D&D General Styles of Roleplaying and Characters

[Ovinomancer]

I also think the authorship vs exploration is flawed, because it rests on the concept of having total control over your character. You NEVER have total control over your character, even in the "default" trad way of playing D&D. You might find that some evil entity with magical power polymorphs your character into, say, a gorilla. That is not something that you had any control over; the only control is, what does your character do about that now? The answer is an exploration of character, at least according to any but a highly unusual definition of that phrase.

And this kind of stuff happens all of the time in D&D. You don't sit around thinking about your character in D&D, you are exposed to stimuli beyond your control, either from the DM, or sometimes from the other players. I don't understand how that is NOT exploring your character. Sure, it's not the same as using mechanics to explore your characters reactions with mechanical stimuli, but stimuli beyond your control is stimuli beyond your control.

Some players may not find certain types of stimuli fun to use, but to me that seems little different than saying something else about mechanics, like "I don't like Action Points" or "I don't like advantage/disadvantage" or something like that. It doesn't fundamentally change anything about what you're doing, just about how you're doing it.

I've been studiously ignoring the "but magic" arguments for the lack of total control over your character due to the fact that it's a clear blindspot and just gets handwaved away as "but magic." The point is that the most haunting performance of the saddest song cannot ever move a character to tears without player approval without magic, but a crone with a charm spell means you're in love. The former is nodded at and approved as obviously correct, while the latter is given just a "sure, it's magic," level of excuse.

 

[Desdichado]

I've been studiously ignoring the "but magic" arguments for the lack of total control over your character due to the fact that it's a clear blindspot and just gets handwaved away as "but magic." The point is that the most haunting performance of the saddest song cannot ever move a character to tears without player approval without magic, but a crone with a charm spell means you're in love. The former is nodded at and approved as obviously correct, while the latter is given just a "sure, it's magic," level of excuse.

I used an example that included magic, but I didn't have to. If you're in the middle of a tense negotiation scene with a local Lord Mayor and another player decides that it's boring and his character shouts, draws his sword and kills the Lord Mayor in frustration, then your character is now exposed to stimuli that he neither expected nor can control. Most likely, he's going to be seen as an accomplice to murder and will become a wanted person in the setting because of something that he didn't do, didn't choose, and had no control over. What does he decide to do about it? The answer to that is also, I believe, exploration of the character.

 

[loverdrive]

It became kind of confusing, with all that mixing of mechanics telling what the PC feels and GM doing the same. I'll focus on the first case, as the second is a bit more debatable.

So. Mechanics, rules, dice, all that fancy jazz.

Is there really any meaningful difference between using dice to determine whether the character can hit a head-sized target at 800m and using dice to determine whether the character can actually pull the trigger, knowing that this head-sized belongs to her lover? I, honestly, don't think so.

I can't see how something like

When you aim to hurt someone you love, roll +Cold. On 10+, go ahead, you heartless bastard. On 7-9, you hesitate — give up or mark Trauma and do it anyway. On 6-, you just... can't. Drop your weapon and mark Trauma. Getting too soft for this job, huh?

is somehow different from

When you attack someone unsuspecting or helpless, ask the MC if you could miss. If you could, treat it as going aggro, but your victim has no choice to cave and do what you want. If you couldn’t, you simply inflict harm as established.

After all, dice is a tool to choose between two equally interesting outcomes. If one of them is uninteresting, then there's no point in touching dice. Any rule out there exists to allow you to disclaim decision-making, after all.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I used an example that included magic, but I didn't have to. If you're in the middle of a tense negotiation scene with a local Lord Mayor and another player decides that it's boring and his character shouts, draws his sword and kills the Lord Mayor in frustration, then your character is now exposed to stimuli that he neither expected nor can control. Most likely, he's going to be seen as an accomplice to murder and will become a wanted person in the setting because of something that he didn't do, didn't choose, and had no control over. What does he decide to do about it? The answer to that is also, I believe, exploration of the character.

At which point everything is an exploration of character. You're in a fight and want the killing blow but the wizard did it, how does that make you feel? If a choice is enough to trigger you exploring your character, then we're on trivial ground. And, even here, it still you making this choice and then mapping it to the character.

 

[Hussar]

he player can choose to have their Rogue respond however they like to such an embarrassment - the DM should hold no control over that portrayal.

I agree. The DM shouldn't have any control.

The mechanics on the other hand...

 

[Xetheral]

The latter, and not in the sense that the author is surprised, but in the reification of the character. I'm often surprised by my choices, but, in the context of playing a game where character is never at stake, I don't confuse my surprise at my choices for the character doing anything at all. The character in this approach is a vessel to hold my thinking. It never pushes back.

No one is confusing anything when an author says that it feels like a character is writing itself. It's a statement about feelings and perception.

