Thinking About the Purpose of Mechanics from a Neo-Trad Perspective

[Pedantic]

I think in both cases (but especially story now), turning the backstory up to eleven makes it hard to actually play the character, for the same reason it's hard to play in a setting with too much detail. If everything is already decided, anything I or anyone else does at the table risks contradicting the truth that is already established. This is why I look at these characters with detailed backstories and carefully planned arcs and wonder whether they are actually fun to play, or even possible to play at all, as written.

When I look at the example of freeform roleplay given by @The-Magic-Sword , it seems to me that you couldn't actually plan detailed character arcs and be sure everything would work the way you planned. The same goes for backstory -- what if another player suddenly implies your two characters used to have a relationship?

I don't think this is quite capturing it. Focusing on backstory and "character arc" is still putting the emphasis on events and plot. The thing I was trying to drive at with the discussion of the primacy of character over situation is that this playstyle exalts characters as independent of the things that happen to them. A character is distinct and discrete from the stuff happening around them, and complete with or without it. You can imagine that these characters would be interesting and engaging to their players even without a campaign to exist in. They could tell you about them without reference to the events of any given game.

I drew that line earlier between "expressive" vs. "growth" orientated characters, but they still have more in common than apart. An expressive character doesn't really change at all; any way such a character is different by the end of a campaign will be framed as self-discovery or explication of established traits. Selina is a thief->Selina is a thief with a heart of gold->Selina is a thief, but won't steal things under these circumstances, etc. A "growth" oriented character has places where change is called for in their plan, and might have a sequence of triggers/events they're looking to react to, but that plan is still encoded in the character from the outset. The exact shape of the tree is uncertain, but it is an oak seed and could never be anything else.

With that in mind, "detailed character arc" is a bit of an overstatement. These characters don't tend to need one. They're looking for a few significant events/details to happen in a story, or for the specific questions they've laid out in their past to be asked and resolved, but they aren't generally concerned with the nature of that resolution.

Your point about "what if someone implied these characters were in a relationship" resolves in two ways. First case, the question could be a violation of some tenet that defines the characters in question (i.e. one of them has "is an aromantic loner" as a defining trait), and thus would either never be asked because everyone involves understands the norms, or would fall into a discussion of out of game courtesies/preferences. Second case, the question isn't definitional to either character's traits, and that becomes another situation the character could be placed in. It might be a place they could show off some character traits or expressions, but it doesn't rise to the level defining the character.

The point I'm trying to express is that there is no outside event, outside of those contained/planned for in a "growth" type character from the outset, that can change the character (or, alternately, any trait that is changed by outside events was never definitional to the character to begin with). The imposition of something of "import" on the character is a violation of the gameplay contract.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Let's put aside the term 'degenerate', since it is a bit fraught (I meant it in the technical sense, but never mind). I think the key bit is in your last paragraph, on the role of uncertainty. Let me quote your example of play from the original post:


First of all, this is great and really interesting (not that it needs my endorsement). Players are effectively setting the scene and making statements about other people's characters (as in the Jackie/Marissa relationship -- were there limits to how much you could do this? Was it established beforehand? Do you still do it in other games?).

Anyway: if everyone has control (mostly) over their own characters, and they make statements in turn, and the players are actually paying attention as building on each others' statments (as in your example)... It looks to me as if play would inevitably throw up some unexpected situations, and test/reveal characters in ways that weren't planned. Does this fit with your experience?


Right! This is what triggered my 'degenerate' comment before. A problem statement is just classic storytelling. Leaving it open looks like old-fashioned 'story now' play. My character has this big issue, let's find out how they deal with it. If you write the answer in stone before you even get there, what then?


From my end, it looks like we're dealing with different but intersecting axes, here. Like, the trad character typically doesn't change much, while the story now character is expected to be challenged (though they may not actually change much). That's one axis. Both types can bring a lot or a little backstory. That's another axis.

I think in both cases (but especially story now), turning the backstory up to eleven makes it hard to actually play the character, for the same reason it's hard to play in a setting with too much detail. If everything is already decided, anything I or anyone else does at the table risks contradicting the truth that is already established. This is why I look at these characters with detailed backstories and carefully planned arcs and wonder whether they are actually fun to play, or even possible to play at all, as written.

When I look at the example of freeform roleplay given by @The-Magic-Sword , it seems to me that you couldn't actually plan detailed character arcs and be sure everything would work the way you planned. The same goes for backstory -- what if another player suddenly implies your two characters used to have a relationship?

Sorry that was me attempting to imply that play had already been taking place or the players had come to an arrangement about shared backstory elements, I have seen that happen organically as you assumed it had here but if so it would have been accompanied by a quick (ooc: [question planning clarification whatever]) at the bottom of the post or pms between the two players, especially if Marissa thought Jack was already implying that or something when really it was meant to suggest he was awkward around girls, but they might even turn around after the misunderstanding and be like "wait i like that"

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I don't think this is quite capturing it. Focusing on backstory and "character arc" is still putting the emphasis on events and plot. The thing I was trying to drive at with the discussion of the primacy of character over situation is that this playstyle exalts characters as independent of the things that happen to them. A character is distinct and discrete from the stuff happening around them, and complete with or without it. You can imagine that these characters would be interesting and engaging to their players even without a campaign to exist in. They could tell you about them without reference to the events of any given game.

