I love roleplaying murphy as he is, its great fun. He does have a softer side but only a very very select few get to see that

It's a matter of making sure you have their personality firmly in your head before you begin playing them. I've had a very dominant, slightly pushy characters, I've had massively shy characters, combat oriented characters (which I am SO not)...but then I've an advantage. I've been a GM of table RPG's for more years than I wanna admit to. So I've had to play out all the NPC's in every campaign I ever ran. When you're trying to keep 10 different characters 'unique' based only on speech styles and attitudes, you learn to RP things that aren't 'you' very quickly. Makes things fun.

And Murph's got an awesome soft side if you're ever lucky enough to see it. the Murph

everyone loves the murph!

i'm gonna get a heap of requests for cuddles now, which will be beaten off with large sticks with spikey orbs attacks to them. You have to really know me to get any of that, no random snugglers!

I think you need to change your avatar before you get any snuggles.

excellent, i'll leave the avatar in place.

I'll have to get fain to do me a signature with an even more badass clown

Aww, I'll give you snugglies even with the nasty clown avatar.

Wait, wait, what I meant to say is...far more people will snuggle you with that clown avatar than with some badass one that doesn't involve stupid looking clowns.

Yeees. >_>

pennywise give you nightmares there shiri ya big princess?

No, it just looks utterly ridiculous and it makes it completely impossible to take you seriously at all.

your badger hanpuppet is worse

Hmmm, probably.

Taking (sensible) recommendations for a better one!

get ialie to draw you a fox....

problem solvered

And everyone who knows where this clown comes from would never, ever snuggle him.

As far as I'm concerned it's "that bloody Orclach with the hurty flails" whenever I see it in any context.

That's entirely not true -- I think you have me mixed up with someone else. I was the one trying to convince people you could do that when no one believed me. And trying to insist that there was roleplay going on in Kalodan when no one could see that, too.

I think if you go back onto the Polls forum you'll find yourself asking what people think of the job you were doing as Erion and you'll find me saying that while I had my reservations about some of it, I thought well of your roleplaying and your contribution of a role that I didn't think I could do.

Edit: Also, might be you misunderstood something I might have said about Erion, the character, not being as deep as Kalodan, as referring to the capabilities of the player.

dammit, my flails aren't damage hurty anymore, watch your limb damage though -g-

I agree with Roark that the hardest thing is playing someone very unlike yourself. But I think that you have to ask another question. There's a difference of kind, not just of quantity, when you play one character for a long time and see him or her through a lot of changes in life, compared to when you play a character through only a short series of events that don't involve any significant development. There are lots of ideas that are very very easy to play for a short while that are much harder to sustain. In fact, some of the hardest roleplaying challenges are to do something that's laughably easy to do for a short term, and sustain it over an entire lifetime.

For me, the most interesting challenge is always in the long term. Play a character so that thirty game years later, people say things like "I knew her when she was just a novice, and no one would have thought that she'd end up like she did... she sure changed a lot, but I never really noticed the changes, each one was so small a step that followed so logically from what came before. I suppose if one looked really closely at her back in her novice days, one could see all of what she's become, but no one looked that closely."

That's the real challenge, and it's very, very rewarding. Particularly if, at the start, even you don't know what your character will end up becoming in the end, but even so, when you get there, people can see the seeds of it in your early days. And doubly so if all these aspects of the character over time are not just reflections of you. Not many can pull that off. In fact, most people don't even realize when someone else is pulling it off near them, while it's happening. Some won't even pick up on it after the fact.

i believe personally, a character begins life with a set of roleplay guidelines, and that is apt to change depending on victories, losses, people who train them, people who they meet, other trials etc which shapes their character. Murphy started out as a jolly, joking type who liked to go raiding but wasn't very good, and he was nice to everyone.

well over his life he's had a lot of bad shit go down, especially with fighting serens, the thing with ialie (and thusly he now hates serenwilde for driving his ialie away so long ago) and a few other issues, has caused him to become who he is today. Valek had a large impact on him combat and attitude wise, where murphy took after valek in a few regards (not the blatant OOC and other things, but his more IC times) As did Ethelon in some regards, and daevos + ixion too.

Hmm, I find it hard to play my characters out as serious, solemn, quiet, etc. It's just that when people are nice and bouncy to me, I just want to be just as ecstatic and happy as they are, and I always end up being a 'nice' guy. I guess in the back of your head you still retain some of your real-life mentality... which I need to get rid of! But anyways, playing a character who's personality is opposite from yours is definitely challenging (DUH).

As for roles I think that are interesting and would be hard to carry out):
- A Celestian who thinks the Taint is not an opposing threat but another lifeform in the Basin and tries to get both sides to acknowledge this and live peacefully (don't laugh!)
- A Magnagoran who tries to expand the Taint not by power and might, but through words and manipulation, and converts a few people to join the Taint claiming that it is a wonderful gift. (people are probably already saying this, but haven't seen too many people 'willingly' join the Taint in order to gain strength and power)

Ah, Murphy. Who'd know you were an Aussie?

On topic, though...
I tend to find it easiest initially to roleplay someone completely different to me, because then there are very definite guidelines about the personality.

Over a long period of time, though - as in something like this where it's a fairly regular thing (read: unhealthy addiction) - the characters I stick with tend to be a lot more like me. I think it's simply because when there is so much actual socialising going on as part of the game, I end up feeling restricted if I have to channel too much of it through a different personality.
That's not to say I don't roleplay on a long-term basis - rather, I find it more enjoyable in that situation when my character is a little closer to me on a very basic level.

Probably why it worked so well for me when my long-time Aetolian character started out rather 'dark', to explain it briefly, and through a dynamic, changing life became a long-time, devoted Druid. I thoroughly enjoy the 'changing' part of character's lives.