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Roleplaying insecurities


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You know, it's not something we talk about often but, it is a thing. We all kind of have our own comfort zone, no? I mean, just let it out. If people kind of comment on this a bit more I'll list some more.


- Playing young characters

- Playing Unathi/Tajara

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- Intimacy. Thiiiiis is not something I enjoy doing, really, unless there was sufficient lead-up to that occurring. No way in hell am I ever going to ERP on that note, though, especially if that other person isn't for certain over 18. It's out of my comfort zone to do that.


- There are fewer things that tick me off as much as people who intentionally make everyone's life, ICly, as miserable as possible even though they know better.

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-Playing weak-willed characters. Considering how much of a little pansy I am in real life, why would I want to play myself in this? I enjoy playing characters with strong opinions, and the will to fight for them. Not someone who backs down at the slightest provocation.

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I don't like getting injured. Most of the time, if I get injured gravely, I'll try to succumb (or ask admins to kill me) just so I don't have to roleplay with the doctors over at medbay. (Sorry, guys! You're still cool!)


I find the whole healing process really ridiculous (if a bit necessary, given the game). I don't mind roleplaying /being/ injured, but walking into medbay, being instantly healed back to "everything is fine", thanking the doctors and awkwardly walking out as if nothing had happened makes me feel ridiculous.


I also don't like being cloned. Like, meh. Deaths should matter, and if I get killed during a round, whatever happened should carry enough impact that you shouldn't just see a character that died walking around again.

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Tell you what, Frances.


today during a nuke round, I died because a doctor did an oops and forgot to shove me in cryo before operating on me in surgery.


So I died. I got cloned by a tard screamer geneticist who didn't know how to clone people (and was also hulked), with a lot of my shit going missing. Exceptions being my shotgun and my carbine.


I was then shoved in cryo and given back my things, but I was blind. Needed rytalyn. Before I could get that, as I was blind, a nuke op pointed an SMG at me. I didn't move. At all. Sec cadets decide to shoot the nuke ops, and then I get my leg shot off.


I'm in fucking paincrit for literally 20-30 minutes before robotics decides to get me a fucking leg. I was pretty much leaning on succumbing so I could get cloned again and completely bypass being stuck in medbay for half an hour in crit. You really can't roleplay being unconscious the entire time.


I dunno, I really think I should have DNCs for my characters. Death for that character is honestly more fun and less pain.

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- Playing a character like myself. I will never ever ever ever ever make a self-insert. You could put a gun to my head, tell me to do it, and I would refuse. Because I'm too fucking boring for me to even think it was enjoyable. It would be something akin to torture. If self-insert works for you, fine. But I can't.


- I have a hard time with romance (No... get your head out of the gutter). I don't understand it. I can't roleplay well something that I don't understand. That may sound pathetic to you, but it's terribly true. (I'm so sorry Enkas D:)

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Tell you what, Frances.


today during a nuke round, I died because a doctor did an oops and forgot to shove me in cryo before operating on me in surgery.


So I died. I got cloned by a tard screamer geneticist who didn't know how to clone people (and was also hulked), with a lot of my shit going missing. Exceptions being my shotgun and my carbine.


I was then shoved in cryo and given back my things, but I was blind. Needed rytalyn. Before I could get that, as I was blind, a nuke op pointed an SMG at me. I didn't move. At all. Sec cadets decide to shoot the nuke ops, and then I get my leg shot off.


I'm in fucking paincrit for literally 20-30 minutes before robotics decides to get me a fucking leg. I was pretty much leaning on succumbing so I could get cloned again and completely bypass being stuck in medbay for half an hour in crit. You really can't roleplay being unconscious the entire time.


I dunno, I really think I should have DNCs for my characters. Death for that character is honestly more fun and less pain.

This is actually the kind of situation I would be willing to go through medical for. That sounds way more fun than getting 50 burn damage, having to pretend you remotely care about your 50 burn damage as a doctor instantly fixes you up, and being sent on your way.


