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+--- Thread: Thoughts On Sad RP (/showthread.php?tid=13225)
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Corelyn - 08-31-2015
(08-31-2015, 02:18 PM)Laike Wrote:(08-31-2015, 02:00 PM)Unnamed Mercenary Wrote: Personally, I think there's a time and place for Sad RP. It certainly can't be all the time, as that would diminish the feelings associated with it.I think this is a really interesting point. There is a fine line between having a sad story, and a character who is just constantly 'woe is me'. Laike is in a bad circumstance, but the struggle I tried to make with him is whether or not his innocence and sunshine will degrade in the face of trouble. So while the story around him might be extremely sad, it doesn't mean that every scene with him is him being sad.
Now, there's got to be a balance to it, as with scenes are good/bad/whatever, just like life. My views on RP in general is that they should be as varied as life. But here's the catch, not everyone is looking for that or feels the same way. I have seen people who have consistently wanted to be surrounded by happy-only things. The same way I've seen people who have gotten into these enormous spirals of "but then it gets worse!" moments that seem to never end. Happy things are happy because we have unhappy events to balance them. Sad things are sad because the situation had been something else beforehand.
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Now, the questions.
So what do you believe the proper way to approach a sad story is?
It depends on the people you're RPing with. If it's a group of people you trust, or perhaps a group of people you've planned a story with, they may be more open to having an ending that isn't just simply "a happy ending". Perhaps it's bittersweet, sad, or downright awful.
Is it polite to warn someone it might not be happy in the end?
I personally like to warn people if I think they might be affected by a bad ending. While having happy endings 100% would get boring for me, if all my interactions with a given person were just about them trying to make my character feel better or my character trying to make their character feel better, I think it would make the RP go a little stale. Take it too far and someone could get frustrated that all of their effort to change/affect a situation isn't getting anywhere.
Is it best just to tell the story and what happens happens?
As cool as it is to have completely pure "organic" (as some call it) RP with no ending planned, a little OOC communication can go a long way. Now this doesn't mean I'm gonna go out and spoil all my sad/bad plot ideas with the people I'm going to RP with, but it does mean that I'll let them know if there's something they simply cannot change about my character, rather than watching them potentially struggle and try without saying anything.
If it's not going to happen, and it looks like a pattern where the person keeps trying, letting them in on it can be helpful. Maybe they'll look at the reasons the character is sad to work on those, instead of endless "cheering up" RP. Or perhaps it'll drive character development with a newfound conflict.
I think that if you have a character that is only ever sad, and there is no evolution or change.. it might not be the best rp for those around them. I guess it's a balance in that respect.
Alllll of this! Joking aside, I embrace and thoroughly love all aspects of RP, and love light-hearted, funny stuff especially (I have a CSI: Miami macro for Dail'a where he puts his sunglasses on while he makes a pun and use it frequently).
However, life, especially in war-torn, dangerous worlds, are not always happy-go-lucky and drama-free. So a modicum of balance is always the best thing to have.
Corelyn in WoW is full-on broken bird most of the time because of an overabundance of tragedy she just could not escape (of course, I don't mind - I take whatever story comes and roll with it as it happens. More fun that way), so Corelyn in FF has been a breath of fresh air most days.
But yes, I do still love sad RP. When I want to give a character a real reason to push themselves harder than they ever would have before, I present them with The Bad Thing™: That one of few things that would get under even the most stoic or easy-going character's skin and really drive the point home.
Another reason for it could simply be to advance a story. Not all stories are good and happy. Some just do not go in the direct one would expect, either. Sometimes, this includes the world just crumbling.
That all said, though... I am an evil little jerkbag and love to watch my characters suffer just as much as I love to see them happy.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - FreelanceWizard - 08-31-2015
I've a long history of beating up my characters. I played a character in CoH who I sorely tested; she was committed thoroughly to a positive world view, and that naivete constantly got her punished.
I like to think of a character's story like a great cocktail. It has a basic theme, but it's balanced. You can have a lot of sweetness, but you also need some bitterness and saltiness to keep it from rotting your teeth out. So, even in games where I take a generally positive, hopeful view in the story -- such as XIV -- I add dashes of sadness. It keeps things interesting and realistic, and as even the game says, there is no light with darkness. Contrast is necessary.
