posh.wiki

A big part of the furry fandom for a lot of people is "role-play", or "RP" for short.

I've found that it's both one of the most accepted topics in the fandom, as well as one of the most controversial. I say this because it seems that everyone accepts that some people love it, and some people flat-out refuse to do it.

I don't get asked about it at a rate where I feel the need to put it in my bio or my index.html, but I count myself comfortably within the category of those who don't role-play, or rather, those who don't engage in furry role-play specifically.

(Here, I use "furry role-play" to mean any form of improvised role-playing interaction between 2 people acting as their furry characters.)

See, I've been known to play a few "role-playing games" in my time, both in the form of video games and tabletop games. By reflecting on how I engage with these, I want to explain why the idea of "furry roleplay" doesn't resonate with me.

I'll talk about video games first. I find this type of RPG a lot more appealing than linear story games, because I have some level of individual freedom while still walking a pre-defined path set out by the game designers. I find it fun to explore the different permutations of how the narrative can play out, without doing the work of constructing said narrative myself.

I enjoy tabletop RPGs even more, because of the additional freedom I get. It's nice to explore ideas with other people, each having their own character, but still with a general sense of story from the DM and balance checks from the rules. Puzzles and combats appeal to the part of me that likes to solve problems, and the more pure role-playing aspect helps me to explore things about myself and the world in a comfortable environment with people I trust.

My comfort zone kind of starts to fall apart when structure is traded for more complete creative control. I first identified this when I tried running a one-shot D&D session a couple of years ago. I'd planned meticulously, stranding my party in a village on an island with only a handful of NPCs, but they still managed to push against the edges of what I had planned, and I felt a lot of pressure trying to come up with new plotlines on the fly to keep everyone entertained. Still, between the 6 of them they kept each other busy, and I had an established campaign setting and rule set to fall back on.

So, take an interpersonal role-play, and remove all but one of the other players, as well as any kind of rules, setting, even RNG. All I have left then is complete creative freedom which I don't know how to use and the responsibility for the enjoyment of another person in real time. To me, that's a great recipe for stress, so much so that I'm not able to enjoy my own side of the experience.

Plus, I find there to be a difference between telling a story for the sake of telling a story, and telling a story for the sake of saying something. During my one-shot, I tried to poke at different characters' conflicting values with a mystery that some weren't inclined to solve and an antagonist who would be redeemable to some but unforgivable to others. As a player in our current campaign, I'm having a great time playing a paramedic in a post-apocalyptic setting, exploring the challenges of trying to stay a good person in a cruel world and getting on with people whose values are different from my own to work towards a common goal. The kind of stories I find the most compelling, the ones I want to experience most, are the ones that end up saying something about both the world at large, and that reveal something about whoever's consuming the story as well.

So, it's not that I don't enjoy "furry" role-play, in that it's nothing to do with the fact that we're furries. I could probably enjoy a furry D&D campaign or the right kind of visual novel, especially with a narrative reason to have the characters be furries. It's un-structured, un-focused role-play that I don't enjoy so much, because I find the stories to lack personally compelling qualities and the creative process to be more stressful than fun.