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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7584949" data-attributes="member: 16814">Players at [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s table may enjoy acting, but that's not Actor stance.  You can use Author, Director, and even Pawn stance and still do acting.  Actor stance really has little to do with acting or what's usually called "being in character" in RPGs.The vast majority of my D&D play has been Author stance play, yet I mostly use "I" statements and talk in funny voices.  I'm making decisions from my player point of view and then coming up with PC motivations.  Any time I decide not to murder that elf after being caught in another fireball because that elf is a PC, I'm in Author stance even if I play my character as grumbling about that damn elf and making theeats.  It's my player motivations that decide, not the PC's.And, metagaming as defined by Max is orthogonal to stances.  By that I mean no stance, as defined, cares about that form of metagaming.  You can decide that your character knows about trolls in Actor stance quite easily, because if the character knows it, it's part of the character's knowledge.  However, as I said above, if you have your character act like they don't know when the player knows because of the player's desire to not engage in the player concept of metagaming, you're in Author stance by definition.  No amount of silly voices and acting changes this.Stances are about which frame decisions are made and whose priorities they serve.  The names of the stances are only obscurely connected to the meaning of the words and are easy to mistake for the more generally used meaning.  Hence, acting is often confused with Actor stance, even though acting isn't a required part of it.  Think more like a movie being shot.  If you're the actor, and you ad lib in the scene only according to your inhabitation of the character's motivations and views, that's Actor stance.  If you act your character because that's what the script says, even if you act it really well, that's akin to Author or Director stance -- the actions come from outside the character. This is a bad analogy, like all analogies, but does highlight that acting isn't required of any stance and can be in all of them, even Pawn.  When I play Gloomhaven, a boardgame, I'm never in Actor stance, even though I often use a funny voice and make up reasons for my character to make decisions I then portray in character.</blockquote>

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