I think I blame many modern writers. I've recently started GMing for some younger Gamers (high schoolers) and they seem to default to angst/emo stuff for character depth.

Of course there are lots of other ways to add character depth. In Shadowrun a healthy relationship or good trait is odd enough to add some surprising depth. There are plenty of ways to be disfunctional and there is always the more hardboiled self loathing that you cope with using a stiff jaw and scotch. Or having something to be passionate about. Living style over substance. And so on.

The question is how to "sell" that to players and get them to do it well, especially "kids" who only know hardboiled as it pertains to eggs, haven't read anything cyberpunk yet, but have read some Drek called "Twighlight" .

(As a side note I think some also try to use being antisocial, a loner, or psychopathic for character depth, but really these are just standard 2D trenchcoater fare.)

That's probably due to the age of your players. There's a reason why the angsty teen stereotype manages to endure.

You have a unique opportunity here. You have the chance to teach these kids how to roleplay. I suggest you approach it like teaching them how to act. Have them start with one or two defining characteristics of their character, and revolve everything else around that. Show them how to take a piece of themselves, and exaggerate it, to create a different character. If you know it, try teaching them Method acting.

For their age they aren't bad at roleplaying. That isn't the issue. It's that what the choose to roleplay revolves around angst/emo and all to similar themes.

Hence why part of my question is how to "sell" other styles/personalities.

The other key part being how to get them to do something else well instead of it falling flat (I suppose something like Method might help there).

Check some TV and anime series, and see if you find some non-emo characters they might like.

Possible non-emo role models for Shadowrunners:

City Hunter:
Ryo Saeba
Umibozu

Angel Heart:
Glass Heart

Full Metal Panic:
Sousuke Sagara
Kurtz
Sergeant Major Mao

Have them read William S. Burroughs or watch modern film noir movies like Memento or Salton Sea. There's tons of countercultural material out there for the budding (post)cyberpunk fan. If you want to keep kids from playing stereotypical characters you need to pull them away from the Blade Runner and Matrix-esque stuff.

The funny thing is that people often times use angst and emo characters as a way to avoid role playing, whether or not they know it. Tell me whats easier, making a good, believable back story and personality for your character, and thinking about how they would react to each situation based on previous experience, or coming up with some generic story about loss and angst and having the character react the same way to everything?

As mentioned above, suggest that they base their characters on a character they like. I've based characters off of Firefly, Ghost in the Shell, Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, Indiana Jones, even X-Files. While they still need to work to make their character unique, having a good archtype to base yourself off of helps the process.

Make them make Golgo 13 ripoffs.

asshole characters.
seriously, the way to go O.o
nothing bad happening in the past, just growing up and having been born with a mean streak.
just be mean for the hell of it. have fun being mean. don't whine about all the world being bad.
don't be mean because you want your revenge against some wrong that happened to you . . .
tragical background sadly is the easiest to write somehow.
'cause revenge is as good a reason to go into the shadows as anything else . .
but try to come up with a background for some jolly good old nice fella with a good sense of humor and nothing really bad happening to him being in the shadows . .
not born poor having to endure some hardships, never knew anything else . . just happy go lucky character that is an active shadowrunner . . if you can come up with
such a backgroundstory, i am SO stealing it . .

>or coming up with some generic story about loss and angst

This is a good point. To that end the characters have to have something that they care about. New players don't want to write that into there characters for couple reasons. Caring makes you vulnerable, and that doesn't jibe with the power fantasy. So you do a little judo and make get them to justify there numbers. Feng Shui of all sources gave me a great bit of advice on getting past that. Point out that it is imposable to get and maintain world class skills in a vacuum. Make them roll up the the gang where they learned there fighting skills and the Prime Runner Evil Sith mentor prime runner who trained them from in there two 5 or a 6 and then fell out some how. Then get the player to round out the community the character uses to maintain the skill and you get both a source of friends plausible contacts, and something they care able with out feeling saddled with a permanent umbrella mission like a kid sister or something.

Second witting up friends, families, ex's, passions, and betrayals takes a knowledge of the setting green RPers don't have. A pinky/Trog Romio and Juliet angle would make for some great Shadow Run, but no noob is going to write that up without help because they don't know there is a lot to mine there. Give there age and experience your players are likely a little afraid of looking dumb by writing up elements that not compatible with cannon, or are just irrelevant.

Lastly, and this is more general advice, people do the best they know at everything they care about. If you want your players to RP better look for what is stopping them from RPing better and remove it.

