Roleplaying Hints
Few players may feel the need to bother reading this webpage. Most players are pretty confident with how they play their characters. Some of this may even seem like common sense. Nevertheless, my opinions on how to improve one’s roleplay have been written here. Please peruse the following suggestions. I do in fact award experience points as per the charts in the corebooks. Thus, greater effort in roleplaying one’s character will be rewarded. The ideas explained below can help one reach for that higher level.
The “hints” below are offered for three purposes: 1) to improve general roleplaying standards; 2) to understand what it’s like to live as one’s own character better; 3) to know how a character’s image can differ from normality more comprehensibly.
Advantages: Overall
In general, I feel that one element often overlooked when playing White Wolf’s World of Darkness gamelines are Advantages. All of a character’s statistics are simply guidelines on how to roleplay her. For example, a character that has a great deal of dots in Knowledges but virtually nothing in combat-oriented Skills or Talents is likely a person who avoids physical competition and conflict, but embraces mental showdowns and challenges. But while a character’s Attributes and Abilities have the most obvious effect on a character’s behavior, Concept and Advantages by far leave a more profound impact.
The section of Concept on a character sheet rarely involves Traits at all. Instead, this is simply a section involving the character’s “class”, job position, Nature & Demeanor, and other related factors. Advantages, however, deal with the character’s spiritual and mental well-being, development, and ability. While a character’s lack (or greatness) of Humanity may not always be readily apparent, such a Trait leaves a very profound, subtle imprint in the character’s motivations and behavior. It is my opinion that roleplaying out Advantages comes before the ability to roleplay out Abilities.
And the main reason for this is simple. Advantages encompass Traits that are either natural to us all or fantastical, and allow one’s creative imagination to flow freely. Abilities involve the mundane elements anyone can know -- but not all of us do. And should the fact that I know next to nothing about computers in real life affect the decision of whether I play a computer hacker or not? Of course not! But there is no excuse for playing a character with low Willpower as anything but diffident.
Naturally, Willpower is only one Advantage of several that characters begin with or acquire over time.
