I roleplay in RPGs. The more I replay a game the more intricate my roleplaying will be. In Mass Effect, for example, I will create a Shepard who is weary of aliens and as more aliens join the crew, they become less prejudice. I also pretty much roleplay in any game that allows it. When I play Madden’s franchise mode I’ll deliberately play poorly if my quarterback is bad.
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Yes and I have the fanfics about my OCs to prove it.
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I wish I could be an ass in RPGs.
Every time I start a play that allows me that (The Witcher, Fallout, etc.) I try to, but then I look at the benefits of being the good guy and fail myself 
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do i RP in RPGs? hah haha, why would i ever do that… i definitely don’t have folders full of screenshots of all the characters i make in games… that would be wild huh…
but yes, i definitely do if given the opportunity. only exception is when i want to play mean characters, i generally have to play the game with a nice character first to make myself not feel bad about it because i’m a sucker.
also, going back through DA2 and playing humorous asshole hawke was the best. the queasy crow flies at midnight 
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Man, I could be here for hours going on about the stupid complex back stories of my incredible player characters. I’m particularly attached to my Captains, characters who fight exclusively with shields(or as close to such as possible). I name them “Captain name of in-game location” every time. The greatest heroes the world has ever known.
It’s super interesting here that the most common answer is yes.
Anyways, I don’t ever. I never go into, for example a Mass Effect playthrough, and think about how a War Hero Shepard would react based on a Shepard whose home was destroyed as a child.
Any choices generally come down to how I personally feel about something, but not that I’m role playing as myself, if that makes any sense.
Of the modern fallouts, new Vegas is the only one I feel can competently support robust role playing. You can obviously head canon anything in any game and you still have to in NV but I just feel it’s the most built for it since your character has such a non-specific background and a motivation that doesn’t conflict with most things you can spend time on in the game
Actually, DA2 was also the first game that got me to do this. I often used to really just play games ideally, either essentially playing someone who shared all of my views, or using walkthroughs to get whatever the “best” outcome was, keep the most people alive, etc.
[spoiler]But as I started to get into DA2, I got a better feel for who my Hawke was and the decisions he would make. He was humorous, but this was at least partially a barrier he put between himself and those around him. An outsider in all things, he was a warrior whose only connection to the templars and mages was the sister who he lost at the end of Act 1, yet still he was uniquely principled, and instinctively knew what was happening to the mages was wrong. He would let his guard down and fall for Anders, and yet, when what happened at the end of Act 3 did happen, the last member of a cursed family, Hawke stabbed him in the back (a scene that goes much different in my head than it does on screen), and does his best to protect the mages still alive in the city.
I also ended up leaving Hawke in the Fade in DAI, as the final keystone in the Hawke family history. But with that in mind, as much as it’s set up that Hawke can return in a later game, I can imagine it being even better that he’s so headstrong as to survive even that. I love the idea of a character who is not chosen, but is nonetheless great out of character and determination alone. Idk, I like Hawke, and I’ve definitely gone back and played DA2 a few different ways since, but that was the first.[/spoiler]
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I would say that I do as much as the game encourages/allows it.
That probably needs some explanation. Let’s start here: I can’t do headcanons. It just doesn’t work for me, I’m a strong believer of the principle that ‘if it isn’t in the game, it doesn’t exist’. As a result, I actually really dislike the ‘blank slate’ protagonists you often see - my favorite RPG protagonists are people like Hawke, or Geralt, or even Adam Jensen, who have sharply defined histories and personalities, and your job as the player is more to interpret than to create the character. Mass Effect is my favorite series of games ever, but I often kind of feel left out by the people who strongly identify with ‘their’ Shepard - to me s/he was always too defined by the events of the game to really influence them in a way I really liked.
This has become especially pronounced in recent years as I’ve gotten more into tabletop RPGs, where roleplaying is more freeform and player driven instead of author driven, as in most CRPGs. Then the problem is almost opposite, especially in games like D&D. It can be hard for players to craft motivations and backgrounds and personalities from whole cloth, and I’ve often seen it devolve into parties merely becoming groups of murder-hobos, just following leads to find more enemies to kill and treasure to raid. That’s a legitimate playstyle, to be fair, just not one I find particularly interesting.
(Sorry for the wall of text; this is just something I’ve been thinking about for a while.)
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If we’re talking single player RPGs, I tend to do what I feel is right, or comes up with the best ending. I might think of dialogue my character would say in their choices, but I typically tend to do what I want.
Now, mmorpgs however…I literally have a three page word document detailing each of my characters within Guild Wars 2. I’ve never left the beginning areas with most of them, but each has a detailed backstory that make them individually unique. Their decisions, however slight in these types of games, are all based on them and their backgrounds, and it’s pretty cool. (I also did this with Xenoverse, but that’s less of an rpg so I don’t really count it)
I find it really really difficult to play an asshole in RPGs with one amazing exception - Alpha Protocol, a game I love for a lot of reasons. The game outright encourages you to be manipulative, but what really tipped me over was finding cosmetic pilot sunglasses I could wear very early in the game. As soon as I was able to customize my character to LOOK like an ass, I found it incredibly easy to PLAY one. I’m kind of sad so few games give me the leeway to do that sort of thing.
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Similar to @GLAVONAK and many others in this thread, I hardly used to, but it’s become the norm for me in recent years. I don’t know — I think that when I first started getting into RPGs, I had so much experience with action-centric games that the idea of roleplaying seemed odd, like an unnecessary investment of effort. I’d play games for the sake of experiencing the stories they told, without putting much thought into how my character fit into that world.