I've never had this problem, but then again, my players are oddballs, as am I. And even the emo kid doesn't make emo characters

Try telling them to model character's after a personality they would like to play in a team setting rather than focusing on a backstory. Sometimes a personality and chemistry fulfilling a certain outlook or counter outlook in a team setting is really useful. Get the player who models his hacker after Tommy Chong who instead of being blown out of his mind from pot, is an aging hippy who lost some brain cells from BTLs "back in the day." Get a player to a dumb "Kung Fool" expert who is so dumb he pipes up and says ridiculous things that everybody knows they could never ever do or listen to, but they keep the dude around because he is handy in a pinch. Have them watch a lot of stereotypical action movies and make them fulfill roles from one of those. Hell, whenever someone new starts in our group, we always like them to model their character's personality after some actor or character they can emulate.

Bah, back when I was that age, half of my characters were orphans whose parents got killed in some gruesome manner or another. The other half were superpowered genetic experiments who never had parents in the first place. You tend to grow out of it after awhile.

Anyway, as a GM, you can always introduce them to some cool NPCs who aren't all angsty and emo, just to show them that it's possible to be an interesting person without harboring a burning hatred for all of existence. Playing up on relationships between characters is a good way to show them that a PC without any attachments is, quite frankly, kinda boring to play.

My elf gun-bunny, Kerrigan, is a hyperactive goth who's only running in the shadows because it's something to do. She was trained in her magic to be a bodyguard, but was told to go off to gain some real world experience before she'll be allowed to be a full partner.

I actually usually run new players through a game of 7th Sea before I send them through another game system like D&D, nWoD, or of course, Shadowrun(yes I play a lot of game systems). The system has a number of mechanics in it to encourage good role playing. First there is the drama dice system, which encourages players to stick their neck out and do crazy awesome things. There is also a backround system in which you create various bad things about your character(old rivals, lost loves, hidden identities, weaknesses, bad guys who want you dead, people you want to kill, and so on) and you gain extra XP when they become part of a plot.

I've done similar things in shadowrun, rewarding good roleplaying by refreshing an edge or two(though what kind of role playing I reward differs in shadowrun then from a system based on 17th century pirate action drama), and rewarding an extra karma or two in a run focuses on a character and their background. So if you build a runner with a little sister dependent, sure that's a weakness, but when it comes time to save her, you might come out a little stronger for it. It's enough to encourage role playing, without making people who are bad at role playing feel punished.

One of my favorite characters, Car, is a well-adjusted, good spirited guy who runs the shadows because he wants to. When he was growing up in the Baltimore suburbs, in an upper middle class family, he and his sister really loved watching old flatvids. He got it into his head to be James Bond. Therefore he worked extra jobs, studied hard, and used his savings and college fund to fund training and minor augmentation in order to become a shadowrunner. When he thought he was ready he moved to Seattle and did his best to infiltrate the 'runner scene. He succeeded. Of course, he discovered that it's not all fun and excitement, but he stuck with it. Eventually after living through Survival of the Fittest he retired from shadowrunning and went into fixing. Today he is a major fixer with international connections and works with the best the shadows have to offer.

So there, Stahlseele, I already had a nice guy with a nice background, a good sense of humor and a strong moral code who ended up in the shadows. Although many would point out that someone with those resources seeking out a life of danger and pain have a few screws loose, I would have to agree. He does have a few screws loose. I would contend that anyone wanting to be a career soldier in the Special Forces similarly has a few screws loose. After all, it takes all kinds.

It should be noted, that while overly angsty/emo characters are annoying, that doesn't mean that all characters with a tragic past are bad character designs. The fact is, if you are living the UCAS dream, you most likely are not going to take to the shadows. Unless you are some rich corp kid who wants to find some excitement, something beyond your control probably put you in the shadows. The character who's family was killed by a Red Samurai raid, the rich entrepreneur who lost it all in the crash, a sprawl ganger who lost their arm in a gang war, when all his buddies lost their life. These are all promising character backstories all of which would be profoundly affected by the tragedy in their lives. The key thing is that they have lives though, they do more then just brood about their crappy past, they have likes and dislikes, goals and fears, they look to the future as well as the past, whether it's just to get enough money for that wiz new cybergun, or to finally find homes for all the orphened children they had been supporting by running.

I could write an entire essay on making good character concepts(and I might someday), they key thing to remember is that no good character is every built with one dimension, just like real people, good characters have many dimensions, and they don't always make perfect sense.

Exactly. The problem with emo character is not that they have a tragic past or that they aren't happy or even that they listen to The Cure. The problem is that it's their only characteristic.

It's the same problem with cybered killing machines and mysterious mages: you can't be a killing machine or a mysterious guy all the time. My rule of thumb: if you can't imagine your character going to the laundromat or the stuffer shack, then he's lacking depth.

