Putting on the Mask: Prepping for Roleplay

So in my last post I talked about giving your character attitude to enhance your performance and to make roleplay better. I didn't do much of a good job in saying how. The reason for this is simple: I can't speak for you. I can only speak for myself. I hate writing something and making people feel like I mean "And thou shalt." If you have a different method and it works for you, do it up. Hell, TELL ME ABOUT IT. I like hearing new things.

So this post is going to be more about the development of attitude for a character, which dovetails nicely into another discussion: preparing for RolePlay. Ready? Good!

As I've mentioned before, I'm a Jungian Counselor in my day job. One of Jung's many contributions to psychology was the concept of the Persona. The Persona is described as that aspect of our Self (Capitalization intended) that we put on when interacting with others, and is commonly depicted as a Mask. Every day, we put on the Mask of the Student, the Teacher, the Artist, the Worker, The Spouse, The Lover, the Fighter, the Dreamer. We wear Masks that are mixtures of these things depending on who we are with and the setting we find ourselves in.

As a roleplayer, I find it easier to play characters that hold a kernel of myself in them. Taglia was the part of me that wished to help but did not wish anyone to discover his own weaknesses, Rhys was the socially outraged New Yorker, Declan was the writer who never wanted responsibility, Rave was the snarky wiseass who kept secrets to protect himself and ended up bleeding for it. These are all aspects of Me, the Self as I see it. I'm not saying that there isn't anything to be said of creating a character wholecloth. As I'm discovering with Owen, my upcoming Littlefinger-as-a-Sith-Lord Vampire, being a morally grey character after years of playing White Hats is interesting and challenging.

My default method is to take a part of me and build with that as the premise. The one thing I truly and totally do not approve of is playing an avatar of yourself with a sheet. I've noticed far too many people who put too much of themselves into their characters take things far too seriously than fun-pretendy times. You are portraying these characters, you *aren't* these characters. So in my humble experience, always build a character that, while in some ways similar, is not inherently you.

So now comes the question: How, Craig, do you do this?

A few tricks, a lot of them coming in the development and referring back to them on the way to the next game. The first is simple: Have a background, write it out, keep a copy with you. Remember the details to remember where you character is coming from. Rhys came from a family without a father and a negligible mother, a manipulative grandmother and a secretive grandfather. As such, his past was laden without trust. Write these out and read them as you start your prep, write out new ones as time goes on. I usually do written reaction papers on the way out of a game or in response to a scene. Sometimes it's easier when your game allows online scenes where you can act out their reactions, have a record, and still be able to walk away from it. But if a game does not generally hold an online aspect there is usually some form of journal or scene written that describes the PC at this point in their life. You take these and you read them to remember who they are and where they are, so you know how they would react to related (and sometimes unrelated) things.

Rhys was very close to becoming a player Avatar, as was Rave. Both of them had my core reaction of analysis and snark. But I put enough history into their backstories as to make their motivations and reactions distant from my own. I'm a writer, I do not write my protagonists to win and they will often suffer even if I have to do it myself. This requires a lot of sitting in the metaphorical mirror and getting real with yourself. Rhys was decidedly more screwed up than anyone care to notice and Rave never finished a story unless he was broken and bleeding either metaphorically or physically.

Another trick I do are playlists, all of my characters have a playlist. Rhys was mostly Muse and classic Rock,  Owen is mostly Rza, Kanye and a few others, all describing sex and power. Rude is mostly Thrice and some Imagine Dragons, earthy tones but with an acid kick. Rave was fueled by Yuki Kajiura, especially the track Cynical World. This is to help me get into their mood, tempos, upswings. I live in the North Bronx, meaning at best I have an hour train ride into New York City. This gives me plenty of time to put the music on, read my material and go in guns blazing

Another thing, and this is the one thing that if you learn nothing else from: Make Ties. Nothing enforces your character more than other players and their characters being in on it. Reality is based on perception, a thing becomes more real the more people agree that it is real. Somebody thought of it, and someone believed it. Right now I'm in the process of building Jacob Rude, my Retrograde Tinker (Who, by sheer nature of being a Retrograde, gets to wear a literal mask) in Dystopia Rising, one of the things that I must do as a player is create ties for him so he can enter the space more readily as other people know him and his story. His credibility as a character is maintained in no small part by the other characters around him.

And having character ties, especially historical ones, helps in building them. Rude had a mother and a father, some siblings. A tie with a PC made another character his uncle on his mother side, gave him a location as his home. Their tie comes in at the Uncle's death, peppering that relationship. My Mage in the Accord venue has romantic ties with at least one PC, which began and end messily in the bathroom of the club he was DJing in. That tells me he's the kind of person who fucks around, and having another PC to attest to that reinforces it. Maintaining this part of the character is easy, you just play. Creating ties nails down aspects of your character into solid ground, because now other people are involved.

Finally, and often something I forget, is the physical build up. By this I mean trying to get a few ticks down in my head well enough so he is distinguishable from me. Rave, my NY Jedi Persona, was a master of Shii Cho, a style of lightsaber combat. I prefer the form myself, but while I am definitely more analytical and observant, Rave was the one hauling through the battlefields after only a quick decision. So before I had to perform for a show, I would do the sword form of Shii Cho we made in Jedi. The first time would be as me, the second time as him. I would do this over again until a little bit of the outward swagger and the snarl formed on my lips, until the careful step forward was a committed lunge. While it was subtle, I felt the shift, and that is all you need sometimes.

All of these things help to build and enhance your character's Mask and keep it going. Congratulations, you've got a character Persona you can portray. I think this method is healthy because you've built up something that is insulated from your personal Self. I can't imagine playing Dystopia Rising, a game that is as much physically taxing as well as it is emotionally taxing. My friend Ericka plays a charcter who, in one of the more recent games, was executed on the steps of the main building by an invading army. She also recounted the traumatic experiences of her character (she got better after her brains were blown out) in the more previous game and decided to back out because it was becoming too much for her. She decided to take off the mask of her PC and be herself for a while/do things she as a person wanted/had to do. Imagine a player whose character was only a weakly veiled version of themselves. Imagine someone who was Too Far in the head of their characters in a full Method Acting overboard Tom Cruise kind of way? How ugly could that turn if their character went through that? How much damage? Having a metaphorical mask to put on and take off helps protect you from the wear of this other poor bastard you're playing.

Now, for the most important trick, what to do after the game. I like to call it the Debriefing Process, in which a person comes down from playing their characters, effectively removing their mask until they need to put it on again. A lot of this is doing the reverse of building/putting on the Mask in the first place. Write out your character stuff as soon as you can and then set it aside until the next game. Pour the memories out and then put them aside. Listen to music, but put it on shuffle, let other themes and tracks be heard. The idea is to reassert yourself as your dominant Persona and not the one you've created. Debrief and take a break.

It's not a perfect system. I had a hard time doing it when I first did Dystopia Rising, it's the shock of the immersive LARPing experience. It's easy to throw yourself into hypothetical scenarios when you aren't actually in the woods in the middle of the night with things chasing after you with malicious intent. It took me a weekend of NPCing to get to that point, with the key moment of me putting on the mask of an outerguardsmen and knuckling up to the front lines of a battle.

Live Action Role Play is all about exploring situations and scenarios, some of them maybe be a little too far out but that's what the extra padding of the Persona is for. It's the land of make believe, and you get to play whatever roles you've always dreamed of in worlds you may or may never have for a few hours, or a day, or a weekend with other like minded people. We enhance our time together by making the veil of disbelief as see through and raised as we possibly can and then share in the communal come down once veil has lowered. That is the core of what we do, in my opinion, take with it what you will.

Later,