D&D General Styles of Roleplaying and Characters

[loverdrive]

I agree with all of the above. In refuting the idea of an objective answer to "what would the character do" I'm not arguing for incoherence, just pointing out that perfect coherence is boringly...well...one-dimensional.

A lot of the arguments I'm seeing amount to policing of roleplaying, at least as they come across to me, which in turn seems like a trust issue. I think everything you said above is exactly correct, but it also has to be in the hands of the author. If we can't trust the author to try to find a compelling balance between "consistent" and "changing"...if we can't (to put it crudely) trust the player to decide for themselves whether or not their character knows to burn trolls...then maybe we shouldn't be playing with that person.

If we do trust them, if we do trust they are trying to create a character in which they feel immersed, then when they choose an action that surprises us...an action that we ourselves wouldn't have chosen...our reaction shouldn't be "Your character wouldn't do that!" but rather "Oh! That's interesting. There's more to that character than I realized."

I completely missed the context. For that, I apologize.

As of mechanical influence over the character, the thing that was discussed, it basically comes down to discovering new things about your character instead of dictating them and disclaiming decision making. It's not really that different from randomly rolling stats or background. Sometimes, it's fun to let go and see where things will go.

As of policing roleplaying by other people, I don't think I've ever heard "that's not what your character would do!". At best, a puzzled stare followed by "uhm, that's weird, but okay".

 

[tetrasodium]

I had a little bit of trouble parsing this, but I think what you're saying is that my argument seems to justify bad player behavior.

Is that correct?

Yes and your later posts back that up. It doesn't matter if the person saying "it's what my character would do" is "trying to create a character in which they feel immersed" or whatever, the simple fact that they need to resort to "it's what my character would do" rather than letting their "enexpected" action stand on it's own shows that the "unexpected" action itself was bad player behavior to begin with.

 

[Desdichado]

At the risk of making a very out of date post at this point, here's a few ideas:

1) I know that the stereotype is the snooty "Roleplayer" looking down his nose at the hack-n-slasher and making passive-aggressive swipes at him all of the time, but in my experience, the animosity mostly goes the other direction. It's very hard to talk about roleplaying in a forum like this without a cadre of anti-roleplayers coming in and vandalizing the thread, no matter how carefully you try to tip-toe through the obvious minefield.

2) One of the many side-effects of having more fully-fleshed out characters that players spend a great deal more time in developing is more of an emotional attachment to them. This has more of an effect on the game than I think a lot of people give credit to. In fact, I think that as that paradigm has come more into prominence, the decreased lethality of the game is positively correlated to it.

3) I think one of the biggest impacts on how much "roleplaying" you want in your game is probably correlated as well to the vector by which you came into the hobby. In the oldest days, NOBODY played D&D unless you were already a wargamer, which had a profound effect on how you viewed the game and your character. In the also old days, but not quite as old, I believe almost everybody came into the hobby through fantasy fiction, which impacted how THEY thought the game and the characters should be treated. More recently, many people have been drawn in because they already liked computer or console fantasy games, which probably also impacts their view on what D&D should look like, how it should be played and how characters should be treated. I personally think that this idea that vector into the hobby, possibly correlated by era in which you came into the hobby and the cultural zeitgeist going on at the time is something that "D&D thinkers" haven't paid enough attention to, and there may well be very interesting things to discover along those lines.

4) For full disclosure, I came into the hobby in the very earliest 80s, only played wargames at all as a half-hearted spin-off of my D&D hobby (in a reversal of the direction of the generation before me) and have EXTREMELY strong preferences towards making the game resemble the kind of fantasy fiction that I was familiar with when I started gaming. So strong, in fact, that I have an almost visceral reaction to even the idea of dungeons because it's such a game-artifact rather than one that has any resemblance to the fiction that supposedly was the inspiration for the game. Finding the balance between enough character depth to be interesting, but enough risk and danger to be exciting is sometimes hard, but I think the secret is to not spend tons of time making character backgrounds and backstories, and whatnot. It's much easier to give characters rather broad personality traits or ticks, and start off with that; any additional depth is usually best developed in play rather than spelled out ahead of time. To do this, I think giving "dangling character threads" to the GM that he can pull on as appropriate is a good strategy too; things that aren't necessarily fleshed out and made too precious by over-attention, but just potential things that may or may not become important and/or interesting as the game goes on.

I also think using something like FATE's character links system when developing the "ensemble cast" that is the player character group helps too, because it gives instant hooks to roleplay on and banter back and forth between the characters for very little effort. That kind of stuff; practical roleplaying stuff that you can sink your teeth into without investing so much that you find your character too precious to risk in adventure, etc. is what I prefer to focus on.

