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The Principle of Legitimate Intentions
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8997512" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>This is certainly a thing. Communicating in such a way that everyone at the table has a similar mental picture of the shared reality is a skill, one that GMs should cultivate and which players should work on whenever they have any reason to doubt that the image in their head matches the GMs image. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Then something IMO is wrong with your RPG. One of my primary aesthetics of play involves Emersion. I like to have the aesthetic that shared imaginary space is believable and richly detailed and that it is easy to imagine yourself within the imaginary space from a first person perspective of someone within that space. I want to provide the insights and sensory clues to you the players as if you were there in the form of the character, seeing, experiencing, hearing, and even smelling what the character would to the best of my ability. I want the player to feel like the shared imaginary space is a real place, or at least, as real as such a fantasy place could be.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>And this precisely gives the problem with your approach. You have NPCs who aren't talking like real people and PCs who are consequently getting most of their information through the metagame and not the game. IMO, the appropriate thing to do as a GM when animating an NPC is to put yourself "in their shoes", get in their head, and imagine what they know, what they feel, and what they are thinking and then imagine what they say - which can include falsehoods and even deliberate lies. As a GM, I act that out in front of the players, often as best as I can manage it with voices.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Even if the Clerk is mistake, the GM is still describing the situation. The GM is describing what the characters can observe and what the Clerk says. He makes no promise to the players that the Clerk is omniscient, unbiased, or honest. He only promises the players that he is faithfully representing the Clerk as the clerk actually is, ignorance and all.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I feel this limitation is artificial though.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>When you describe a room to the players, you don't feel you are required to describe to them the as yet not scene next room to them or the contents of the unopened chest or the fact that there is a door hidden behind the wall tapestry. Those particular details are picked up through further play. Likewise, social interaction only provides the descriptions of this particular NPC from the vantage point of that particular NPC. Different NPCs will provide different descriptions of events. The full picture of what is going on is, as in real life, pieced together from the testimony of different NPCs until gradually the full picture becomes available. </p><p></p><p>The same rules in tabletop RPG apply in this respect that they do in other narrative forms such as a novel, a movie, or a computer game. When reading a mystery novel, you don't expect the characters in the story to speak in the highly ritualistic highly objective manner that you suggest that they should in a RPG. You expect them to speak in a natural fashion, and for you and the protagonist of the story to gradually unwind the truth from the clues, figuring out which character might have lied or which character's testimony was unreliable because they didn't see what they thought that they saw. The same is true if you watch a movie like 'Knives Out' or 'The Glass Onion'. The fact that some characters testimony is unreliable and that you might get a false impression is part of the fun. And if you are playing a video game like "LA Noire" the same thing is true. </p><p></p><p>In short, I think it's fine for NPCs to speak in a very natural language and be limited by their own understanding. Using very objective and unbiased language is a good idea if you are giving GM narration. For example, if a player searches for traps, you say, "You didn't find any traps." and not "There are no traps." But a GM can accurately relate an NPC's statements made in ignorance without flagging that the character is unknowingly speaking in ignorance.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8997512, member: 4937"] This is certainly a thing. Communicating in such a way that everyone at the table has a similar mental picture of the shared reality is a skill, one that GMs should cultivate and which players should work on whenever they have any reason to doubt that the image in their head matches the GMs image. Then something IMO is wrong with your RPG. One of my primary aesthetics of play involves Emersion. I like to have the aesthetic that shared imaginary space is believable and richly detailed and that it is easy to imagine yourself within the imaginary space from a first person perspective of someone within that space. I want to provide the insights and sensory clues to you the players as if you were there in the form of the character, seeing, experiencing, hearing, and even smelling what the character would to the best of my ability. I want the player to feel like the shared imaginary space is a real place, or at least, as real as such a fantasy place could be. And this precisely gives the problem with your approach. You have NPCs who aren't talking like real people and PCs who are consequently getting most of their information through the metagame and not the game. IMO, the appropriate thing to do as a GM when animating an NPC is to put yourself "in their shoes", get in their head, and imagine what they know, what they feel, and what they are thinking and then imagine what they say - which can include falsehoods and even deliberate lies. As a GM, I act that out in front of the players, often as best as I can manage it with voices. Even if the Clerk is mistake, the GM is still describing the situation. The GM is describing what the characters can observe and what the Clerk says. He makes no promise to the players that the Clerk is omniscient, unbiased, or honest. He only promises the players that he is faithfully representing the Clerk as the clerk actually is, ignorance and all. I feel this limitation is artificial though. When you describe a room to the players, you don't feel you are required to describe to them the as yet not scene next room to them or the contents of the unopened chest or the fact that there is a door hidden behind the wall tapestry. Those particular details are picked up through further play. Likewise, social interaction only provides the descriptions of this particular NPC from the vantage point of that particular NPC. Different NPCs will provide different descriptions of events. The full picture of what is going on is, as in real life, pieced together from the testimony of different NPCs until gradually the full picture becomes available. The same rules in tabletop RPG apply in this respect that they do in other narrative forms such as a novel, a movie, or a computer game. When reading a mystery novel, you don't expect the characters in the story to speak in the highly ritualistic highly objective manner that you suggest that they should in a RPG. You expect them to speak in a natural fashion, and for you and the protagonist of the story to gradually unwind the truth from the clues, figuring out which character might have lied or which character's testimony was unreliable because they didn't see what they thought that they saw. The same is true if you watch a movie like 'Knives Out' or 'The Glass Onion'. The fact that some characters testimony is unreliable and that you might get a false impression is part of the fun. And if you are playing a video game like "LA Noire" the same thing is true. In short, I think it's fine for NPCs to speak in a very natural language and be limited by their own understanding. Using very objective and unbiased language is a good idea if you are giving GM narration. For example, if a player searches for traps, you say, "You didn't find any traps." and not "There are no traps." But a GM can accurately relate an NPC's statements made in ignorance without flagging that the character is unknowingly speaking in ignorance. [/QUOTE]
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