Roleplaying training wheels: playing as yourself

[Frozen_Feet]

Roleplaying, like acting, is a skill. Rare few people can naturally get inside the head of a foreign person and pretend they are someone else in a convincing manner. Even fewer have vivid enough imagination starting out to feel empathy towards people or creatures who are not tangibly present, only existing through brief description of words.

Coming from this outlook, I was somewhat puzzled by the fact that most RPGs I own don't go in-depth about teaching how to actually roleplay! What advice there is is very brief, as if the game expects the reader to know most of the concepts by heart. Out of the games I own (Lord of the Rings RPG, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, AD&D 1st Edition, Praedor, Tähti), only Lamentations has a lenghty tutorial devoted to bringing a completely new player to the hobby. Having browsed over many other games as well, this kind of thing is pretty uncommon.

But even Lamentations thrusts you into the boots of a foreign character. You might think this is the natural first step when learning how to assume role of another person. But after pondering about it, I've come to the opinion that there's one step necessary before that: before you can learn to act like a foreign person in a foreign situation, you must first learn to act like yourself in foreign situations.

Indeed, this is what a lot of first-time players attempt to do in my experience. The problem is that older players in the hobby, especially those who are already good at roleplaying, seem to discourage this. "Don't play yourself, play your character" seems to be the guiding principle of most "true roleplayers", and the first advice they give to a new player (see the comment about the above tutorial).

But this is too much. Trying to think like someone else leads just to new players not thinking, period. Not only is the new player forced to visualize a foreign situation based on very little information, he is actively being denied his usual framework and set of mind for making decisions. I theorize this is the reason why new players, regardless of age or genre of a game, tend towards Attention Deficit Hyperactive murder-hoboism. Inability to comprehend, visualize and process the world presented essentially kicks them back to infantile behaviour.

You can test this yourself: ask a random by-passer, what would a female doctor of biomechanics say when meeting a red dragon? To an experienced roleplayer, this is thought-provoking mind experiment. (Speculated reply from random non-roleplayer: blank stare combined with either "Huh?" or "Excuse me?")

To teach a new player to better roleplayer, it is important to start of closer to home. Alas, traditional fantasy games may be ill-suited for this. Ergo, do not distract a new player with too many deviations from real life, or from their own base psychology. Start with easy to grasp scenarios such as:

"How would you act if you found your fridge empty when you get back home?"
"How would you act if your pet died today?"
"How would you act if someone attacked you on the street?"

Then we can move to putting the player into slightly more outlandish situations. Yes, the player - it is important to keep their reference point as close to unchanged as possible.

"What would do if the world ended tomorrow?"
"What would you do in a zombie apocalypse?"
"What would you do if you saw a red dragon?"

The crux is that this way, we can focus the player's attention on the setting, not what he should or should not "know". After we have taught the player to visualize these scenarios, then we can move to changing their reference point:

"What would you be like if you'd been born as member of the opposite sex?"
"What would you be like if you'd gone to vocational institute instead of highschool?"
"What would you be like if you'd not met your current friends/girlfriend/spouse?"

This way, we will slowly build our player's imagination and ability to deviate from their own perspective. After they've first imagined how they'd tackle extraordinary obstacles as themselves, and then ordinary obstacles as not themselves, they will be much more capable of imagining tackling extraordinary obstacles as not themselves.

But wait, "is this necessary?" you might ask. Well, for having fun and distracting past time with your friends, it is not. It is necessary for becoming a better roleplayer.

"Won't they learn anyway if they stick at it?", might be your second question. Well, some will learn -those who already have more vivid imagination and greater capacity for empathy (or at least faking it). Others will stay on the infantile level or near it, either sticking to murder-hoboism or essentially playing the same character over and over because. I bet we've all seen these players.

Of course, unwilligness to learn is another thing, and can't be cured this way. There are players who have little interest in becoming better roleplayers - and there are others who have equally little interest in teaching. I've even seen people, on these very boards, who are actively against teaching anything in the context of RPGs.

To summarize: More RPGs should focus on first teaching players how to visualize a scenario as themselves, before burdening them with having to visualize the same scenario through eyes of someone not themselves. Thoughts and comments?

[Winds]

A decent approach, though time might be an issue. As would effort-if the person you're trying to convince isn't held by the method, it become like a forced tutorial in a videogame. They'll find something that doesn't take so much effort to 'do right'. Still, this is a better approach than the sourcebooks that just assume you already get it.

[Exediron]

It's an interesting theory. I learned role-playing growing up (along with, coincidentally, acting - which I think is a great synergy skill to pick up if you want to kickstart your role-playing) and am mostly a natural at it, so I can't comment too well on how this would work; but I'm in favor of it because I think anything to raise the general role-playing level and awareness is a good thing.

[Fortuna]

Personally, I've never dropped those training wheels - I've just got better at hiding them. It is a very rare character that I do not play as 'myself except'. The exceptions have simply got grander and broader as I've developed. Often, they become so broad that they mask my own character almost entirely - 'Myself except a bit thick, honour-driven to the core, and a dragonborn' only looks like me in some very unusual situations - but at heart, when I set out to create a character, what I'm really creating are exceptions.

[kardar233]

Personally, I've never dropped those training wheels - I've just got better at hiding them. It is a very rare character that I do not play as 'myself except'. The exceptions have simply got grander and broader as I've developed. Often, they become so broad that they mask my own character almost entirely - 'Myself except a bit thick, honour-driven to the core, and a dragonborn' only looks like me in some very unusual situations - but at heart, when I set out to create a character, what I'm really creating are exceptions.

This is pretty true for me. While I create a character wholesale, once I've created the character and have played them a couple sessions I can usually boil them down to "me, if I were a scheming psychopathic bastard with two layers of schizophrenia and self-delusion" or something similar.

The only exception I've had so far is Ky, who is so far off ("me, if I were a young girl who was quiet, naive, had low self-esteem, wouldn't lift a hand to protect myself if it would hurt someone, wide-eyed and curious, possessive, easily hurt, had a princess fixation... etc.") that she's basically her own person.

[Lupos]

That's quite a good set of points. I will say, however, that even as a veteran Roleplayer myself, I still find the best way to make a character is to impart into them some aspect of myself, be it a minor flaw, a small part of my mindset, or just a tendency I have makes it more than easy to find a way to change my mindset to theirs over my own and step into their place. And even while each character is based of some aspect of myself, they are each their own person and grow in differing ways. And that's the advice I will always give a newer RPer, place something you can relate to in the character so that you can enter their mind through that gate, makes it all a lot smoother.

[Incom]

I can find a bit of myself in basically every character I've seen, and most people I've met IRL as well; ergo, by definition, anything I'd roleplay would be a certain degree of "playing as myself". (If I ever got to play.)