That aside, though, in organic RP, I don't worry too much about whether the story is too light or too dark. I do what makes sense ICly and let the chips fall where they may. Since my character is generally a positive person, that tends to make stories turn out positively, but even L'yhta has dark moments. Her lack of self-confidence comes out now and then, she sometimes drinks herself into a stupor over sadness at friends lost, and her temper has been known to cause significant problems.
So, on the balance, I try to strike a balance.
Going too far in any direction spoils the story for me, in much the same way I wouldn't want to drink a whole glass of Angostura bitters.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Laike - 08-31-2015
(08-31-2015, 02:25 PM)Corelyn Wrote: That all said, though... I am an evil little jerkbag and love to watch my characters suffer just as much as I love to see them happy.
To be fair. It really is their fault for being born from our twisted minds.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Aaron - 08-31-2015
I'm emo.
My entire life's a tragedy. Just typing this I hear linkin park slowly whispering in my ear.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Masaki Moui - 08-31-2015
In my opinion tragedy requires a catharsis to be satisfying, and to pull off a tragedy well all the players generally have to feel as if 'it was worth it.' A story doesn't have to have a happy ending - it has to have a satisfying ending. A recent, post-modern attempt at classic tragedy as a modern film was obviously Gladiator. There was nothing happy about that movie and yet I'd argue that the ending was incredibly satisfying and that the film crew did a great job in trying to capture that aspect of catharsis that is so important in a good tragedy. If you don't have a catharsis, if you don't feel it was worth it, then you'll end up feeling betrayed and annoyed with stories that lead you to your doom. And that's a huge weight to carry around as a GM, as a pocket-GM for your own characters, etc. Just as an acting troupe gets a taste of the script before they agree to play it, whenever I start up a tragedy, I like to give the players an understanding of the way things will go. This is what I see as the first step necessary to building the kind of savage trust level needed to go through a brutal storyline. Can the players trust you to make it worth it for them? Whew, what a question!
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Addison - 08-31-2015
(08-31-2015, 02:01 PM)Verad Wrote: Best used sparingly.
Pretty much sums up my feelings on it. One of my biggest guilty pleasure TV shows is Grey's Anatomy, and every season something absolutely dreadful happens to the main characters.
Soooo it's kind of hard to feel sympathy for someone who constantly has tragic stuff happen to them. So sparingly is probably my ideal way to go.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Harrow - 08-31-2015
As in all things there is a balance to it. For a lot of RP'ers Drama is the life blood and usually fuels the conflicts of their stories and this can lead to some amazing moments where a character becomes more then the player ever thought they'd be or they grow closer to the people they've been telling these stories with. In my experience a lot of these stories end on happier notes even if the story arcs themselves were very dark and sad.
I've had the great pleasure of being part of a few long arcs where the protagonists were dogged at every turn and the few victories to be had were narrow. For me these had a great deal of excitement and engagement during the events, and then between the events we had a lot of humorous moments and time to digest what all was happening in the events. And then the conclusions were sometimes happy, sometimes sad.
At the beginning of an arc I was part of not to long ago my character, the 'father' figure of the group, died at the outset and it lent an amazing sense of weight to the proceeding RP. The arc centered around a terrorist whom after a few more horrific events the group had found and killed, leaving a very powerful sort of bittersweet ending.
Of course to have those big impactful events there has to be a balance, because if all we had were those twists and turns it would become the norm, and to make it impactful again we would have to do something even more extreme.
Though the above is admittedly in a preformed group of people, we all knew the general direction things would go. The OOC communication to pull off this sort of thing is very important, because while you don't have to give a play by play version of the arc people knowing that it's going towards the dramatic I have always found to be polite and help things go more smoothly.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Klynzahr - 08-31-2015
Like several others have already said, I find RP gets very stale if the good guys always win. Without a certain amount of honest failure, conflict, and the occasional tragedy all those happy RP moments would quickly grow stale.
However the danger of overindulging in these tragic scenarios arises when characters begin using them as a means to garner attention. Good tragedy, like good comedy, can only be played properly with a good balance of sad and happy moments. In a story line that is specifically intended to have a dark end, the lighthearted moments are actually more important than they would be in a comic tale.
