Challenge the Players, Not the Characters' Stats

[joethelawyer]

The biggest flaw (and many have pointed out) to Avatar play is that it reduces the character to a mere puppet. If I'm not a wizard, my intelligence score can be a 3 or 18 and it doesn't affect the way I played him. Ditto charisma. I could be the smoothest bard with a 25 charisma, but if I can't convince the DM, my smooth talk fails.

the guy in our group who loves roleplaying has that dwarven cleric i mentioned above. he has a 7 intelligence. he makes it a point to never let his dwarf say any words of more than 2 syllables. he also doesnt say more than 5 word sentences. he was once cursed with having to rhyme everything he said. it made it interesting as hell.

i never let him live it down that my familiar has a higher intelligence than him.

 

[Henry]

Add two people in the back seat to watch out either side to help find the road you are looking for and then you have a party of people working towards the same task.....

Continuing the "vehicle" analogy, they've got their own cars to worry about, they're not in yours. You could follow their lead, but why do that if you could put a GPS in your own car? Your artificial sense of direction isn't as good as their natural gift of directions, true, but it does help make up for the deficiency you yourself have. I have family members who have a terrible ability to follow directions, and one could say, "if you keep helping them or giving them a GPS, they'll never learn" - it doesn't change the fact that they aren't getting where they want to go. Giving them the artificial means to navigate themselves empowers them to do things for themselves, and have more fun in the short term.

That said, I can see value in both - getting someone to do more for themselves, so they can learn to be better at it, as well as giving them an aid to empower them more quickly so they can start having some fun now.

Me, I like it best when the players who CAN do certain things (solve a puzzle, fast-talk, orate) help the players who can't, and let it come off that the skilled CHARACTERS are the ones doing the action; so, even though Verys the Bard is the one making the poetic allusions suggesting that the king's family had godlike beneficence, Bob at the table is helping Mike, who plays Verys, to come up with this little piece of baffling bull-puckey.

 

[Umbran]

We play games in a real-world consequence free environment in order to learn.

We do? Always? Funny, but I think the first-person shooter video game usually is real-world consequence free, but not exactly big on the learning.

Maybe you do. Not all players do all the time. Sometimes, we (general we, human beings) play games in a real-world consequence free environment to have fun and engage in fantasy, with no burden of learning implied or desired.

Learning is intrinsically fun, for anyone who hasn't had the fun of learning burned out of them by, um, less than ideal teaching practices.

I think you should stop speaking for others, now.

Winning is cool and exciting, but losing a pretend battle (rather than a real war) doesn't have to be un-fun.

Sometimes, whether it is fun or un-fun is not in the GM's hands, pr predictable. If Joe has had a bad week at work, he really may not be in the mood to be personally challenged, fail, and have the character he's been playing for three years die because he, personally just wasn't quick on the uptake.

 

[justanobody]

@ Henry:

Exactly. There should be very few places where only Verys is allowed to answer unless you have some anal retentive Sphinx asking a quesiton of a single character. The entire party should be participating to solve it.

 

[Henry]

@ Henry:

Exactly. There should be very few places where only Verys is allowed to answer unless you have some anal retentive Sphinx asking a quesiton of a single character. The entire party should be participating to solve it.

You might be misunderstanding me: I'm saying that Bob is helping Mike come up with Verys' answer, because it's Verys who is supposed to be the eloquent one, not Dumb Krunk, who is the Dwarf Battlerager that Bob is playing. So if that sphinx is asking only Verys, Bob is contributing, too, because Verys is smarter than both of them put together, on paper.

On the other hand, if Mike is trying to decide if Verys is going to sleep with the barwench and help wreck her marriage, or if Bob is deciding if Dumb Krunk will spit on the King in the Audience Hall, then that's each player's call. It's up to them to make the choices that will doom their character or save them, rather than dooming their PCs based on whether Mike is a quick-witted guy or not.

It's really an age-old debate: I've been seeing it ever since the only thing you had to gauge smoothness on was a Reaction Adjustment and a Max Number of followers.

