D&D 5E Character play vs Player play

[Mishihari Lord]

The reason I don't like to do this during play is that I find it causes people to drop out of character too much and continually think in the meta-game. I really like players to be thinking "Alright, I'm on a street, I'm a badass rogue who owes money to everyone in the city. I see people in the shadows...what would I do?" rather than "Oh, wouldn't it be awesome if the people in the shadows were members of the Shadow Cartel and they want me dead because of a job I failed to pull off for them 2 years ago? Hey, DM. Can the people in the shadows be that group?"

That captures it pretty well for me too. As a player I want to be experiencing the game world, not writing it. And there's definitely a tension between the two. The more I'm writing the world, the less I feel like I'm in the world, experiencing it. When as a player I can affect the world directly rather than through my character, the world feels less like something real and more like a dream.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You do break character, though when you decide that this guy is there. That's not something that your character has the power to decide.

It is also much faster than asking questions and waiting for the DM to give you enough details to go on. As much as I hate that sort of thing, I could see the merit in sharing authorial control with players, just so you don't have to spend as much time describing everything. Since the player knows what details are relevant to any given action, it's much faster to establish only those details.

You break character slightly. But it's only slightly; if there wasn't someone who's right there I'd go somewhere else until I found someone. You also break character every time you pick up and roll dice. And any of a few dozen other things. As I said, speed matters.

That captures it pretty well for me too. As a player I want to be experiencing the game world, not writing it. And there's definitely a tension between the two. The more I'm writing the world, the less I feel like I'm in the world, experiencing it. When as a player I can affect the world directly rather than through my character, the world feels less like something real and more like a dream.

Once again, I find it to be a lower level of problem than simply rolling d20s. Any time I need to refer to my character sheet the world's a whole lot more like a dream than it is if I simply establish what I expect to find somewhere is approximately true.

 

[Hussar]

On the thing about character vs player resource. I'm not sure that the divide is really that cut and dried.

In Fate, if I take a character with the aspect, "Fate be a Lady and sometimes she's a real... (you get the idea)", when lucky things happen around me, is that a character or player resource? The reason that lucky things happen to me is because of the aspect of that character. It's not something, I as the player, am doing. It's supposed to happen all the time. Now, as a player, I can leverage that aspect as a resource and have lucky things happen to me right now, but, again, I'm still leveraging a character ability. If I had a different aspect, I couldn't do this, same as a fighter can't cast spells.

What's the difference? How is it any different to have a character with the "I can cast spells" power and having "I'm lucky" as an aspect? They are both character abilities. They are both leveraging the in game fiction to allow the player to alter the game world in ways that their character physically could not.

As I recall, there were kits in 2e that had essentially the same thing. Some sort of bard kit maybe? It's been a while so I forget exactly what. But, the character would have random lucky things happen to him, that he could invoke, while the DM was instructed to have random bad things happen or add complications. Pure story gaming mechanics and it was a pretty popular kit, again, whose name I'm totally blanking on.

I'm honestly not seeing the difference between having spells and having character aspects. They are both pretty much meta-game mechanics that are pretty easily justified in the game world.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

What's the difference? How is it any different to have a character with the "I can cast spells" power and having "I'm lucky" as an aspect? They are both character abilities. They are both leveraging the in game fiction to allow the player to alter the game world in ways that their character physically could not.

The difference is that the "lucky" aspect is something which the player invokes to alter the game world, and the "spellcaster" aspect is something which the character is physically capable of doing within the game world. The character can decide to cast a spell, but it's the player who invokes luck to make something happen.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Any time I need to refer to my character sheet the world's a whole lot more like a dream than it is if I simply establish what I expect to find somewhere is approximately true.

That's a good point, and one of the major selling points for 5E over either of the previous major editions.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Once again, I find it to be a lower level of problem than simply rolling d20s. Any time I need to refer to my character sheet the world's a whole lot more like a dream than it is if I simply establish what I expect to find somewhere is approximately true.

