Roleplaying As Yourself

Me, Myself, & Eye

Everybody, on some level, roleplays themself. I am writing about making your current player self into your actual PC, or something close to that. 

I was introduced to Delta Green as a player about two months ago. The first session was humdrum, meant to train the players on the ruleset and apparently make clear that the Delta Green world is an ominous place filled with implacable, cosmic horror. The scenario really felt like character choices didn't matter. Plus my character was kind of a drab pre-gen, military meat-head guy, which--at least for me--has a limited number of role-playing pleasures. 

The handler said we could change up characters, so I rolled myself up for the second session.

It wasn't quite me. I tried to give myself accurate stats and skills, but I changed his timeline so that his major career failure was somewhat different than mine, and also was the reason he joined Delta Green, the organization. (My real-life occupational disaster did not lead me to joining an institution dedicated to the suppression of cosmic evil, unless you consider the School District of Philadelphia to be such an organization.) PC me also remained bonded with people I've lost touch with in real life and he "believed" in the occult (sensibly, in the Delta Green milieu). 

The second Delta Green session was probably my favorite as a player this year, out of forty plus. 

Some of that was attributable to the differences in the modules, but the second, "Last Things Last," in the most recent rules quick-start, was just about as railroady as the first. There's only one big player choice in the scenario, and that choice--however fantastic it is to have been placed before the players--is almost written to undermine the impact of said decision. The basic activity of "Last Things" is investigation, however, rather than merely surviving, and that was pure joy as myself.

When our PCs were trespassing, it felt as though I might get caught, arrested. The frisson here, the bleed, made every minute the characters spent digging through useless clutter exceedingly tense. I spent several minutes of unnecessary role-playing to cover up my tracks after an encounter, because I didn't want myself to be imprisoned for some dumbass evidence that could be tracked back to my home. When the big choice and the fight for survival came, it felt like it was really me (until I rolled a crit throwing a hatchet, that kind of broke the immersion). When I went through the "home" session, it felt like I was really lying to my wife.

That night, after the game had ended, I immediately made plans for running the scenario for my main group (and introducing them to Delta Green). And their pre-gens were gonna be themselves.

The Experiment

I ended up running the little adventure twice, for two different groups: the "main" (seven years' running) and an "open," two brothers (my cousins whom I've gamed with on and off for years) and a local who'd gamed with one of them once online. The players were given the instructions to imagine themselves with some great live upheaval at age 25, to explain joining Delta Green. Their 25th year was also to be set in 1993 (which didn't quite work for the non-twin brothers). 

Everybody took to.their alternate self in some fashion. A couple made comic variations on their real personas (including joking bonds), but pretty much everybody was pretty serious about giving themselves "accurate" skills and ability scores, including giving themselves what they considered realistic weaknesses. One example: "Member of Catholic Church, mother was church secretary. I completed confirmation class, was an altar boy for about 5 years. Attended Catholic mass just about every weekend during college. My occult should be 30%." Two created alternate selves with tragic backstories, one killing off the game version of his parents (who had been assassinated), and one his game wife, pregnant with his first child (who has in real-life finished graduate school). Both of them did this with the intent of connecting the personal catastrophe to some as-yet-unknown supernatural force. This was even though I declared the session to be a one-shot at the outset.

During the sessions, the players imagined themselves in the game world in two different fashions. One group wanted to role-play as they would have if the horrific game event had occurred to them in real life. The other group role-played as an alternate self given a chance to be very different than the normal. Some used real-life backstories to negotiate skill rolls even further than the base score. Most felt as I had, not wanting their alternate self to get caught during the investigation, more so than even a standard PC.

The "main" group completed the adventure successfully in the terms of the scenario. The "open" table group was struck with disaster--they were very careless with one object, and the cascade of trouble that followed left one PC dead and the other two in game world prison. The successful group also had a form of failure. Two of the players reckoned that their real-life reaction would be to immediately quit Delta Green, and so their PCs did. One was role-playing a reaction to the horror, and the other to his own ineffectiveness doing agent-type things against dangerous cosmic entities. The first group seemed ready to play more Delta Green, though whether because of the freshness of genre (we've done Traveller and Pirate Borg, the latter to great enthusiasm, the former abandoned) or the experiment in character, it is hard to say. Perhaps because the second group ended the session on a down note, there was no discussion of revisiting the genre, but one of the players sent me an email about the nice change of pace. 

Cautions

I didn't think too carefully about unpleasant "bleed" before I ran players as themselves. This thoughtlessness was for a couple reasons. First, even though my play-through as a player seemed to have great danger, no character died. After reading the module, I realized that the central monster pulls its punches (seemingly mainly as a set up to become a recurring campaign problem), so I foolishly didn't think the characters that I was running would get themselves killed. Second, I am in a relatively comfortable place in life, with finances as stable as they've ever been, and no difficult or strained family relationships. When my "me" PC probably should've died during his second adventure ("Convergence") through no mistake of his/my own--the module had a bit of a cosmic horror railroad for one PC--I was at peace with him perishing, as it seemed fitting for the genre. My GM was probably too gentle with the final outcome. Admittedly, the lack of substantially character advancement (in duration, four sessions, and system, a few skill points) would have made his loss more bearable, had it happened. 

The same is not true of all of my players. The player of the PC that died because of risky behavior might have been reacting in game to some of his current real-life frustrations. Then again, in another short-shot I ran, a different character of his deliberately finished the adventure with a similar self-destructive move. (He destroyed an infected NPC because he was an asshole, not because he was infected, surprising all of the rest of the table that his PC's suicide had been for a petty grudge.) Others in my play groups face job loss, upheaval in living situations, and elderly parent care that is stressful. Of course, any beloved character's demise in an RPG could be worse with these conditions, not just a very familiar avatar. 

I nearly always write a re-cap of sessions played, but this was the first time a killed PC bore a real name, that of my cousin. Copying my own Delta Green handler's method, the story was told through documentation, pretend newswire articles and internal DG memos. It was rather dark writing one of those tragic post-mortem newspapers interviews with my "uncle and aunt" as the subjects. Because I had gamed with everyone in the sessions for more than a year, I didn't bother with any safety tools, which may have been a mistake.   

There is, of course, the common RPGing goal of getting away from our real-life self through role-play, and this escapism might be confounded by playing oneself. There's also the power fantasy that draws many to our games--which I've been trying to get further and further away from in my own gaming experience--and for this reason players may balk at playing "themself," although the method could certainly be wrenched into an extreme version of the fantasy. And speaking of that, this will only transfer easily into "modern" games, rather than the standard fantasy or SF RPG, making the PC self mostly limited to certain rulesets and settings.