Once, Lysanuh (one of Nightmare's characters) got killed by space carps. Doctors cloned him. Except, one particularity of Lysanuh is that he has a prosthetic arm. At some point during the cloning process, one of the doctors realizes that they should probably replace clone Lysanuh's healthy arm by his prosthetic, so that he does not realize he is a clone. Sadly, that doctor is not the doctor who is in the process of cloning Lysanuh. As a result, while Lysanuh wakes up from being cloned, he gets to see a random doctor dragging his own body to surgery to cut off his mechanical arm. He RP-faints.


However, the story does not end there. Shortly after that, yet another doctor intelligently decides that although Lysanuh has already seen his own corpse, he would probably be glad to wake up with his prosthetic arm instead of a brand new healthy arm (who knows, he might just assume the whole thing was a dream at that point). Said doctor drags clone Lysanuh into surgery, and proceeds to cut Lysanuh's arm off. The doctor forgets to pust clone Lysanuh under anesthetic. Clone Lysanuh actually faints for real this time.




Anyway. I find these debacles hilarious. The only way I would even resolve to getting myself cloned is if I was given a chance to see my own body, so I'd have the perfect excuse to go insane, throw a fit, and troll the fuck out of all the medbay doctors for the rest of the round. I love when people do that.


(I really don't hate medbay I promise)

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Don't get me wrong, I appreciate medbay for what it is.


Though, sometimes, I would rather pick a shitcurity officer over a bad doctor. It's crazy how badly the medbay mains are taken for granted.

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Don't get me wrong, I appreciate medbay for what it is.


Though, sometimes, I would rather pick a shitcurity officer over a bad doctor. It's crazy how badly the medbay mains are taken for granted.

Bad doctors are terrible. A bad doctor can lock you down in surgery for 30 minutes, or completely forget about you, OD you on chems you don't even need or all sorts of terrible things.


In order to bring this back on topic, I really struggle with RPing characters whose overall "moods" do not match my own. Has anyone else experienced this? Like I have a lot of really happy, or friendly, or casual characters, but sometimes I'm gonna feel especially gloomy and realize I don't have an overly depressing character to play.

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Guest Menown

-Roleplaying "males."

I have male characters, but they're undeniably girly. The only time I've stepped out of this was for Declan. He was 85 years old, and something of a "Bill Nye" type guy.

-Roleplaying Non-White characters.

No idea why. Likely due to me not knowing much about other races mannerisms/ability to RP them.

-Older characters

I have trouble with older characters, barring Declan. Part of me tries to be serious, but I end up being dumb and stuff, nullifying the seriousness that comes with older characters.

-Direct conversation/interactions.

Something I have the most trouble with. I'm reclusive, and anti-social in real life, and that bleeds over to my characters. They have trouble with interaction, because I do. Something I've tried to work on.

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Gonna pitch in some extra stuff, I guess

- Playing Girls

I don't like it, I'm never comfortable when I do it and I feel dirty.

- Playing Red heads

This really started from the kind of snowflakes that have neon eyefuck hair and say it's natural, I don't like playing gingers anymore.

- Playing characters with accents

Generally the stereotypical or ridonkulous ones like, Russian, German and Jamaican.

- Roleplaying with Tajara/Soghun

It might sound stupid but, it's just them being furry races. I don't know, it makes me feel rather uncomfortable. Hey, I don't have any hate for furries themselves but I choose not to involve myself in that kind of community and I like to keep myself not associated with it.

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- I have hard time socializing. I can do it and enjoy it once in a blue moon, but I generally don't enjoy and don't know how to socialize. This goes for my characters and me.

- RP physicial pain, none of my characters feel pain

- Scripted RP. It just doesn't work and it's awkward.

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  • I cannot emote for the life of me

    I'd like to think that I'm rather good at carrying a point across with simply using words, sentence structure and punctuation. When it comes to emotes, however, I am terribly stoic and do not use them at all. Or even if I do, I keep it on the minimalist side. I've actually made roughly two characters in an attempt to try and have more animated characters to play, but they've both slinked back to my normal MO.

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I have a couple.


Playing males

- Mainly because Girl. But I think that I wouldn't y'know...make a convincing male character. I have16x characterd and none of them are guys


Romance

- Not that any of my characters have been given the opportunity, but I I'm OOCly uncomfortable discussing romantic situations with people I'm not close with, and so that makes IC character relationships uncomfortable for me.


Playing a straight character.

