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<blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7449057" data-attributes="member: 6775031"><p>Player characters are people, as far as the rules and our choices are concerned. They are fictional people, but people all the same. They are the people which the players <em>become</em>, by the act of role-playing. The only difference is that the PCs are people within the game world, while the players are people in the real world. In every way that matters with regards to what happens to them - in terms of how they make their decisions, and how the world reacts to those decisions - there's no difference.</p><p></p><p>To say that PCs and NPCs are characters in a story would be a misleading way of putting it, because we aren't <em>telling</em> a story. Saying that the PCs aren't <em>people</em> implies that they're <em>less than</em> people, and don't deserve to be treated as such. I guess the most relevant distinction is that people have free will, where characters are mere narrative constructs which can be acted upon with impunity. If you're telling a story, then something can happen to the protagonist <em>because</em> they're the protagonist. When a player takes on the role of their character in an RPG, their will is their own; there's no element of narrative contrivance, because the game world does not operate on narrative logic, and the PC is not some mere story character.</p><p></p><p>As far as discussing how things play out in the game, and the ramifications thereof, the distinction between characters-as-people and characters-as-story-elements is more useful than the distinction between people-in-the-real-world and people-in-the-game-world. The real people are pretty much irrelevant to the conversation, since they can't influence the game except as their characters. If we need to refer to the players, we can just refer to them as players.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="The Crimson Binome, post: 7449057, member: 6775031"] Player characters are people, as far as the rules and our choices are concerned. They are fictional people, but people all the same. They are the people which the players [I]become[/I], by the act of role-playing. The only difference is that the PCs are people within the game world, while the players are people in the real world. In every way that matters with regards to what happens to them - in terms of how they make their decisions, and how the world reacts to those decisions - there's no difference. To say that PCs and NPCs are characters in a story would be a misleading way of putting it, because we aren't [I]telling[/I] a story. Saying that the PCs aren't [I]people[/I] implies that they're [I]less than[/I] people, and don't deserve to be treated as such. I guess the most relevant distinction is that people have free will, where characters are mere narrative constructs which can be acted upon with impunity. If you're telling a story, then something can happen to the protagonist [I]because[/I] they're the protagonist. When a player takes on the role of their character in an RPG, their will is their own; there's no element of narrative contrivance, because the game world does not operate on narrative logic, and the PC is not some mere story character. As far as discussing how things play out in the game, and the ramifications thereof, the distinction between characters-as-people and characters-as-story-elements is more useful than the distinction between people-in-the-real-world and people-in-the-game-world. The real people are pretty much irrelevant to the conversation, since they can't influence the game except as their characters. If we need to refer to the players, we can just refer to them as players. [/QUOTE]
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