Anons, how do you roleplay mental illness?
A lot of times mental illness is written or roleplayed as a stereotype and heavily inaccurate or as an excuse to be a troll or quirky but at the same time mental illness really can be genuinely horrifying and disturbing in a way that little else can.
Act like you do in your daily life
I don't know I have too much of a sense of robotic detachment to properly know when I would feel angry or happy about a situation if I was experiencing that situation.
>Anons, how do you roleplay mental illness?
I don't because that doesn't sound fun for me, and sounds even less fun for everyone else at the table. What would be the purpose, beyond like said, being a"quirky" snowflake?
I roleplaying it by b-ing myself ;)
Making CoC players RP their SAN loss sounds fun.
If you are rping a villain for example. Most mentally ill people aren't evil villains. But you have to be really fucked up of some kind or another to massacre people (or be fed propaganda dehumanizing the enemy.)
Well first I make a shit thread oh wait you're already on it
You can also be fucked up without having a mental illness. I'd assume most mentally healthy people aren't going to be perfectly fine if they watch their family murdered by an invading army, or get cheated out of their life savings, ect.
Hell, alot of doctors develop short-term depression the first time they lose a patient, despite otherwise being completely mentally healthy.
When you hurt other people you need two things: a motive to hurt people and a lack of empathy.
Mental illness can provide strong reasons to justify motives of rage, disgust, a need for a sense of power and paranoia.
Lack of empathy is often justified by cultural and social reasons such as propaganda that dehumanizes enemies. Mental illness rarely actually provides a justification for a lack of empathy.
>I'd assume most mentally healthy people aren't going to be perfectly fine if they watch their family murdered by an invading army, or get cheated out of their life savings, ect.
Here's the thing. The person who is cheated out of their life savings will shoot the guy who did it or pursue action in a court of law and the person whose family was murdered by an invading army will try to attack the invading army.
Those don't really justify action at unrelated figures. They do work for villains but they ultimately have targeted, accomplishable and possibly negotiable goals.
>Anons, how do you roleplay mental illness?
The key to roleplaying crazy is that the character believes themselves to be acting rationally. No matter how batshit they are, how much the actual rationale shifts moment to moment, or even how aware they are that they are in fact crazier than a shithouse rat, mentally ill people are either reacting to stimulus in a way that makes sense to them, or acting on a compulsion that they can't resist. lolsorandumb is random, not crazy.
FISHY FISHY FISH FISH
Isn't everyone on Veeky Forums acting like they have one?
It also really depends on what kind of mental illness you want to represent.
Which mental illness? Depression? Anxiety? Schizophrenia? Bipolar? Borderline Personality Disorder? Sociopathy? Psychopathy?
Research the mental illness in question and use the DSM description of symptoms as a guideline, and seek out literature written by people who've experienced it firsthand. Understand that, for instance, depression isn't being sad, it's more like viewing everything through a lens that warps everything to just be shit, and if not properly countered can create a sort of feedback loop that makes even good things that any regular person would find happiness in seem to be shitty and negative, with the ultimate result always being more self-loathing.
Understand that mental illnesses cause people to perceive the world or themselves in a manner inconsistent with reality, or react to things in a manner inconsistent with typical/constructive human behavior. The mind's self-constructing mechanisms are flawed and so too is the mind that comes about from these foundations. The mind still interprets the world through a set of rules and assumptions, and fires up familiar reactions to stimuli based on these, but the rules and assumptions are fucked up somehow and that affects the way they act.
>Understand that, for instance, depression isn't being sad, it's more like viewing everything through a lens that warps everything to just be shit, and if not properly countered can create a sort of feedback loop that makes even good things that any regular person would find happiness in seem to be shitty and negative, with the ultimate result always being more self-loathing.
Ugh. I know people say this because they want depression to be treated as a serious illness and not just a result of feeling sad about bad things but sometimes this leads to the opposite effect where legitimate complaints about bad things happening to a person and making them feel more sad are brushed off as just part of depression. Whatever else depression might be it is not curable if the person is too busy experiencing lots of stress and trauma at the time.
Don't you fucking special snowflake.
just be yourself
I used to role-play on a chat site, full profiles and all. I could tell you stories about some of the most edgy shit people used to do.
>One person wanted me to be part of their rp family. She once bragged about how her vampire character used to eat babies, slaughter children, etc.
>The local "clan of wackos" were basically just baby-killing edgelords who never displayed any other "symptoms" of mentally instability
Anyone who tries to role-play mental illness fails miserably because they haven't even the slightest comprehension of what "insanity" or otherwise looks like. They go by generalizations and nothing else.
>Anons, how do you roleplay mental illness?
Just be yourself!
You might as well just reply to an existing comment with '1 upvote".
Represent them mechanically. If a character has a state during which they receive some minor bonus and another state where a save is halved, the player is going to rush to get it all done in the first part, hide from everything in the second, and roleplay bipolar disorder whether they meant to or not.
I play an epic level sorcerer who's also a retarded nudist gnome.
Heroes of Horror, the Book of Vile Darkness, Polyhedron Magazine 107, 2e's Player Options- Spells and Magic (Alienists), Dragon Magazine #337 (Hallucination table) 2e's Necromancer Handbook, Lords of Madness have you covered for subjects of insanity- as well as Exemplars of Evil and Kingdoms of Kalamar's Vllian Design handbook.
Also Insanity as a benefit is used through the Madness Domain power- which can be gained by worshipping a mad god or getting the Planar Touchstone feat and getting the Keystone of the Archives of enlightenment t oget the Domain power from the Plane of Mechanus.
>upboating
>not just copy pasting the same response until OP gets the exact same hive mind shit from 50+ posters
How does anyone act anything out?
Mental illness means rationality is out the window, and instead of choices being governed by what the character most desires, it's typically defined by what the character wants to avoid the most and will often not even be seen as "choice" since they will only see one solution and focus wholly on if it can be done or not.
That's a severe generalization of it, at least. Ofc it depends on the type of mental illness, the character's past prior to developing said illness and how the setting can either worsen or relieve their symptoms.
I suppose the best advice would be to seek out first hand sources if you're lucky to not have any experience yourself. If you were really dedicated to playing out a character with a mental illness "faithfully", it likely wouldn't be much fun for the table. I'd recommend toning down some aspects and playing whatever traits are selected by ear. In a game with something of a daily life aspect, a depressive streak might be an interesting event on its own. In a game about slaying dragons and saving princesses, it becomes more of a hindrance to the main event.
Maccaroni!