Perhaps. I look upon dice, record keeping, and even game rules as necessary evils. They interfere with my play goals, but we need a method of conflict resolution and I haven't found one that's less intrusive. Giving players game authorship may be a smaller problem, but at least it's one I can avoid entirely. I don't need player authorship for the game to be fun, and it costs me more than I gain.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Once again, I find it to be a lower level of problem than simply rolling d20s. Any time I need to refer to my character sheet the world's a whole lot more like a dream than it is if I simply establish what I expect to find somewhere is approximately true.

It may effect you that way, but I don't see it the same way at all. When I pick up a dice and roll it I'm imagining in my mind my character swinging and fighting the enemies. I may be picking up a die and rolling, but that's not actually breaking me out of character at all.

When I attack, it normally sounds like this:

"Alright, I swing my two swords at the enemy."
*rolls dice* *cursory glance at the dice to make sure they are above 12 and therefore likely hit*
"I hit, for.." *glace at dice* "..12 points of damage as my sword bites into them."

I've internalized die rolling and my bonuses so much that I really think of them as an extension of my character. Since they represent his skills, looking up his bonus to hit and applying it is just the out of character manifestation of him swinging his sword and I think of it accordingly.

Which is different from when I say "Hey, there's a guy over there I need to talk to, he comes running towards me." Because it isn't representative of anything my character is doing at all. It uses a different part of my brain than the portion that just continually asks "What is my character doing right now?"

 

[LostSoul]

That's the thing - both editions use the same basic system to determine the main factors behind weapon availability. For a randomly generated star system, there are methods of rolling the tech and law levels, values that are set for published star systems (it should be much harder to get a Tech Level 15 Fusion Gun-Man Portable on a TL 3 backwater than on a TL 15 industrial world, for example). After that, a GM could weigh other setting or campaign event factors like proximity to a border conflict with presence of mercenaries or local culture (it should probably be easier to get illegal weapons on a world frequented by Vargr corsairs than deep within the conservative and bureaucratic Vilani sector, easier along the Imperial/Solomani Sphere border except possibly around Vega where security is tighter to fight Solomani terrorism, etc).

Thanks - like I've said, I haven't read or played Mega/Traveller. I think this sort of procedure applies context to the Streetwise check. With that context, I can see how the work of the random roll I would have made is covered by the background setting/setting generation procedures.

What I don't really understand is if pemerton or you see an authorship element in one, why don't you see it in the other? Both involve the player telling the GM that he wants to use the PC's streetwise skill to find and obtain or do something that's probably sketchy or involves the resources of sketchy people. Both involve the GM setting a difficulty on achieving that goal. What's the difference?

Speaking abstractly, if the player is creating an element of the game world using PC resources that are not related to their PC's actual abilities, then I'd classify that as player authorship. I think you can see how that works: the DM doesn't yet know if there are weapons available, so he or she calls for the player to make a check. While it's true that the chance of success is set by the DM, the PC's roll is determining if such weapons actually exist.

(I'm not speaking about Traveller specifically here, just the general principle. Traveller seems to be a more nuanced case.)

It's a subtle distinction, but one that I believe exists. What I find interesting is how (to tie it back into the thread's topic) it relates to character vs. player play. Like I've said, I use a specific mechanic for determining unknown aspects of the game world - I don't call for skill checks or anything relating to the PC. I do this because I want to focus on "player" play - I like to call it "challenge-based" play. But is this the best way to achieve that sort of play? I think so, but it's always good to question your beliefs.

I have been playing Call of Cthulhu lately - running it for the first time! - and there was an instance in that game that might be of relevance to this thread. (A few, actually.) The PCs found a hand-written manuscript off of one PC's old college friend, an Al Blackwood, who disappeared (aside from strange tweets and facebook posts) after his great-grandfather died. It was written in Arabic, and the PCs did not speak that language.

One of the players said that she would take it to one of her contacts at the ROM here in Toronto (I set the game in our town and at the current date). I didn't have anything like that planned - it came out of the blue - but I figured I would roll with it. I substituted the set-up I had for "investigating the manuscript" to go with what the player had suggested. It seemed to work out.

I'm a neophyte at running CoC and I wonder why that seemed like the best way to go. It seems like Illusionism but, at the same time, it doesn't.

