[Dischord]

Lesson One: An Introduction To Role-Playing

What better place to begin then, at the beginning? So long as there has been imagination, there has been role-play. "How can this be?", one might ask. If role-playing is the essence of writing a story from the perspective of your character, then, every single writer is also a role-player, on some level.

Role-playing comes in many shapes and forms. Not all role-playing is the same. Not every role-play is the same, for that matter. Each role-play is different in some aspect. Even if it's all the same story. In following this direction, we also recognize that not every role-player does so in the exact same fashion. If everyone wrote the same, there would be no real creativity in the world.

And from this, we go into role-player classification. A lot of role-players, or those who could potentially be good role-players, I tend to lump together into two groups.

1.) Those who find themselves either too lazy to put honest effort into their posts, even though they possess the skills.

or

2.) Those who have been taught previously by an unskilled individual and are unwilling to learn anything else that could help them better themselves as players.

The first group tends to be the easiest to salvage. A little extra nudge, give them a good reason to put more effort into what they do, and this first group can become some of the best role-players you have ever seen. Quite a few people fall into this first category. All it takes is a nudge to get them going. I fell into this category until I met my husband, who encouraged me to put more effort into my role-playing. Thanks to him, I've become quite skilled.

Then, you have group two. This is the group that tends to give you the most amount of difficulty. They either refuse to admit that they're horrible at role-playing and need lessons, or they defend the fact that they can role-play in that manner if they want to, despite the fact that they get very little play. They later whine about this lack of play as well. These are what we refer to as 'Gary Stu', in the case of men, and 'Mary Sue' in the case of women. These two terms can also be applied to anyone who is simply a bad role-player regardless of what they do. Unfortunately, these do exist in the world.

The category you fall into may be a little different, or you may try to claim that you're not part of either category. If you are, there's no shame in this. You're only limited by what you think you can achieve. I hope this little introduction has been helpful. Now, we get onto the real foundation of it all.