January 19, 2025

How do you relate to your character during role-play?

An idea I keep coming back to,

is the experience of a dual consciousness during role-play. I came upon the concept last year, when I was hitting the rpg journals again. Tracking down a reference I landed upon a talk by Jaakko Stenros.¹ It’s a long piece about the aesthetics of role-play, but in passing, he touches upon a unique feature of our art form:

You have a sort of dual consciousness as you consider the playing both as real—in the fiction—an as not real, as playing. You are both a player and a characters, which creates interesting frictions since you inhabit the same body.

Doesn’t that make all the difference? You don’t just see these characters on a screen, or read about them in a book. You and your friends embody these characters at the table, up until a certain point, or, at the very least, you represent them.

That is a very interesting relationship. Your character is not you, but you might put something of yourself in them. Or not! You could be playing against type, so to say. In her 2010 book The Functions of Role-Playing Games, Sarah Lynne Bowman distinguishes nine types of player-character relationships. Let’s get into them.²

A second self to deal with

Bowman drew her character types from interviews with players in long-term campaign games with custom characters. If you’re sitting there thinking that could mean these types don’t map as well to short term games or games with pre-generated characters, you might be right. My guess is some of the following player-character relationships might not occur as often in those games, but the general typology would probably still effectively describe those relationships that do occur.

Bowman calls her archetypes “selves”, I think to emphasize the duality: during play, you are your own self while also embodying another self. The typology is all about how your own self relates to that other self.

Doppelgangers, Augmentations and Subtractions

In these first three categories, the character you play and your own self are almost identical. Doppelganger Selves are characterized by that identity: the character’s personality, identity, or even life circumstances echo your own. Augmented Selves, then, are you plus an important addition, like a pact with a demon or the ability to fly a plane. For a Devoid Self, as Bowman calls them, you subtract an important part from your identity or personality. Such a character is you minus your small-town background, for example.

Fragments, Repression and Regression

To create more distance between themselves and their character, a player might create a Fragmented Self. Such a character is centered around a magnified aspect of their own personality. I grew up religious, for example. I used that aspect of my identity to build the cleric that would be my first ever character. Inversely, a Repressed or Regressed Self creates distance between you and your character by going back to an earlier stage in your development. I could play a faithful believer, for example.

Idealization and Opposition

Another type of relationship a player can have to his character, is one of admiration: an Idealized Self. These are the brave heroes we play, the patient healers and the confident charmers—characters we might want to be more like, or that, at the very least, embody values society admires. On the other end of the spectrum we have Oppositional Selves. This is a relationship of aversion: you play someone with completely different ideals or personal ethics, for example. Playing an untrustworthy criminal in Blades in the Dark might fall in this category.

Taboos and Experiments

It might sound similar to an Opposed self, but when Bowman describes the Taboo Self, she is more interested in transgression than aversion. The category is comprised both of characters that the player themselves finds problematic and those which society finds taboo. If, growing up, I’d have played a queer character, that would’ve been a taboo self for me then, since my direct community viewed it that way. Experimental Selves are devoid of that air of sin. They are about exploration. Maybe you’d like to see how a coward will fare in a dangerous situation? Or maybe you’d like to see how it feels to play another gender?

Of course, it's just a typology

Like any topology, it’s hard to find a pure instance of any of these. More often, players will relate to their characters in several ways, maybe even differently from moment to moment. What Bowman gives us, is a way to talk about those relationships. Is this magnification of my love for painting just an instance of fragmentation, or is this an idealized self? Is this regression dipping into opposition, and how do I feel about that?

Bowman cites several of her interviewees when she makes the point that role-play can be a potent way to get to know yourself better.³ Here's a player designated as Darren:

All my characters teach me something about myself because I get to externalize a part of me and really look at how it interacts and plays with other people.

Having some vocabulary can be helpful when trying to interpret those experiences. But, as Bowman herself also emphasizes, this typology is but a first step in that direction.

That's it for now,
Hendrik ten Napel