D&D General Styles of Roleplaying and Characters

[Xetheral]

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.

(Emphasis added.) I have to ask--is the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference deliberate or accidental? Intentional or not, it's much appreciated!

 

[Blue]

The fact that there are different approaches to RPGing has been known at least since the late 70s (because I have White Dwarf articles from that time discussing the different approaches). I think you'll be hard-pressed to find a poster on these boards who more consistently acknowledges that fact than me.

That doesn't mean that we can't talk meaningfully about those various approaches - something that was indeed happening in those White Dwarf articles and can still happen today.

We don't have to stop our discussion of what we find valuable in RPGing with it's fun. No other field of criticism does that, and there are differences of approach, preference, school etc in those fields too.

I wasn't saying we can't talk about them, that's really moving the goalposts. I was saying that you are wrong to try to assign one of them as the goal of playing. It's not. You acknowledge that yourself here.

The original point of all of this is that you can not conflate character goals and player goals as a single thing. They needn't be.

 

[Bill Zebub]

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.

I must have badly expressed my intent, for what I mean by "performative" covers both of those cases. Maybe "expressive" would have been a better word?

What I was trying to cover was all portrayal of a character, not not just in accent and personality quirks but also this whole thing about figuring out what your character would do based on who you are trying to portray. The simple declaration of taking your attack action against orc A instead of orc B might by itself, with no additional acting, be an example of portrayal...of performative roleplaying...if the reason you are doing it is because there is some reason your character would make that specific choice (e.g., orc B is the more obvious target, but your character is secretly in love with the character orc A is attacking, or whatever.). It's performative because the goal is to create an accurate portrayal of this character.

What I'm trying to contrast that with is the goal of feeling an emotional link with your character, completely independent of how realistic/unrealistic, innovative/cliché, complex/simple, 1-dimensional/3-dimensional that character is.

The word "pawn" is thrown around (usually pejoratively) to suggest that without 'roleplaying' you are just moving a piece around on a board. But, for me, my character is a pawn if I don't feel, at least a little bit, that it's me there in the action, fighting the dragon or leaping over the pit or sneaking past the guard. That's what I'm calling experiential roleplaying. And I do think they are two different things, based just on my own experience that the two aspects haven't correlated, and (again, just speaking for myself) to some extent they conflict.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

If the Gnome hates fish and has a fear of heights, why wouldn't we want to learn these things as - in-character - we get to know him?

Never mind that the fear-of-heights piece might become relevant later when the party finds it has to climb down a cliff to the beach...

 

[pemerton]

I wasn't saying we can't talk about them, that's really moving the goalposts. I was saying that you are wrong to try to assign one of them as the goal of playing. It's not. You acknowledge that yourself here.

Here's my post back from page 3:

In the context of most D&D play, the conflation is not wrong: the goal of play is to succeed at "the mission", whatever exactly that might be (acquiring loot from the dungeon or lairs; defeating the opponents; solving the mystery/plot the GM is presenting to the players).

In the context of this sort of play, subordinating pursuit of the mission to the presentation of one's character runs a real risk of being disruptive - as one sees frequently discussed on this and other forums.

And here's a post I made yesterday:

The point is, that we can describe typical approaches to various RPGs, especially widely-played ones like D&D. The most typical approach to playing D&D involves the PCs undertaking some sort of "mission", either player-directed exploration of some place authored by the GM (quintessentially a dungeon) or the players working through some sort of scenario - a sequence of encounters, often with some overarching mystery to solve or situation to resolve - that has been authored by the GM.

My basis for making the claim in the previous paragraph is that nearly every post in the How Was Your Latest Session thread describes something like what I've described; that nearly every module ever published by TSR or WotC is designed for something like it; that the submission to Iron DM nearly all look like it; that there are endless posts on these boards about how to design scenarios ("missions") so as to ensure proper encounter rates in the context of 5e play; that concepts like "adventure hook" and "side quest" are ubiquitous parts of the lexicon (contrast technical terms associated with different approaches to play, like "kicker", that have to be defined every time they're used in a thread); etc, etc.

Playing in a typical fashion is neither good nor bad, neither true nor false. But it's a thing that plenty of people do. And my assertion is that there is a tension between playing that fashion, and aspiring to rich, complex, "three dimensional" portrayal of PCs - for the reasons that Christopher Kubasik set out in the early 90s. Reasons which aren't mysterious: if an expectation for play is that a player will (via their PC) take part in "the mission", a lot of questions about what the character wants and needs and will or won't put up with has already been answered.

I haven't changed my mind in relation to either of these posts. Which one are you objecting to?

 

[pemerton]

If the Gnome hates fish and has a fear of heights, why wouldn't we want to learn these things as - in-character - we get to know him?

Who does your we refer to? In the post to which you were replying, I used the pronoun "I":

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.

And the reason is the one that I already posted upthread, multiple times I think:

depictions of character might be a frustrating distraction from what we're trying to do - as @Manbearcat has already posted upthread.

If I'm sitting down to play White Plume Mountain or a similar sort of dungeon crawl, I'm there to try and work out how to handle the tricks, and thereby beat the dungeon. I'm not there to hear someone complain about a fear of heights.

And if this sort of thing is going to happen . . .

Never mind that the fear-of-heights piece might become relevant later when the party finds it has to climb down a cliff to the beach...

. . . then I doubly don't want to hear about the fear of heights, as not only is it wasting my time within inanity but it's disrupting our chances of succeeding at the adventure.

 

[Scott Christian]

It should be pointed out that players who "Roleplay" as opposed to "roleplay" or use one dimensional roleplaying are given the opportunities and scenes to do so. So much of this is based on the DM, it's not even funny. Moral quandaries, interactions from NPCs, scenarios that facilitate thinking in character versus out of character - all based on the DM (and to a smaller extent, the other players at the table).

 

[Ovinomancer]

It should be pointed out that players who "Roleplay" as opposed to "roleplay" or use one dimensional roleplaying are given the opportunities and scenes to do so. So much of this is based on the DM, it's not even funny. Moral quandaries, interactions from NPCs, scenarios that facilitate thinking in character versus out of character - all based on the DM (and to a smaller extent, the other players at the table).

This is only true in games where the GM is the primary source of the fictional situations and players only react to them. It's an artifact of the distribution of authority, not anything universally true. It's largely true in D&D, though.

 

[Umbran]

(Emphasis added.) I have to ask--is the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference deliberate or accidental?

Entirely deliberate.

 

[Xetheral]

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.

I suspect that part of this difference in perspective is explainable by differenences in when the authorship is taking place. Making IC choices on-the-fly for a partially developed NPC is a simpler task than doing justice to a fully-fledged character in a pre-written work.

The improvising GM has much less material constraining their choices--the range of plausible IC choices is quite large. Additionally, the GM doesn't (yet) need to worry about future consistency and can even make IC NPC decisions where some of the rationale remains as-yet undetermined. For example, a GM can determine that an NPC decides to lie in response to a question about a crime not because the NPC is guilty of that crime, but because the NPC is trying to hide involvement in a different, as-yet-undetermined, crime.

By contrast, in non-improv acting the actor is constrained by needing to maintain fidelity to what has been written about the character, including material presented on stage thus far and the remaining script. (And any other works involving the same character.) On top of those constraints, the level of detail required is larger, particularly if the character is a main character (in contrast an NPC, almost by definition, will never be a main character). Plus there is more pressure too, as the stakes are much higher in theater than in a TTRPG.

So while both tasks involve an element of understanding human interaction, I think the comparison is complicated by the tasks being fundamentally different in scope, and the GM's simpler task being made still easier by also possing authorial power for the NPC.