I like that. Punchy.

To the people advocating relationships. I actually do that. The romantic interest is probably at this point my default thing to develop a bad roleplayer. The problem here being that their emo/angst books/whatever feature lots of relationships and all too often the relationship is used as an angst soundboard.

Also if I haven't said it I do forum games and this one has to stay PG/PG-13 tops. Which limits me more than I expected...


Thanks for a number of the resources/shows mentioned.

Also I generally agree with TheOOB. Most runners have a screw loose or some major issue, possibly a troubled past of some kind. But even James Bond had the classic orphan background and you don't get much less emo than Bond. But the same deal for a lot of contemporary characters.

I always try to make my players give me (as GM) something to work with and exercise their past and current relationships. Give me a reason you have those skills, and while you're at it, give me a couple contacts that you knew from that part of your life. In fact, give me at least one contact from all the different jobs you had (exaggerating). I'll make sure for whatever reason your old high school nerd buddy pops up and want's to hang to kill your one dimensional angsty emo mood.

Somebody should come up with a list of questions one could answer to give their characters more depth. Maybe like twenty of them. =i)

Seriously, though, if the Twenty Questions in whichever edition of Shadowrun you prefer is inadequate to your needs, I suggest taking a look at the Character Quiz in Phage Press's Amber Diceless game. Good stuff there.

Again the problem is in how they'd answer them. Again these people want to have character depth, and try to add it. They just seem to feel that depth=angst.

Besides, the questions don't in and of themselves add depth. They help to set up a basic personality and backround but they really don't serve the answer the question "How does my character react to this given situation" if anything they are best to show other people so they understand a bit about your character.

Direct them to media with better writing? It's not like you're doing this in meatspace, where you could force them to watch something.

A couple of good superstitions and some religion can help define a character pretty quickly. It's the Sixth World, after all; a healthy fear of large black cats isn't entirely unreasonable anymore.

I don't really see the problem with letting a person play the character they want to play. I mean sure, you might find it less than ideal, or only two-dimensional, but if the player is having fun and getting what they want out of the game, why should you force them to add 'depth' they don't want to add, or become 'more creative' with their characterizations?

In my opinion, it is best to just let the player play the game the way they want to play it. Most players will evolve naturally themselves, especially when exposed to other players who put a lot of 'depth' into their own characters, or even better, a GM who isn't afraid to pour on the characterizations in the social scenes, and plays up the day-to-day life of the PCs. I don't feel that there is a need to 'teach' players to be better role-players, or force them into playing characterizations they don't really feel comfortable with, or aren't ready for themselves.

The best answer is the question why? If they can't answer Why then their character does not have a back story.

One of my characters has abandonment issues. Why? Because he went on a run and way betrayed by one of the team. He spent three years in jail for it and was sprung on an extraction mission led by the fixer who regarded him as a son. He is slow to trust, and fiercely loyal. Bamn if you can't answer the why or the how then you have a bad backstory.

Also keep in mind with the whole angst/emo thing, there is a difference between ''emo'' and actual ''tragedy''. There is nothing, IMO, wrong with a tragedy in a character's past-hell, it sucks but most real-life people have a piece of tragedy or two in their past-death of a parent, friend or sibling, a long marriage ending, massive falling out with an old friend that turned ugly, etc. Some of these things can, and do, add depth to a character.

One of my own favorite characters, a sorta repo-man named Leon Sparta, does have a bit of tragedy in his far past which explains some of the things he does now-but generally, he's actually quite a good-natured guy, willing to help in ways that he can, which usually means hitting things very, very hard, lifting them, or throwing them(and while he's very cunning-he's a bit dim. It adds to his general likability; i found.) Hell, Ive had my friends tell me to play him, because they like the character so much; he's just a big, kinda lunk-headed womanizing prettyboy who likes to drink and pick up girls at a bar, but there is a lot more to him underneath, and a little of the tragedy that happened to him in his youth did help shape it.

Some tragedy sprinkled about can explain things and actually add a little bit of realism if you want it(it's a rarity for someone to have lived a 100% super-perfect happy life, IMO, unfortunately), but I admit there comes a time where it can go overboard(to ''emo-land.'' as people like to say. )

It's also hard to have a 100% super happy life that leads to you being a criminal for hire with magical powers or cybernetic implants. Shadowrunning is not a good enviroment for those who value honesty and healthy, stable relationships. Life is already about compromise even for normal people with normal problems. The Sixth World, unfortunately, is in large part defined by its hard truths.