I like to use two examples from my days in Wow....
- The first concerned a very well portrayed schizophrenic character and his drug-addict friend. Both were talented RPers, who stuck to their characters flaws religiously. However they quickly became estranged from other RPers, because they both lacked balance.
The addict was starving herself for drugs, constantly injured, and never seemed to have a shred of luck. She refused every IC effort to help her, with insults or indifference, that drove the most persistent characters away. The schizophrenic was worse, because every time a character tried to aid him, his player would twist their efforts to send him down an even darker path.
Then they both complained OOC that no one ever RPed with them and they felt excluded from the larger community. Â
- The second concerned a favorite character of mine, who began life as a happy-go-lucky young paladin in training. She had a difficult backstory and her life's ambition was to become a light-wielding hero like her mother. After a few months of RP, she faced her first big baddie and had those dreams entirely crushed.
  Simply put she broke her skull and suffered a traumatic brain injury. She lost the ability to speak coherently and her left side was almost completely paralyzed. Perhaps the saddest thing of all was that she retained all of her memories and ruined dreams.
  Now many healers tried to 'fix' her over the course of the next few years and each of them ultimately failed. However this constant failure was balanced by many amusing moments and small victories. I allowed her to form true relationships, rather than relying on other characters to constantly save her or feel sorry for her. She had friends, enemies, challenges and small victories. She fell in love, with a character from another race who had a drastically different life span and eventually broke both of their hearts by turning him down.
   Her story was never one that could end happily, but she was a full character with her own strengths. This allowed for a large variety of RP that did not revolve around her tragic circumstances, and made them that much more potent.
I think that the key to playing a tragic character well lies in never allowing them to know that they are tragic. Instead of wearing out your fellow RPers with a constant stream of bad luck, failures, and self-pity, try building up some success and connections before allowing tragedy to strike them down. It will be more rewarding in the long run.
Finally there are a few instances, where you should definitely warn your fellow RPers. One is the case where a well meaning character is devoting themselves to "fixing the unfixable" or preventing the unavoidable. Many players will enjoy the chance to have their own character fail along with yours, but others will just be frustrated and angry.
The other important thing to remember is that stories involving things like suicide, rape, or mental illness can be very painful for some players to see or participate in. You should always be up front when setting out to tell these stories, to avoid unintentionally hurting other players.
So bring on the tragedy, keep it balanced, and don't forget to communicate.
/end rambles
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Laike - 08-31-2015
(08-31-2015, 03:36 PM)Klinzahr Wrote: However the danger of overindulging in these tragic scenarios arises when characters begin using them as a means to garner attention. Good tragedy, like good comedy, can only be played properly with a good balance of sad and happy moments. In a story line that is specifically intended to have a dark end, the lighthearted moments are actually more important than they would be in a comic tale.This really is an important point. So many times I've seen people lose the spotlight and suddenly 'OMG look at this tragedy that happened to me, pay attention!'
Tragedy is not a device to get people to pay attention to you.
The world is a difficult place and everyone has personal tragedies. In fact, one of my favorite 'tropes' in a lot of my characters is them coming to the realization that their suffering is not special... isn't different. It's common. It's the shared experience of many.
Another thing that was mentioned is the 'unfixable' That always bothered me. I don't want to throw out insults or make people believe they are 'doing it wrong' because I don't see things that way. But... when your character complains about being poor, having no food and you refuse someone willing to feed you? It makes no sense. I get you built your character to tell a story, but a large part of RP is being in a world you can't control. If my character is starving and is offered food he'd damned well take it. If my character is in trouble with a gang and is offered the coin out of it... he'll take it. He'd be weary, but he'd take it.
I think instead of holding on to pre-defined notions of how a character would go, people should think about how the opportunities presented to them from others can shape the story and bring it in a new direction. Perhaps by taking coin to pay off debts, the character instead decides to use it to gamble, feeding their addiction and getting them in further trouble. This gives the player who tries to help an 'in' into their rp, but also allows the first character to continue the path they wanted to take. Things like that.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Elaris - 08-31-2015
I personally love it, if you can tell a great story that adds many elements I would love to go down for the ride personally. It is why I keep to the many alts route, I can safely pick and choose how their stories progress with others because I'm guilty of the, " I want none of my characters to have a happy ending, but rather a satisfying one. " Which means anything is possible for them, including death. Be wary of the people you RP with regularly too, many choose to only stick to lighthearted stuff and that is fine.
