#being ic

[roleplayerscoffeeshop]

I feel like sometimes that my muse is too emotional and breaks down into fits of depression and tears more than they should. I feel like it makes me seem like a drama queen, but it’s so organic for my muse. They’re an emotional person and it fits, but I still worry.

[roleplayerscoffeeshop]

If you’re going to put music on your roleplay blog, at least make it music that either relates to your character or fandom, or that your character would listen to.

[friendly-rp-advice-blog]

How do I make my character funny and witty when I'm not?

It's often hard to try to write for a character we don't feel we naturally have similar personalities with. What I'd recommend, is looking at witty or funny characters on tv shows or movies that you feel encompass the kind of wit and humor your character has and use them as inspiration.

[friendly-rp-advice-blog]

Everyone always says "make sure you do your research!" but no one ever says how. Where are good places to go? How in depth should you research it? What if the info confuses you? And how do you make it not like a chore? I want to rp for fun not feel like I'm gathering sources for an essay.

The glorious thing about roleplaying or any kind of fiction writing is that you have complete creative freedom to be as realistic as you feel like. How much research you do is up to you. You can be general in your explanations and still get across that your character knows what they are doing. For example, if your character were, say, a chemist:

He gathered his chemicals together, cautious as the beaker sat atop the Bunsen burner. Cautiously, he mixed together the liquids, the solution changing from clear to blue and bubbling while it heated up. Holding the dropper over the mixture he turned to his partner, "You may want to step back, as soon as this comes in contact, the reaction could be...volatile."

Writing like this can still give the impression that the character knows what they're doing without you actually having to be an expert in the field yourself. (I am absolutely no good at chemistry at all)

Your major help here to make it believable is vocabulary and terminology; beaker, Bunsen burner, volatile, etc. So looking up common terminology of your character's field is something you'll want to look up.

Google searches are really all you need.

If you want to go a little further, try finding some wikipedia articles. This is roleplay after all, not a school paper. So wiki is a perfectly acceptable source to find information, so long as you do keep in mind the potential for misinformation.

If you want your character to be hyper realistic, deeper research obviously would be necessary. Surfing the web, finding books at the library, any general resource is available to you.

But if you're feeling like looking up information is too much of a chore, then you can always just wing it based on your general knowledge of the character.

[friendly-rp-advice-blog]

How do you make a character scary? I've tried writing scary characters in the past and usually what happens is my partner's characters once they get over the initial shock don't find them that scary at all.

I've written from the other side of this scenario before, where my character ends up not afraid of what should be a scary character after getting over the first meeting.

Generally what happens is that the other character realizes that the scary character isn't really going to hurt them, and pose no kind of threat.

I have also interacted with characters that do keep up that sense of fear in my own character.

I think the determining thing is how your character treats others. If they repeatedly remind the other characters that they are a subject to be feared. If that is my threatening them verbally or physically, or by messing with them mentally.

However, be sure to mention such actions OOC to your partner so that you don't accidentally trigger anyone. It's always best to make sure you have the other person's approval first.

[friendly-rp-advice-blog]

How do you write an immoral character? When you don't agree with them but don't want it to come off as satirical?

Character portrayal is very heavily based on your character's reactions. In order to really show how your character is thinking and how they feel about their actions will help you to show where they stand on a moral scale.

Do they show any remorse? Are they shameless or even proud of their immoral actions? Or do they feel their actions are no more immoral than any regular daily task?

[friendly-rp-advice-blog]

I'm interested in LARPing (I don't know if you're familiar with it but it's basically live action role playing). I tried this improv thing, which is similar, but I failed at it because I can't think of responses quickly.. T-T When I RP on Tumblr, it takes me forever to reply to everyone! It's annoying that I think in character too slowly. How can I think in character faster so I can do LARP and chat RP?

Something you might try is considering how your character would react in certain situations. Try a character study of their different emotions. The "9 basic human emotions" are:

love

joy

surprise

fear

sadness

anger

disgust

shame

pride

Perhaps thinking about how your character would show these kind of emotional responses might help you to dive into the character.

Understanding your character more in depth might be able to help you think a little quicker on your feet. And with anything you're hoping to gain speed at, practice can help, so don't get frustrated if it doesn't come to you right away.

[friendly-rp-advice-blog]

Any tips on how to play an immortal character that doesn't age and has to keep it a secret for as long as they can? I figure they would have to live like an undocumented immigrant, except they'd probably have to move around more. But how would they get ahold of a new fake ID every few years, and what other challenges would they have to face?

Well, I can't tell you how to write your character, and this would be a pretty big chunk of their personal bio/backstory.

It depends on how you want to write it. Are you writing at various periods of time in the character's timeline with different people you interact with, such that it's a multi-verse character? If this is the case, then you can have them all taking place in the different places that your character can live. This is somewhat beneficial from a writing point of view because you literally have anywhere in the world to choose from to put your character.

I'd say you are definitely right that they would want to move around after a while of staying on one place to long to keep people from noticing that they don't age. But generally, roleplaying is done mostly in a one-on-one writing style, where two characters are present at the time of the action, as opposed to solo writing (with the exception of mini fics and drabbles to elaborate on the character at your own leisure). So because s/he'd be wanting to keep the fact that they need to get new IDs a secret, they would likely be alone when they went to get their new ID's made. Thus, I wouldn't really think it's too important to focus on that aspect in the actual writing of the roleplay itself.

They could live like an undocumented immigrant as another option too, in which case, you may wont to consider different ways they might be living since they don't necessarily have real documentation to say who they are. Are they able to live in a house? Would it be a shady kind of place they are just renting out from someone on a cash-only kind of basis? Maybe they live out of their car they procured from a sell-by-owner?

There are a lot of other kind of challenges they have to face as well which may tie into how you want to portray their personality. Are they reclusive and do not like to form relations with people around them? Are they friendly and crave the friendship of others but leave after some time has passed with no goodbye? But that is on you to come up with for your character.

One of the great things about roleplaying is that we do get to have creative freedom of our own characters and we can be as vague or ambiguous with the characters as we like, or like wise as specific and detail oriented as we like. It's good to think about how to really make your character believable and realistic, but you can just as well gloss over some things too.