Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief in a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Philosophers who profess realism also typically believe that truth consists in a belief's correspondence to reality. We may speak of realism with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, or even thought.And also:
Realists tend to believe that whatever we believe now is only an approximation of reality and that every new observation brings us closer to understanding reality. Realism is contrasted with idealism and anti-realism.
That aside, I'm using realism here in the most basic since. For those familiar with roleplaying, you'll probably be familiar with certain scenes that might play out. Like for example your character decides to do something such as stealing from another person. In the most logical since, what are some of the possible outcomes? One they could get away with it and perhaps feel guilty about it later on. They could get caught, possibly arrested, or let off with a simple warning and never do it again. There are so many possibilities as to what you can and cannot do. You're not limited to just the world around you, but you can also use your imagination.
Both these disputes are often carried out relative to some specific area: one might, for example, be a realist about physical matter but an anti-realist about ethics. The high necessity of specifying the area in which the claim is made has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years.
Increasingly these last disputes, too, are rejected as misleading, and some philosophers prefer to call the kind of realism espoused there "metaphysical realism," and eschew the whole debate in favour of simple "naturalism" or "natural realism", which is not so much a theory as the position that these debates are ill-conceived if not incoherent, and that there is no more to deciding what is really real than simply taking our words at face value.
Some realist philosophers prefer deflationary theories of truth to more traditional correspondence accounts.
Taking another scenario though where your character encounters someone new and wants to get to know them. Idealistically is it safe to say your characters fall in love at first sight and thus start making out? Of course not. Is it possible they hit it off and start to become friends and slow build up to that boyfriend/girlfriend thing? Absolutely! Now guess which I try to do. If you guessed the latter, you're correct. And no, I did not force you to read all of this without a just reason.
By nature, I like to have a sense of realism. Have that sense that yes roleplaying is fun, but I want to make it sound believable to me as a writer. Which leads me into the topic of this blog, and that's about the choices you and your characters have. To me, choices are fun. I love having the knowledge that I can put my character in a situation and then have the choice of what to do with them once in that position. I love being able to have that amount of control. But at the same time, I also have to think about it in the terms of my characters. Not just what I want to see, but what they would more than likely do in each situation. And I have two prime examples of this.
Damien Lovett is one of my favorite characters. Granted, I have a variation of him on two different sites. On one of those sites, he's worse off than on the other. Meaning within the last few months - roleplay wise - he's been in and out of the Psychiatric Ward of a hospital, with little to no change. The last time he actually self committed himself. Honestly, I have yet to figure out where he is right now. Damein's sort of floating. He's standing on that line and has the option to change, or not to. If he doesn't though, I have a strong feeling it will be the death of him. He's digging his own grave right now. One more screw up, and he's just as soon done for. But, oddly I think I would be okay with that to an extent. I mean, I've never actually killed off a character...So, in some ways it would be interesting. And it's not like he'd be lost forever. I have the better part of him on another site. Troublemaker still, but nowhere near emo. So it wouldn't be as though I would miss him completely. Still, a part of me is praying that he sees some light. That he sees how much he's screwed up and actually does change, to prove to himself and everyone else that he could do it.
And then there's Angel Echo. One of my favorite wolves by far. Actually, probably one of my favorite characters out of all of them. She's the perfectionist, intelligent, angel, typical seventeen-year old, etc. She's done little wrong. Oddly though, she's doing everything in her power to keep her lives separate from one another. There's the fact that her family does not know what she is, and she's trying to keep that hidden from them. There's also the fact that she's maintaining two jobs (though one of them is more 'come in when you can') and doing what she can in school. School isn't so much an issue for her though, so that's the least of her concerns. The fact that she's keeping parts of her life separate from one another is making it harder to keep things balanced. Currently, I have a rough idea of what she'll end up doing, and it's nothing horrible. Short of that though, I don't know. I haven't entirely figured out where she stands or where she's going. She's going to stay good, as good as humanly possible. Whether she learns stop keeping all three worlds from one another or not, I haven't the foggiest. We'll find out I suppose.
Now the big thing here is that both characters are in my hands. I have control over what they do and do not do. And that's a good thing, I think. At the same time, I try to think in terms of what are they most likely to do. I'd hate to have something happen to either of them when they wouldn't be likely to cause it. Angel for example wouldn't go around setting fires to buildings at random. That's beyond her entirely. Idealistically, I'd like them both to have happy endings. Realistically, I think out of both characters thus far, Angel would be the one who'd more than likely walk away with a happy ending.
Still, I love the vast amount of choices you have. First of all, I love how you can start out with one idea, and then from there you can branch off in different directions. Writing is always good about that. You have so much more freedom in your writing then you would normally have in life. It leaves you a lot of room to be creative because you can choose one choice, and then spiral from there. It also tests your writing capabilities. You can push yourself to try new things and ideas - not in a bad way mind you - and see what you end up with. I think from a writers standpoint, roleplaying offers you that room to test your own limits. See what you're strong out, and what you need to work on. I'd definitely say that any amount of roleplaying I've done, though has been great fun and which I have enjoyed immensely, it's also helped me improve as a writer.
