How to Roleplay

How to Roleplay: A guide to making an enjoyable roleplay experience.

This guide cannot be comprehensive, because it will only be as accurate as a guide on how to develop a relationship (which will vary with person and situation) or how to master a programming language in one day (a claim as laughable as there being no such thing as centrifugal force); however, it is possible to cover some basics, and these basics will be almost universally appreciable across all forum role playing games.

Creating the Character

Some games might require that you have the character approved before you can play the character, and other games just let new people create characters on the fly and only get rid of obvious godmodding players. In either case, once you start playing the character, you should generally come up with an explanation for the character as needed. Who is the character? What is the character's significance? Where is the character at physically and mentally? How does the character relate to the game? "When" will usually be obvious upon posting, since the order of posts loosely determines the progress and timeline of the game, and "why" may be implicitly asked and answered later in the game.

Interacting with Other Players and the Game*

* No, not "the Game." Go get some anti mind virus software now before you hurt yourself at every petty mention.

The game is in many ways like a story with multiple protagonists: each player is expected to interact with other players, contribute somehow to the progression of the game in his/her own way, and develop as a character as the situation changes and the character is forced to react within plot constraints. As such, your character must not be a godmod. Even if you are appointed as a trusted godmodder for the game, and unless the game explicitly permits it, your character itself must still not be able to godmod. A character that can godmod is not going to be truly challenged by the game, ergo the game will not be able to force a response with limited plot constraints, ergo the character will never have a chance to develop, ergo the character will be the same annoying godmod as it was in the beginning, thus making the story boring or stupid, if not both. Limitations, if they are supposed to be able to be overcome, should be overcome as a result of an ability that the character realistically has in a believable, although maybe not necessarily realistic, manner (e.g. biochemist developing a cure for something within a matter of days at the very least, not seconds or instantaneously from hammerspace), or be overcome as a result of the collaboration of multiple characters applying the above to get a collaborated result better than any of the individual results alone.

In short, a character should contribute to and change with the game as if the game was a story, because the game is a story. Stories where a protagonist overcomes everything easily and never changes aren't interesting. Stories where some protagonists are faced with a challenge and work together to overcome the challenge, possibly with some sacrifice, can be very interesting. You should be able to print out the posts of the role playing game, see a story in it, and enjoy reading the story.

Different Kinds of Roleplay and Their Expectations

Just as there are different kinds of stories, there are different kinds of role playing forum games. This guide will look to the Nonja line of forum games and Tephanis's Grasp as models for some of these types in an attempt to analyze those types of games.

Adventure Based Roleplay

Adventure based games generally focus on individual players that work together or against each other to achieve a particular goal. The objective for adventure based games vary wildly, but all focus on groups of players interacting rather than players controlling political entities as the central objective. Adventure games might require that all players work together to do something, or they might require that players choose what faction to join and then try to fight for the success of a faction.

Chat Roleplay

If a forum has a chat, then the chat will almost inevitably be more popular among forum users than the forum itself. Since users will spend significant time in the chat, gameplay in the chat will eventually develop. Unlike most forum games, chat roleplay is less serious and will often be spur-of-the-moment. A chat roleplay can potentially develop when someone takes normal chat interaction between several users, makes himself into a character, and posts actions in third person. Others will then follow that user's lead and interact in a similar format. Sometimes, a game chat will be made and users can post in-character in first person since it will be understood that roleplay is occurring as opposed to normal chatting.

Despite the loose, aimless nature of chat roleplay, godmods are still generally discouraged. Superusers tend to derail the playful nature of the game by taking a made-up objective too seriously and doing whatever he desires to reach the otherwise pointless objective. Other times, jumping into a chat roleplay for the first time or jumping in to a chat roleplay without taking the time to understand what is going on will make you seem like an unscrupulous guest with no regard for respect.

Sometimes, there is a stigma attached to being the person who begins roleplay. If the initial roleplay consists of trying to harm a user that bugs you, few will tend to go along with the roleplay and may even explicitly request that you stop roleplaying. Malice in chat roleplay is almost always discouraged, especially if you're not joking about the malice.

Diplomacy Based Roleplay

These role playing games generally have players choose/create a political entity, such as a nation, and control one or a few characters from that nation. Generally, the objective of this kind of roleplay is to dominate other nations, and the progression of play will be much like that of the board games Risk or Diplomacy. Play will usually consist of a nation trying to keep its citizens happy, safe, and dominant, working on technology and military unit production progress to these ends. To encourage expansion, a map will usually have more nations available than players to occupy them and assign non-progressing neutral non-players to these nations. Players will be encouraged to take over these nations in order to quickly gain more resources or progress. Eventually, a conflict involving multiple players will arise, and a war will be simulated based off each conflicting player's current military units and resources and progress. Players are able to ally with or declare war on each other, and an alliance of nations may be able to win unless the game mandates a "last man standing."

Rather than just making posts to progress, a player should include a story about a citizen or the nation's ruler and how the character reacts as the nation gains and loses resources and progress. These stories are an excellent outlet for creativity, and are usually required by diplomatic role playing games.