- I have exactly one straight character due to both my previously mentioned hesitance with sexuality in general, feeling like it wouldn't be convincing for me to play one and just feeling weird about it


Actually talking

- I tend to overuse emotes to an almost excessive point (most people can probably tell my characters because of this). Just because I don't talk irl, so I tend to lean towards body language more and I reflect that with my characters

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I would kill to be able to emote in a way where I'm satisfied with the body language I'm attempting to display. pls someone teach me how to emote without it being a failure of a descriptive sentence structure.


Also. Uncomfortable with homosexual relationships in general for IC. I have never offended anyone for that in either IC or OOC during my time here, but the way I was brought up nearly pointed me in the worst direction.

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-Talking

In general, fun fact. Besides the few times where Carton freaks out on the crew or targets someone to harass, I worry that I'm boring to talk too IC. So much so that I try to avoid conversations that involve my characters now out of the fear that someone will go "....Wow...uh...damn....Im just gonna go before you put me to sleep"


-Females


I don't understand then, hell I can't talk to them without stuttering a little, so I know I can't play them.

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I seem to find it very hard to play 'normal' characters; those that haven't gone through some kind of major hardship. Am I destined to play tragic snowflakes and be hated for it...?


I also shy away from playing synthetics. For one, I have no idea of the mechanics and I'm too scared to try in case I fuck up (crap excuse, I know). I know everyone has big expectations of the AI, for example. But also, I'd be way too worried about not sounding smart/robotic enough and that would make my attempts suffer. I'm a bit weird about that sort of thing...

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I lol'd at the medbay horror stories. Those are pretty classic and they haven't gotten old for me yet.


-Fucking things up

I want to mess something up but I feel I'll be judged for it. And people will talk about how awful I am but I just want to do some things wrong for fun.


-Scripted RP

Like someone said earlier, its way too fake. It's all forced. I don't like it, no way, no how. And for the most part, awkward for me because I feel like everyone else is just forcing their characters too.


-Talking on general comns

I feel like that's kinda like the hangout spot for the cool kids. I have to force myself to say anything there unless it's a "heat of the moment" kind of thing.


And may be surprising to everyone else considering Tina "encounters" but


-Romance

Like everyone else in this thread, romance in space station is weird. Im able to do it when things transition naturally and I can comfortably say, "Yep, Tina, you get it" but otherwise it seems just like scripted RP to me. Weird. And believe me I've tried to force romance on Tina but I just could not.

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I'm really bad at socializing IRL, and so it leaks into my roleplaying. Ergo, my characters are either oddballs or social outcasts. I have a hard time maintaining a meaningful conversation and so I usually end up in my character's department, idly messing around with mechanics and waiting for people to need me. Which is sorta what I do in real life anyway. Hue.


I'm also partial to playing female characters. My favorites are Janet, Alura, April and Versha. However, because of my aforementioned social awkwardness, I worry that maybe I'm not portraying a woman correctly, and that it might be just coming off as clearly a man in a woman's body.


Also, I have a problem playing old characters. And also security characters. Cristof is supposed to be old and worn down, but whenever I play him, he ends up smacking people with batons and picking fights. People don't like to listen to their superiors, and have these annoying little things called consciences, and so I feel like I have to put everyone back in line. And that's usually around the time I get arrested/beaten to death for overstepping my power.

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-Direct conversation/interactions.

Something I have the most trouble with. I'm reclusive, and anti-social in real life, and that bleeds over to my characters. They have trouble with interaction, because I do. Something I've tried to work on.

 

This and what a few others said.


I find it difficult to strike up conversation with characters. The bar is usually one place I never go, due to it being a hub of social linking. I tend to just switch off when there are too many people talking at once, and so I will creepily observe people from either my respective department, or from ghostmode until I determine whether or not I'd have any common ground with them. This is also partially what I love about Science as well; the fact that nobody cares about you, which can be both good and bad for obvious reasons. I've only ever had a few people approach me and strike up meaningful conversation, and I still talk to them to this day.


- Young Characters

Playing young characters makes me uncomfortable, partly because I just don't think it'd be realistic for anyone below forty to be on a Space Station, and partly because I just find them awkward to play. I feel like their young age doesn't allow for enough substance.