 

[justanobody]

And then came comeliness....

I would be telling Bob to play his own character at that point. Play your own character, not someone else's is the rule.

Remember that even the dumbest character can have a moment of genius too.

I just don't think many things should revolve only around a single player. The whole door that required an elf or theif in the party really chapped my hide.

Another reason characters should not wandere off from the party alone, or they deserve to get caught up in something that they shouldn't be trying to handle. DMs of the past were supposed to tell players or parties when they were trying to face hopeless situations, not turn them into cake-walks for them.

DM: You get a feeling that walking down that alley might not be a good idea.

It works for challenges and undeveloped regions as well.

 

[Lanefan]

You might be misunderstanding me: I'm saying that Bob is helping Mike come up with Verys' answer, because it's Verys who is supposed to be the eloquent one, not Dumb Krunk, who is the Dwarf Battlerager that Bob is playing. So if that sphinx is asking only Verys, Bob is contributing, too, because Verys is smarter than both of them put together, on paper.

If Verys asks for help or somehow gets the rest of the party involved, then well and good. But if s/he doesn't, and the rest of the party don't know what's going on (let's say only Verys can understand the Sphinx) then help from the other players (in or out of character) gets smacked down fast and hard.

On the other hand, if Mike is trying to decide if Verys is going to sleep with the barwench and help wreck her marriage, or if Bob is deciding if Dumb Krunk will spit on the King in the Audience Hall, then that's each player's call. It's up to them to make the choices that will doom their character or save them, rather than dooming their PCs based on whether Mike is a quick-witted guy or not.

However, if Bob can help Verys with the Sphinx, it's a pretty short slide down the slope to have Bob "help" Verys in other ways; in other words, you can quickly end up with people part-playing characters not their own. And that, believe me, gets messy.

Lanefan

 

[Delta]

But as soon as your Wizard has Genius level intelligence, and you do not, the limitation of that play style shows how lacking it can be.

Your limitation is very specifically the preferred play style for people I introduce 1E vs. 3E to for the first time. Or maybe I just play with geniuses (which is possible).


But the other thing I see is that for new players (the older ones I introduce), a greater amount of technical lingo is a barrier to entry. "I run over and hit that guy with my mace," they're all over that. "I use my at-will power to Amber Dragon Whipsaw," or whatnot, immediately turns them off. So the more they have to learn & utter technical keywords to get stuff done, the greater distance between them and their role, and the more resistant they are to the experience.

i.e., On a continuum, "Player language space" more good, "Technical language space" more bad. YMMV.

 

[pemerton]

I've spoken to this before, coining the term "Avatar" vs. "Persona" playing.

<snip>

The biggest flaw (and many have pointed out) to Avatar play is that it reduces the character to a mere puppet.

<snip>

By contrast, Persona play has the problem of personality (and personality conflicts) can get in the way of the game. The classic "whats my motivation?" with characters come up, and inter-PC conflicts can derail the whole game.

Personally, I perfer Persona play. To the point that playing avatar play is akin to playing a video-game; I'm merely controlling a character rather than playing him.

In Forge terminology Persona is called "actor stance", but Avatar is distinguished between "Author stance" and "pawn stance". In Author stance, the player players the PC from outside rather than from within, but narrates the emotions/desires/etc of the PC so as to retroactively justify the decision made.

Assuming that everyone at the table is agreed that pawn stance is bad (because it's not really roleplaying, and we're all here to play an RPG, right!), then any challenge to the character is also a challenge to an author-stance player, because the player has to come up with an ingame rationale for the behaviour of her PC which is satisfactory to the rest of the table. Interestingly, though, the challenge to the player is not the same as the challenge to the PC - it is a sort of metagame challenge, to come up with a good story.