I think the key is balancing the angst/tragedy to a point where it's not ''oh, god. another person whose entire family was killed in a drop bear attack, whose wife was eaten by a giant squid, his second wife commiting suicide after she lost all of their money, and he had to sell his own limbs and get cyber replacements because he got more money selling his regular limbs than he had to pay for the cyber. Oh, his enemy also killed his little dog too'' nor is it ''100% happy fun club, all the time!''

while i agree that using angst as your only character hook is lame, as others have said, it does have its place, where one is not likely to find themselves in the position of listing "criminal" as their profession without SOME wrong turns in your past. my current character is an orphan (de-facto "orphaned" at 13, anyway) who grew up in the barrens. which is a REALLY stereotypical shadowrunner backstory, yes, but a lot of the character inspiration comes from a friend of mine who was abandoned by her parents when she was 13, and who grew up on the street, so natch, nobody can say it's not realistic

also, sometimes the 20 questions can be a hindrance to some players: i know that i don't like to make too much of my characters' personalities set in stone before i have actually played them for a few sessions: a lot of what i do outside of running is stuff i come up with on the fly while we're playing; like, i'm trying to hack a maglock, and i think, "goddamn, i can't wait to finish this run and go smoke a joint and play Dawn of Atlantis." or "i was just flirting with the Face in our group to mess around with him, and maybe rip him off later, but then this crazy razorgirl showed up and now SHE'S flirting with him, and suddenly she and i are casting dirty glances back and forth."

i guess that may count as a more organic style of character development, but it works for me. i think it works a lot better than building a bunch of backstory hooks into your character only to get frustrated by the things you put down on paper that never end up being relevant in the game, or stuff that you later think is too unrealistic

Ya know I'm getting the feeling a lot of people on this board have a hard time differentiatiating angst/emo and tragedy/troubled past.

Most action characters have a tragedy and troubled past. But it doesn't have to generate angst, emo, or crazed psychopathy. Like pretty much the entire casts of Firefly and Sin City for example. Ok, a couple emoish chars in there. But most are put together and go a different direction with the stuff.

For example Malcom could get his emo on about losing the war, dead war buddies, the feeling of betrayal in the valley, being abandoned by his father, any number of things. But he doesn't. And it isn't ignored by the character either, they're frequently used as motivating and character development points. Just not in an emo way.

getting back to the OP. One thing you might do is leverage the mentor spirits. If you PCs all have emo bullshit you could have a mentor spirit give them a way to overcome that.

Lets see, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, angst is:

"A feeling of anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression. "

And emo is just a genre of music usually heavy with self loathing and depression.

How I generally define an angsty/emo character who's primary reaction to ever situation is self-loathing and/or feeling sorry for themselves, oftentimes constantly referencing a past event that causes them to be this way. For some reason people seem to think that these are good characters to play and that always hating yourself is good roleplay, but I personally find characters who have the same response to everything to be annoying.

Anyways, i think wikitropes has a good article on emo

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Emo

Emo is so ridiculous that I have just invented a new word for it....


Ricockulous! Just like ridiculous, only more so.

so would it be emo do to a facepalm and ask in a whiny voice:"why me?" when someone else does/says something excruciatingly stupid?

Yes.

I define Emo as the celebration of Weltschmerz. Coincidentially I therefore define today's Gothic as Emo + Harry Potter.

For your players: They're in high school, that's pretty much the most valid reason, why their characters are so angst-ridden.

I'm sorry, but I really can't take 'Emo' seriously. I guess it doesn't help that whenever I read the word, I picture 'Elmo' instead.

In a non-creepy way or do you mean the psychopathic fey/Belkar Bitterleaf variety?

The former is relatively easy in a hooding-based campaign and a good way to portray a character with strong convictions as someone who doesn't fall into the self-righteous crusader category.
Or you come up with a character who just can deal with hardships by being upbeat, who's got a "if it's not enough to make you cry, laugh about it" or "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"mindset, not necessarily a chronic optimist, but someone who's a realist who can deal with the inevitable.
Such a character can easily become the moral backbone of the team, the one who holds everything together when things get messy.

The latter, of course, is loads of fun, too.

It generally helps to build characters as a group, asigning each player not only a strategical role, but also a social one, to facilitate interaction between the characters.

It is best to base this of protagonists in TV series, movies or comic books who rely on an ensemble of characters, as pop culture has well-established, easily combinable archetypes.

Fortunately, the good people at tvtropes.org have taken the effort to categorize these archetypes and provide a plethora of examples in the character tropes section of their wiki :

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Characters

Damn, just saw that the site has already been mentioned upthread.
Whatever.

