When I guide new players, I often encourage them to consider minor elements about their characters that will be fun and memorable at the table.
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These tidbits often generate great interplay between the characters, despite the fact that they may have no impact on the stakes of the story (at first anyway, see below for more on this).
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There is a fluidity between how these details may impact the "actual play of the game." Maybe when I create my dwarf, I don't imagine the beard thing will be significant. I haven't written anything about it on my character sheet. But the beard jokes gain traction at the table and I start thinking more about the cultural significance of my beard, describing the intricate braids and beads that represent various elements of my character's background. Eventually, a good GM picks up on this and may develop hooks and connections. Maybe we meet another dwarf whose "beard writing" reveals something about them. Or we end up in a scenario where my beard is threatened (or I need to be in a clean-shaven disguise). I never consciously declared to the GM that these things are central features of my character, but over time these story elements can grow and become more significant. This sort of promotion and demotion of roleplaying elements seems to be a significant component of most games that I've played, regardless of the system.
This is important.
You are right about fluidity: actual play doesn't manifest discrete
types or
moments of the neat types we use in analysis and criticism.
Some of what I had in mind in my post that you responded to is elaborated in my posts to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] just upthread.
Here's a passage from
Christopher Kubasik that also captures what I had in mind:
The tales of a story entertainment are based not on the success of actions, but on the choice of actions; not the manipulation of rules, but the manipulation of narrative tools.
The primary tool is Character. Characters drive the narrative of all stories. However, many people mistake character for characterization.
Characterization is the look of a character, the description of his voice, the quirks of habit. Characterization creates the concrete detail of a character through the use of sensory detail and exposition. By “seeing” how a character looks, how he picks up his wine glass, by knowing he has a love of fine tobacco, the character becomes concrete to our imagination, even while remaining nothing more than black ink upon a white page.
But a person thus described is not a character. A character must do.
Character is action. That’s a rule of thumb for plays and movies, and is valid as well for roleplaying games and story entertainments. This means that the best way to reveal your character is not through on an esoteric monologue about pipe and tobacco delivered by your character, but through your character’s actions.
But what actions? Not every action is true to a character; it is not enough to haphazardly do things in the name of action. Instead, actions must grow from the roots of Goals. A characterization imbued with a Goal that leads to action is a character.
Because of the fluidity that you mention, it may be that
characterisation leads to
goals and thereby
character and protagonism. In this way it ceases to be
mere colour.
With respect to
interplay between the characters, my own view is that the more this is conceived of in the same sort of frame as action declaration - ie something that
matters to play and is part of the way the players express their protagonism - the more we tend towards flourishing roleplaying. Consistently (I think) with your fluidity point, the colour becomes a bridge to play and action.
My thinking on this is also influenced by one particualr RPGing experience that I had. There was a lot of interplay between the characters, and among us we built up a strong sense of the gameworld, the stakes of the game, that was somewhat independent of what the GM was doing. At a certain point, the GM - I think in order to try and retake control of the game - moved us all 100 years into the future of the gameworld.
If the character stuff was mere colour then this wouldn't have mattered. But the character stuff wasn't mere colour. It was central to play. The GM's change, which severed the PCs from the gameworld and hence pulled the rug of their relationships out from under them, killed the game. I left it a few weeks after that change, and heard that it broke up completely not much later.
That's an example of the GM not recognising and respecting the protagonistic trajectory of the players' colour.
