You don’t have to play a specific story line that someone else sets up for you, it’s up to you as a player what you are comfortable playing. This is where YOUR creativity can take off! Remember role playing is a lot like writing a book, but it is also like living another life at times. You can have your character live and grow anywhere you want. It can be a real location with research so you don’t mess it up, or you can change the area to meet your needs. This is called “creating an alternate reality” so that your characters life goes how you want it. You don’t even have to play present day! You can play in the present, in the past or even create a future to your liking!

 

Your setting can even effect what type of personality and history your character can have, it’s free roam! If you want you can even change your character to take more effect over the setting. Once again I’ll stick closer to realistic. I liked the New York City setting, but say I want to show more of Iasons underground life instead of playing out a school scenario. I create a club, give it a name, even describe the illegal things that can take place in it. Maybe I just prefer to play him in a different school where he’s not a bully, just a quiet student who shies away from attention. All of these are possibilities.

 

You choose where your character is, why he’s there and what he is doing. This is what makes it fun! It’s a life you choose to make and interact with. Anything from a mafia life to creating underground fighting pits or the perfect life of a rich big house, cloths and items you can’t afford! You can play in your own country or take it to another country and city all together, even play in the wilderness! This is a tough thing for most new players, but it’s a good way to expand your horizons and develop your writing skills and imagination!

 

Now that you have taken the reigns though you can begin to create your own world and what is in it. You can make up new technology or remove the items you don’t like from it. You can give your character room to grow that it may not have in a restricted story you did not create. Even if you didn’t create the setting however you CAN add or take away things that you want to inside of another’s story idea. Even setting up your characters room to look how you want can be fun and challenging. What makes it even better is how much description you put into it, it takes work, but it can be done with some effort. It’s fun and the more vivid you can make it the easier it is for both players to interact with.

 

The biggest ‘no-no’ in settings though is once described to have something new miraculously appear in the setting without previous description that it was there or a description of where it could have come from. For instance you can’t just out of an empty room come up with a blanket, cloths or a restrictive item suddenly be picked up from the floor without mentioning it’s presence before hand. This is like saying a person can enter an empty room in real life and not notice a street cone sitting in front of them.

 

Now that we have the basic idea for what a setting can be I’ll move into the more complicated areas of what you can do with your character, the fantasy element.