On Not Being Able To Roleplay
I’m a writer. I write constantly. Every day, I write 500 words, often more. I don’t just write articles, I write fiction as well. In fact, I do so much writing that it’s basically burned into me now, it’s a massive part of my routine, and because of it, I’ve been able to both keep The Daily SPUF daily, and my fictional writing is still going, slowly but surely. In my writing, I have to do a little bit of roleplay, putting myself in the shoes of my characters, or even my non-fiction readers.
I also play a bit of Dungeons and Dragons. Typically, I’m the person who writes things down. But a lot of Dungeons and Dragons features a lot of roleplaying. And while my methods for roleplaying for writing work fine, I find it nearly impossible to roleplay in Dungeons and Dragons.
Seriously, my characters kinda suck. While they don’t all have the same traits and personalities on paper, when they come out of my mouth, there’s no difference between a happy-go-lucky rogue and my stiff upper-lipped paladin. They sound identical, and when I try and act as them, they end up looking identical as well. I have not a single drop of talent when it comes to physical roleplaying. It doesn’t help that I also don’t have great backstories to my characters, and leave a lot of gaps in my background. Or, worse, I tend to forget about my background entirely. I get too busy living in the moment, I guess.
A lot of it is shyness and embarrassment. I’m not a fan of making a fool of myself, which is exactly what happens when I attempt to act in any way. What happens in my head is always very different to what I actually say and do. All the cool factor that my character (potentially) has disappears the moment I open my mouth. Thankfully, my DnD group are fine with my ineptitude and being a generally useless actor, and they don’t make me do accents or anything. Well, most of the time. Out of character, they agree with me that I am shit at roleplaying.
Of course, roleplaying in a text format is a million times easier. I used to do a lot of play-by-post roleplaying when I was younger. But when you are writing, you can control pretty much everything your character does and create a perfect character. And you can easily stamp out any mistakes before they happen. So my characters generally end up way better on paper than they do in the campaign.
But with written roleplay, you also have way more time to carefully craft your actions and responses. This allows one to have a lot more death. Meanwhile, roleplaying in DnD (or any sort of RPG) requires you to be instantaneous and ready to react, with not that much time to think. Sure, you can stop and think while another character is saying what they are doing, but there’s a lot less time to ready yourself. It really doesn’t help that, especially in combat, I am rather indecisive. I overthink pretty much whatever I do when I roleplay and my characters are worse off because of it.
Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. As long as I stop overthinking, I think I can make my characters better. It’s a slow thing to improve on, and my characters won’t get better overnight, but at least I can make them feel a bit more natural.