If a player has adopted Persona/actor stance, then any challenge to the character may or may not be a challenge to the player, depending on what device is used to work out the character's response to the challenge - game mechanics unmediated by player choices (eg I roll my to hit, I roll my diplomacy skill, etc) don't challenge the player, but once those game mechanics require the player to make choices (eg I choose to charge, drawing the AoA from X so I can flank Y) then the player will be challenged as well as the character. The more simulationist the mechanics, the more the challenge to the player will be the same sort of challenge as that faced by the character (eg a tactical challenge).

I agree with Cadfan that an interesting game, even one that is intended to be played in actor/Persona stance, benefits from requiring interesting choices of the player, rather than just roll, roll, roll . . .

I also think that it is a mistake to confuse the issue of challenging the player vs challenging the PC with a quite different issue, which is whether the action resolution mechanics should be highly structured with an important role for mathematics and/or dice, or rather should be based primarily on a players' ability to spin a plausible tale of why her PC succeeds. It seems that most people prefer some version of the structured approach for combat, but that there is a signficant split over whether social conflict should be resolved using maths and dice (eg as in 4e's skill challenges or HeroWars's extended contests) or via player tale-spinning ("Here's what I say to the Duke . . . pretty persuasive, wasn't it!").

You might be misunderstanding me: I'm saying that Bob is helping Mike come up with Verys' answer, because it's Verys who is supposed to be the eloquent one, not Dumb Krunk, who is the Dwarf Battlerager that Bob is playing. So if that sphinx is asking only Verys, Bob is contributing, too, because Verys is smarter than both of them put together, on paper.

If Verys asks for help or somehow gets the rest of the party involved, then well and good. But if s/he doesn't, and the rest of the party don't know what's going on (let's say only Verys can understand the Sphinx) then help from the other players (in or out of character) gets smacked down fast and hard.

I tend to prefer Henry's approach. But given that it obviously involves metagame thinking, it fits better with an author-stance rather than an actor-stance approach to playing one's PC.

However, if Bob can help Verys with the Sphinx, it's a pretty short slide down the slope to have Bob "help" Verys in other ways; in other words, you can quickly end up with people part-playing characters not their own. And that, believe me, gets messy.

I've never had this problem, but I can imagine that it could be a problem. I think if the general approach of a group was actor/Persona stance rather than author/(motivated-)Avatar stance, then the problem could come up more readily, as it would become ambiguous who was the "actor" for Verys - whereas multiple authorship doesn't threaten a particular PC's ownership of Verys in the same way, as it would still be that player who, after the metagame discussion has come to an end, would actually make the final call as to what Verys does/says.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I have always tried to play within the confines of my characters stats and abilities. Sometimes that means I can do things in character that I can't do in reality, like do a head shot on a moving target from a moving platform with a 80lb test composite shortbow at 100yds, or designing a computer virus on a Mac that will take down the computers of an alien starcraft.

Sometimes, however, it also means that I can't do things in character that I can in real life...like regurgitate the weaknesses of every critter in the 1Ed MM from memory.

In one case, I (the player) had an epiphany about the puzzle of symbology that was being constructed by the DM by the 5th adventure in a campaign just as we were breaking down the game for the evening. I did so so thoroughly that it would have revealed the campaign's overall metaplot...skipping ahead perhaps a year of gaming. Due to RW events, we couldn't game again for several weeks, and by that time, I forgot the structure of clues I had once assembled in my mind, and asked the DM to remind me.

He said no.

I said that, while it had been months of RW time- long enough for me (the player) to forget my insight- only 8 hours had passed in game, so I (the PC) wouldn't or shouldn't have forgotten what he figured out.

His response was that it was highly unlikely that my PC (whose mental stats were lowish) would have figured out the mystery in the first place, at least with the events up to that point.

He was right. While it was possible that he (the PC) could figure it out, I knew that part of why I solved the puzzle was because of my personal RW knowledge. I used knowledge and mental skills my PC simply didn't have.

So, to shorten an already long post, I'd have to say that even though I've been playing for 30+ years, I've always favored challenging the PC than the player. Going the other way has too many potential pitfalls.