible and implementing solutions as soon as they are conceived in order to test them instead of 'pointlessly' discussing them; in debates that don't have an obvious answer yet, attempting to clarify to each side what the other side means without particularly taking either side.

Kallestra Lorelai Aostare is pretty much exactly me at sixteen or so, with a subtly different set of cultural biases and subsequant opinions. She sees herself as disarmingly honest, she knows an awful lot of Stuff and has a voracious hunger to know more Stuff about basically anything that can be learnt about, she has a deep and intrinsic belief in her own superiority which is offset by a deep insecurity about her own fundamental *goodness* (being better than everyone else doesn't necessarily make her more virtuous, after all, but she isn't quite sure what being virtuous *entails*, and is pretty sure that deep down she does know but it's more effort than she can bear to spear on it and would be deeply inconvenient for her to pursue in her current circumstances). She has an awful lot of theoretical knowledge about sex and relationships but hasn't done more than kiss a friend, which was basically just confusing and not as pleasent as she was expecting. She defends herself from things she doens't understand or is afraid of with cynicism and a desperate kind of affected world-weariness.

Charridy was meant to be something of a matriarch figure, but ended up as the living embodiment of Curiosity Killed The Cat. She was mostly an experiment in How To Be A Kender Without Being Annoying, with the Kender traits of insane curiousity, utter fearlessness, a tendancy towards impulsive behaviour, and with it an innocence and general attitude of goodwill towards all creatures, with the added 'personality traits' of an irrational hatred of True Elves (to try and dispel the Happy Fuzzy Friends Brigade atmosphere) and an aversion to sitting on chairs (too static, too entangling, too hard to escape from in a hurry) combined with Constantly Looking Around Everywhere. But the 'pick at the sore bit because it hurts' kind of curiosity she exhibited is a part of me, and her deep and abiding interest in people and how they live (how they justify their actions to themselves, how they endure, how they break) is definitely an important part of me (and I just wish I could be as bold in asking people deep questions and arguing with them to tease out their worldview).

Mithril hasn't really evolved into a part of me yet, which is probably why I've put her back on the shelf for now. (That and the strictures of her deity are mentally exhausting to keep, and Mithril takes them all literally, poor girl.) In essence she is deeply straightforwards and normal and sane (insofar as one can be sane and a priestess of Luca), in ways I'm really, really not. She carefully and logically and literally does exactly what she thinks is currently the correct action according to her worldview. Because I don't have much spare capacity over while running her (because she deeply cares about some fairly computationally expensive things) she is also, alas, not that bright.

Talishae was my attempt at a 'blank slate' experiment, the Awakened in Maelstrom having 'blank slate' as one of their starting options. Unfortunately this produced a very close clone of myself, which I probably should have anticipated, just myself with different loyalties on account of growing up in a different world. This led to quite a lot of efficient empire-building and information-gathering, because freed from my social anxiety I'm actually quite formidable at these things, but led to a character who was deeply and passionately involved with causes that OOC I had grown tired of, but if I had been actually in that world I would also have cared deeply about and invested my everything in trying to pursue / support, which was really tiring. Managed one tremendous 'moment of realisation' (my favourite moments in LARP are the ones where a well-established character goes 'oh shit, I really don't want to do this but I know that I am going to do it anyway because it is the only course of action which fits with everything I know to be right and correct action and I really want the end result even though I don't like some of the more immediate consequences', or almost as good 'I really don't want this to happen, with every fibre of my being, but it's totally inevitable and I can't do anything about it') but I decided that I should retire her on the crest of that because life would go back to being pedestrian but also in a tearing hurry everywhere over the many important causes that needed forwarding right now that minute.

Tourmaline formed something of a personality at Discourse, but it's likely to change when I actually start roleplaying with my actual group, and most of its elements are probably deeply FOIP right now.

