Some Thoughts on Characters

One of the hardest things, perhaps, it to play a human being: alternately confused and consumed, torn by decision, stubborn in necessity, fallible, joyous, enraged... mad and sane. Humans ride the paradox every moment of every day because we must, because it is demanded of us. The characters we create don't have to... they do it because we insist and because we work at it.

Like most people, when I first started roleplaying, my characters were extensions of myself. Later, as I gained more experience, and lost some of my shyness, and grew old enough to better understand human experience in general, my characters became less and less like me. Now, one of the most interesting aspects of roleplaying, for me, is exploring a different facet of life.

Every character thinks differently. As one learns to look at the world through a character's eyes, one also becomes aware of the ways other people think about situations, the way thought patterns other than one's own natural thought patterns. I think characters, different though they may be from our "real" selves, nonetheless represent something fundamental about the way we think, feel, analyze the behavior of others, and view the world.

The best characters are shaped by their experiences, created with histories that lead logically to their present state, and which leave room for the characters to grow and change. They have stories of their own to tell, trials and tribulations which evolve naturally out of who they are in relation to the fantasy world that they inhabit. The characters who remain the most fascinating are the characters who, in essence, play themselves -- the ones who constantly surprise us, who change in unexpected directions and teach us things we didn't know about ourselves.

Characters allow us to explore aspects of existence that we have no opportunity to experience ourselves. We may become good and noble, young and foolish, decrepit and senile, or irredeemably depraved. I think that the extremes of good and evil are perhaps the most difficult to play without resorting to stereotypes; even the purest of men must have his flaws, and the best villains are the ones who nonetheless seem very human -- Lancelot and Darth Vader are two of my favorites.

Modern roleplaying games have increasingly encouraged us to explore our dark sides. To me, it is the flaws, the weaknesses, the darkness within that makes every character, even the most virtuous, interesting. It is the struggle to overcome the worst within oneself, as well as the struggle against the external foe, that really lends pathos, so to speak, to a character. Evil should never just be "there"; evil should always have a rationale, always make sense in some sort of twisted way, always tug at some small part of someone in some way which allows one to admit in the dark silence of one's soul, "That could have been me."

At the same time, there's always the nagging question: "What does playing a character like that say about me?" Everything exists only in the imagination, of course, but as we rationalize or empathize our way through the personalities of psychopaths or worse, one has to wonder where all of this is coming from. To play "dark" well, one has to achieve one's own understanding of where man's darkest impulses come from. A character like that should always disturb onlookers from the viewpoint of psychology as well as actual harm done by such a character; their deeds should never be simply trivialized as "that villain's just dis bad guy, ya know?"

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