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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6743984" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not even talking about a preference for playing alignment.  Alignment has here been a very incomplete short hand for character.  Nothing that I've said even when I use terminology from a specific game should in any way be construed to be system specific.  Fiasco generally presumes this same sort of "contract", and does not presume that the character will necessarily or inevitably grow or change as the result of his experiences.  This contract that you will play a character that has whatever traits you label the character with, however you label the character, is inherent in roleplaying.  If you don't intend to abide by your traits, don't bother writing them down, because what the heck do they mean in that case anyway? Yes, I am familiar with games that allow characters to have very fluid and evolving traits.  But even they only assume that traits will be tested.  They don't assume that a trait will necessarily be abandoned.  They merely allow it to be changed if the player (or the table) decides to.  The stance that you should be redefining your character all the time, it's that stance that strikes me as being oddly parallel to an alignment stance in D&D.  It's not that I think it's impossible or unreasonable to play a character that is vacillating, unconsidered in his beliefs, and unprincipled and whose beliefs would fluctuate on an almost daily basis with his moods and feelings.  It's merely the idea that you have or even should if you want story that I find bizarre.Nonsense is distinguishable from sense, but that doesn't make nonsense an actual thing.  To the extent that I see something meaningful in what you are calling the Narrativist style, it appears to be asking the question, "What would I do?" as opposed to, "What would the character do?"But while that is a meaningful distinction, the first is a strict subset of the second.  It's not a contradiction nor incompatible.  The first person is playing a character whose beliefs/strictures/code/moral attributes/descriptors happen to correspond to his own, which a person playing the later could do just as well without feeling he's changed styles.  Moreover, two players at the table could simultaneously play in the same game using the same system and created a shared story.  Or the same person could play a character like himself for a while, and switch to a character unlike himself.  This makes his distinction here at most a slight change in stance, and by in large a meaningless change in stance, because as I said most players end up playing themselves anyway even without meaning to and ultimately in the long run end up gravitating game after game to a character with recognizable traits.  I mean this is something that is so common 'Knights of the Dinner Table' satirizes it.  Obviously, any play approach characters are subject to stress and may be subject to change.  But equally in any play approach a character may be subject to stress and find in that validation of his beliefs.  Or the character could finish the story still oblivious.  Subject to change doesn't mean that they will change or must.  Change in the sense of departing from what one formally believed is not a necessary component of anyone's story.</blockquote>

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