I drew that line earlier between "expressive" vs. "growth" orientated characters, but they still have more in common than apart. An expressive character doesn't really change at all; any way such a character is different by the end of a campaign will be framed as self-discovery or explication of established traits. Selina is a thief->Selina is a thief with a heart of gold->Selina is a thief, but won't steal things under these circumstances, etc. A "growth" oriented character has places where change is called for in their plan, and might have a sequence of triggers/events they're looking to react to, but that plan is still encoded in the character from the outset. The exact shape of the tree is uncertain, but it is an oak seed and could never be anything else.

With that in mind, "detailed character arc" is a bit of an overstatement. These characters don't tend to need one. They're looking for a few significant events/details to happen in a story, or for the specific questions they've laid out in their past to be asked and resolved, but they aren't generally concerned with the nature of that resolution.

Your point about "what if someone implied these characters were in a relationship" resolves in two ways. First case, the question could be a violation of some tenet that defines the characters in question (i.e. one of them has "is an aromantic loner" as a defining trait), and thus would either never be asked because everyone involves understands the norms, or would fall into a discussion of out of game courtesies/preferences. Second case, the question isn't definitional to either character's traits, and that becomes another situation the character could be placed in. It might be a place they could show off some character traits or expressions, but it doesn't rise to the level defining the character.

The point I'm trying to express is that there is no outside event, outside of those contained/planned for in a "growth" type character from the outset, that can change the character (or, alternately, any trait that is changed by outside events was never definitional to the character to begin with). The imposition of something of "import" on the character is a violation of the gameplay contract.

You are correct, it can be both too though, the same player I've been talking about actually has in the past, basically designed for me a setup where their character's bullying brothers appeared as minor antagonists through the campaign (e.g. showing up as hired muscle by other bad guys) so he could have an arc of beating them one by one, and (for the comfort reasons I described) absolutely expects a happy resolution-- this is also part of the reason I think, you see so much ink spilled over litigating the GM's right to PC death on reddit advice forums for GMs, there's friction between the idea of what resolution the player wants to see and the emergent consequences DND-likes typically deliver.

Different players will essentially experience it to different degrees, some have certain questions they want to hit (I'm like this, I have a vague idea that my current character will pursue lichdom, because she contains a shard of a lich's soul and its been tempting her with powerful occult magical abilities, and she's trying to live up to the power of the heroes who saved her and has been frustrated with her lack of progress doing things the safe way-- I'm ok with that story going in a few different directions, but I sure do know exactly what it's about, and that was set in stone by her backstory) but others will have a straight up canned arc they will be mussed if they deviate from, like my buddy--

He was a little put out when I chose to focus spotlight on another dimension of his backstory in a way he wasn't expecting, having his fairy-tale lover figure rope him and the party into fey politics that she was trying to influence to be more tolerant of mortals (being fey herself) as her knight and champion. Somehow I'd managed to hear all of his ideas without processing that the 'brothers who show up periodically so he can beat them one by one' thing was actually the load bearing part, whoops; I honed in on the childhood friend turned warlock patron who allowed the kid with medically fragile bones to become her loyal knight true love story instead and made her a much more massive character, while in truth she was meant to be more passive.

 

[loverdrive]

Now I don't know much detail about your Scum & Villainy game, @loverdrive, but when that shift in interest happened for your character, was there some playbook move you could have traded for another, or action ratings you could have traded for one in Attune?

Sure! It's not like this is a completely unsolvable problem.

But if this trade is done completely freely, is there even a reason to have action ratings in the first place?

 

[niklinna]

Sure! It's not like this is a completely unsolvable problem.

But if this trade is done completely freely, is there even a reason to have action ratings in the first place?

Well that's why I said it has to be supported by established fiction. There's got to be a reason things shifted.

Swinging back to the original issue, though, a heavily gamist attachment to "balance" and such can be a real damper on things the established fiction justifiably calls for. Maybe in that moment, your character should have just gotten advances in abilities, XP rules or no. And of course other characters might well have similar opportunties, or definitely would if "balance" was a concern.

 

[loverdrive]

On character arcs, for those wondering "what's the point of playing if you already know where your character will end up": if we think about roleplaying as capturing a fantasy, a feeling, then, well, it makes sense how a specific journey can be an integral part of it.

I don't really have a fantasy that I consistently want to capture in the realm of swords and guns and space to talk about it with a required amount of passion and understanding, besides, I think erotic roleplaying shouldn't be spoken of in hushed whispers, so...

I'm really into bimbofication. Not into bimbos, bimbofication. The transformation process, slowly losing the ability and need to think, slowly giving up all the anxieties and fears by giving up humanity and will, turning into a thing, it arouses me. And without the journey, even if the destination is predetermined, this fantasy is incomplete.

When I'm playing a fierce warrior corrupted by a succubus, the scenario, where the warrior displays nothing but sheer human will and crushes the creature of hell under the heel of her sabaton doesn't interest me. Choosing failure, sticking to the predetermined outcome is me, the player, expressing agency, taking control of losing control.

