demeanor
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Storyboard: To be the jerk
I've talked many times about the pitfalls of playing a jerk. What I haven't done is mention the benefits of playing one, starting with the fact that playing a jerk can be all kinds of fun. You've got your garden-variety jerks, you've got jerks who are stunningly competent and who treat everyone else as a lesser person because of that, you've got jerks who just don't care about other people, you've got jerks clinging to antiquated beliefs that don't line up with reality... so many jerks, so many ways to make mistakes. But also so many ways to play one correctly. Heck, you can play a character who takes pretty awful actions from time to time without issue -- why not a character for whom "awful" is the default setting? There has to be a way to make a jerk who works, right? The answer is yes, most definitely. Jerks are playable. But you have to be a bit more careful about it because as I've mentioned in previous weeks, if your first impression is "pointless jerk," no one will want to hang out with you. So let's talk about playing one in such a way that your character comes across correctly while still being worth a closer look.
Storyboard: Nobody gets your character
Odds are good that you went through a stage as a teenager convinced that no one really got you. Sure, your parents told you that they understood, but they never experienced a love like what you felt or pain like you felt or ennui like you felt, and so on and so forth. You were the first person to ever feel certain things so acutely, and it was a tragedy that others thought they understood. It's also likely that you realized a few years later that none of the above was true, and if you were lucky, your parents were polite enough to point out that you thought you had the purest love of all time simply because you had no basis for comparison. (If you haven't gotten there yet, it's cool; we'll be here when you have.) Those around you understood better than you thought; it was more a matter of your not getting something. There are many roleplayers who seem to believe that their chief problem is that no one understands their characters. All of the drama and poor roleplaying is a result of other people not getting something crucial. I invite readers to draw the obvious comparison.