Urban dictionary beat you by over four years. Looks like you'll have to shred your patent application.

Since we're talking about emo the thing that really bugs me about it is that I can't tell the difference between a kid who is just trying to be cool and fit in and one that's actually about to off themselves or in need of some real help.

Come to think of it eight years back if I had players acting this way I'd be asking them if they had problems in real life and this was some kinda call for help. But I'm pretty sure they're just being dramatic the only way they know how.

Anyway so it sounds like a good first move would be to try and push them towards some good non emo stuff.

I guess I'd get more milage out of stuff that's free online via Hulu, or pretty much any anime series. Lots of manga is online too. Um, if you don't know Hulu go there now, watch Burn Notice if you haven't yet if they haven't pulled the episodes, maybe the Sarah Conner Chronicles or Dresden files if they have.

So from this thread:

Anime:
City Hunter
Angel Heart (really? )
Full Metal Panic
Outlaw Star
Cowboy Bebop (and stop them before the last couple episodes...)
Golgo 13
Ghost in the Shell

Hulu (at least they might be there)
Firefly
X-Files (really? Moulder could be a bit of a whiney bitch)
Indiana Jones
Anything Bond
Burn notice (at least I think this one would be good)

From the paying catagory


Books
William S. Burroughs
Maybe the Gibson stuff
Most of the SR novels (going to hell and back in a Hawaiian shirt, now that's class)
Sin City

Movies
Memento
Salton Sea

I do like the bit about imagining them going to the laundromat and trying to pull them into some of the more "normal" or possibly even happy aspects of "real" life when they aren't running. Though sadly nearly anything can be emoized.

"As I sit in the grimy Puyallup laundromat, watching with melancholy eyes as my pathetic collection of black clothing spins around and around through the rinse cycle, I am reminded once again of the sheer uselessness of the life cycle in which we are all just spinning aimlessly."

I'm not sure whether that's so emo I want to vomit, or whether it's painfully awesome.

Since I'm pretty sure he's being sarcastic, Awsome.

To offer a counterpoint - imagine if you'd only have emotionless killing machines to deal with, characters with no personality at all past "kill stuff, get paid, buy more stuff to kill more stuff" routines, who wade through corpses without any reaction at all. It can be hard to have a grim and gritty dystopian campaign if there is no emotional reaction to it from the characters. It can look and feel more like a reskinned Dungeon crawl in such cases.

So, don't be too worried about emo characters, it could be worse.

Damn. It figures though, I'm always late.

I got a new player today. (Don't mind the "host" stuff, that's specific to my game)



I can't fault them for lack of effort or plot hooks. (They wrote some other stuff too.)

Just, well, you know.

I think the real problem is that because these kids are young and inexperienced roleplayers they don't understand the immense value in showing not telling.

"Malone was feeling down about his dead brother. He knocked back a shot of synthahol to dull the pain inside, and then put on a brave face."

It's trash because it's overt, and they're telling you how the character is feeling, which comes across as forced and tacky.

"Malone thumbed the shot glass, staring it down with bleary eyes. His eye drifted to the photo in his right hand, smiling faces, a dog with it's tongue lolling, a fresh-faced young lad with his arm around his lilttle brother. He sniffed loudly and lay the photo face down with a care the hulk of a man looked unnacustomed to, rubbing his eyes discretely and saying in his strongest, most authoritative shadowrunner tone, 'Another. In a clean glass, this time."

In this example we get the same information, that Malone is sad because his brother died, but instead of describing ("telling"), we get a look (showing) at Malone's state of mind through the way he acts.

This is why physical and mental quirks are so important (see 20 Questions) for a character. Take my czech hacker, Beta, for example. Sure, her mother and best childhood friend were murdered violently at the hand of a Shedim possessing her father. Sounds like the typical emo backstory, right? To work this in and make it relevant, rather than Beta constantly referencing her dead parents, instead she displays fear and discomfort at the sight and smell of meat, and also has a phobia of physical contact and intimacy with others. To get the intimacy and sexual gratification she shuns she lives a voyeuristic life over the matrix, and drowns herself in BTL porn sims.

That's part of why Wujcik's quiz is so brilliant. There are questions in there that offer some character depth without favoring drama or angst. For example, "How does your character get his or her laundry done?" is more clever than it might seem at first blush. It explores some depth of the character while forcing overly dramatic or angsty answers to be just silly. When the player starts exploring the more mundane aspects of the character, he or she stops being a two-dimensional pulp character with an angsty background and starts to develop.

Some of the Twenty Questions in Runner's Companion try to do this, too, but you can only cram so much into twenty questions.

Any of that online?