(04-14-2014, 03:59 PM)K Wrote: Unless you're a creature that lacks the ability to empathize then I don't see how you could not experience strong or harsh emotions for your characters. I have felt a variety of things through, or on behalf on my characters, even if they themselves didn't. In addition, I have also been through a lot when exposed to other characters even when I was totally uninvolved with the scene taking place or even so much as not even having ever roleplayed with the character. This is what makes RP exciting and interesting. If you couldn't feel anything from it then I don't understand why one would do it in the first place.
I've played a character before that has nailed a woman (literally with carpenter nails) naked to a table and interrogated her by skinning a tattoo off her hip and tossing it down on her face. Â He finally got her to talk by preparing to slice off her finger to show her the ring she was wearing, having her tell him it had come from her husband, and threatening to have them find her husband to torture him as well.
It was fun, it was tense, it was dramatic, it was absolutely 100% not something I'd ever want to empathize with. Â I've had a great many heroic roleplaying characters in my time, but I've also played characters that, at various times, have burned down an orphanage after killing everyone inside, had a witness killed and disposed of in order to get a murderer acquitted, and had one character bring a yearlong forum RP thread end by killing his own fiancee on behalf of his employer after leaving his entire gang to death.
If you want to know what I love best about RP, it's that several of the characters I've played that have done that, I've had people feel sympathetic, friendly, and respectful towards, despite all of that. Â But I would assume no one would want me to actually empathize with these characters.
I play characters that are very different from me, so I don't necessarily feel everything they feel. Â Generally, if you're a bruiser for a local criminal syndicate, I personally feel like you've got nothing to be proud of and nothing to feel sorry about if one of your associates dies on the street. Â These guys aren't me personally, though, so I have to run the RP through the lens of that character and whatever reactions they have.
Way more fun that way, I personally haven't killed anybody and I don't know magic. Â I don't want to RP a happily married architectural designer that gets annoyed when his dogs don't get out of the way. Â The fun of RP is playing someone else, often someone completely different.