The character doesn't have an agency. She is not a human being, she is a figment of my imagination, a tool, a toy, her mind and body are nothing but a mine full of precious, precious feeling ore, and I'm the one commanding the excavation process, I'm the one swinging a pickaxe, I'm the one bathing in the processed liquified ruination. Even if the character is suspiciously looking like a mirror image of me.

Different things can happen to her, sure, but only a subset of them furthers my goals, and lets me hit the mining quota. Uncertainty is good only so long as any possible outcome is interesting.

---

A character can't be frozen in time and put under the glass without all the context, that's like cutting a piece out of Gioconda. What happens to the character is an integral part of them, working in tandem with their personality, beliefs, drives, looks, whatever. There's a lot of precious feelings ore to be mined, if you take that into account, too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

When I look at the example of freeform roleplay given by @The-Magic-Sword , it seems to me that you couldn't actually plan detailed character arcs and be sure everything would work the way you planned. The same goes for backstory -- what if another player suddenly implies your two characters used to have a relationship?

Well, just to devil's advocate--what if they did? Unless you've got a character with a very short history, you're not going to fill every moment or even every year of that backstory. Unless there's some reason it seems unlikely for other reasons (established traits that make it very unlikely you'd connect with that character), you just add it in and move on; after all, you can still fill in the parts of it to explain why and how it happened in part, so it need not disrupt your through-line meaningfully.

Just because I think so much in terms of superheroes, it may matter a lot to my conception of Bruce Wayne that he's had a relationship with Talia al Ghul and Selena Kyle, but does it change anything that he also had a relationship with Vicki Vale or even Jezebel Jett? I'd say not really, and you can just encompass that and move on.

The question ends up being whether other things can be inserted in your character's back story without being disruptive of what they're about. I'm sure that for some people anything that comes outside their own conceptualization is a problem, but that isn't intrinsic to the general idea of being focused on character; the latter at most is concerned about not inserting things that simply don't seem to fit.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well that's why I said it has to be supported by established fiction. There's got to be a reason things shifted.

Swinging back to the original issue, though, a heavily gamist attachment to "balance" and such can be a real damper on things the established fiction justifiably calls for. Maybe in that moment, your character should have just gotten advances in abilities, XP rules or no. And of course other characters might well have similar opportunties, or definitely would if "balance" was a concern.

That, of course, can be the solution, but the problem is when the opportunities occur. If one character is going to take a visible capability jump early in the game, and one late, that may be less than satisfactory for people who care about such things at all.

That's why I say one issue with any actual game-system expression of these sorts of thing is whether the character is "too big" for the system or setting (using setting broadly). You can also have the situation where, in a multiple character game, some people's characters are "bigger" than others are, and even people who find that okay in principal don't find they like the dynamic it produces in play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, I've met another PC's enemy, who was his previous teacher, and the whole situation was like "Finally! A worthy disciple!", and I really liked the idea of my character being a hidden gem of raw psychic power who was wasting his life on petty crime. SaV surely allows to utilize actions you don't have many dots in, but I didn't want to just do psychic stuff. I wanted the debut to be an explosive grand success, a reality storm.

I don't hold it against the game, but it made me think about the necessity of having rules that make thieves be good thieves and bad sorcerers.

Yeah, there might be some ways to shade it. I haven't played SaV, but in BitD if you were to want to do something akin to that you might get a dot in Attune, and then do a DTA to get a really nice set of Arcane Implements, and maybe some other attune pumping thing, then just go to town with Devil's Bargain and pushing to the hilt. It'd probably crash and burn a little at some point, but you could PROBABLY pull off something fairly cool! Of course tier 0 BitD PCs are definitely running at the hairy edge of death even in their strong suites, so I imagine it would be real dicey. Still, play to find out! If it goes off, its legendary, and should net you some good XP to boot. Worst case you wake up the next day with a new trauma and a deep hankering for some vice! lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Being someone whose style I don't think fits neatly into a lot of RPG categories, I can understand that. Generally I find attempts to lump people into play styles pretty tricky. It can be handy, and I think in this case, the overview is useful, but like a lot of things of this sort, it gets carried forward by other people online and that is when it gets confusing for me

I guess my point is this is useful as a break down to discuss, and there are good insights I think in the article. It is still clearly an open discussion though (the author isn't claiming these groupings are absolute or that his take is the only viable take). But after articles like this come out, they become more set in stone and can form a kind of orthodox taxonomy (where I think it is more useful if it is just seen as one way of grouping these things, that alternative groupings have merit too----especially since this is a hobby where most of us were viewing its evolution from a our own narrow perspective in our own neck of the woods)

Meh, it happens in every field. People are STILL going on using Freudian terms and ideas when they have been basically refuted and relegated to the ash heap of bad notions in every sense by anyone who actually studies the subject. I mean, they're basically a historical curiosity, yet in the everyday world people blather on about them as if they're cutting edge science or something.

But maybe terms from art and literature are more apropos, as there is equally no 'wrong way' to view most questions in those subjects either. If something was said 500 years ago, someone will still be repeating it! lol.