5) UPDATE: Oh, another thing; I have also very strong preferences about player vs GM sovereignty, and I think that the GMs (or the system, for that matter) have no business intruding into player sovereignty (or vice versa) without a high risk of it triggering disappointment and/or conflict over how the game should be played. Respect of "sovereignty" is one of my key attributes as a GM that I think it crucial, but again, I don't hear people talk directly about it very often. Although I feel like people talk around it a lot without necessarily having the terms to talk about them very well.

 

[Ovinomancer]

In the post I was originally responding to, @Aldarc said:


This statement reads to me as covering the whole gamut of mechanics that directly change a character concept (as opposed to having the mechanics control what happens, and the player determining the impact on the character). Accordingly, I tried to keep my response at the same level of generality.

If you are asking whether I would consider the two examples you provided to be mechanics that directly impact a character concept, my answer would be yes, I do. In the BW case your character's political allegiances were subject to dictate by the game mechanics. In the BitD case the game mechanics dictated that you acquire a new personality trait. That in both cases you knew the stakes beforehand doesn't influence my categorization of those mechanics as ones that directly change a character concept.

Okay. This would fall strongly on the performative or expressive side of roleplaying with little to no interest in exploration of the character, yes?

 

[Bill Zebub]

I completely missed the context. For that, I apologize.

As of mechanical influence over the character, the thing that was discussed, it basically comes down to discovering new things about your character instead of dictating them and disclaiming decision making. It's not really that different from randomly rolling stats or background. Sometimes, it's fun to let go and see where things will go.

As of policing roleplaying by other people, I don't think I've ever heard "that's not what your character would do!". At best, a puzzled stare followed by "uhm, that's weird, but okay".

I can't say I've ever actually had somebody say "that's not what your character would do" but certainly there are a lot of comments in this thread (and others I've gone back and perused) that seem to imply there are "allowed" and "disallowed" actions. Usually this seems to be in the context of knowledge that the character "wouldn't have" but I believe those are part and parcel.

 

[Oofta]

Yeah, folks talk about rules variants that might be applied at their tables all the time. How often should people need to demonstrate that there's a "hue and cry" for a rules variant to justify discussing it?

Umm ... it's just a throwaway phrase. Not seeing how this moves the conversation forward.

 

[Lanefan]

I didn't say my view was typical, or even widely shared. I said that I find - in a game in which characters are supposed to matter - that being able to control my PC's emotions weird. If I'm playing a game in which characters are supposed to matter, then I want to inhabit my character. And part of inhabiting my character is experiencing what they experience. And one thing that a person normally doesn't experience is choosing their emotions.

As far as this goes, I agree.

However, one thing a person also doesn't normally experience is having their emotions chosen for them by someone else; and that some games (including D&D at various times) have social mechanisms for PCs and-or NPCs to (try to) do just this is what's under discussion here.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes and your later posts back that up. It doesn't matter if the person saying "it's what my character would do" is "trying to create a character in which they feel immersed" or whatever, the simple fact that they need to resort to "it's what my character would do" rather than letting their "enexpected" action stand on it's own shows that the "unexpected" action itself was bad player behavior to begin with.

Then I must be a bad-behaving player every time I play the game, as "it's what my character would do" is my justification for every action I ever declare regardless of situation, context, or other factors.

 

[Desdichado]

However, one thing a person also doesn't normally experience is having their emotions chosen for them by someone else; and that some games (including D&D at various times) have social mechanisms for PCs and-or NPCs to (try to) do just this is what's under discussion here.

There are naturally limits to the degree to which D&D can simulate that kind of thing. We're sitting around describing situations, and making choices for a fictional character; we can't actually experience the emotions of the characters, only the emotions that we (may) feel as players. And we can't actually rewire our behavior to be different than how our brains are structured.

I've actually never heard of attempting to experience the emotions of a PC, or worrying about how we can't choose those emotional responses. Probably because the answer to that admittedly kind of interesting (in an academic sense if you've got time to sit around wondering about such esoteric weird details of your hobby) is... "yeah, and?" It's interesting to suggest that you can't really replicate that, but what exactly are you supposed to do with that? I also can't experience the feeling of flying through space at the speed of light, so the best I can do is use my imagination to approximate it. Same here.

I'd argue that even attempting to do so is much deeper into a simulationist stance than I've ever heard of anybody proposing before. Still... it's a kind of interesting idea.

 

[Maxperson]

The ICE game Middle Earth: The Wizards doesn't use a board. (It can use a map, but that is optional.) Still, the easiest way to introduce that game to someone who knows a little bit about games would be to say that it is a board game that uses cards.

Likewise for a tile-based game like Mystic Wood or Forbidden Island - there is no board in the strict sense, but they play as board games. Eg Mystic Wood is rather like Talisman except its fun!

Middle Earth is an RPG, even if it does use a map. The other two games create their boards as you play, so while they don't have a fold out board like Monopoly, they do still count as board games.

Mystic Wood sounds like a lot of fun(I like Talisman), but I'm not sure I want to spend $100+ to get it.