The Slow Reveal
So, you’ve spent hours (days! weeks!) working out your character’s backstory. You RP walk around town, or happen upon RPers gathered in a tavern, and — at last! — someone asks who you are, where you come from, all that good story-stuff.
/glee
Out come the ten pages of notes, the spreadsheet of NPCs, the…
No, hold on. Sweet baby weeping zombie Uthas, hold on.
It’s an easy instinct, when greeted by a crowd of interested RPers (or even just one interested RPer), to want to spill your whole story. Someone’s talking to your character, and you want them to know where their various quirks come from — why does he walk with a limp? Why does she glance over her shoulder every time someone new enters the bar? Did they notice the keen tattoo that’s in your (description-only please) flagRSP? Don’t they want to know what it means?
Well, here’s the thing:
Yes, they probably do.
But not all at once.
Consider your audience — these are people you’ve just met. Would you walk up to someone you didn’t know all that well and tell them every last detail of your life’s story? What if your character’s an unsavory type? Going around confessing all of his or her crimes might make him sound badass, but it’s also a very good way to get arrested.
What if the people you’re talking to are unsavory types themselves? Do you want to give them blackmail material?
Or maybe, rather than a history full of derring-do, your character has a past filled with tragedy and woe. Again, are you comfortable telling complete strangers about your lost love’s death in excruciating detail?
A little can go a very long way. If you start broad, it lets the other people you’re talking to ask questions and get involved:
“I’m a sailor on a merchant vessel.”
“Oh? Where’s your home port?”
“I came to Stormwind a few years ago, after the plague.”
“Are you from the north, then? I had family in Stratholme.”
While there are times that your companions might want to hear the whole story all at once, it’s more likely to foster further RP if they have a chance to react to the tale. If I find myself typing big long paragraphs in rapid succession, I try to pause and let others react before I continue on.
Beyond a simple break in the text, emotes are a pretty handy cue. Flag down the bartender for another drink, look down at the table as you gather your thoughts. Or, go right ahead and ask, “have I left anything out so far?”
This can also apply to RP within established groups. A few months back, Bricu got Threnn to talk about something that happened back in her early days of soldiering, something she’d conveniently left out of all her previous tales. It would have been easy enough for her to tell the whole story in one long wall o’text, but instead, I tried keeping a kind of back-and-forth to it once she started talking. Bricu didn’t have a lot to say while she was confessing, but you had a good idea what was going through his mind by the reactions he emoted.
Whenever Tarquin initiates a new member into the Riders, he tells what we call The Bloody Long Story — a summary of the events that brought the guild together as it is now. The telling of it can take a good long while, but he breaks it up in some of the same ways — buying a round, engaging the others in the room, asking other members of the guild to pick up the thread of the story for a while.
All those cases are situations where you can take an RP story that happened to you, and make it into a story that happens with you. It’s fun to get the whole tale out, but once it’s told, well… then what? Leaving some of it shrouded in mystery helps invest other people in the story, too — it gives them a reason to want to talk to your character again and find out more, and gives them an incentive to get involved in your current plots as well.
You never know — it might turn out that someone else in the crowd has something in common with your character — a shared profession, the same hometown — and find a jumping off point for new RP.
Filed in RP,Tips and Tricks 8 Comments so far
Itanya Blade on 16 Jul 2009 at 3:03 pm #
One way to look at it is to ask yourself
“Would you spill your guts to a perfect stranger in a bar?”
I bet the answer is no. Even when dating someone, you’re not going to detail all the important pieces of your life at once. hell, I’ve been married for years and every so often the husband will say “You’ve never told that story before.”
We dole out the story of ours lives in bits and pieces. Our characters do too.
However, I would still like to know more of Keltyr’s backstory…. not that he ever reads this damn blog.
Hammaryn on 16 Jul 2009 at 10:47 pm #
This is such a great post, and the idea is very fresh in my mind. Last night at the picnic I host, someone new came in and joined in on the fun. Only during her character’s basic introduction, she launched into a very long and traumatic story from her character’s past, complete with crying in front of the group. All I could think was, would you really say this to complete strangers? Because I sure wouldn’t.
Bricu on 17 Jul 2009 at 12:33 am #
I think a fast reveal could be done well if the character was sincere and believable. There are some people–my late, sainted mother–who could walk into a restaurant and after a few hours, walk away with a room full of friends. These new friends knew all about Judy’s kids–how one got dumped, the other dyed his hair–or Judy’s husband–a wonderful man but who is in a snit today because of a bad case–or Judy’s health–she’s in remission!–much to the embarrassment of judy’s kids and her husband.
Woe to anyone who said, “they don’t want to hear it.” Who ever they were, they wanted to hear it.
That kind of vibe is extremely hard to create in a virtual setting, and I don’t think I’ve met anyone who could pull it off.
Itanya Blade on 17 Jul 2009 at 11:19 am #
I think part of that, Bricu, is the lack of tone. Since its a text medium, you lose voice inflection and body language and a lot of the other things that we take for granted seeing people face to face.
So much of personal charisma is tired up in that.
Shaemon on 17 Jul 2009 at 6:47 pm #
The issue with pouring out one’s whole backstory right off the bat is that when you do that, your character is the backstory. To be interesting in RP, the character has to be a person. I think many roleplayers, especially new ones, get so excited about their writing that they forget to let the character be a person. And few people want to be judged by what they were once, or by what has happened to them.
A corollary to this; when you are sharing your incredibly emo backstory, leave it to others to judge how terrible the events therein are. We had a gentleman come to a Rose meeting to introduce himself, and when we asked him to tell us about himself, he did indeed tell us the whole story about how he lost his children and wife to the plague.
And then he insisted to at least one other character, whose story he did not know, that -his pain was worse than theirs-.
That. In character, it’s offensive. Out of character, it’s the absolute worst victim-mongering I have ever seen, and god-modding in its way. Letting people react on their own, as Threnn says, is vital to keeping it fun.
Itanya Blade on 17 Jul 2009 at 7:01 pm #
There are a few times that I have seen nearly instant backstory being made interesting.
Noxilite hosts a fire night and we encourage people to tell stories. I remember one night recently where a death knight told the story of how he got to be a death knight, but it was told in story form.
It was nothing short of horrifying and breathtaking. (Bullhoof kicked major ass with that story) But he didn’t drama monger it, Gomez presented it as a story, a fireside tale.
Corise on 17 Jul 2009 at 7:29 pm #
I think that a lot of people put so much creative energy and effort into creating an interesting backstory that they sometimes forget that RP is so much more than what happened to your character in the past. An effective backstory provides a solid basis for the person that your character is in the present day.
My character has a fairly dark secret in her past, a majorly lifechanging experience that played a pretty significant role in shaping her personality, outlook on life, fears, etc. In four years of RP, I think that there are only two characters who have heard Corise tell that story. Nonetheless, even though her history is very rarely mentioned directly in RP, it is always an integral part of how I play her – it is reflected in the way she acts and reacts to situations and people in her life. The fact that others may not always understand what motivates her behavior and where she’s coming from only opens the door for further interaction.
Revealing a backstory artfully can make for fantastic RP, but sometimes a character can be defined in interesting ways by what they DON’T share.
Kansin on 27 Jul 2009 at 3:38 pm #
depends, people do dumb stuff once alcohol is applied. IIRC, the pig & whistle is a bar. You and yours spend most of your time hanging out in a bar. Dumb stuff occurs at bars. I’ve had my fair share of “OMG, why did you tell me that?” happen in real life at bars.