NationStates Jolt Archive

When I first got started with roleplaying, it was smaller things like PBEM RPGs, tabletop, stuff like that. It's a lot easier to create and connect with a character when you're actually directly playing it.

However, Nationstates is a lot different-- you're RPing the actions of an entire nation.

I have a hard time focusing on individuals in such an environment and am curious as to how you guys do it.

Ever read Larry Bond?

Develop a character just as you do national leaders and the like. Put emphasis into giving him/her a personality, focus on their actions and their compunctions and thoughts, and truly make them alive, rather than simply thoughtless zombies. Ensure your characters have weaknesses and strengths, emotions (makes them more "feelable"), memories, and all sorts of natural human things. Rather than focusing on statistics or visable details, as Nation RPs often happen, focus on the mind a lot in character RPs.

I had problems at first, until I started to focus on characters that I genuinely enjoy (Like Remiel and Lucian and Cabot.). You need to find what you like about characters, be they fictional, be they aspects of yourself, and develop them.

Play them as things that you like, things that you enjoy, people that you'd enjoy, or loathe. It all goes towards humanizing them. Even when they are utterly inhuman ;)

I do this a lot better than I do war RP's, to be honest; the drive to win is not there as much (unless you're trying to escape a pursuer or group of them, or otherwise survive) and often I just let events influence them. (People in real life are influenced by events, so that makes it more realistic.)

One thing I have done in all of my RPs is do a little of both, in terms of Characters and national scale. I will RP 4 or 5 generals in 4 or 5 different theaters of Combat. the Large scale RP comes from the mass area affected by the Individual RP actions.

But a good refresher course would be to join a celebration thread or a meeting thread and observe how they RP as characters.

What I did is I decided on a specific that I want my country to have, from there I thought about how I could make that trait the best. Baisically I start from as broad an aspect as possible, and narrowed it down as far as I could.

Take my character Valerie for example. She is a psychotic soldier who is an experimental breed with genetic engineering. However, she's very mentally unstable. Now, without the basic understanding of my country this makes little sense. My country consists entirely of mercenaries, founded on the adrenaline junkies of some long lost war. Their plans never consisted of the next generation, but as the saying goes, our fathers are our models for god. The next generation brought it to the next step, they made the laws that all children must go to school to learn how to become soldiers. They wanted to find ways to make the human body more resiliant to wounds. They only had one succsessful experiment, that was Valerie. She was trained on a more elite level than all the other students, however seperation from her peers has made her reclusive, and sporadic in how she acts.

See how I built her actual character from the most broadest of perspectives and worked my way down?