Roleplaying: Longevity and Immortality · 2 November 2007, 23:30
A common issue in fantasy roleplaying games, especially those that involve vampires or other creatures known to get ridiculously old – dragons come to mind – seem to constantly tempt people into making use of this for their characters. Somehow, the idea of having a character that has been around for hundreds of years tickles that want to be -est in pleasing ways.
Of course, -est is not what roleplaying is about. No. Not on that level. Roleplaying is about playing a role. If you want to be -est, then you will have to play your role -est, not tweak the role to suit your perceptions of -est so that your character can always win.
Often, people do have to make up their role more or less from scratch. Massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) give you a lot of fancy graphics to work with (commonly, at least), but no personality or history. Text roleplaying games are worst of all, they’ll force you to make up everything about the character, unless you’ve been given something of a template by one of the gamemasters.
The -est mindset then usually promptly ruins it.
Today’s spotlight falls onto longevity and quasi-immortality in roleplaying games, and why it is a bad idea, despite often eliciting, “omg, kewl!!!!” comments when quoted.
Let’s repeat something that may’ve gotten lost in the length of the intro: “Roleplaying is about playing a role.“ I invite the reader to let that phrase sink in. A moment’s reflection may already yield the answer we’re looking for. If not, read on.
(Note – a lot of following is argued from perspective of an ancient vampire in the modern human world. The musings are no different in any other setting, though – just typically far harder to research into. The modern human world is still fairly convenient as the destination of a character’s long history – anything else will quickly border impossibility.)
Timespans
Many roleplayers rarely get confronted with having to make up things their character has done during certain timespans once they have a profile up, because in most games, if they come back next week, they can pretty much pick up where they left off. Of course, it needn’t be this way, and as I firmly believe a different perspective may help understand the problem of longevity, let me present one: in Crimson Feather, in-character time continues to move between the sessions. This means that even when we are not roleplaying, things are happening to our characters. They’ve had as many nights worth of sleep as we have, providing nothing is stopping them, and they’ve spent their day being more or less active.
This has liberated Crimson Feather from various troubles other roleplaying games run into, such as stalling during the absence of a major character, or having to continue a plot even though it has entered a dormant/boring phase, or keeping track of in-character time, but comes with its own intriguing side-effects.
What exactly are the characters doing when no one is roleplaying them?
Typically, this is left up to the player the characters belong to once they log back on. They’re told what they missed – or can read it up on the site – and consider how their character fits into the happenings, and the blanks between them. Sometimes, gamemasters will help with these blanks, or describe all actions of the player’s characters during their absence.
But it does make people aware of timespans. Just as our lives are not standing still, the lives of the characters don’t stand still, either. Occasionally, I struggle to come up with a week’s worth of non-roleplay, because there are mindbogglingly many variables to consider in my character’s actions during the time, and I do, after all, want to play my role properly.
A week?
Well, you could probably get away with letting your character mostly loiter about for a week. Maybe said character’s depressed or unmotivated. If they can kill time with something mundane effectively, then you’ve got your Get Out Of Jail Free card right there.
But what about a month? Two months? Three? A year?
Breaking into sweat yet?
An issue you will no doubt come across is that you are only experiencing minutes of your life as you try to come up with the answers to these hypothetical questions. You are forced to make decisions for your character that your character has had hours or even days to think through. You may feel your answers to the questions are inadequate – perhaps you are missing some variables in the equation, something you’ve overlooked, that your character would not overlook?
Well, don’t worry about it, everyone makes mistakes. Roleplaying is supposed to be fun, above all – not a pain. In Crimson Feather, you’re given no choice in the matter, you have to make up things that were not roleplayed, lest you will go under. It’d be easy to just pick another roleplaying game and not have to worry about all this.
Or is it?
You still have full control and responsibility for the history of your character. All of it.
If you want a glimpse of the work that you would have to put into a character that’s been around since the 1400’s, which is young compared to many characters boasting centuries of age, I invite you to read up on the history of Ciaran Taika-Tessaro. I wanted to see if I could pull it off – longevity is important for Ciaran’s personality to work quite the way it does – and I must say, the end result of the exercise is mildly disappointing. I can’t say I had the patience to pull it through. Without the help of Wikipedia, I would have lost patience even quicker… my knowledge of history is so fleeting that I can’t begin to consider the happenings in the past centuries without slipping up.
You’ll notice even I gave up between ~1500 and ~1900.
Have fun.
Acting one’s age
Possibly an even bigger issue than having to come up with the depth of history involved in an ancient character is actually acting their age. Many, many people who pull the longevity/immortality card already have issues acting their own age. Tackling a character with multitudes more experience than you yourself have had is a tricky subject. The very foundations of society have shifted over the centuries. Someone who seems crassly conservative today may have been burnt at the stake in medieval times – and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
The amount of ancient characters I’ve seen played with modern mindsets is laughable. Even the most open-minded character from the middle ages would be revolted at some of our practises these days. What would they think of the internet? Mobile phones? Latter even causes some individuals of us modern human beings to throw up their hands and cry “Sodom and Gomorrah!”, they’re so annoying. Going further back in time – telephones? Even further – lightbulbs? Machines?
Keep in mind an ancient character would have seen a lot of change around them. No amount of isolation excepting entombment would have all of it pass by unnoticed – and even then you’re faced with the challenge of having your character understand all of the new knowledge at once.
Your character’s entire personality is bound to have been shaped quite thoroughly by the change of times. Their opinions are bound to have been beaten, dragged through the meatgrinder, and come out either hard as rock or in tatters.
Which’ll it be?
— Neike Taika-Tessaro
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