roles

[quarrel]

I once chatted with a friend on the MUCKs about characters and roleplaying, as this person was quite skilled at it and I was far from satisfied with my abilities in that field. The advice I got pushed an existing point of view I had to new realms. I was already aware that if you expect particular interactions to take place in the scope of an RPG, you aren’t roleplaying, you’re trying to author a story (and would likely be happier if you simply did that instead). What I hadn’t considered is that this goes all the way back to character creation. Playing and deciding are mutually exclusive, and that includes the time you spend deciding your character’s name, or race, or age, or sex, or anything else about her/it/him. Deciding on a female dwarf or a bear detective cuts off your character’s voice before you can learn what it really is.

This came to mind while pondering another acquaintance’s reasons for why Firefly is a demonstrably bad show that people only like due to a preconceived irrational fondness for its creator. He (the acquaintance, not the creator) had made a perplexing claim: that the show had only one character. Obviously, he didn’t mean that literally. He must’ve meant only one “real” character, for some academic definition of “real”.

But what was that definition? Could it be that only one character ever developed over the course of the show? I turned the series over in my head and postulated it was most likely Jayne. Everyone else acts pretty much the same way through the show’s season, but Jayne undergoes a pivotal test of loyalty and nearly fails.

I was wrong. He’d meant Malcolm Reynolds, the captain, with the rationale being that Mal — allegedly based on statements from the character’s actor — was the only character who could actually affect the plot. The other characters only ever had plot imposed upon them.