RPing a character whose beliefs are oppisite your own.

Here's the question I want to ask my fellow RPers. When RPing, do you find it difficult to play as a character whose beliefs or morals are very, very contradictory to your own?

For instance, I play a character who is a complete *******. He is not nice. He pretty much hates humanity. If he could get away with it, he'd probably kill anyone he saw fit. All he wants is to control everyone around him.

The thing is, a question popped up in the thread I RP in. Not directed at me, but still.

I...don't. I have no talent for writing someone who isn't in some way a reflection of myself. It's a bit of a problem for me, at times.

We exist as a form of communication for our characters, not the other way around. It's none of our business if the character in question has radically different views which rest on the extreme opposite end of the given spectrum of the issue at hand. It's not the narrator's place to question or judge said character for their views, since that can lead to bias in narration.

The reason why the narrator would even relay FOR a character of a radical opposite mindset being that the story, the ideal and the thoughts created and expounded upon by that character interacting with other characters within an invented realm is a concept beyond good and evil, right or wrong, purity of perversion.

I haven't done a helluva lot of RPing in my time, but when it comes to this game, a great deal of the characters are just "Me+Superpowers," so, no, those aren't hard at all to do the extremely light RP that I sporadically do.

However, I have also been the guy who roots for the villain to win in comics and on TV because they are usually much more interesting to me than the (so often) one dimensional hero (not that villains can't also be one dimensional). Soooo, to get back around to the question: when I do have a character who has a distinctly different moral character than my own, I don't think I would be any worse at RPing him than I would any other character I do (aka, I will still suck at it ).

Now, ask me if I think I could RP the opposite gender... I really don't think I could, which is weird, I think. I mean, I can RP a straight male just fine... which should be more of a stretch to me than RPing a girl (me being gay and all). Perhaps it is because I spent like 15 years or so RPing a straight male in RL... I will never know for sure.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blarg If I met anyone as much of a bigot as my character in real life, I would beat the ever loving crap out of him.

So what you are saying is, you are prejudice against racists? (Totally just messing around with you and saying it before someone says it, and means it.)

No, I mean, I definitely think it's just as much personal as it is sociological
Unless, you were, like, the worst straight guy ever and your coming out was all
Thirty-seven: I'm... I'm gay
Them: No DUH!

Complete opposite, yes, I would struggle. A perverted exaggeration of your own beliefs, less so.

My main villain is a pro-mutant supremecist who takes Nietzsche's ideas to the extreme and ends up quite radical and zealous because of it. Still, somehow he manages to be soft and cuddly to some people he cares about. Go figure.

I must admit to struggling with characters who are truly evil i.e. they know what they're doing is bad but like doing it anyway. In four years of over 30 roleplayed characters in CoX, I've only ever managed one. As the game doesn't really encourage 'real' evil (it settles instead for being an agent of truly evil ones) this isn't so much of a problem. But I do have to tuck all empathy aside when I log onto that character.

This is the very reason my namesake doesn't get as much RP as he use to, I have to be in the right frame of mind to full put on the mad scientist persona. If I'm tired I can't pull it off yet that's where most of my characters rambling dialogue comes from, I use to play him when I was completely sleep deprived so the madness would flow a lot easier because my brain wasn't in the normal state anyway but now I have to 'slip in' to character beforehand to play him.

Like putting on a pair of slightly tight old leather gloves, needs a bit of flexing first before you can feel comfortable in them.

My latest creation, a villain called Broken Verse I created specifically to be my antithesis. I've always had a tendency to create "good" characters over "bad" ones, and specifically characters that shared one trait or another similar to their own; oh btw when I refer to characters, I don't mean CoH I mean characters in general, I write a lot. While I have since overcome the whole 'bad guy vs. good guy' thing, I wanted to create a character who was the antithesis of me. When I say antithesis, I don't mean I'm a guy he's a girl, I like bacon he hates bacon, I am not a racist, he is a racist. I mean things like fundamental building blocks of his character.

I am a Christian Socialist, so I believe very strongly in the goodness of people and rules that will help society to evolve from it's current deteriorated state. As a Socialist, I believe in order, a society in which the power of the individual cannot outweigh that of the majority.

This guy is a Nihilist with no values whatsoever, except in a lot of ways he isn't. Nihilists believe there is absolutely no point to existence, and they usually find themselves in a blind rampage or killing themselves. Except that Broken Verse doesn't believe that there is no value to existence in all scenarios. He believes that the current established order has absolutely no value - it is what he refers to as "The Insipid Intolerable Monotonous Cacophony" - but with all governmental, legal and social structure absolutely broken down to the point where the entire world is not bound by anything whatsoever. That is what he believes is the only meaningful way to exist.

