D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[AlViking]

Not wild at all. You can obviously roleplay however you want.

But you can't call it a faithful portrayal without being able to measure it against something to be faithful to. I'm not arguing about the play, I'm arguing about the terminology.

You can make up any terminology, and "standards" that you want. Doesn't mean that anyone else will agree with you when you use common descriptive language that is frequently used in RPGs. You can say you define "up" as "down" according to your terminology, just expect pushback and people telling you that it doesn't work that way.

 

[Maxperson]

We use 30-second rounds, still not perfect but it's an OK middle-ground between 1-minute rounds and the much shorter WotC-edition rounds.

Thinking about it, though, I can't remember the last time (if ever!) someone tried picking a lock during combat; so this isn't something I've had to give any real thought to other than for purposes of this discussion.

I have it happen a couple of times when the party was in a dungeon fighting. They were caught between a lock and a hard place and needed to retreat.

 

[Maxperson]

You can do that; you just can't call it faithful. Being faithful to your headcanon doesn't count.

If you've made external declarations as to how you're attempting to portray the character, than that's fine. It doesn't have to be a mechanic. But it can't just be in your head.

Why on Earth would being faithful to it not be called faithful? How is this not One True Wayism.

Someone doesn't have to tell someone else about something before he can have faith in it or be faithful to it.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Lacking some external signifier, how would Mike ever know or think that Mary is playing her character unfaithfully?

This is stating the obvious. That without other indications, an external observer must rely on an external metric. But that’s a far narrower scope than the post I replied to implied.

Not wild at all. You can obviously roleplay however you want.

But you can't call it a faithful portrayal without being able to measure it against something to be faithful to. I'm not arguing about the play, I'm arguing about the terminology.

Thanks for the clarification, but I still think the argument is too rigid.

"Faithful" doesn’t inherently require an external metric, it just requires a standard, and that standard can be internal. If I create a character and define their personality, motivations, and values, then I can measure my portrayal against my own intent. That is something to be faithful to.

Just because that metric isn’t external or universally visible doesn’t make it meaningless or invalid. Internal consistency is still a form of consistency. Dismissing internal intent as insufficient undermines the very idea of self-authored characters.

As an author, you can call it a faithful portrayal if it’s true to the character as you envisioned and established them. To suggest otherwise is to deny the role of authorial intent and imply that external interpretation is authoritative.

That’s a sweeping change to how we view creative expression. In effect, it places creative works at the mercy of majority opinion, flattening nuance and treating any deviation from popular consensus as objectively incorrect.

Seems pretty wild to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, I've seen a lot, and my sense of it is that if a player uses backstory authority to, say, grant their character power and influence, so what?

So what is I don't think that gets to be a unilateral choice there; it should be baked into either action or character generation, both of which avoid turning it into a sleight of hand/gotcha moment.

Now their story is about that! Meanwhile, spotlight is a whole other thing.

No, I don't think they entirely are.

Part of the job of a GM, in most systems -both traditional and otherwise- is to manage the allocation of table time. If a player is unable to defer to others, that seems like not an issue of play style. It usually happens with children.

Then there are a fair number of very old children.

I mean, there can be additional manifestations too, like using some kind of authority to push play in a direction, or change the tone, genre, etc. unilaterally. But again the problem isn't player authority, it's table manners!

And again, I don't think they're completely disconnected.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's a group game with group dynamics. If one character has inherited wealth and power it's not fair to the rest of the players at the table. But thanks for making your opinion clear that if we don't care for your choice it's only an issue if we're childish. It helps me put the opinion into perspective.

Eh, that depends. Tony Stark has inherited power and wealth, but it only mildly matters to the rest of the Avengers because power (in the social sense) and wealth aren't what they're about. Even in fantasy games how important that is varies considerably.

The kicker is for it to not be out of nowhere, and everyone else being onboard. As I referenced, in 13th Age, everyone gets to just pick something distinctive, which could include enormous social power--because that's not intrinsically relevant to what the game is about, and because its assumed it'll have baggage associated with it. If its the sort of thing another player cares about, they can just do the same. In other games you can get high social level as a component of character gen if you want.

But its usually something you want to see coming, not sprung abruptly without time for other players and the GM to properly prepare.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So it's not that I took issue with your stating that only children would have an issue, it's that I'm stuck in the 70s! That's oh so much better.

I've had experience with games where one person had a character of privilege as well (taking the Noble background to too much of an extreme most recently) and at one point we sat the GM down and said that it was making the game less fun for the rest of us. I'm glad if your experience has been different but it does not resemble mine for multiple reasons.

Yup. Nothing insulting about telling someone their play is "obsolete", right?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is a wild claim. It assumes that fidelity to a character must be measured externally, as if there's an authoritative benchmark. But that's an odd standard. It dismisses a person’s ability to assess their own thoughts and intentions.

You also disregard subjective portrayal. In roleplaying, internal consistency is the norm. If I say my character is cautious, but I play them recklessly without reason, I’m not staying true to my concept. But I don’t need someone else’s metric to realize that. My own creative goals provide the standard.

This argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It casually dismisses the value of self-awareness and introspection. Worse, it seems to undermine the legitimacy of self-directed creativity. An idea that, if taken seriously, would reduce personal expression in roleplay to something dangerously limited.

You might be going a bit far in the other direction. Nor did @TwoSix say that self-awareness etc. was nothing. He simply suggested something that my experience tells me is pretty useful. That is, you should have some actual substance to the portrayal. BW and TB2e have belief, nature, instincts, stuff like that. It's not a straightjacket, but it does remind you what you are going for.

 

[Lanefan]

Not wild at all. You can obviously roleplay however you want.

But you can't call it a faithful portrayal without being able to measure it against something to be faithful to. I'm not arguing about the play, I'm arguing about the terminology.

To begin with, all you've got is your own head-canon to measure against; and nobody else has anything. No problem there.

After the character's been played even for just a few sessions, however, everyone else at the table has the patterns, personality, maybe alignment, etc. you've established in play to measure against.

The advantage of this is that you can use those first few sessions to determine if what you've got in your head is going to work out at all well in play, and - before you've locked yourself in too much - tweak accordingly if it isn't.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I quite enjoyed when McNally opened a Master Lock with another Master Lock. Truly the tool every Rogue should have.

I have a friend who is a master lock hacker. Truthfully, for a skilled person tackling ordinary locks there's little doubt of the outcome. Still, it took him 20 minutes to pick a simple toggle bolt lock on my apartment door one time. Padlocks are all super pathetic though, even the studly looking bike locks. One summer I collected all the leftover bikes for a College next to my house. Took several hours to open a couple hundred bike locks. Zero of them resisted, lol. Most of that class of locks can be tapped open IME.