A Hermit's Look at Roleplay

Insights of Kasenko, Entry # 1
~On Roleplay

Hi, folks. Kasenko here – the writer, not the character. I participated in a tabletop roleplay in one of my classes the other day, and it brought up some interesting points.

Limited Time to Play
Exactly what it says on the tin, basically. Nobody has an infinite amount of free time. Sometimes it’s planned out so that it won’t take very long, but that’s assuming it follows the plan to a tee. Often, far more time than expected will be spent on one part of the “game”. Unexpected things will always happen. In the roleplay I was in, for example, we spent an entire hour shopping in town instead of actually heading out (for ADVENTURE!). We barely got halfway through the plot before class ended, and had to end it there.

There isn’t too much you can do to avoid this – just plan on the RP lasting a while longer than it seems like it should, and don’t RP when pressed for time in real life.

Player Count
Typical tabletop RPG sessions are between four to six people. This is in place in order to give each character unique attributes and plenty of “screen time” between each player. If you have to wait for 19 other people to make their move before you, it would get very boring, very quickly. With fewer players, people feel like they’re actually participating instead of waiting in line or competing for the main attention. Being involved constantly makes it easier to imagine the game as a real occurrence that you’re taking part in instead of just pretending.

It’s not quite the same in our roleplay, however. A large amount of people can be involved in a roleplay, and it can make some amount of sense. Seiga, for example, did this very well. However, with large RPs, some people will end up idling or tend to be a bit left out or ignored. It’s not intentional, but sometimes a few people take the spotlight and not much else can really happen. Other times, the RP will be broken into smaller sections within the channel.

I’ve seen a lot of groaning about “private RPs” and the like. While I understand, they are pretty much necessary. Not all characters would even want to join some huge group event in the first place. If people want to participate in large roleplays, that’s good. If not, there’s not much you can do. You could always start an RP of your own, even if it only attracts a few people.

Limited Information and “Junk” Information
Due to the nature of a roleplay, you’re not going to have as much information as you would in the real world. Information is laid out by the setting/game/GM, and that’s it.

In the real world, if you’re doing something, there’s sensory and mental information coming in all around you. Some of it may be significant to you, but much of it is trivial and inconsequential. However, the information given to you in a roleplay, game, or whatever is intentionally chosen to be there. That rock you see as you walk down a dirt road? Somebody had to code it or decide it should be there. That little side-comment that you see that doesn’t seem to have any significance? It might be the clue to the whole story.

Basically, any information you’re given in an RP is either significant and related to the situation, or useless junk information designed purely to lead you astray. It’s not always clear which type, of course.

Again, there’s not much you can do about this. Any information that comes up in a rolelay will generally be important to the situation. You could, of course, use this to your advantage. For example, if you go to attack Tamako, and she smirks and makes no effort to dodge, something is obviously off. She probably has a plan and is luring you into a trap. You as a writer can assume this because I, as a writer, took the effort to tell you that information. HOWEVER, it’s borderline metagaming. A subtle smirk one a person's face is quite difficult to see in the middle of a fight. Even if you saw it, unless your character knows Tamako’s powers and that she could easily be tricking you with an illusion, you would likely still try to attack. If you hear a bush rustle while walking through a forest, you don’t instantly know there’s someone hiding in it. You’d just assume it was a wild animal.

It’s difficult to use “junk” or misleading information in an IRC roleplay. Pretty much everything has a meaning or significance. And since we don’t have a GM of sorts, there’s not much point anyway.

On the Necessity of a GM…?
Tabletop RPGs would not function without a GM there to run it. Why?

Every game, movie, book… any piece of fiction, if you will, has a setting. It has rules, accepted standards, physics – which are not always the same as our world’s. The GM is there because they designed this new reality in its entirety. The players will always, ALWAYS come up with an idea to try something that may or may not be against the “rules” of said universe. The designer may not have foreseen this idea, but they can easily come up with a new reason or restriction if they haven’t. That way, the game stays intact, and the players can continue to feel like this world they are in is a real thing. The more the world is fleshed out and detailed, even in the middle of the roleplay, the more the players can imagine themselves as their characters, doing whatever it is that they are doing. While it would be ideal to set every guideline and rule possible beforehand, in order to limit asking the GM about them during the game, that is nigh-impossible. Even with the rather large amount of information and rules ZUN has given us about Gensoukyou and the world it exists in, there is near infinite room for expansion. Headcanon exists for a reason.

But what does this mean for our roleplay? We sometimes pull off entire events without a single person actively guiding the situation. In a way, ZUN is our GM – he already made the established “ruleset”. The Game Master represents the game itself, in a way. We (the players) do things within that game, restricted - but also empowered - by it. Our headcanon defines some of the rules that ZUN hasn’t given us. We, as characters, operate within a fairly defined “universe”, and while there are many supernatural elements, the actions and reactions of everyone should make sense. The characters in this RP should react based on the information given in canon.

Despite this, RPs often go smoother if someone makes a general plan beforehand. Someone running the game and nudging the “players” in a specific direction helps quite a bit. It's not necessary, of course - there have been plenty of RPs where people just go along with whatever happens. But without someone giving us something to "play against", there isn't much to be done besides chat or interact among ourselves.

Closing
Well, there's not much more to say. Personally, I'd recommend trying a tabletop RPG at least once. With a good GM and players, it's very fun. Anyway, that's it for now. Tune in next time~!