(I have other concerns about that game - I think I may be screwing the players over horribly - but I think I've given them the opportunity to figure out that screw-job and, once they figure it out, they can get out of it easily. It's tricky because the genre is what it is. Anyway, it's not important to this thread.)

 

[pemerton]

The reason I don't like to do this during play is that I find it causes people to drop out of character too much and continually think in the meta-game. I really like players to be thinking "Alright, I'm on a street, I'm a badass rogue who owes money to everyone in the city. I see people in the shadows...what would I do?"

For me this is where issues with immersion kick in. If I was really a badass rogue I would know the town, know its people, know where to go and who to meet.

But if I'm relying on the GM to dribble all this out to me, it breaks my sense of immersion pretty badly.

But what you are arguing is that players can't assume things about the setting that their characters would know and be able to exploi

<snip>

if you are in character, player establishment of things only enhances this. You declare to be true what you believe would be true in character.

This.

You do break character, though when you decide that this guy is there. That's not something that your character has the power to decide.

Is "breaking character" a logical state, or a psychological one?

When we're talking about immersion - which is a psyhcological state - then I'm not that interested in abstract logical analysis. I'm interested in empirical realities.

And in my experience it does not, as an empirical matter, break immersion when I narrate something that fits in with my expectations that I have as my character. Just as, in the real world, it doesn't break my immersion when I reach my hand out to greet someone, expecting him/her to shake it, and s/he does.

Of course, the GM can always break those expectations if s/he wants, by vetoing a narration. Which is actually closer to reality - the surprise of expecting to see someone and him/her not being there - than if everything is being doled out by the GM, which reduces the experiential contrast between expectations being thwarted or confirmed (in part because it tends to reduce all expectations and increase uncertainty and a quite unimmersive sense of loss of control over one's immediate environment).

I look upon dice, record keeping, and even game rules as necessary evils. They interfere with my play goals, but we need a method of conflict resolution and I haven't found one that's less intrusive. Giving players game authorship may be a smaller problem, but at least it's one I can avoid entirely.

The way I understood [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION], he was saying that you can trade a degree of player authorship for d20 rolls - instead of making Streetwise checks and getting the GM to tell me what I (as a badass rogue) know, I just relate to the table what I know, where I'm going, and who I'm planning to see there.

I've likely already figured out who the people in the shadows are and why they are there and it is way too late to start giving the PCs authorial control over the adventure. If something happens DURING the adventure, I likely already have a good reason for it and don't want my plan second guessed by players.

Whereas I tend not to know who is for what, and where s/he came from, and how exactly s/he relates to the PCs, until this comes out through play. I'm expecting to be flexible and responsive to the players' action declarations, and also to their hopes/expectations for where the story is going.

 

[pemerton]

The difference is that the "lucky" aspect is something which the player invokes to alter the game world, and the "spellcaster" aspect is something which the character is physically capable of doing within the game world.

This is like saying that combat ability is not something the character can do because it involves rolling a d20, which is a metagame event.
[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s point is that invoking a Lucky aspect is no different from (say) a 4e deva character invoking Memory of 1000 Lifetimes to get a bonus to a check that will otherwise fail. It's a feature of the character - that s/he is lucky, that s/he has the memories of 1000 lifetimes. The fact that it is mechanically implemented via spending a point (in Fate) or declaring a power usage (in 4e) is no different from attack sequencing being implemented via initiative rolls and attacking and parrying being implemented via d20 rolls parcelled out on a one-per-turn basis.

This also leaves the Paladin example unexamined - suppose that the player of a paladin who has just reached 4th level calls for her warhorse. The GM narrates the dream - the warhorse is tied up in the castle of a black knight. It has now become true, in the fiction, that the black knight at some point captured and tied up this horse. That was not an action performed by the PC, nor caused by the PC. But the GM was obliged to introduce that content in virtue of the player activating his PC's ability to call for a warhorse.

Hussar is correct to say that this shows that there is no clear separation between character abiliities and player authorship. Some character abilities, in order to be resolved, vest a greater or lesser degree of authorship in the player.