An Overly Long Post Talking About How to Approach New Roleplay (TM)

[McSpazz]

We've come a long way, haven't we? If you read my other tutorial posts, you have gone through a small novella of tips and tricks. Maybe you're ready to go and want to paint the town red. But the real thing you are left wondering is...how? Now that you have your character all put together, how do you actually get started?

 

Well, that's what we're here to talk about today. This is going to be a little less structured than my other posts, so do bear with me here.

 

1. Location Location Location

It can be daunting when entering a new space to try and find where roleplay actually happens. While it would be easy to just tell you where to look in City of Heroes, I feel like that don't really address the bigger issue here. Different MMO's have different locations where people meet up. If I just tell you where to look in CoH, I feel like I'm doing you a disservice. So let's kind of go over the steps here.

 

The first thing to look into is if the game has an environment that really only exists for the purposes of socialization. Pocket D (CoH), Club Caprice (Champions Online), etc. These locations are generally only good for bar/club roleplay, but it's a great means of networking and meeting new people. The text crawl can be a pain, but I do encourage going there once in a while to meet new people. It can also help flesh out your character's personality to roleplay them in a more casual setting like a bar or club.

 

But maybe those sorts of settings aren't your thing. While there are very few games with this feature, private bases run by guilds/clans/etc can serve similar purposes. City of Heroes, for example, has a multitude of privately run clubs that run weekly events. These, like Pocket D, are fairly casual and can open a lot of doors when it comes to forging new friendships and connections.

 

While joining a clan or guild that is explicitly for roleplaying is an obvious choice, you don't necessarily need to make anything so formal. Groups of people can come together and create informal SG's of sorts that allow for frequent and consistent collaboration without the baggage that might come with an SG. If you find yourself among a group of people that frequently roleplay together, it might be worth seeing if there's any interest in creating a group chat in something like Discord so you can all keep in touch more easily.

 

Lastly, if you have a specific style of play you want to play that doesn't yet exist, remember: if you build it, they will come. Even if people don't do exactly what you wanted, if you introduce something that is fun to interact with, people are going to want to check it out. Scheduled in character task forces, bounties that can yield additional rewards built out of the AE, you name it. Heck, the daily Rikti Warzone Mothership Raids didn't just come out of nowhere. People started hosting them and, over time, it became almost expected that it would happen every day. Sometimes, all it takes is for someone to bring together like minded people who can do what you can't and go, "Hey. Let's do a thing." Is it easy? No. But it can be super rewarding.

 

2. The Approach

So let's say you've found some roleplay and are getting it going. While I can by no means dictate your style, there are some things you should do to ensure everyone is having fun. I have already mentioned some of these in other posts, but I might as well repeat myself to ensure they really stick.
 

1. Hook Them In
   As this is all collaborative, every other one of your posts if not every post should be something of an invitation for someone else to respond. Imagine roleplay as an adventurer swinging along a series of vines. A single vine will only carry them for so long until they need to leap to a new line. Your posts are those vines. You need to give ideas or concepts that other players can look at and find something to respond to. For example, let's say you have two criminals talking. One mentions to the other that they have done a ton of robberies. You either need to make something about that comment worthy of asking for more information or throw a bone to the other roleplayer (such as asking how many the other character has done). Even simple responses with complex emotional reactions can be a lot to build off of. Basically, you don't want to be in a situation where one person explains a concept, throws the ball into the other person's ballpark, and they just say, "That's niiiice."
    
2. The Roleplay Doesn't Start When You Do
   If you are joining an ongoing roleplay, be it in a team or at the side of a bar, remember that you are just arriving. Don't look for the first opportunity to move the roleplay into something you find interesting. See if you can't find fun in what's already present and, hey, you might get an organic opportunity to insert something you find cool into the mix. If that's just not happening, everyone is better off if you just find a reason to duck out. This is for fun, after all, and if you aren't having fun, you don't have to stay. Likewise, forcing a conversation to focus on you or your ideas out of nowhere is likely going to be more annoying than productive.
   
   Likewise, consider the tone of the scene you are walking into and consider, realistically, how a person if not your character would enter that. If some people are hanging out at a bar and joking around, is it really going to settle well if your character barges in and goes "My parents are deeeaaad!" No, it's going to kill the mood. If somebody asks how your character is doing and the answer would spoil the mood, it pays to do what an actual reasonable person would in the real world: lie or say not well but add some kind of subtle warning that you don't want to kill everyone else's buzz.
    
3. Walls of Text
   I get that you might be super excited about your lore, but if you start spending a solid 5-10 minutes straight explaining your concept ICly, people are going to tune out. As cool as your lore is, people didn't come to roleplay with you to get a lecture on the intricacies of the governments found among the Mole People. If you feel inspired or feel there's a good reason to go over this, involve the audience. Give them things to react to within your descriptions, ask questions of them, compare your new concepts to things the other character would be aware of. If the only thing people have to react with is, "that's interesting," you need to reconsider your approach. Likewise, if you find that you are the only one making posts, try and give more things for the other person to respond to.
    
