On Characters and Such...

 Cyberpunk 2077 has had me thinking some about RPG characters in general. I have a lot of thoughts. I don't know if I can organize them well, but at least I can put them out in some fashion...

Perhaps more than most genres, cyberpunk is about living hard and fast even if it means dying early - being the candle that burns twice as bright yet half as long. That's sort of baked in to the stories, depicting a quiet life under corporate rule as a fate worse than death. To some extent, that philosophy exists in most games. Fantasy adventurers are willing to take on dragons and the like, after all. The motivation for this may be glory, money, or upholding some greater principle.

These stories, though, are stories for a reason. Things get messy if you try to inject too much realism. Money as a motivator is one of the aspects that crumbles the quickest - having enough money for that cutting-edge cyberarm or that magical sword often means having enough money to retire in luxury. And less materialistic motivations would often be labeled "realistically" in the realm of extreme narcisism, socio-/psychopathy, obsessive zealotry, etc. It's even worse if you look at the common body counts in these games/stories.

Man, major characters in our fantasy/sci-fi games/stories tend to be fucked up by current societal standards. "Wandering murder hobos" indeed.

This has been a hurdle for me in online roleplay that has been less structured, because the fantastic and realistic intersect... oddly. A weekly D&D game running through a campaign is one thing - that's easy to lean into the adventure side and not worry about the rest. When a character is expected to go from defeating a bunch of bandits one day and casual free-form interaction for the next several, that feels awkward to me. Turning the larger-than-life adventurer setting on and off is a pretty big tonal shift even at that low level. Getting into saving the city/world is even crazier.

For all those thoughts, though, I can't say I have a clear conclusion of any sort, so it's sort of just rambling...

Comments

  1. KynElwynnJanuary 8, 2021 at 10:26 AM

    It's hard to play the people you see between the adventures that take place in each episode.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. RedwolfJanuary 8, 2021 at 10:40 AM

      And to some extent, I could say "Why would I want to?"
      I mean, yeah, it can be fun sometimes and the depth added to characters in downtime can be very worthwhile, but at the same time, such entertainment tends to be escapism for me. I don't want to regularly roleplay the mundanities of normal life when I get plenty of that on a day to day basis. :)

      Delete

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