I’m not sure if there was any one game that made me change my stance, so much as it was a gradual progression. Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins were definitely early catalysts in pushing me to branch out and think about my avatar’s deeper motivations. I put a lot of time into Fallout 3/NV, creating multiple characters, which is when I started thinking beyond the same generic self-inserts I’d often created. These days, I can spend literal hours in the character creation screen of any RPG, sculpting the perfect image and forming an emotional attachment to this make-believe character. As I play the game, I consider what their motivations are, how they’d approach certain situations, and how the events of the game they experience would shape their world views. I express this through direct actions I take in games — are they militant, take-charge types, or are they cunning pacifists who prefer brains to braun? — as well as in how I decorate whatever “home” the game may offer my character.
This isn’t necessarily limited to custom-character RPGs for me, either. They more I’ve started treating game experiences like creative writing exercises, the more I’ve started thinking about all the characters I play in this way, even if that means sacrificing a better game reward to maintain the integrity of a character’s personality. Right now, I’m playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and consciously sticking to a no-kill playthrough. I reached the point of the story where Adam needs to choose between saving Allison or stopping Versalife at the bank. While I was vaguely aware that the bank job would offer better rewards, and it seemed a more “pragmatic” approach, I reasoned that the kind of Jensen I’m playing would prioritize saving the life of someone in immediate danger over “the mission” at large.
Here’s my question for the rest of you roleplayers, though: If you roleplay in RPGs, do you create characters based on yourself, or are they completely unique inventions? Why?
My only real experience with this was in Fallout 4 and I have to say it really added a lot to my connection with that game and changed my views on role playing.
I developed my character while watching my friend play New Vegas with a character he named Lebuck Cherry (a twist on Chuck Berry). Lebuck was basically a chaotic evil character and I started joking around, as I watched him wreaking havoc, that I was his white hat sidekick/conscience named Dats Fomino (Fats Domino).
Typically I role play as myself, but when I started Fallout 4 I decided to bring that joke character to life and played him as righteous and possible (no senseless killing, stealing, extortion etc.)
One of the most unique experiences that came form playing this way is I wound up romancing Danse (as a straight guy playing a male character) pretty much entirely by chance because I just liked my interactions with him which obviously made that one quest really emotional.
I haven’t really played many RPGs of that scope since then, but that experience definitely will influence the way I play those kinds of games in the future.
Another small quirk I’ve developed is when I play Persona insist on giving the protag his cannon name. I still make the decisions that I want (or whatever’s optimal) but it does give me more of a sense that I’m playing a character.
The thing with Alpha Protocol is that it’s always been my reading that it’s less about role playing Thorton’s character than it is about manipulating everyone around you. I guess you could say that it’s role playing Thorton role playing, if you want to get meta.
Man, I wish more people had followed in the wake of that game. So many great ideas, and a lot of them even worked.
Usually on subsequent playthroughs of a game—almost never the first time around. Usually I’ll start out as just “me.” It helps me make decisions faster and I feel more in the moment. Also I have a rule with games that have (occasionally) detrimental consequences to saying something gauche or acting violently that I never save-scum. I think it’s the result of playing a ton of BioWare games.
The exception to this has been The Witcher. I really like Geralt and how you can mix his buried sense of righteousness with just straight up “ya gotta eat, ¯_(ツ)_/¯” moments.
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My Hawke, a rogue, was kinda the same personality-wise, which made it extra crushing for her during the “all that remains” quest, I like to imagine. Origins definitely got me to roleplay really well, the starting origin quests are great at introducing you to the world and making you feel like a part of it. My character was a naive, idealistic/heroic elf, always bent on doing what was right and wanting to see the best in people, which got him into a bunch of (great) sticky situations. I only really had him “snap” during the quest in the alienage with the tevinter slavers.
For Inquisition i tried to roleplay my character, but found it kinda lacking in that regard, the whole game made me feel sorta more like a tourist in it’s world than an actual inhabitant like the first two did.
I love to RP in RPGs. I pick a character from something I’m writing and use the game as a way for me to explore and improve upon my own creation.
It depends on the game really, but honestly I generally only do Role Playing when its a multi player game rather than a single player one. With single player games, I usually find myself going into a mindset where I’m curious about the different outcomes regardless of what I myself would do in that situation, just because I want to see how the game handles such things.
Its different in multi player though, because now it becomes about people interact with each other. It immediately changes my mentality of characters and the concepts of good or bad become far more complicated.
Mind you, when a single player game at least tries to achieve the same thing, I’ll eat that stuff up like its my life blood.
I get really, really emotionally attached to PCs in RPGs and tend to roleplay all the way. I have multiple word files documenting my characters’s backgrounds; occasionally I completely disregard canon and create my own tragic background stories. Sometimes the opposite happens - in the case of DA:I, I have written stories about my main Inquistor’s fighting style based on the specialization I chose for her in game, so I get to weave a gameplay aspect into a fictional aspect rather than the other way around.
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I don’t really Come Up With A Character but I tend to settle into a specific role. That tends to align with the views of whichever character I want to like me. (i.e. my sarcastic hawke in da2, who loves magic and freedom but hates blood magic, ha ha wow anders we have so much in common.)
Edit to add here that this led to a weird disconnect that still kind of frustrates me years later: when Anders Does The Thing at the end and you have to choose whether to execute/banish/forgive him. In character, I’d banish him. But, I relied too heavily on his healing magic, I wasn’t prepared to face the final bosses without him, so. I forgave him.
Which, led to a maybe inconsistent character when I played DA:O, because he did a lot of questionable actions (dealing with demons and the like) before I modded it so I could gay kiss Alistair, and then he became a much nicer person. Which I guess I retroactively view as him Learning to Be Better with the Power of Love or whatever. Then Alistair died and he burned down Amaranthine.
I don’t really have concrete details in mind, but I get a Feel for how my character will behave/react to things, I guess.
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