- Romance/ERP

This is something what people have tried with my characters in the past, and I personally found it really uncomfortable; so much so to the point that I made one of my characters an asexual, 41 year old virgin. I'd be willing to try a relationship IC'ly with a good character, but the commitment would likely irritate me. Sometimes, I get tired of talking and SS13 lets me not have to really deal with that, so if someone was constantly messaging me I'd probably get annoyed. Or perhaps this is just my subconscious trying to mask its fears, who knows.


- Snowflakes/Tragic backstories

Something I personally find quite ridiculous. Most of my characters have living parents, fully intact limbs, and generally quite 'normal' lifestyles. I did have one character that had a bit of a far-fetched backstory, but that was retconned and replaced with something more believable. One thing I love about normal characters, is that they allow support for the better snowflakes to get their stories out there, which is always nice, assuming they aren't terrible. Besides, most snowflakes tend to be very melodramatic with a generally insatiable lust for attention, and as a result, are usually quite good at drawing eyes away from me. That being said, I try my hardest to avoid them.

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Tips for a few of the issues I saw people bring up here:


-Roleplaying someone of the opposite gender is surprisingly easy. A few people complain that males roleplaying females tend to fall within the trap of playing "dudes with boobs", but tbh, it isn't something I really noticed here, mainly because, no matter who you are, you're first and foremost a professional working on a space station. And there isn't going to be much of a difference between a male and a female there - no need to get overly excited about going shopping with your besties after the shift, or pretending to have a period.


People are just... people. When you roleplay a character of your own gender, you probably don't think about stereotypes. In fact, you probably don't think about how they're your own gender at all - your character simply exists, as a human (or alien) being with their own unique personality, likes, dislikes, qualities and flaws. The opposite gender starts out being the exact same. And if, branching from that, there's a persona you want to copy (the cool action dude, or the cutesy always happy chick), then go for it. But if what you're afraid is of doing a bad job, you'd be surprised - it's really hard to fuck up at pretending to be another gender. You're probably already doing a way worse job at pretending to be a space surgeon or scientist, yet nobody bats an eyelid there.



-Also, I think someone said they were afraid of playing as a synthetic because they're not sure how to sound clinical/robotic enough, you could start out as a robot with a personality. These tend to be the cooler, coolest robots around, because tbh, actually leaving an impression as an emotionless borg is pretty hard - unless you're one of the best, few people will pay attention, or remember you.


 

This is something what people have tried with my characters in the past, and I personally found it really uncomfortable; so much so to the point that I made one of my characters an asexual, 41 year old virgin. I'd be willing to try a relationship IC'ly with a good character, but the commitment would likely irritate me. Sometimes, I get tired of talking and SS13 lets me not have to really deal with that, so if someone was constantly messaging me I'd probably get annoyed.

If you like the IC romance, it can be as fun as an actual one. If you hate it or aren't invested in it, though, commitment can become an issue pretty quick. Play it off as your character not being committed!

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Neon coloured hair (anything besides bright red):

Had a character with neon coloured hair, eh. Didn't pan out for me in the end.


Younger characters under the age of 25:

I used to be able to play them, but with a bunch of retcon I had to do, I can't see myself playing a young character again. Especially a young male for some reason.


Anything past romance/interspecies romance:

I can roleplay light romance. I have no problems doing so. Just being ovetly "cuddly", sexual, whatever, I just can't do it (like make out in a closet in GREAT DETAIL, but I can handle pecks and gestures of affection). I also don't really can't into interspecies romance.

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Starting conversations Playing a social person is pretty hard for me, as I my self am rather introverted. I try, but eventually I end up awkward and boring, without finding too much to say.


Intimacy While I don't mind roleplaying a romance, I find anything beyond hugs and mild cuddling, pretty damn awkward.


Playing asshole/evil characters Through all my RP career, I have tried to have an evil, or a dickish character, but eventually, I broke their nature, by just not taking it anymore, and pushed them a bit towards the good side... Yes, I have morally questionable characters, and I have characters that may have short tempers, but they all eventually end up caring about those around them, and well, actually begin to help people. I just can't help it. The only exception is with the short-lived antag characters, where I don't manage to put much depth into their personality, and who eventually get outrobusted anyways

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