D&D General Styles of Roleplaying and Characters

[Ovinomancer]

With respect, that's not the causal relationship.

We can see this, because there is absolutely nothing in the rules of chess that prevents a pair of players from building a shared fiction around their play, and making their game choices based upon that fiction. My pawns may be John, Paul, George, Ringo, Bingo, Bango, Bongo, and Irving. The Bishop of Canterbury may threaten the denizens of Castle Black with excommunication, until the knight Sir Didimus falls upon him with a sword...

However, there is no room in the rules and constrained action choices to allow that shared fiction to impact resolution of the action. The Knight will take the Queen's Bishop's, no matter what the fictional positioning says. Thus, while we can have it, the shared fiction is not useful in the game, and so we do not bother to develop it - the lack of the fiction is the result of it not mattering, not the cause of it.

The cause, as already said, lies in the extremely restricted action space, and highly abstracted rules that require no judgement, no interpretation to resolve the action. Nobody playing chess ever has to ask the question, "What should happen here?" so the fictional positioning is not relevant, and is in fact excluded by the design of the game.

I think that once we're postulating things we can add to a game to change the game, we've lost sight of the original point of the example. I can add things to Monopoly until it resembles Risk, but then I'm not really playing Monopoly anymore. The fact that I can add a story to a chess game doesn't mean there's a shared fiction to the chess game, it means I have a chess game and then I've also told a story.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I think D&D has done a dutiful job of having rules for its traditional main foci. But, if D&D was designed intending romance to be a major focus... it'd probably have rules for it, weapon speed factors and all.

....um..... I can't .... I mean ... no ... I won't ...

But, we can imagine a game with different focus, say, less about who gets killed, and more on who marries whom. Mr. Darcy does not need a two-handed sword or magic missiles.

....MR. DARCY IS MOST CERTAINLY PACKING A TWO-HANDED SWORD!

What, you think Liz Bennet is pining for a bare bodkin? I don't think so!

And for that matter, let's talk about weapon speed. If you're concerned about winning initiative with your quick weapon, you're doing it wrong.

 

[Campbell]

Before I get into this I want to preface what I am about to say that I do not think the current version of D&D would benefit much from more involved social mechanics (maybe some encouragement to use what's there would be nice though). I say so largely because it does not really have anything in particular to say about how we interact with each other. It's just not that sort of game nor do I think it should try to be that sort of game.

One of the primary reasons I favor social mechanics in a lot of the games I run and play is that mechanics can provide a shared language that helps us communicate about and keep track of fiction that is more complex than we can easily fit inside our heads. In a typical game with 3 players it's not unusual for us to be dealing with upwards of 20+ recurring NPCs with who each have their own personal agenda, conflicting belief systems, and often different relationships with individual PCs. Player characters often might be members of different factions, have individual relationships with important NPCs, have friends and family members that are relevant to play, etc.

In a lot of the games I run and play the focus is on a very complex social environment about 75%-80% of the time. Violence happens, but it is extremely rare. Like in 6 months of playing Infinity I'm pretty sure we have broken out the formal combat rules about 4 times. In about a year of our Vampire hack we have had maybe 3. The rules for social stuff help us to navigate and understand complex fiction. If we did not have them we would have to dramatically simplify the fiction we are dealing with.

When other people say their games have plenty of character focused bits, relationship drama, etc. I do not really know how to react. I bet it would be plenty for most gamers, but like for the group I play primarily with it's the main course. It needs to be as effortless as possible. We need to be able to navigate those moments when we're fading towards the end of a session. The type of support you need is just different than when those moments make up maybe 15 - 20 % of play. Effort and preparation can do a lot for you when you are talking about something that makes up maybe 1/5 of your time at the table and is probably a highlight of the session.

Besides communication and just like tracking stuff it's important to me to line up player and character incentives. I like playing games and I like playing my character. I hate when I have to choose between the two. I also really want to avoid the temptation to do particular things for the sake of the story. That's particularly important to me as a GM. Social rules, especially ones like we see in Exalted Third Edition help keep me focused on character in moments where I might be tempted to angle for particular outcomes in the narrative.

