And That's Why I Never Play Dwarves

So, an experience with a recent RPG the other day, and a session of the class I teach the night after, got me thinking about how I roleplay and how I might do it better. I try so hard to play a variety of ways to get, you know, the maximum experience, but there are just limits, I guess, to my ability to do everything convincingly. The thing is that there are two parts of my brain—let's call them Evil Genius and Softy—that vie for governance of my actions in any given situation, and frankly I have kind of a hard time following through with evil or even basically amoral actions in video games. In other words, Softy wins most of the time.

The other day I managed to get in my first few minutes of Dragon Age (yes, lttp), and I decided to play as a dwarf. I almost never play dwarves. Evil Genius said, "Let's play a dwarf. We never do that. It'll be fun. New horizons." Softy said, "I concur."

Well, there happen to be two kinds of dwarves to play in DA, nobles and commoners, and I thought the dwarven noble was a better fit for the Thorin Oakenshield (okay, Binwin Bronzebottom) flavor I was looking for. As it happens, there's a lot of room in the dwarven noble's life for arrogant, elitist ugliness. Evil Genius thought, "Awesome! This'll really let us stretch our legs!" Softy said, "Hmmmm."

There were, by my count, two major crossroads in my short play session where I made a real impact on what my character will become. At one, I was given the opportunity to chastise, punish, kill (I think), or praise a dwarven scholar writing a book questioning the authenticity of a rival house's founder. At the other, I had to decide whether to go along with a dwarven lord's seemingly magnanimous plan to restore noble rights and privileges to surface-dwelling dwarf expats. That's a big thing, I guess, because the dwarves in this game interpret moving to the surface as a fundamental rejection of the dwarven way of doing things.

My inner professor won out big-time in the first quandary, and Softy's belief that "The truth should always be known!" didn't really conflict with Evil Genius' opinion, which was "The only power this scholar's research undermines is that rival house's, and screw those guys." The scholar got a hearty clap on the back, and the angered member of the other house got a giant middle finger. Everybody won. Except the member of the rival house.

The second decision, um, turned out weird, frankly. Evil Genius' totally reasonable protests that I was playing against character in voting to help out the surface-dwellers, because that was the decision I started out making, were drowned out by Softy's whole "just think of those poor surface dwarves and the pain they must be feeling! Oh, the humanity!" thing. But THEN another dwarf pulled me aside and warned me that I was playing right into the hands of our mutual enemies—i.e., houses who'd never lost members to the surface world and stood nothing to lose if the expats' rights were restored. Our houses, she pointed out, would by contrast end up losing an awful lot of money on this thing. In other words, the lord who'd petitioned me for help was really just trying to advance his house at the expense of my house's coffers.

Well, I did what any reasonable noble dwarf would do: I marched right back to that Lord Dace and told him I was on to his paltry scheme. He basically said, "Oh, whatever. Welcome to politics, kid." So I told him his little tricks were an insult to my house. Here he was pulling this crap at my debutant ball, after all.

If this happened in real life, probably I'd challenge someone's honor, and that would be the end of it. But regardless of how dishonorable they act, nobility—like white-suited, revolver-carrying Southern gentlemen—want to appear honorable, so calling this guy out committed me to a fight to the death with his son! Evil Genius crowed victoriously! Softy collapsed in a heap on the floor.

I won the fight, because pretty much every other dwarf in town sucks at fighting, and the other lord hung his head and said something like, "My machinations have led to the death of my own son." "That's right! Suck it!" exulted Evil Genius. Softy twitched imperceptibly from his place on the floor.

As I told my students the other night, I usually can't act well enough and/or distance myself from those computer-generated NPCs enough to really start acting like a monster. I got the teensiest little ways down the path on the Temple of Shadows initiation quests in Fable II before I felt horrible and couldn't go any further. Hell, I felt awful when Sheriff Simms and I busted in on Mr. Burke in Moriarty's bar in my first game of Fallout 3 and the sheriff ended up dead. The twist of the knife came when I ran into his orphaned son later and realized this poor little guy was all alone in the world. All alone in this computer-generated, fictional world. Yeah, Softy tends to run the show.

I don't know if it's my upbringing or not, but I think I have almost as hard a time treating NPCs like trash as I do people in RL. My inner lawman just down't let me play it otherwise. Oh, except in DA, apparently. I'm interested to see how my little duelin' Dalton (see what I did there) turns out.

The picture of the angry dwarf above comes from paizo.com.