Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, RP, (Roleplaying) All the World’s a Stage

All the World’s a Stage is your source of roleplaying ideas n’ stuff. The usual columnist is grateful to Alex and Matt for covering for him the last couple weeks while he got ready to defend his MA thesis.

Getting into character isn’t all that easy. First of all, as Matt demonstrated last week, one must have the desire and the gumption to just do it. You can’t sit back and say, “But I don’t know how to do it right!”or “But what whether public don’t like my roleplaying?” or any other excuse like that. You have to put your fingers to the keyboard and just start playing your role. Whether public like it more or less depends upon a bunch of things, including your skills and knowledge about how to do it well, but first and foremost it depends on your willingness to go out and try things out — next look back and learn from your experience. You won’t stop having problems and making mistakes, but you will get better by day.

Today I’ll share with you one view I found that helped me a lot with a problem I was having: when I found myself having a bit of trouble “logging in” to a specific character’s personality, I found the concept of the “Character Diamond” to be extremely valuable in pinning down precisely who that character is, how she would reply, and what it feels like to be inside her head. that concept was originally thought up by a screenwriting teacher named David S. Freeman, but it has gone through a bit of modification to suit the MMORPG world. So, with permission from the folks at Dramatis Personae who first taught me about it, I would like to sum it up for you here as a starter’s guide and reference for making character diamonds of your own.

Continue reading All the World’s a Stage: Character Diamonds

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Original post by David Bowers