One thing I will say as an amateur actor and student of the craft I am still somewhat nonplussed by the confidence most people assert about their ability to understand human interaction. I can understand that some processes and tools work differently for different people, but it's legitimately hard for me to fathom someone feeling so confident about their ability to on the fly do for an entire fictional world something professionals struggle to do for a single character after months of preparation when they already know what they will be saying and doing. I know that I personally look back after every session and think about how I can do it better. It's hard stuff and I need all the help I can get.

 

[Malmuria]

Question for 3d Roleplayers: do you roleplay your characters conscious motivations and inner monologue, or do you also take into account their unconscious fears, anxieties, and habits, that they would not have direct access to?

 

[Bill Zebub]

A couple times in this thread I’ve started to describe something that was only just occurring to me, and I don’t think I did the topic justice. I’ve been thinking about it a lot more, and I think I have some more of it figured out.

I want to distinguish between performative and experiential roleplaying. (Maybe somebody else has introduced these terms, or at least the ideas behind them; I will admit I’m not much of a student of RPG theory. I'm sure pemerton will set me straight.)

I’m calling performative roleplaying that which is observable by other people at the table. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s done for their benefit, but it is the visible/audible(/olfactory?) expression of roleplaying. It’s what your character does, and how you convey it.

What goes on in your own head I’m calling experiential roleplaying. Simplified, it basically means you feel empathy with/for your character. When something good or bad happens to your character, you feel like it is happening to you.

These two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, although for some people they may be in conflict. They are, however, two very different goals, and will lead to very different behaviors at the table.

As I described earlier (unless it was in the closed thread) my first character was an elf fighter/magic-user with ridiculously high ability scores and way too many magic items. We (as teenagers) were total monty haul players. We raided dungeons, killed monsters, and took their stuff. We didn’t explore our characters or really even talk to NPCs. And yet...I felt like I was that character and he was me.

Performative roleplaying? 0/10
Experiential roleplaying? 10/10

I don't feel that way with every character I play, and I never feel that way playing board games or video games. (Exception: when I was playing World of Warcraft 40+ hours a week back in the day when there was such a thing as server community, and everybody knew me as my character, it started to approach that same feeling.)

A lot of the behaviors/rules/approaches that people are describing as being absolutely essential to roleplaying I would categorize as performative roleplaying. They are always about what your character says or does. If “you” are brought into it, it’s with the exhortation that you try to get yourself out of the picture.

In fact, I would say this whole conversation, and especially the claims made by Colville (again, I didn’t watch it but am basing this off the summaries) apply only to performative roleplaying. They may even be 100% true, but still they apply only to performative roleplaying.

Now, maybe for some people the act of doing this results in experiential roleplaying. The more you remove yourself from the picture, the more you feel like you are there in the shoes of this other person.

Not for me.

If I’m sitting there thinking, “Am I allowed to use this knowledge? How long should I wait before burning the troll? Should I ask the DM, or roll dice, to see if it’s ok if I know something? I know what I want to do, but what would this other not-me person want to do?” I feel less and less like I’m inhabiting my character and instead more like I have a remote control sending commands to somebody else. And that’s not what I want.

And here’s the thing: nobody is in any position to pass any sort of judgment on somebody else’s experiential roleplaying. You just don't know what is inside their head. What works for you may not work for somebody else. End of story.

Now, I can understand sharing ideas because something works...for you, and makes roleplaying more enjoyable...for you. But to do so you must accept that somebody else's experience may simply be different.

Thoughts?

 

[Bill Zebub]

Oh, P.S.: if we're strictly talking about performative roleplaying, then I'm totally fine with the 1D/3D terminology.

 

[pemerton]

You're right - you don't have to portray your character beyond the minimum required to play the game.

The question is, even though you don't have to do this, should you at least try to do it anyway? And, if you do, will it make the game better for all involved?

