Immersion, Stance, and Playstyle Discussion

[SweeneyTodd]

Having these two concurrent threads is a bit awkward. I responded to the original thread but feel silly cross-posting to this one now. Sweeney, how would you like to handle this?

Yeah, I know. I hope mythusmage doesn't think I'm trying to steal his thunder. I think he wanted to restrict his thread to "what's your stance, and why", so I thought it would be courteous to start a new thread for discussion of the various pros and cons. It may not work out.

I'm thinking maybe the "I don't see my style as "distancing" me from my character" discussion might be more appropriate over here, but it's your call.

 

[Telsar]

Do any of you folks ever get hassled for not using Actor stance? A lot of people seem to see it as "real roleplaying", and pride themselves on really "becoming the character" with Method Actor-type techniques. I know plenty of people get a lot of enjoyment out of that kind of play, but it's just never 'clicked' for me.

My situation is sort of the opposite... I definitely enjoy the method-actor RPing, but with my current group, the rest of the players and the GM are mostly in the pawn stance. On numerous occasions I've been mocked (all in fun) for getting into character and trying to have conversations with enemies, while the GM just has them there for us to attack. In 8 months of gaming, no villain or monster has had anything interesting to say... but my character keeps trying to draw something out of them. The players/GM don't hassle me for it, but they find it amusing. *sigh*

 

[S'mon]

Do any of you folks ever get hassled for not using Actor stance? .

As GM I have hassled players for refusing to roleplay - refusing to speak in-character. This isn't what Edwards calls "actor stance", though, which means simulation play, thinking purely in terms of what the character would do. I don't expect players to speak in character all the time but I do expect it for certain important situations such as political negotiations.

 

[S'mon]

My situation is sort of the opposite... I definitely enjoy the method-actor RPing, but with my current group, the rest of the players and the GM are mostly in the pawn stance. On numerous occasions I've been mocked (all in fun) for getting into character and trying to have conversations with enemies, while the GM just has them there for us to attack. In 8 months of gaming, no villain or monster has had anything interesting to say... but my character keeps trying to draw something out of them. The players/GM don't hassle me for it, but they find it amusing. *sigh*

I feel your pain. Personally I love it when my players' PCs talk to the monsters; sometimes they choose the wrong monster "I talk to the owlbear", but it's far more common that players unthinkingly attack everything that has green skin or tusks.

 

[Afrodyte]

I tend to use Actor Stance, but I am far from the Method Actor end of things. I tend to be more like Lawrence ("Why not try acting, son?") Olivier as opposed to Dustin ("I had to do this to myself to get the right feeling") Hoffman*. The only reason I'm not fully of the Author Stance is in the fact that I don't do anything retroactively with regards to my character, particularly not motivating him/her to act a certain way in a given situation.

*A reference to Marathon Man.

 

[Gold Roger]

My Stance actually depends on the situation.

In charakter creation I'm 100% Autor Stance. I come up with a charakter sheet that's on the edge of power gaming, then I come up with a charakter that fits it and fill in eventual blanks on the sheet acording to the char.
In game I try to be as much actor as possible. However, I tend to slip into Autor stance again. That's because I'm not that good an actor and my brain tends to come up with a clever plan insteat of a suited charakter reaction. I try though, like I said, to stay as much in charakter as possible.
Imersion is similar, during play, I try as much imersion as possible. But neither am I to good at it nor is my group concentrated enough for real deep imersion.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I'd just like to applaud the existence of any discussion which deals with the fact that roleplaying != "pretending to be someone else".

The immersive/escapist/idealised-self/persona-assumption corner of the hobby is too often viewed as the "one true way to roleplay". I've seen scores of people assert that if you're not pretending to be someone else you're not roleplaying, and it's clearly garbage.

I draw a distinction between "immersion" and "actor stance", though. I often play in actor stance - I'll change my speech patterns, put on an accent, speak in-character. I don't do this all the time, but then stance isn't about the one single way you do it. Rare is the player who spends all of his time in one stance, and the best habitual actor stance and immersive player I know will often break actor stance to explain actions rather than stand up and perform them, or even to explain his motivations - a very authorial sort of thing to do.

