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Playing a stupid character is oddly frustrating because it's incredibly difficult to do.

This should not be the case. This should, in fact, be the opposite of the case. Playing someone with the mental alacrity of a ball of twine should be much easier than your brilliant wizard. But when you try to play a dumb character, it's easy for that character to wind up slipping into periods of pointless stupidity without acting like any of the nitwits you've actually dealt with over the course of your life.

Intelligence is a hard thing to quantify at the best of times, but some of our characters are meant to be just plain slow. I've played a few, and it's always a challenge to make the character feel like a person instead of a caricature. So here are some tips for making your big dummy feel appropriately oafish and endearing instead of just being a strawman.

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Roleplaying is the same as it ever was. People are still shoehorning in lore characters into backstories, someone is a sparkly magic vampire, and you can still turn a corner in a tavern to find two people with a decided lack of gear or public shame. (In Second Life, that corner is the one you turn to download the game.) But I've had three years of talking about it, so it's at least a little different than it was.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it's better.

Every year I like to take a look back at the past year, talk about what worked well, what didn't work at all, and what I'd like to do in the future. So it is for this year, complete with a nice big surprise down at the end there. Regular readers may be less surprised, but you can just bear with me.

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A while ago, I talked about the fact that roleplaying in MMOs most closely resembles comic books. This is apropos of the current discussion because both mediums have a fundamental issue with how villains are supposed to work. A good villain should be roundly trounced by the end of a story, but you also want to bring back a villain for more antics later on. So as I begin the follow-up to my recent column on the topic, the question becomes how you can make a villain who's entertaining and satisfying to encounter without becoming boring or making everyone wonder why no one has stabbed him yet.

To be fair, there's no way to absolutely fix this problem. Someone will always have the idea that stabbing the villain to death will alleviate the problem, and that assumption is pretty much right. But there are ways to minimize the issue without making everyone seem like a colossal twit or creating the soap opera problem (wherein everyone is a malicious jerk every so often and no one seems to make long-term changes). This week I want to examine how both antagonistic and malicious villains can be played to avoid those pitfalls.

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There's something inherently alluring about objects of power. That much is obvious; games are already fairly littered with them, ranging from weapons to vehicles to various items whose powers are invariably decided by needs of the plot. It's inevitable that as a roleplayer you would want to create something of power for your own purposes, something that has a purpose that only you know, hopefully a purpose with more careful thought than "being the most scary thing ever."

Items like this are what I'm calling artifacts. In some settings they're actual artifacts; in others they're just exceptionally well-programmed computers or bits of otherwise lost technology or whatever. They're useful for extended roleplaying, they create an additional element of your characters, and they're also really problematic in a variety of ways. Still, the drawbacks aren't significant enough to make them useless, just significant enough that you'll want to use a careful hand when adding in your own hidden wonders.

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I really thought this was a topic I had revisited on a few occasions, but apparently the only time Storyboard has discussed villainy was back in the column's infancy when I was still properly finding its voice. (Not that I feel that project has ever stopped, but that's another matter.) And it's an interesting topic for many reasons because villainy as a concept really gets put through the wringer in RP to begin with, especially if you tend to let morality be muddled into a few million shades of gray like I tend to.

The thing about villains in roleplaying is having a character solely meant as A Villain generally doesn't work as well, simply because no real people are as malicious as that might require. Instead, you wind up with several people serving as the villains in a particular timeframe. So we need to define what we mean by villains, what role they can play in roleplaying, and what the pitfalls are in the first place.

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A couple of friends of mine recently found themselves knee-deep in roleplaying community drama. For those of you who have not seen this dread beast before, let me assure you that it is the most vile of all forms of drama, in which people wind up angry at one another over elements that virtually no one else cares about. I've seen it strike many times, and it's always frustrating and unpleasant due in no small part to its sheer pointlessness.

I've talked about community drama on one occasion when it comes to the Final Fantasy XIV roleplaying community, but the fact that I'm seeing it passed around elsewhere means that it's a topic worth addressing in a general sense. This isn't drama centered around what happened within the game but drama about the managerial aspects of the community, about handling site ownership and moderation and all of the associated stuff. And there are a few tricks to help minimize this before it starts.

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Human beings like to make stuff. It's in our nature, presumably because the humans who liked making things were able to create important inventions like clothing and weapons and homes and portable DVD players. That stuff gives you an edge over the guy hunting with a rock and a decent pitching arm. A lot of jobs and hobbies alike revolve around making things or changing existing made things into new made things.

The Builder isn't just someone who enjoys making things but someone who lives by making things. Our previous professions have all focused around providing something, but the Builder is the person responsible for making those things. This is a profession that's all about creating, something near and dear to most roleplayers to begin with. But it's also a profession that has a bit more to it than simply being the guy down the road who puts cabinets together at a discount.

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Every so often, I start a column and it just doesn't come together. So my original plans for this week's article are being changed. I could technically go back and edit last week's piece to erase any evidence that plans had changed, but that would just be wrong.

That segues nicely into this week's actual topic: morality. We generally paint morality in broader strokes than is necessarily beneficial, as evidenced by the fact that I just said that something as harmless as editing an old article could be considered wrong. Obviously it's not harming anyone, but because of standards that I impose on myself, I feel as if it's the wrong course of action to take.