My own answer to both those questions is an unequivocal YES.

Doesn't better here just mean Lanefan might enjoy it more? If I'm sitting down with a group to play a WPM-ish dungeon crawl, I don't think I need to hear all about the gnome's fear of heights and hatred of fish.

 

[pemerton]

With respect, that's not the causal relationship.

<snip>

The cause, as already said, lies in the extremely restricted action space, and highly abstracted rules that require no judgement, no interpretation to resolve the action. Nobody playing chess ever has to ask the question, "What should happen here?" so the fictional positioning is not relevant, and is in fact excluded by the design of the game.

The development of RPGs from board games is the development of taking a wargame (with a fiction colorful enough that we maintain it, regardless of not needing it) and admitting into play sufficient clearly defined regions of doubt and uncertainty to how to resolve the action that the fiction can be used to resolve the doubt.

I don't agree with this account, and indeed think the causal relationship is the reverse: the reason the space of possible moves in a RPG is open-ended in the way it is is because the moves are made within the context of being this person in this imagined circumstance.

 

[pemerton]

In a lot of the games I run and play the focus is on a very complex social environment about 75%-80% of the time. Violence happens, but it is extremely rare. Like in 6 months of playing Infinity I'm pretty sure we have broken out the formal combat rules about 4 times. In about a year of our Vampire hack we have had maybe 3. The rules for social stuff help us to navigate and understand complex fiction. If we did not have them we would have to dramatically simplify the fiction we are dealing with.

For me this varies a lot across systems. Our Prince Valiant games have a reasonable amount of jousting, some skirmishing with bandits, and more recently a fair bit of warband leadership. Our Classic Traveller game has much less combat - maybe once per three sessions?

One of the primary reasons I favor social mechanics in a lot of the games I run and play is that mechanics can provide a shared language that helps us communicate about and keep track of fiction that is more complex than we can easily fit inside our heads. In a typical game with 3 players it's not unusual for us to be dealing with upwards of 20+ recurring NPCs with who each have their own personal agenda, conflicting belief systems, and often different relationships with individual PCs. Player characters often might be members of different factions, have individual relationships with important NPCs, have friends and family members that are relevant to play, etc.

I don't run games with this degree of intricacy of social situation. Normally it's a handful of salient NPCs. As NPCs become more central or "routine" in their occurrence in the fiction, they tend to drift under the control of the player of the PC with whom they're affiliated. As GM/referee, I'll take over when some sort of conflict-of-interest emerges.

I think it's also fair to say that a lot of our NPCs are not super-intricate in their characters!

When other people say their games have plenty of character focused bits, relationship drama, etc. I do not really know how to react.

Likewise, but probably for slightly different reasons from you.

I take it for granted that any given situation in play has the potential to become a site of conflict between PCs; and in a more intense system like BW any situation should be generating pressure on the player's conception of their character and what their character is hoping to achieve. That means that any moment of play may be, and hopefully is, a character-focused bit or is putting some pressure on a relationship.

The examples I posted not too far upthread - of Prince Valiant, Cortex+ Heroic and Burning Wheel play - should illustrate what I mean.

One thing I will say as an amateur actor and student of the craft I am still somewhat nonplussed by the confidence most people assert about their ability to understand human interaction. I can understand that some processes and tools work differently for different people, but it's legitimately hard for me to fathom someone feeling so confident about their ability to on the fly do for an entire fictional world something professionals struggle to do for a single character after months of preparation when they already know what they will be saying and doing.

I am not any sort of actor, amateur or otherwise. I come to this from a different perspective, as someone who has thought hard (and professionally) about moral, social, legal and political philosophy for close to 30 years now. And who has lived a reasonably social life in the course of doing that professional thinking.

People are simultaneously very predictable, and very hard to predict. That's not contradiction - rather, they are predictable in some ways (eg how they're likely to greet you if you greet them) but not in others (eg whether or not they'll fall in love with you when you've fallen in love with them; or more prosaically, whether they'll listen politely but ignore what you say, or actually engage with ideas you put forward to them). The first thing makes sociology possible as a field of inquiry. The second is part of the explanation of why human relationships involve so much hurt and upset and frustration and gossip and argument and reconciliation.

