Roleplaying, Body Language, Expressions, Etc

Yep, last night touched off not one but two posts! And I’m look­ing for feed­back. So even if there isn’t a straight-out ques­tion, I want to hear from you.

I love gam­ing with Sam and F (see the last post). Both of them are great about using their voic­es and body lan­guage to tru­ly ROLE­play. I am, in fact, very spoiled.

This is why I can’t even begin to get inter­est­ed in online gam­ing. There just isn’t enough band­width. And I’m an elit­ist, so hon­est­ly, I don’t want to play with the masses.

I haven’t been gam­ing long. I’m still get­ting com­fort­able with it. I have a lot to learn, and I pre­fer small groups. My inner intro­vert inter­feres with RPing some­times in larg­er groups, so I have trou­ble RPing as ful­ly as I would oth­er­wise. I find that frus­trat­ing, and I enjoy the game less, so for the most part I just don’t want to play with more than about 3 peo­ple at a time (Sam, me, two oth­er players).

If my char­ac­ter is going to try to seduce some­one, my voice is going to get low, smooth, and sen­su­al. I’m going to use innu­en­do. My body lan­guage will indi­cate sex­u­al inter­est and availability.

Are these things that I sit around to con­scious­ly think out? No. But they hap­pen. If I try to think about it too much, I fear it’ll ruin everything.

If my char­ac­ter is pissed off, my voice will be sharp and stri­dent. My lan­guage will be cut­ting, and my body lan­guage will suit the rest.

(Some of this just does­n’t come through well in writ­ing, but I don’t have a micro­phone hooked up so that I can record sound files at the moment.)

If my char­ac­ter is going to try dis­tract­ing some­one, (some­thing that hap­pens fre­quent­ly, since my main char­ac­ter is a bard who does social engi­neer­ing far bet­ter than overt attacks), I’ll DO it, rather than describe it.

Last night, my char­ac­ter felt very uncom­fort­able with some­one who was (appar­ent­ly) try­ing to get her into bed. She did­n’t have much of an excuse for leav­ing, so she faked a sud­den aller­gy attack due to some­thing used to clean an area of the build­ing, pushed past the guy, and ran outside.

I did­n’t say, “I have a sneez­ing fit.” I just did it, try­ing to speak around the sneezes as real­is­ti­cal­ly as possible.

Once, when my char­ac­ter was poi­soned with a very pow­er­ful drug in the midst of a very dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion, she was reduced to look­ing at the pret­ty col­ors and pat­terns. She got total­ly caught up by the feel of dif­fer­ent fab­rics in her and oth­ers’ cloth­ing. I had to have some­thing to think about so that I did­n’t come out of char­ac­ter to say, “Look, would one of you PLEASE give her the neu­tral­ize poi­son potion that’s in her bag before she gets killed?” (They did­n’t know she car­ried it and did­n’t think to look, so the oth­er char­ac­ters were stand­ing around won­der­ing about how to get her to a healer.)

To have some­one sit there and say, in a bored monot­o­ne, “I try to dis­tract him,” is just more than I can stand. HOW will you try to dis­tract him? With what? It’s a damned good thing I’m not in charge of the game.

I’ve seen an arti­cle in Drag­on or some­where like that talk­ing about how to deal with play­ers whose (social, obvi­ous­ly) skills aren’t up to those of their char­ac­ters. How does one deal with some­one who isn’t pre­cise­ly Men­sa mate­r­i­al play­ing a mage with an intel­li­gence of 20? What about the gal whose actu­al charis­ma is, well, NOT, but who wants to play a bard?

I don’t know. I don’t DM and don’t think I’ll be ready to do so for a long time, if ever. 

I don’t real­ly want to play with peo­ple who are play­ing char­ac­ters so, well, out of their range.

It might be unrea­son­able, and I know there are peo­ple who will tell me that I can’t expect gamers to have good social skills and so on. But I know enough of them who are that good that I fig­ure there have to be more. I’ll just con­tin­ue to hold out for high-qual­i­ty gam­ing with them, instead of high-quan­ti­ty gam­ing with just anybody.