Pretty much all of your characters have moral codes, and if you're not thinking about them consciously, those codes can easily default to the same ones that you have. I've touched on that idea before, but there's more to it than that. When you get right down to it, your characters need their own codes, some of which you might even find personally repugnant.

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Music is kind of a big deal. The right choice of music can change a scene from being happy to ominous, and intentionally mismatching the scene and the music can lead to hilarious results with minimal effort. In-game music makes use of this, naturally, and it's rare to find something stirring and peppy in the midst of a zone filled with volcanoes and demons. We rely on the background music to set a mood and underscore what's taking place at any given moment.

All that goes for roleplaying, too. But the odds are that the game music isn't going to provide the romantic music you need in the Undercity in World of Warcraft or the driving combat music you need on your bridge in Star Trek Online. Game music is meant for people who are playing; the music you need is closer to scoring a film.

So given the importance of music, let's talk about it just a little this week. After all, having the right tune playing can make a lasting impression, even if it's just on the people within earshot.

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Some of my characters are pretty awful people. Some of them aren't people in the strictest sense of the word, to be fair. But there are some pretty awful types among them. And I enjoy playing them, but I sure as heck don't like them. They're terrible people who deserve to meet with terrible fates, and the glory of roleplaying is that they serve as a bit of anarchistic fun until someone gives them what they deserve. I don't like them as people.

But that's not universal. I have other characters who will frequently do awful things but aren't fundamentally bad, just misguided on several occasions. Sometimes the line can get a bit blurry between one well-trained spy and assassin when one of them is a character I like and the other one is meant to be awful. So I started thinking about the distinguishing factors and what it means to play a character you like personally compared to one just meant to cause trouble. The answers were a bit odd.

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People want stuff. It's a given. Part of this is because in the earliest days of human history having a sharpened stick was the difference between eating and starving, but part of it is just the way that we've structured our societies. And a lot of the things that people want are things that they can't make themselves, which means those people need someone to come to the rescue. That's where this profession comes in; the Merchant is all about getting people the stuff that they want.

This is easily the strangest profession discussion I've done yet because it's easy to understand how you could have a lot of different people in the role of a spy or an aristocrat, but it's less obvious how you could have a character with certain archetypes be a merchant. The thing is that the merchant isn't just about selling things and making money. Being a merchant is what a character does on the road, and that ranges from selling mushrooms to selling your sword in the name of a good cause.

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One of the points I've harped on in the past is the idea that game mechanics don't encompass your entire character. They can't, almost by definition. Mechanics are in place to ensure that everyone plays by the rules and works according to a standardized system, while individual characters are meant to have their own unique traits and abilities. So no matter what, when you create a character in an MMO, you're creating the best possible approximation rather than an absolute copy.

The odd thing is that as I recreate one of my favorite characters yet again, I find that she's a lot easier to build and understand as a result of the limitations of many games. While there's a definite case to be made for the awkwardness of fitting a character into a system, I think we give the limitations of most systems too little credit in terms of narrowing down character ability and making for a better environment. So let's talk about the benefits of having mechanical limitations.

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So there's a beta going on right now that is really relevant to my interests. Yes, that does mean that there is an unofficial beta roleplaying server, also relevant to my interests. Long-time readers will know both what I'm talking about and why I don't have a whole lot of other things on my mind right now.

This actually dovetails nicely with an obvious topic, however: roleplaying in the beta for any given game. If you plan to roleplay when the game goes live, beta is a great time to get started, possibly building up character relationships and dynamics before the game has even launched. That's all good stuff.

The problem is that beta is not, in fact, a prequel to the live game. It's a test version of the real game. And even beside the obvious repercussions of rollbacks and the like, there are reasons why roleplaying in beta might not be a great idea.

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Aristocracy is not a job in one sense. You can't apply to be an aristocrat, nor can you get a degree that leads to becoming an aristocrat, and there's a marked lack of professional guilds and unions for the field. You can't even really hope to be one when you grow up, since you're usually born into it. But in the broader sense of roleplaying character professions, "aristocrat" certainly qualifies, as it answers the question of what your character does while on the road.

Some aristocrats might hit the road because they have a duty to those of lower status. Others might be out there because they want to be anywhere other than home. Some have tastes or curiosities that can be satisfied only in a more exotic location. Whatever the reason, many aristocrats pack up their elaborate and numerous bags and head off in search of adventure, or at least the various opportunities that adventure brings along.

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Roleplaying guilds, as I have mentioned before, have a lot of problems that more normal guilds just plain don't. The Guild Counsel discusses a lot of guild problems in detail every week, and if you haven't noticed that guilds make for a litany of major issues, well, it only gets worse when you consider that roleplaying adds a new slice of potential drama and hurt feelings. I do not envy those in charge of these organizations, especially when I think over my brief stints of leadership.

As a result, forming a new roleplaying guild seems like an activity best undertaken with great care and personal protection, like installing a beehive. But it's actually far simpler than that. You can start a roleplaying guild with minimal effort and have the foundations in place for it to work. Whether or not it will work in the long run isn't as obvious, but you knew that already.

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