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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5736687" data-attributes="member: 42582">From <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/4/" target="_blank">Ron Edwards</a>:Stance is defined as how a person arrives at decisions for an imaginary character's imaginary actions. *In Actor stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions using only knowledge and perceptions that the character would have. *In Author stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities, then retroactively "motivates" the character to perform them. (Without that second, retroactive step, this is fairly called Pawn stance.) *In Director stance, a person determines aspects of the environment relative to the character in some fashion, entirely separately from the character's knowledge or ability to influence events. Therefore the player has not only determined the character's actions, but the context, timing, and spatial circumstances of those actions, or even features of the world separate from the characters. What you describe as roleplaying sounds like playing in Actor stance. Many games - including D&D - routinely use Author stance. For example, every time the PC party accepts a new member, or one PC helps another PC out with some hare-brained/illegal/immoral scheme, or etc etc, the player is typically in Author stance. Many games also feature Director stance - for example, the question comes up as to whether or not my PC can wiggle his/her ears, or has a brother or sister, or has brown or grey eyebrows, and I get to decide. I think many people would describe most if not all of this as part of playing a RPG.From <a href="http://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">Eero Tuovinen</a>:Players can have different roles in a roleplaying game. Typical overarching categories are “player roles” and “GM roles”, which are fuzzy and historically determined expressions of natural language. One type of player role is when the game requires a player to be an advocate for a single player character – this advocacy thing is an exact theory term, unlike the fuzzy concept of “player role”. When a player is an advocate for a character in a roleplaying game, this means that his task in playing the game is to express his character’s personality, interests and agenda for the benefit of himself and other players. This means that the player tells the others what his character does, thinks and feels, and he’s doing his job well if the picture he paints of the character is clear and powerful, easy to relate to. . . Character advocacy is . . . a common ideal in D&D, although I do admit that there are readings of the game text where advocacy is not present. Still, it is common to claim that the ideal of the game is that each player invents a player character who is a full personality, and then represents this character’s choices and actions in the game for the benefit of the group.Advocacy, in this sense, is quite consistent with Author stance. Just to give one example: if one characteristic of my PC is clumsy, then I might declare at a crucial moment that my guy fumbles the McGuffin, with mayhem and hilarity ensuing. This is not "making decisions chiefly because they're the ones your character would make in that situation". Rather, it is "determines a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities" - in this case, my priority of portraying my PC as clumsy. But I think most people would still recognise this as roleplaying.Advocacy in the specified sense is also compatible with at least certain versions of Director stance. Suppose, for example, that my PC is returning to his/her homeland after many years of travel. I (the player) state to the group that the people give me a tumultuous welcome. This is Director stance, but if the persona of my PC is "beloved leader ot the people", then this episode of Director stance play is quite consistent with advocating for my PC. And, again, I think many RPGers would recognise it as roleplaying - it's not "in character", but it is "getting into my character and expressing his/her persona through the fiction of the game".</blockquote>

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