So we arrive at a similar conclusion via different pathways.

I don't know if you agree with the next bit: that a freeform/"say 'yes'" approach to social resolution, with nothing more, will struggle to produce the tumultuousness and exhilaration that typifies real human interaction.

 

[pemerton]

I want to distinguish between performative and experiential roleplaying. (Maybe somebody else has introduced these terms, or at least the ideas behind them; I will admit I’m not much of a student of RPG theory. I'm sure pemerton will set me straight.)

I’m calling performative roleplaying that which is observable by other people at the table. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s done for their benefit, but it is the visible/audible(/olfactory?) expression of roleplaying. It’s what your character does, and how you convey it.

What goes on in your own head I’m calling experiential roleplaying. Simplified, it basically means you feel empathy with/for your character. When something good or bad happens to your character, you feel like it is happening to you.

<snip>

A lot of the behaviors/rules/approaches that people are describing as being absolutely essential to roleplaying I would categorize as performative roleplaying. They are always about what your character says or does. If “you” are brought into it, it’s with the exhortation that you try to get yourself out of the picture.

In fact, I would say this whole conversation, and especially the claims made by Colville (again, I didn’t watch it but am basing this off the summaries) apply only to performative roleplaying.

Oh, P.S.: if we're strictly talking about performative roleplaying, then I'm totally fine with the 1D/3D terminology.

Have you not watched the Colville video? Before I read that bit of your post, I was getting ready to reply that I think you've slightly misunderstood, and now I think I know why.

Colville's "1D" corresponds entirely to your notion of performative roleplaying. By 1D he means characterisation via repeated mannerisms, catch-phrases, distinctive voice, etc. I was getting at the same thing when I referred to the gnome's fear of heights and hatred of fish.

But by "3D", Colville means something quite different. He means an approach to working out what my character does (he also refers to a GM doing 3D roleplaying, in which case he is talking about how the Gm decides what a NPC does). And the approach he has in mind is working out what my character does by drawing on my character's motivations, including possibly conflicting or not-fully-understood motivations.

Now because we're talking about RPGing rather than literary fiction, I don't think we need to talk about Toni Morrison or Graham Greene. But we could contrast, for instance, Chris Claremont's Cyclops, Storm or Wolverine (all 3D) with his Nightcrawler, Colossus or Arcade (all 1D). That first bundle of characters have motivations that drive their actions, bring them into conflict (self-conflict, and conflict with others), etc. Whereas the second group are really just a schtick: Nightcrawler is mostly light relief or a sounding board (reinforced by his sense of how people respond to his look); Colossus is loyal (the X-Men's version of Boxer in Animal Farm); Arcade kidnaps people and fails to assassinate them with his silly carnival games.

The 3D-ness of a character will manifest in play, but not because of the voice or characterisation or witty dialogue; but because of what the player has the character choose to do, or not do. In my personal experience (as a player, not a GM) the combination of identifying with my PC and playing my PC as "3D" can create a pretty intense experience.

Question for 3d Roleplayers: do you roleplay your characters conscious motivations and inner monologue, or do you also take into account their unconscious fears, anxieties, and habits, that they would not have direct access to?

For me, this depends on system. A system like Burning Wheel is more likely to force me to think about unconscious fears, habits etc. Eg as per my post not too far upthread, when Aedhros (my bitter Dark Elf) went to kill the innkeeper in the course of robbing him, I failed the Steel check and Aedhros hesitated. So I have to confront the fact that Aedhros is not as ruthless as he aspires to be.

As a BW character, Aedhros also has Instincts: Never use Song of Soothing unless compelled to; Always repay hurt with hurt; When my mind is elsewhere, quietly sing the elven lays. These reveal something about his unconscious inclinations; and they are considerations in action declaration.