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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6206508" data-attributes="member: 42582">Maybe I'm just ignorant of acting techniques, never having been one nor trained as one - but are you suggesting that Christopher Reeve, playing Clark Kent, didn't adopt and/or perform the mannerism of adjusting his glasses on his nose with an eye to how that might look to an audience on screen? I guess that's possible, but it would never have occured to me as a likely possibility. (I personally think that this also shows that there are plenty of ways in which an actor can make decisions based on considerations other than what the character themselves would feel or experience, without giving a wink and a nudge to the audience.)Or if we think of the performance of Harrison Ford as the "rogue with a heart of gold" in Star Wars - is he really playing that character without regard to the fact that he has to come across as brash but likeable rather than brash and unlikeable?For a more recent example, I'm thinking of the Mark Ruffalo vs Robert Downey Jr show, otherwise known as The Avengers. Those performances are so self-conscious that it beggars belief to think that they are based on nothing more than the actors' conceptions of how the character might be feeling and thinking at that moment in the fiction.Now both of those are good actors. And a performance like Ruffalo's in My Life Without Me I would consider as being more plausibly grounded in a sense of the character's own position in the fiction and nothing more (though even then I don't know that that's all of it). But Ruffalo was also less well known then. Compare that to his performance in The Kids Are All Right - ostensibly a comparable sort of role as far as character and fiction are concerned - and I think you can see a lot more self-consciousness in the performance. But he's still playing the role!This seems to be positing method acting as the only mode of acting. I'm not sure that's true. Leaving aside more vaudevillean or "weekend matinee" approaches to acting, I'm not sure that method acting is the proper approach to something like Waiting for Godot. I think there are a range of approaches to acting which can still count as "playing the role".In RPG play there is an additional complication that, unless the GM has prescripted the whole thing, the players are not just actors but authors. And also audiences for one another's performances (and for the GM's performances). I'm not sure that the only viable way to approach this situation is via method acting. There are a range of reasons why this is so; here's one: method acting depends upon a sense of the character, the character's motivations and inner life, the needs and demands that the scene places on the character. This all depends on pre-scripting by the playwright/screenwriter. In an RPG, that hasn't happened yet. The character actually has to have that inner life authored, the stresses and demands of the scene created. And who is going to do that? Even if your answer in respect of the scene puts all the weight on the GM, someone has to author the inner life of the character. And surely that is the player! And in so far as they are authoring the character in this way as they perform, they are doing something different from what the method actor does.Why is this ideally the goal? Robin Laws - who, whether or not one agrees with everything he says, presumably knows a thing or two about roleplaying - discusses this issue in his contribution to the Over the Edge rulebook.For instance: Player A knows that Player B's PC - call that PC X - is hunting for the person who was a mysterious benefactor while the character X was a child. (Think Great Expectations.) Player A's PC - call that PC Q - does not know this, however. Now the GM and Player A are resolving some minor aspect around Q's affairs - perhaps Q has gone to the wizard's guild to meet up with a contact there - and the GM has an NPC mention to Q some little bit of gossip about a myserious guild member who never shows his face, but who periodically sends donations to support the wizardly education of struggling young apprentices. Now Player A immediately thinks "I wonder if this is connected to X's mysterious benefactor?" But from the point of view of Q, there is no real reason to treat this as more than idle gossip. Is Player A being a good player or a bad player if s/he has Q take a degree of interest in the gossip and learn more; and then, upon Q meeting up with X later that day at party headquarters, has Q mention to X "Hey, I heard this interesting gossip at the wizard's guild about a shadowy guildmember who bestows bounty on young apprenteices"?In my game, I would consider this as PLayer A being a good player - s/he has picked up on a thread that might link PCs together and drive the game forward in some interesting way. Some other tables - yours, Wicht, and perhaps [MENTION=17106]Ahnehnois[/MENTION]'s - think this is bad play, because it is metagaming - playing the character on the basis of knowledge that s/he lacks but that the player has. I'm happy to accept there are different preferences here - but I won't accept that Player A is not "playing a role", or that what we have here is no longer an instance of RPGing.Are you speaking for yourself with that, or for all RPGers? That's not really how I view RPGing. Apart from anything else, it suggests that the rules are a necessary evil. That's not how I experience them. For me, they play a key role in generating the experience of play.What I think is "narrow" is an attempt to define D&D, RPGing, and the techniques that playing them can involve, in ways that entail that half the posters on this site are not RPGers. Or that entail that Robin Laws - one of the leading designers of RPGs and commentators on what RPGing can involve - in fact misunderstands the activity that has been his life's work.If you think I don't understand your approach you're mistaken. I understand it - I just don't particularly care for it myself. Much the same as I gather you don't care for mine. But I don't attempt to tell you you're not RPGing, or that you're playing the game wrong. I'm really just inviting you to extend the same courtesy.Which was my basic point back when I introduced the notion of playstyles in a post that tried to explain to Cyclone Jester why other posters like Wicht, Ahnehnois and [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION] might not experience balance issue in their games  - namely, because they are using different techniques and approaches to play. There are different ways of playing D&D, and for some the caster/fighter issue matters in ways that are different from others. The role of the GM in preventing those balance issues from breaking out is important in some approaches but not available in others. Why anyone would think this is a criticism I don't understand, given that all three of you have yourselves said that "good GMing" is what makes the balance issues not happen in your games.</blockquote>

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