Immersion, Stance, and Playstyle Discussion

[SweeneyTodd]

Hi all,

mythusmage started a very interesting thread here about immersion and the various ways people portray their characters.

He's stated that he'd like his thread to work more as a poll, and not discuss the relative merits of immersive versus non-immersive play, so out of respect for his wishes I've started this thread. Hopefully we can expand on the topic while allowing him to keep his thread on his original topic.

I'd like to lead off with a key distinction I make between 'immersion' and 'stance'. Here's how I view it:

Immersion: The extent to which a player identifies with and attempts to portray or become their character. (This is very vague; feel free to offer a better definition)

Stance: A technique a player uses to portray their character. For example, character as "game piece to be manipulated", "role to be played", or "character to be authored".

I think the two are often connected, but not necessarily. For example, it's possible to not identify with your character at all, but still interact with the group with first-person descriptions. On the other end, you might identify strongly with your character, but describe their actions in the third person.

I welcome any and all opinions, including personal preferences, relative merits and pitfalls of different approaches to immersion and stance, etc.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

I wanted to expand on Stance a bit more, since I think lumping it in with immersion complicates things. (I think Immersion is "internal" and Stance is "external", for instance.)

Here are some possible types of stance, which I'm taking from the roleplaying supplement Sorcerer & Sword (because I've got a copy next to me at the moment). I'm not glued to these definitions, but they're a place to start.

Note that these don't necessarily address third-person versus first-person phrasing. They often have a particular kind of phrasing associated with them, though.

Pawn Stance: The player decides the character's actions based on the player's priorities. OOC knowlege is not kept separate from IC knowledge. Sometimes this means that a character's behavior is erratic, like a paladin slaughtering an innocent person to get the last few XP to level. On the other hand, if you're playing a character very much like yourself, this stance might be very useful and plausible.

I think this is what mythusmage is referring to in the other thread as "treat the character as a game piece to be manipulated".

Actor Stance: The player decides the character's actions based on the character's imagined priorities. The character's priorities and motivations include only that knowledge gained IC. Actor stance is usually associated with a high level of immersion, because like immersion, there's a strong sense of "thinking as if you are the character".

I think mythusmage was referring to this as treating your character "as a role to be played".

Author Stance: This starts off like Pawn Stance, in that the character's actions are based on the player's motivations. However, there is an additional step where the player "authors in" retroactive motivation for the character to act in the way they did. (So the character's doing what the player wants, but there's an effort made to keep this plausible.) OOC knowledge is used to direct IC behavior, often in a nonintrusive fashion to set up future interesting scenes and conflicts. (Example: In a horror game, I have my PC go into the basement, and come up with a reason why he would do so, because I think it'll be more interesting if he confronts the monster and has to run from it.)

Professor Phobos described this stance as "acting as if you are the character's head writer, for, say, a TV show".

There's also Director stance, where the player can exert control over things outside of their character, but we can leave that off to the side for now, since it's most often used by GMs. (It does come up sometimes in D&D, for instance when the player directs the behavior of their hirelings or cohorts.)

So, help me out folks. Does this rough breakdown of Stances reflect behavior you've seen in games? Does the divide between Pawn and Author stance make sense? What are the good and bad points you see in the use of the various stances?

 

[Aaron L]

I view characters as a role to be played, and try to get into thier heads. I go back and forth on immersion level depending on what is going on in the game and dramatic importance.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm pretty clearly somewhere between author and actor stance internally. Probably externally too--I might pop up an accent on occasion, develop unusual speech patterns, or whatnot, but I often find that too intrusive to keep up.

 

[barsoomcore]

As a player I'm definitely on the Author side of things. I love the collaborative story-telling aspect of RPGs and as an Author I help direct the story. The Pawn stance doesn't interest me a lot for the same reasons that video and board games aren't really my thing -- I'm not competitive much and "success" or "winning" aren't very rewarding for me. And the Actor stance is one I'm suspicious of anyway -- I'm not convinced that ANYONE actually does that. I think we're ALWAYS aware of and using OOC knowledge to make our decisions and pretending we're not is probably just a way of lying to ourselves.

And I'm a crappy liar.

 

[sniffles]

As a player I'm definitely on the Author side of things. I love the collaborative story-telling aspect of RPGs and as an Author I help direct the story. The Pawn stance doesn't interest me a lot for the same reasons that video and board games aren't really my thing -- I'm not competitive much and "success" or "winning" aren't very rewarding for me. And the Actor stance is one I'm suspicious of anyway -- I'm not convinced that ANYONE actually does that. I think we're ALWAYS aware of and using OOC knowledge to make our decisions and pretending we're not is probably just a way of lying to ourselves.

And I'm a crappy liar.

Aaaahh!! Get out of my brain! Where's the tinfoil?
Um, I mean, I completely concur with the above statements. The last bit about not using OOC knowledge is particularly good. The only way one could roleplay without using any OOC knowledge would be playing with no character sheets and no knowledge of the rules system being employed to adjudicate the game.

 

[med stud]

Immersion Depends but generally not very much. I'm not above summarizing gathering information etc with saying generally what places I search etc. I try to speak and act like the PC but I don't do voices etc.

Stance Character to be authored.

Generally speaking I like to play RPGs much like CRPGs but with a superior AI (=the DM). I don't like the acting aspect very much and I feel RPGs are too arbitrary to really get into "winning" or "losing" mode.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

This is really interesting. I'm pretty much in the boat with you folks so far, although hopefully we'll hear from some immersion and actor-stance folks as time goes on.

Do any of you folks ever get hassled for not using Actor stance? A lot of people seem to see it as "real roleplaying", and pride themselves on really "becoming the character" with Method Actor-type techniques. I know plenty of people get a lot of enjoyment out of that kind of play, but it's just never 'clicked' for me.

My take is that if there's something interesting that comes up during the game, I want to have the flexibility to pursue it. That doesn't mean I'm going to make my character do wildly irrational things, but if there's something going on in another scene that I'd like to make my character get involved with, I'll contrive things so that they show up if possible. Maybe it's that I'm still in GM-mode the rare times I play.

 

[James Heard]

I find that my authoring is spot on if I can convince the actors people that I'm "with them".

Strangely enough though, I don't have any particular problem popping up pawn tendencies if the rest of the group starts in on it - or maybe it's just my real tendencies as a director coming out, and wanting to direct everyone's activities so that we reach a satisfactory climax to the action? What I think is funny is when I get scolded for being too immersive, when in fact I'm not being immersive at all - I've just come across a character that bothers the rest of the group with some nit and part of my priorities involves bothering people.

Hey, sometimes it's the most amusing thing going on for me at the table. Bring on the gnomes!

 

[fusangite]

Having these two concurrent threads is a bit awkward. I responded to the original thread but feel silly cross-posting to this one now. Sweeney, how would you like to handle this?