Joined: 18 Feb 2009
Posts: 33
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While everybody loves playing nice and the occasional scene where everything just seems to fit... everybody gets along, and we can just kick back and enjoy a drink at a local Chicago dive with comerades, the majority of role play in our setting should revolve around conflict. Personal conflict and conflict with other characters. I think it's a common misconception that the Imm Staff frowns upon IC conflict and violence--they definitely do not; on the contrary they seem to highly encourage it. It's another common misconception that players prefer to avoid trouble. I can't speak for absolutely everyone, but I frequently hear the complaint that our characters are too soft for their own good. A bunch of supernatural hunters, inhuman blood-suckers, shape-shifting demi-humans and dangerously passionate magi should be bursting at the scenes with conflict, but we end up time and time again tipping drinks, eating burgers and posing karaoke more often than hunting supernaturals, sucking blood or shape-shifting. Why?
Characters in the World of Darkness should be driven toward strife in their nightly lives like Wolverine toward a high-powered magnet. Almost nobody in the WoD stays up all night every night because they're an innocent insomniac. Think about what your character is doing out on the town every single night. We're the weirdos of the corrupt modern world. Every character we have is at least a little "off", or they would be a faceless NPC sleeping in his bed during role play hours. Why don't we ever act the part? Why does everyone make friends with everybody else when other, less pleasant but more thematic actions would make things far more interesting for everyone involved?
I get the feeling a lot of us are paranoid about driving someone away with our IC actions, so we choose instead not to do anything at all. What I'm suggesting with this post is--Don't be so afraid to offend someone OOCly that you omit IC conflict from your role play. People are here to engage in In-Character conflict. It builds their characters, it gives us something to write about in our journals and something for our characters to experience outside the mundane things we could just as easily experience in Real Life. We don't log in to a World of Darkness setting to role play Real Life. We log in to a World of Darkness setting to come face to face with inhuman turmoil.
That friendly-faced gentleman you met wandering around the slums at 3AM might just be looking for trouble, and the whole idea of the game's theme is to give it to him! The rare exception should be the character who's worried about his safety and buys him a cab ride home. People will be bored by this kind of behavior, especially when it's the reaction of every character they come across--villain or hero, we've fallen into a trend of playing the same responses to keep from possibly offending someone OOCly. We can't be so worried about people panicking over losing that bit of text we call a character that we stagnate instead.
For just one sphere's example of what could help add life into nightly role play: If you are a vampire--Try feeding from a character. They're there for you to eat, after all. Or make a ghoul out of another player. Groom a character as a Childe. Take out your frustrations on a character who reflects in part your own stolen human life, even if you never see them again. We don't want to be treated fairly and humanely by every vampire we ever meet.
The game is about horror and conflict, and no one would be here if they weren't looking for both.
tl;dr (trendy little acronym it is...) - Play mean. We want it!
~R~ |
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