4. Beware the Lone Wolf
   You might be playing a character that is super anti-social and doesn't like talking to people. That's fine, but you have suddenly written yourself into something of a problem. A character that hates talking to people is going to hate socializing. Characters that hate socializing are not going to be very fun to socialize with. If you want to make your character anti-social, consider how they show that off or you are going to find that few people want to interact with you. A character that sits off in a corner and /e walllean's all day while everyone else is talking and having fun is probably not going to take off very well unless a particularly outgoing character drags them along.
    
5. Not Everything Is Work
   Don't just focus on roleplay where your character is going about their profession (ie: villain/hero) or, worse, only talks about their profession. Unless you are fully intentionally making your character an unhealthy workaholic, try and find other things to talk about with other characters. It doesn't even have to be small talk.
    
6. Questions Are Your Friend
   Not sure what to say? Don't know how to respond to what someone just posted? Ask questions! Not only is this good if you don't know what to say, but this is ESPECIALLY useful if you are making most of the posts and get the feeling the other person doesn't know how to respond. Questions don't just help everyone better understand what's going on, it also is one of the most effective ways of hooking people in.
    
7. Circles are EVIL
   In a relaxed setting, roleplayers often tend to create circles with those they are roleplaying with. This can be fine...but the issue with circles is that they give the distinct impression of a closed session. If you have a solid circle of six people all facing one another, you'll find that far fewer people will try and join compared to if it was a more relaxed set up like two lines of people or a row. Likewise, closed off circles also results in a lot of wasted space in the center and will require reshuffling once new people are invited to join in (especially in City of Heroes where we have giant hitboxes to leave room for Jesus).
    
8. Your Presentation Might Not Match Reality
   If you are trying to present your character one way but find characters are treating them as if they were something completely different, remember that the problem might not be them. We sometimes get an idea of how our characters act in our heads, but the way we are presenting them isn't actually matching that. A common example might be the "asshole with the heart of gold", in reality, just being an asshole. If you find that people are consistently not reacting to your character the way you'd expect, reach out OOCly and bring up your concerns. If it turns out you're totally screwing up your attempts to pull off the concept, it's only really possible to fix if you are actually aware there is a problem to begin with.
    
9. IC is not OOC
   It can sometimes be easy to read into another character's behavior towards your own and get the feeling that you, the player, might have done something wrong (especially if you are anxiety prone). If you get the sense that might be happening, take a deep breath and just keep your eyes open for any behavior that is unnecessarily hostile in response to one of your posts. At that point, instead of asking if you did something wrong, instead ask if the other person is alright. There's nothing wrong with verifying that what is currently happening is not bad IRL emotions bleeding in. Just don't overdo your concern. Ask once and, if they confirm it's all IC, rest easy.
   
   Likewise, you should do whatever you can to avoid doing this the other way around. If you feel too emotionally distressed to roleplay, don't. If you don't think you can keep your IRL emotions from seeping into roleplay because you are too stressed over them, then don't roleplay. Find another means of relaxing and decompressing. While roleplay can be fun and serve as a means of letting off steam, not only can your own current issues come out as negative posts from your character, but it can also make you feel worse when other characters don't validate your character's abnormal feelings.
    
10. Just Because You Aren't Having Fun Doesn't Mean Other's Aren't as Well
    Lastly, remember that roleplay comes in many different flavors and styles. Don't like spooky roleplay? Don't participate in spooky roleplay. Don't like school settings and think they're stupid? Then don't participate in them. Think roleplay in Pocket D is stale and pointless? That's a fine opinion, but other people clearly disagree. There are very few forms of roleplay that one could call objectionable by its nature. If you don't enjoy a form of roleplay, don't bash others for doing it. Just let them do it and find circles you enjoy.

 

3. Aftercare

Wow! That was fun! Now what? Well, after the RP is done, you are likely going to want to follow that up with more roleplay at a later time. But it's not enough to just add those people to your global friends list and call it a day! Be proactive! Reach out and, if not to initiate roleplay, just find out how they're doing. Repeat the cycle and keep that ball rolling! I know this section is a little short, but, hey. I just wanted to emphasize it.

 

---

 

I know this was a bit of a shorter one, but I really wanted to get this one out there like...now. But I also have a head cold that is haunting my life. If you have other suggestions for how you should go about initiating and carrying a roleplay on, please post them below! I'd be happy to add quotes to them above!

 

This is part of a series of tutorials regarding roleplay! You can find the full list of tutorials here!