That was the entire thrust of my post, yes. That you're using exploration as a term for being surprised at a choice you made, and I'm asking if it should instead mean being surprised by character in a moment. I don't see how the latter can occur in a game where I have total and absolute authority over character for my character, because then it's only from me to the character. There's no feedback or pushback possible. I can rationalize anything I want to justify any bits of character I desire. That I don't fully understand my own thinking and so occasionally (or often) surprise myself in these choices of rationalization or justification doesn't have anything really to do with the character. To me, this can still be loads of fun, but my purpose here isn't to find out who this character is -- to explore why they do things -- but rather to put together a fun performative package to share with the other players during the game.

Bold emphasis added. Why does what explore "should" mean even enter the picture here? If we agree that we're using the word "explore" differently, then we're just discussing different concepts using the same terminology. We could discuss in more detail the concept each of us is describing, but I see no value in a discussion of which of our conflicting definitions of "explore" is superior. By what metric would we ever resolve that difference of opinion, and what would be the value even if we could?

Trying to address our underlying differences rather than focusing on our different usage of "explore", I have a substantive question regarding what you wrote in the quoted post. You object to the idea that surprise felt at one's unexpected choices for a character can be described as "being surprised by the character" on the grounds that doing so is problematically reifying the character. But doesn't describing surprise felt at the result of a game mechanic that tells you about your character as "being surprised by the character" require exactly the same degree of reification? In both cases the surprise originally results from something external to the character--why do you consider it ok to ascribe that surprise to the character in one case but not in the other?

 

[Desdichado]

At which point everything is an exploration of character. You're in a fight and want the killing blow but the wizard did it, how does that make you feel? If a choice is enough to trigger you exploring your character, then we're on trivial ground. And, even here, it still you making this choice and then mapping it to the character.

Well... yeah. D&D and D&D-like games are fundamentally, unless you play in a pure, Talisman-like hack-n-slash format where characters are just game pieces, games about the exploration of character. I mean, obviously your example isn't likely to be one in which character exploration is very deep, complex, or likely to be further explored by any but the most petty of characters. But still.

This feels a bit like reducto ad absurdum, but maybe you don't see if that way unless I turn it the other direction. If exploration of character only involves you NOT making choice and then mapping it to the character, then the only valid exploration of character happens when you're completely passive and finding out about the character through decisions that you don't author. You have to essentially become a spectator watching SOMEONE ELSE author the character. Curiously, in a trad D&D game, EVERYONE ELSE at the table gets to explore your character except for you, because you aren't exploring him, you're AUTHORING him.

Better yet, it becomes very difficult to actually explore characters in a gaming set-up. If you want to explore characters, put down the dice and go read a book so you can explore the character that you are not in any way whatsoever authoring!

 

[Hussar]

From my standpoint I entirely agree that it is more believable that the character is impacted by events in the fiction rather than that the character has perfect control over their emotional responses.

I merely think that leaving it up to the player who best understands the character to decide how the character is impacted by events allows for more believable nuance than any game mechanic ever could.

I personally don't see any increase in believability from simulating the character's inability to control its responses to traumatic events by also mechanically preventing the player from controlling the character's response to those events.

Because the player is never objective.

No matter what the player decides, it will always come from the very subjective position of the player. Even players who delight in torturing their characters are still making choices based on that particular preference of play. IOW, the player will nearly always choose a response that the player thinks of. Obviously.

Take a DM's example. The monsters have downed a PC but there are still standing PC's around. The monster's turn comes up. Now, as the DM, you could instantly kill the downed PC - two automatic death fails kills the PC in this example (assume the character has already failed one death save). So, as the DM, do you whack the PC or attack someone else? Well, either way you decide is tainted by your awareness of the table. If you choose to kill Dave's character, he might be kinda pissed off. OTOH, if you choose not to kill Dave's character, are you making that choice because it makes sense in the fiction or because you just don't want to kill Dave's character? But, if you kill Dave's character, are you doing it to avoid looking like you are avoiding not killing a character - on and on and on, around in circles.

So, if you're me, you let the dice decide. 1-2, kill Dave's character, 3-6 move on to the next target. It's objective and fair and doesn't put me, as DM, square in the spotlight for whacking Dave's character.

The same goes for players. Players will never choose something that they don't think of themselves. They can't. Obviously. So, that's where mechanics come in.

 

[Hussar]

pure, Talisman-like hack-n-slash format where characters are just game pieces, games about the exploration of character.

Wow, why does EVERYONE get to say this except me?

 

[Desdichado]

Wow, why does EVERYONE get to say this except me?

There's obviously some context here that I'm missing and I don't really know what you're talking about specifically. But as a general rule when something unusual happens and you think it's EVERYONE ELSE except you that's the cause of it, chances are it's actually you.