NOW LIVE! -- Presents for Goblins: Festive Resources for 5E on Kickstarter! A festive softcover of holiday-themed D&D 5E resources, including the short adventure 'Presents for Goblins'.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7638327" data-attributes="member: 16586">I'm going to start with some personal background. Before I ever touched any dice I got my start role playing in online free form communities associated with various fandoms. I also am a lifelong theater geek with a deep appreciation for the craft of acting. I have a group of friends who gets together every couple months to do read throughs of some of our favorite plays. Right now I'm currently working through The Warner Loughlin Technique which is a set of acting techniques used to attempt to feel the emotions your character is directly in the moment. I'm not involved in community theater right now, but hope to do so at some point in the future. Right now my career and athletics are my focus.My primary focus on stage and when I play role playing games (other than B/X D&D which I approach as a tactical exercise) has always been authentically experiencing what my character is with a focus on relationships and emotional driving forces. This is a pretty big ask. Authentically feeling the weight of the moment as someone who has dramatically different life experiences, people they care about, and ways they process emotions is like hard. Add on top of it the real world social dynamics that exist between players playing a game and at times it can feel damn near impossible. I need all the help I can get.In my experience there are certain issues you run into in completely free form play. The first is that the real world rather than fictional social dynamics can often take over. This is problematic enough on stage, but becomes a much larger problem when we are authoring what our characters actually do. I find it helpful to have mechanics which help us play with more integrity. Sometimes this comes in reward mechanisms. Sometimes in social influence mechanics. Sometimes like in Blades in the Dark or Dogs in the Vineyard the core mechanic helps us think like these characters should think.Another more pernicious problem is that we grow to care for these characters. From a player side it may come down to developing an idealized image of their character that they do not want to see tarnished. In GM mediated play this might express itself in making sure a given character shines in their specialty or forcing the story down certain roads or not providing meaningful antagonism. We become way to focused on outcomes rather than authentically seeing what happens. This is why I favor a set of GMing techniques which limit mediation and favor playing to find out. I also favor mechanics which have something to say so the GM can focus on providing meaningful antagonism. I also feel like intent based adjudication can cause issues here.There is a downside here. We are providing a focused lens towards the sorts of characters in play. We also want to preserve player choice as much as possible. I feel the games I play do that by constraining or affecting outcomes, but still leaving players firmly in the driver seat. I'm willing to dive deeper here, but only if we are going to talk about design trade offs and not try to argue why one set of techniques is always strictly superior.</blockquote>

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