“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Despite my best efforts I find that my personality, my values, and my own schema tends to come out in the characters I play and the worlds that I create as a GM. Perhaps personality bleed is not the official term for it or the best term to describe the phenomenon, but I use the term here because it makes sense to me. In the above quote was Earnest Hemingway referring to actually bleeding; not likely. Was he referring to how painful it can be to actually sit down and write does it feel like you’re bleeding? Maybe, but when I read those words, what they say to me is that despite any efforts to do contrary we pour our own personalities our beliefs and our values into whatever we write and into whatever we create. We “bleed” ourselves onto the paper (Or the computer screens as it were).
As a player, every character that I make reflects something of who I am and what I believe. Even if I am playing a villain, I will play that villain in a manner that tells the reader the kind of behavior or interactions that I consider to be villainous. If I am playing a hero, the actions and words that I use when playing that character says something about what I believe to be heroic.
The same applies when I am the game master or dungeon master. I believe that every NPC, good or bad, will contain some element of the person that created them. The world that a game master creates will inevitably be loaded with the creator’s biases, values, and beliefs. It is impossible to avoid imprinting our own schema onto the worlds and the characters that we create.
What I find interesting, however, is that I have a hard time playing the villain or playing a character in a manner that contradicts my own values and what I feel is “good” or just. Of course even if I did play a character that contradicts my own values it would still say something about my values, and my personality would still “bleed” into the game. As a game master, when I play a villainous non-player character I must reference my own experience and biases in order to play the NPC as a villain. What makes them villainous? To consider them a villain in the first place they must hold some value or engage in some form of behavior that I find reprehensible otherwise they are not truly a villain in my eyes.
A few physical alterations and maybe a couple of quirks here and there are put in place to flesh out a character and make them unique, but for the most part characters I play in role playing games have me and my own personality written all over them. Does anyone else find this to be true for them?
I think it is one of the things that drew me to role playing games; it’s sort of like a form of therapy. I can explore my own psyche as my personality ‘bleeds’ into the game while at the same time I am drawn by curiosity to look upon the psyche of others as they also bleed themselves into the cooperative experience of a role playing game. Why did that player character react the way they did? What does it say about the person behind the character pulling the strings?
What are your thoughts about personality bleed in role playing games? Is it a thing, or is it all a bunch of nonsense? As a player or Gm, do the characters or the worlds you create say anything about who you are and what you value? If personality bleed is a thing, then is it a good thing or should it be mitigated as much as possible when playing? In the end, does it matter and who really cares, it is just a game right?