Don’t forget we moved!
https://brandmu.day/
Negative emotions and their role in RP
-
This is so interesting to me.
Because I’m not particularly drawn to sadness as catharsis. I don’t necessarily want to play a person who is sad, and my tolerance for angst and deep sadness is…limited.
Where my catharsis is, is ANGER. I control my anger and I have all my life. I’m the kind of person where in RL, if I express mild irritation, people recoil and go, “I didn’t think you could even get angry!” Even when I let myself get angry, ninety-five percent of the time, I cool down fast and am soon saying, “Well, it wasn’t that big of a deal. I’m sure they didn’t mean it quite like I took it. I don’t see the point in hanging on to this.”
So, god, I want to play angry people. I want to play angry people WITH angry people. I want to have characters who are filled with wrath and vengeance, who have screaming fits, who fight and swagger and get their asses kicked or kick ass, either is good. And not just the righteous sorts; I want people who get angry over petty things, who lash out when they didn’t mean to, who cause damage they never intended. People who…lose control, for good and bad.
It’s not because I want to hurt PCs - in fact, I usually restrict a lot of that to NPCs unless I’m sure the player is on board. But I admit it’s an adrenaline rush to just play someone who can stop worrying and just UNLEASH, and let the consequences be a Future Them problem.
-
@Pyrephox I like playing angry people, too. What I find interesting is that when my CHARACTERS are angry, I’m often, IDK, excited? Jazzed up?
When my characters are sad - like REALLY sad - I’m often sad, too. Not like- to the same degree. But I feel it as sadness in a way I don’t feel rage as rage.
It’s weird. I’m so fascinated by why this is.
-
@Selira I think this is just personal preference, not a universal truth. I have plenty of story without having terrible things happen. My characters have conflict over ambitions, or specific goals to accomplish, or even things that are “bad” but don’t have to be deeply emotional - I can RP about a failed mission or the character hating their boss without making the RP itself sad or deeply focused on the emotional lows. There’s only a handful of specific plot points I avoid (like death of loved ones, for instance - I just acknowledge it and let it be happening in the background). Otherwise I can engage with things in a variety of ways that don’t require my character to be sad af. Lots of happy stories still have conflict (in the narrative sense) of some sort!
-
@Pyrephox I feel this hard, actually.
-
@farfalla I mean, I’m not talking about just wallowing in the sadness. I’m talking about using low points as a tool to push things forward. The character most people know me for did not come off, 90% of the time, as sad, but pain, tragedy, anger, and spite were absolute driving forces in her ambitions. And sometimes they’d come out in beautiful infernos.
-
@Selira I definitely think that’s true for a lot of people! I’m just saying it isn’t true for me, so there’s other ways to approach narrative momentum.
-
@Pyrephox said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
So, god, I want to play angry people. I want to play angry people WITH angry people.
Is one of my favorite things about playing with you. I can let my PC say the horrible thing, literally no pulling punches. You give better than you get in the best way when it comes to conflict.
-
@KarmaBum said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
@Pyrephox said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
So, god, I want to play angry people. I want to play angry people WITH angry people.
Is one of my favorite things about playing with you. I can let my PC say the horrible thing, literally no pulling punches. You give better than you get in the best way when it comes to conflict.
I BLUSH. DARN YOU! (thanks!) It’s one of the things I love about playing with you, as well. We can really play a scene out and I trust that if something goes too far, you’d say something, or I could say something, and it’d be OKAY. We’re still cool at the end of it, whatever ‘it’ is.
-
It’s interesting thinking about that but I started a pose that got navel-gazy quickly. What I will say instead of the long post for which no one has all the context is that years ago I rped characters who suppressed their rage and passion out of fear and I grew into rping characters who ride the rage high, and now I am playing characters who learned to channel or transmute rage into fuel for other things, and it’s kind of interesting to look at that as a kind of emotional theme in my rp and to wonder what will come next for my character brains.
-
I know I’m on the same page with @Pyrephox in terms of wanting to play characters who do the wrong thing and make an ass of themselves and then try to write why they are still apart of the group. (also about the punching, always the punching)
I definitely don’t want to make other people OOCly angry, sad, jealous, whatever but I do really want those things ICly. I want messy relationships that are hard and make you examine if something is forgivable. I want to see characters make choices that aren’t clearly right but understandable. I love playing trainwrecks who sometimes get it together. However to me it’s always important to do it in a way that is pro my character (not mean spirited) and with a good sense of humor about it. I don’t ever want sad or difficult storylines to feel like an unrelenting buzzkill to read or take part in.