Brunhilde came out of an attempt at playing an Evil-aligned character, which I basically just don't do (I play characters who do things which are evil in the sight of others, but their actions are fully justified in terms of higher powers and duties and Right in their own worldview), and also someone who thought they were a warrior but had very limited IC skills to back it up. (Also Alchemists were undersubscribed as a character class and Dwarvesd as a character race, so I thought they needed bolstering.) She basically just cared about herself and how she looked to her familiy back home, along with having a deep and burning resentment against priests due to the wholesale death of the dwarven pantheon and the general abandonment of the dwarves by the gods. She might have developed into a playable character if Sibley, who appeared to have fallen in love with her and with whom she was about to enter into a marriage of convenience because he was also very rich, had stuck around, but Sibley's player left the group for OOC reasons and Brunhilde didn't really have much going for her after that, so I retired her.

Silka was the 'scared feral child' part of me, which I generally haul out when I need to do some asocial screaming and wailing and carrying on because someone's going to make me do something I don't want to do, or more seriously just comes out when I can't cope any more, although that is thankfully rare nowadays. She was mostly born out of the thought experiment 'what would someone who could actually keep the Durham TT Lucan strictures, or a fair approximation thereof, and still not fundamentally be a bad person in and of themselves, look like?'. (The strictures in question were - Never explain your actions or motivations. When asked a question, always give the answer that hurts the most. As Luca is above the mortal realm, so are you above the mortal law.) I gave her a deeply traumatic childhood to have flashbacks to, and brought an immensely cathartic brand of utter batshit screaming crazy (with occasional bouts of quasi-prophetic singing) to the Wessex Arms. I still miss her, but I wouldn't have traded her death (killed by the hero she'd fallen in love with while both of them were helpless under a compulsion miracle) for anything.

Thea was the first real CUTT character I got to grips with (I had a couple of others first, a Morvanite orphan and a Kender beserker, but they never really established themselves). She was very definitely and absolutely What I Would Want To Be If I Had Grown Up In That World And Had Less Total Physical Unfitness - priestess of a generally benevolant deity (basically a cross between Athena and the Goddess of Feminism at that point in the setting's development) who spent her time wandering around villages providing miraculous healing and promoting egalitarian princpals. Every now and again she would find a group of adventurers who were daft enough to go out adventuring without a healer and tag along to patch them up, as well as dispensing cheerfully cynical tactical advice like 'So, the crest of this hill looks like a good spot for an ambush'. She was generally likeable and liked helping people, especially when it took the form of rescuing them from the patriarchy. Unfortunately she got totally broken when a necromancer slaughtered most of the nearby villagers and she found herself still alive at the end of the suicide mission to take him out, surrounded by the ghosts of villagers she'd been raised amongst and had helped through the years blaming her for their state because she'd come too late, and I decided that instead of playing her angsting I'd have her flee the city to get away from the guilt. I'm still toying with the idea of having her return - I've had various thoughts and dreams and moments of 'what she has been doing while she's been gone', which came on especially strong when I wore her kit for dancing one banquet.

I'm sure I've played other interesting characters but that's about as far back as my introspection goes.

Comments

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

I could mention Lucinda, but I know what part of you she was...*runs and hides*

I'm never quite sure how much of me intrudes into my characters. I have conscious bits of them that aren't me, but the rest of their reactions, or when I'm not thinking much, all kinds of me probably creeps in. Now I'm wondering if Flame's endemic shyness problem is due to me or not...

[malal.livejournal.com]

One of the interesting things I've discovered about roleplaying: The longer you have to play the character in one stretch, the more like you they become.

I think this is due to the how tiring it can be to play extreme characters. I've managed characters very different from me, but I can't keep them up over a whole day LARP event.

These days I plan for it. My event characters tend to end up as "me with a twist". The psychological experiment characters (which I've also done a fair few of, I wonder if it's a common roleplayer thing to do?) are relegated to afternoon / evening games.

Of course, I could be wrong, and it's the social aspect that influences the character. Short things tend to be around people I know, so I'm more comfortable experimenting. Big events I'm less comfortable at, so I take a more conservative view?

Hmmm... Probably a mix of both, but food for thought none the less. Thanks. :-)