Of course I agree with many people here when they mention that it should be used sparingly, if bad things happen too often it kinda takes away from the character. Turns the character into a joke really, I have seen it happen before actually. Some OOC plotting and details is okay to leak also, especially when it comes to the death of a character towards the end. I had a friend kill off his character, he did not tell anyone that he was going to do this. His IC wife and a few friends were not pleased with the outcome, in fact it really pissed the few in his circle off so some communication can really go a long way. Anyways, Keep the balance and watch your character involve or fall apart.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Lydia Lightfoot - 08-31-2015
It's a balancing act with me. I love, love, love tragic and difficult backstories, because they tend to create characters that if realistically portrayed have complexity, prejudice, fears, sour memories, and a certain grim realization that life isn't a fairy tale, and yet that twinkle in the eye that says "...but I haven't given up /yet/."
Then, in the live RP, it's really great for the character to have goals and to achieve those goals over time. Progress! Hooray! But not without hardship, or the advancement of the story lacks a certain... gravitas. At the end of the segment of the story, as the characters exhale in relief at having achieved a hard-fought objective, there should be that bittersweet moment where they look back upon what led to that moment and feel the ambivalence of joy and sorrow.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Faye - 08-31-2015
I love sad RP. That being said, you can overdo the sad. I'm not interested in a story that's always grimdark, where bad thing after bad thing happen to your character until he/she is a total woobie and eventually stops being a functional person but some unstable, emotionally wounded, shivering... thing. As with most things, moderation and variety are important. Sad scenes are going to be a lot more impactful when they strike after some moments of happiness. With no reprieve from the tragedies, it's hard to keep caring about them.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Sylentmana - 08-31-2015
Never really been a fan of tragic characters and drama. That being said, there is a time and place for such things which I feel the MSQ does fairly well. For the most part though, I prefer a healthy mix of comedy and adventure with maybe one sad/heroic death in there where appropriate.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Kinono - 08-31-2015
I'm been roleplaying in this game for over two years at this point, and only recently had an incredibly sad thing happen to my character.
Up to that point, it'd been mostly fun times, silly adventures, and romance.
The sad thing hit hard. It was the best roleplay I've ever had.
RE: Thoughts On Sad RP - Caspar - 08-31-2015
For me, tragedy/dark storylines are low-hanging fruit. It comes to me naturally, but if I overindulge it loses its flavor. My dream is to make someone so emotionally invested in my writing that they cry or laugh as I intend. I want to build up to a strong, cathartic finish that people will remember, so I cannot just repeatedly throw punches at the participants and make them numb to sadness. Unfortunately, rarely have any of my rp experiences actually ended successfully, so the complete story never really comes to fruition.
Even when it's stuff that I didn't write, I still find myself drawn to dreary stories and drama like a fly on carrion. Just the other day, I was observing some other rpers' characters discuss a particularly toxic relationship of some infamy, and I got the old itch to watch, or even participate somehow, despite feeling like an interloper.
To counteract my tendency to gravitate towards depressing rp or dramatic writing, I've tried to make sure most of my impromptu or walk-up rp is neutral or comedic, rather than constantly trying to push my character's obviously unhealthy mental state/philosophy as the theme of the day. I save that for when rp focus shifts to my character naturally, either because it was planned or because people are interested in her.
The other thing I do is just not get immersed. I like to pick apart my own stories and make fun of my characters on the side OOC, though I know that bothers people. A lot of the silly prompts we write on the forum are a great way for me to not take my character too seriously. A tragic storyline often is just this fertile ground for black comedy to me.
That being said, I share the trait of certain popular writers these days in that I often find that I struggle to write a happy ending, maybe even to the point of being incapable of it. Sometimes that actually bothers me a bit, to think I'm really that pessimistic. Were all the countless rps of yesteryear that ended due to scheduling, flakiness or loss of interest finished properly, I could count the number of my characters that ended their stories unequivocally happy on one hand. A grenade inspector's one hand.