At the same time I know I’ve screwed up in terms of not checking in with RP partners often enough even when we’ve agreed to a certain storyline. I forget who mentioned that but it’s a really good point whenever treading into things that aren’t just good times or beating the baddie up.
-
This post is deleted! -
I love playing the angry trainwreck also. (RIP K’vvan, I miss being able to do the things I loved on you.)
However, I’ve gotten a lot more sensitive over the years and I worry more about how I’m hurting people playing that archatype. So I don’t think I can do it any more even if I LOVE IT.
-
I often play bad guys (not that they think they’re bad, obviously), but I’m exceptionally wary about how my doing bad things is going to impact people - especially on a game grounded in a version of reality like a WoD game. The bad things I do can be a trigger for trauma or simply an experience someone doesn’t want to RP through. This is part of why I argue that WoD isn’t a horror game, even though it’s touted as one by some.
I think that’s the crux of negative emotions in roleplay, they’re negative and thus can have some pretty damn difficult attachments for people even when they’re cathartic for others. It requires a greater deal more OOC discussion and negotiation than, say, having a neutral or joyful family dinner RP might.
It’s a lot more work than people typically deal with, thus it can be fraught with difficulty when that work isn’t put in - and many of us simply don’t have the time anymore to sit down for a long conversation on limits, tastes, and needs when the alternative is so much easier.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Pavel said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
It requires a greater deal more OOC discussion and negotiation than, say, having a neutral or joyful family dinner RP might.
It’s a lot more work than people typically deal with, thus it can be fraught with difficulty when that work isn’t put in - and many of us simply don’t have the time anymore to sit down for a long conversation on limits, tastes, and needs when the alternative is so much easier.
This is a really good point. Playing someone who elicits these types of emotions REGULARLY takes a lot of work to do really well - and they bring something valuable to the game, I think. Someone who can drive social conflict while still being a good communicator, thoughtful player, and OOCly great person to hang around with can really bring a lot of life to a game.
Someone who drives social conflict WITHOUT those characteristics can drag a game way way down.
I find that the characters I best remember are often those who choose a ‘messy’ emotional path, but do so in a way that is nuanced, balanced, and considerate of their RP partners.
-
@Pavel This is interesting and kind of a – connected but tangential thought to the original question. I also can’t play bad guys. I can do morally gray in specific cases, but in general I’m incapable of not playing a white hat. In some cases I’m just not good at it, but in others it just makes me feel icky. Glitch looks cool af, but I simply cannot play someone with murderous impulses.
as previously stated, good day.
-
@farfalla said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
Glitch looks cool af, but I simply cannot play someone with murderous impulses.
100% get this, and it’s why I splashed warnings. I honestly respect players who read them and know their limits.
I would
playing with you again. But on a game where we’d both feel comfortable.Someone will make one someday!
-
@farfalla For me it’s less that I can’t play bad guys, but it takes time and trust to play them well with other people. I don’t have a lot of time these days, especially when I’m elbow-deep in revising for exams or whatever (mature-age student life, yo) so I don’t have the energy to sit down and have those kinds of conversations with every new person I’d have to have them with.
Communication is absolutely important and key to those kinds of roles, or any kind of role that will repeatedly and intentionally cause negative emotions in the people they’re playing with.
-
@GF said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
I try to limit negative emotions in my RP because the kind of RPer I am, I often have to access those emotions in some way to be able to portray them.
So this is why I can’t TS! I just can’t maintain a feeling of lust for long enough to portray it.
-
@GF said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
@GF said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
I try to limit negative emotions in my RP because the kind of RPer I am, I often have to access those emotions in some way to be able to portray them.
So this is why I can’t TS! I just can’t maintain a feeling of lust for long enough to portray it.
I know your comment is tongue in cheek but it’s probably hard to maintain any emotion long enough for an entire scene.
Like if my character is angry, miserable, etc… in IC terms that might last for 10 minutes, but the scene OOC might go on for hours. I can’t stay angry all that time.
-
@Arkandel said in Negative emotions and their role in RP:
I know your comment is tongue in cheek but it’s probably hard to maintain any emotion long enough for an entire scene.
Not at all. It’s a genuine revelation to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my relationship to MUing, and this answers one of my questions about why I’m so bad at filling the roles I expect people to want of me.