I would go so far as to say that I'm not convinced that immersive play is necessarily a worthy goal for many players. I'm not suggesting that it's unhealthy or lame, merely that prevailing wisdom misleads many players who would have a more rewarding experience playing in a different mode into believing that only through immersion - pretending that they are their character - can they truly roleplay.

After all, there's more than a few words' difference between "Do what you would do if you were your character" and "Do what your character would do." I think it's a difference larger than many players realise.

(Naturally, I lean towards "Do what your character would do." There's no element of self-identification or persona assumption in how I play - it's more like I'm telling the other players how this person (that I know better than anyone else at the table) would react in this situation.)

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Pursuant to the loose definition of immersion in the first post:

Immersion is the act of pretending to be the character you play, to assume their persona.

Non-immersion, what I might think of myself as the reporting or representing mode (though that's a name which really only fits my personal model of the mode), is the act of representing your character and "speaking for him", not "speaking as him".

It's not "speaking" in the actor stance in-character sense, of course. Immersion is internal - you can play in author stance and narrate your actions while still assuming your character's persona internally, thinking as they do and so on. Arguably, "immersive author stance" play is the ideal of that certain kind of online systemless narrative roleplaying you find on forums like Gaia, in LiveJournal communities, and in chat rooms and IM conversation all over the intarweb. Players (often, anyway) assume the role of their characters immersively but describe their actions in literally authorial style because of the limitations of the medium.

(You can tell they're immersive because they're so very, very possessive of their characters - even when they didn't create them. Nothing like the rage of a regular, say, Draco Malfoy roleplayer seeing Draco played badly.)

 

[Varianor Abroad]

I far prefer immersive play personally. I think it's wonderful.

My players cover a gamut from loving it to hating it.

As a player, I think I fall more into the actor category.

The immersive/escapist/idealised-self/persona-assumption corner of the hobby is too often viewed as the "one true way to roleplay". I've seen scores of people assert that if you're not pretending to be someone else you're not roleplaying, and it's clearly garbage.

....
I would go so far as to say that I'm not convinced that immersive play is necessarily a worthy goal for many players. I'm not suggesting that it's unhealthy or lame, merely that prevailing wisdom misleads many players who would have a more rewarding experience playing in a different mode into believing that only through immersion - pretending that they are their character - can they truly roleplay.

This is an excellent observation. As I read this thread and the other ones, I fear that lurking in the background of all this discussion are extreme value judgments as to different play styles. Remember Mike Mearl's "silent majority" of book buyers? Do they go out of their way to worry about THE right play style? I don't know. But I do think it's dangerous to constantly focus on defining the "right" way to roleplay to the exclusion of other styles.

Which is why I think everyone should read Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering, which covered this subject well already. (I understand anecdotally that he incorporated a lot of the same thinking into the DMG II chapter on play styles.)

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Thanks for the thoughts, folks. You've pointed out to me that there's three parts of what sometimes gets called immersion. I'm going to stick names on them because I like doing that sort of thing. I'm sure someone can come up with better ones.

There's Mindset, which is how you treat the character in your head. How closely you identify with them, whether you're trying to think like they do. The Olivier vs. Hoffman example would go here.

There's Motivation, which is how you decide what actions the character will take. This is more about what motivations the character has and how you deal with IC vs. OOC information.

Then there's Technique (please give me a better name here), which is how you describe your character's actions. Stuff like speaking in character and "I go up to the bar" versus "Ragnar walks up to the bar" goes here.

These are kind of connected, but not always. I think what I call Stance in the first post kind of mixes Motivation and Technique.

It's an excellent point that there's no one way to mix these things that's "roleplaying right". It can cause problems if different players in a group handle things differently, but it's a matter of preference. I think in the other thread someone said that they often describe their character's actions in third person, and other players will respond in in-character dialog.