I found roleplaying and writing as him surprisingly easy as, although I've never been good at empathising with individual people, I do find it eays to empathise with ideals no matter how far extracted they are from their own. Plus, I have a very good sense of reality, and I don't get any kind of apprehension when roleplaying as a character who performs heinous acts, because I know it isn't real.

Either you can or you can't, really. I find it fairly easy, because characters for me are very much their own entities that, once properly formed, go off on paths of their own. I don't have any real racists amongst my list, but I do have someone who hates aliens and demons and such, and one who wants to see Humanity as it is now wiped out in atomic destruction
You do it pretty well so far Blargy, put it that way

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Bit like Techy.

My characters are intellectual constructs. I'm not a method actor. Faced with some moral choice, I have to reason through how the character would respond, so it's not hard for me to play someone with drastically different moral views.

Now, someone once asked me to play a terribly angry homophobe. This I had trouble with, not because I had any moral problem, or an issue with acting through it, but because I discovered that I lacked the vocabulary. I haven't got the words to correctly express someone like that. If I want to insult someone, I'd do it with some complex series of expressions, not a string of target specific swear words. That particular thing was hard, but I'm rather proud of the reason it was hard.

While I don't roleplay, I do write (kind of), and I've found one thing to be true above others - you can write for ANY character of ANY morality if you can find some way in which that character relates to any part of your own personality. For instance, I can take my frustration with carefully-laid plans and lots of effort gone to waste, and from that I can create an empire-building, ruthless dictator whose entire point in existence is to have carefully-laid plans AND SUCCEED. If need be over the dead bodies of his enemies. Or I can take the feeling that you're surrounded by idiots (we've all felt that way at one time or another) and run with it, to produce the hyper-intelligent, arrogant scientist who wants to replace all the world's living creatures with machines, starting with the end of the world as we know it and complete disrespect of the sanctity of life.

I like to think of myself as a nice guy. I like to think that, give the (clear) choice, I'd do the right thing, I'd be the hero, I'd make the sacrifice and so forth. The truth is, I'm not as virtuous as I like to think. I have a hard time believing anyone really is. Not deep down inside. We may all ACT like heroes, but that's because we manage to suppress negative emotions, thoughts and desires. I find that it sometimes pays to take such a desire and run with it. That will always give a character a unique, believable trait, because you're not making it up. It really IS how you feel. Or rather, how you would feel if you didn't have a conscience, say.

On that note, I've found that if I have to stop and ask myself: "OK, how would Villain Man react to this?" then I'm doing it wrong. The only real way I've found to write an evil character who disagrees with my methods is to sort of get into character on a subconscious level. Psyche myself up, run through the motions and get my brain in gear until I can actually THINK like that particular character. For me, that's always quite an experience, and it does take a certain amount of suspension of good sense and taste, but it works to make a pretty compelling story.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I RP. I also write. I have a few rules that I try to stick by when I do either, and they seem helpful insofar as creating a believable character - any believable character - goes.

1. Know Thy Subject: if you RP a physicist, or write for one, at least have the courtesy to go and read up on Newtonian mechanics Theory of relativity and atomics.

2. Avoid Superficiality: In all things, onesidedness and shallowness is bad. Even the most appalling things have depth and cause-and-effect chains that create these beliefs and Understanding things in-depth helps you create a believable mind.

3. Thou Shalt Create a Background: Every character is a product of their environment, and not all environments are the same. prejudices, just like any other opinion or mode of thought, are products of their environment. Understand the background, and you understand their current selves.

4. Be Objective: Your characters are your tools, not your neighbours or friends. it's not your job to hate them for their opinions, it's your job to work with the raw material in order to create the foci of stories.

Thanks for all the replies, guys. It's been a great read.

I find myself in a similar situation to the above.

I'm RPing and writing a whole bunch of characters that are completely 180 to me in RL and its quite fun to do so.

One of the characters in particular I'm having particular enjoyment in portraying as a complete *******, which is as far removed from me as can be possible, its not funny.

But how? I do most of what the others have said above... its part intellectual exercise, part being the character, part being in the right mood. I find having a notebook and writing down snippets as they come to me helps.

I should mention that I'm currently juggling something like 5 active characters, all slightly different.

Mmph... RPing someone who is completely opposite to me is a relatively rare thing for me- the two that are most active on the boards here are pretty much just minor variants on my own personality (mind you, one of them is a variant of my own (much) younger personality, but still).

On the other hand, one of my characters who I consider my most memorable (and who I really should find a way to bring into the CoH 'verse), despite the incredibly brief stint of time playing him, had almost nothing in common with me, aside from maybe the tendency towards snark that pretty much all my characters develop at one point or another >.> Sure was fun to play, though- a deranged, womanizing, daredevil Spaniard pirate running a kind of flying Casablanca in a quasi-post-Apocalyptic world. Not exactly 'opposite' to me... more perpendicular off into the middle of nowhere <.<