Let Me Tell You About My OCs: Learning To Live With Shame
April 4, 2018 Jamey Alea 0 Comments
art by tumblr user spoorks
Let me set a scene for you.
Picture an athletic woman in her late 20s with white hair and gold eyes, wearing leather armor dyed in blues and purples. This is Hannah Zelicia, the Dungeons & Dragons character I played while I was in college.
I’ve been playing tabletop since I was 15, about 12 years now. I’ve played a lot of characters in that time and I still carry an intense fondness for nearly all of them. The more I reflect on the characters I’ve created and roleplayed as, the more a thought occurs to me. As a frequent tabletop gamer, time and time again, I have designed characters who have been forced to learn lessons that I myself have needed to learn. And I’ve done it without even realizing what I was doing! Many of us pour a lot of ourselves into our PCs; I certainly do. It makes sense that we would sometimes find our characters struggling with the same kinds of things we struggle with in our real, more mundane lives.
Read the full article on Sidequest! I’m very proud of this piece, which compares my two tabletop characters that are most precious to me: my D&D character, Hannah, and my Vampire the Masquerade character, Owen. Being able to pour little pieces of myself into my characters is fun and rewarding, especially when trauma that they experience helps me make sense of insecurities in my own life, particularly as a trans person.