Here are some of the pitfalls to watch out for as a player
Just focusing on telling
the story – a great deal of the enjoyment of a freeform comes
from the interaction with other player characters. However, some players feel
that they must achieve something each session or that game has not been worthwhile.
That’s silly. A game session is worth your while if you enjoyed the
experience. Your character can actually suffer and terrible things happen
to you, your luck can go bad and you fail at what objectives you set yourself
up for, yet you still enjoy it all – because you were there and it was
fun being your character. That is the essential thing to remember –
it is you being your character that is important, not the story of what happens
or what is ‘meant” to happen. If you focus too much on achievement
and your characters storyline, you can forget to actually enjoy the ride along
the way.
Striving to be good – there really is no independent measure of what a good roleplayer is. At the end of the day only yourself and other participants can be the judge. Some players will claim they are not very good roleplayers. How can they be sure? The truth is that no one is a really good roleplayer – they simply roleplay what they can when they can and if the people around them think its good then its good.
So, it’s a waste of time evaluating your performance every minute and feeling you come up short. No one can know if its not good enough. Don’t try to be “good” at roleplaying – try to roleplay.
Striving to exploit emotion
– overacting is what lay people call it. You know it when you see it
– when a player is informed that there character might feel a certain
way by a gamemaster so the player goes way over the top and seems like a crazy
emotional person. Stop as a player and think about it before portraying any
emotion – at any given moment you as a person feel emotions, often a
few, sometimes conflicting.
If you behave in an overwrought fashion people tend to call for Prozac or summon a stretcher so why would your character go over the top? The game is not about performing for other people to see your acting skills at portraying emotion – it’s about playing a role and experiencing someone else’s feelings and reactions in a situation.
Listening for cues not meaning – a few players listen to every thing a gamemaster will say and try to portray their character based on what they think the gamemaster wants them to do. Sometimes a gamemaster will actually try to influence a player to portray their character in a certain way – no doubt for story purpose – but more often than not a gamemaster is simply informing the players of what they might not know. As a player listen for what is being said and think about what it might mean for your character, rather than as a directive from the writer of the game on how to behave. Game masters are not there to tell you what to do.
Acting (instead of inter-acting) – your characterisation could be spectacular, you can literally think as your character would, you could deserve an academy award – but it’s meaningless if you do it in isolation. Any and all roleplaying you do ultimately is related to or in the presence of another character. The purpose of a freeform is to interact – otherwise Age of Aquarius would be a one player game and all this work would be solely for you. As a player you must have noticed that it’s not, so always remember other players are there for you to talk to, to react to, to respond to, to play a role in your characters life.