rp-101
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Storyboard: RP 101 - The mechanics of interaction
There are a lot of times in life when you're expected to figure out the mechanics of something by jumping in facefirst. Your first time roleplaying is among them. You know about all of the groundwork you need to do before you start roleplaying, and you know about what happens when you are roleplaying, but the first time you roleplay is going to be filled with a lot of awkward half-starts and confusion over what you're supposed to do at any given moment. So it's a lot like the first time you learned how to ride a bicycle. Yes, I was building up to the bicycle analogy; what did you think I was going for? Part of this is because most people have The Friend Who Roleplays, who introduces you by example; you don't need to find out how it's done because someone who already knows is showing you. But maybe you don't have a roleplaying buddy or anything beyond a desire to see what all the fuss is about. Rather than discussing anything more abstract, I'm going to talk about the bare mechanics of roleplaying -- stuff to do when you start, stuff to keep in mind, and the pure mechanical aspects of conveying a character through text and a few model animations. This is both easier and harder than it sounds.
Storyboard: RP 101 - What is roleplaying?
Two weeks back, I received a comment asking, in all seriousness, what was the deal with roleplaying. The author of said comment opined that as near as he or she could tell, it was mostly just talking like your character and developing a bunch of strange romances. If that comment had only listed vampires in there, really, I could have stopped writing this column altogether. All right, there's more to it than that. While I've spent the past 120 installments of the column dealing with creating characters, playing respectfully, and producing stories, I've never actually put down a definition of what roleplaying is. I've never liked opening off by defining roleplaying because it's an awkward beast, and the explanation is always shoehorned elsewhere. So today I'm going to kick off at least one and possibly more columns answering the very basics, starting with the obvious -- what the heck is roleplaying?
