This week I want to talk about everyone's personal judgement regarding the characters they play.

One of the fun things about roleplaying is that we get to play more than one character. We can play a stoic bodyguard, a shy child, and a weepy teenager all at the same time. We don't have to choose just one thing, we can choose everything.

But as much as we might like playing all sorts of different characters, we all have limits. Maybe we can only handle playing a few characters at once, or maybe we can handle many characters, but only in one game. No matter what those limits are, at some point we all reach them.

The mistake many players make is in ignoring these limits. It's true, it can be hard to accept your own limits. When I first started roleplaying, I grabbed up every character I could in five different games. It was amazingly fun and easily one of greatest summers I ever had roleplaying. But within three months it all crapped out on me, because I had stretched myself too thin. Trying to play 20 characters at once burned me out, and by the end of that September I had to drop most of them.

Now I know my limits. I can handle five characters in two games, and no more than that. It's kind of sad, since I would love to play more sometimes, but I know that if I pick up that sixth character then I slow down with all of them and just fall apart. Five is my personal limit, and I have to remember that.

If you know how many characters you can handle, then roleplaying becomes much easier. You can balance your real life with recreation without constantly worrying about all the tags you have to make and all the threads you have to finish. Roleplaying becomes a lot less stressful if you respect your personal limits.

There's not much to practice here, so instead I want you to focus on finding your limits as far as roleplaying goes. Figure out how many characters and games you can handle without getting overloaded, and try to stay at or below that number.