D&D General Styles of Roleplaying and Characters

[Hussar]

Heh, @Aldarc and @pemerton, you have rightly hit the nail on the head.

For some reason, it is perfectly acceptable for the mechanics to dictate your actions, but, for some reason, things like emotional responses, while just as involuntary and beyond a person's control as missing with an attack, are completely unbelievable and rip people from their immersion.

I would LOVE to meet people whose control over their emotional responses were so completely under their control that no matter what, no matter what the stimulus or in the face of anything, they are 100% in control at all times.

But, apparently, that's more believable than having the mechanics tell you that you believe a lie or that nameless horror from beyond is just really damn scary and makes you wet your pants. Hell, even apparently being beaten literally to death, and then being ripped from whatever just rewards you have shuffled off to to reinhabit your scarred, broken, body has zero impact on a person's psyche.

 

[Manbearcat]

Heh, @Aldarc and @pemerton, you have rightly hit the nail on the head.

For some reason, it is perfectly acceptable for the mechanics to dictate your actions, but, for some reason, things like emotional responses, while just as involuntary and beyond a person's control as missing with an attack, are completely unbelievable and rip people from their immersion.

I would LOVE to meet people whose control over their emotional responses were so completely under their control that no matter what, no matter what the stimulus or in the face of anything, they are 100% in control at all times.

But, apparently, that's more believable than having the mechanics tell you that you believe a lie or that nameless horror from beyond is just really damn scary and makes you wet your pants. Hell, even apparently being beaten literally to death, and then being ripped from whatever just rewards you have shuffled off to to reinhabit your scarred, broken, body has zero impact on a person's psyche.

This is something I’ve talked about pretty regularly on ENWorld in the past.

This “agency-purifying idea” (not sure what else to call it) in D&Dville whereby humans suffer neither hijack nor undue influence by the endocrine system, cultural layer pressures, badly formed heuristics, and decision-tree work offloaded onto automaticity and unconscious process…

…well I certainly don’t see how it produces either more realism or more habitation of cognitive/emotional workspace (the phenomenon of capture…which is largely not opt-in/voluntary). It resembles nothing like what life is like. Taken to its ultimate conclusion it should wipe out a whole host of troubling human conditions that routinely haunt lives captured by them (like variations of Stockholm Syndrome, peer contagion, addiction, and plenty more).

 

[Swarmkeeper]

No, it isn't apples to oranges. The DM is telling you that your character is falling down (after being tripped by another character). Your DM is telling you that you cannot fight anymore.

In every case, the DM, through the mechanics, is telling you how your character is behaving, within the limits of the mechanics. You failed your check, so, you trip on the wire strung across the hallway and fall on your face, take D4 damage is the DM telling you how your character is behaving.

In the context of 5e, a DM narrating to the player the result of their PC's stated action is definitely not the same as the DM telling the player what their PC is saying, thinking, or doing (really, trying to do). Falling on one's face is not typically an action the player would state for their PC. That is to say, falling on one's face is not a behavior, it is a meaningful consequence of failure of a player-declared behavior. That is the difference.

I guess I'm just having a tough time seeing the difference. Your character is a high dexterity acrobat Rogue who routinely walks on tightropes, can climb a waterfall and has the reflexes of a cat. And I just made him look like a Keystone Kop because you failed a Perception check. How is that not impacting the portrayal of that character?

I would hope the DM has a good reason that the rogue fell on their face and that this adjudication of a declared action is not just some kind of "gotcha" to flex their DM power. In the former case ("good reason"), the player can choose to have their Rogue respond however they like to such an embarrassment - the DM should hold no control over that portrayal. In the latter ("gotcha"), we're treading into bad faith play territory which I don't think is the point of the discussion.

 

[Xetheral]

The whole, "the character is writing itself" thing is all well and good and it sounds really profound, but, at the end of the day, it doesn't really mean anything. It's just a shorthand way of saying that the character was easy for the writer to wrap his or her head around.

I disagree that the meaning of the "the character is writing itself" is that it was easy for the author to write that character. From personal conversations with authors who have expressed such sentiments, my understanding is that those authors were expressing that they were surprised (both in the moment and upon reflection) by how they wrote that character. In other words, the author wrote the character differently than they would have expected in advance. And rather than the author at some point making an analytical choice to write the character differently, the difference from the original expectation came about incrementally as certain elements of the character followed naturally from what had already been written, and in the moment the author instictively went with that new, more-natural seeming option rather than writing the character the way they would have previously expected.

Obviously I've not had personal conversations with all authors who have expressed the feeling that a character was writing itself, so perhaps the phrase is used to mean different things by different authors. But the above is my best understanding of what the authors I've talked to meant by expressing the feeling that the character was writing itself.

From my perspective, in such circumstances the authors are very much engaged in act of discovery. Specifically, they're finding out what the most natural response of the character is to any given situation, and learning that it is different from what they would have expected even mere moments prior.

 

[pemerton]

Heh, @Aldarc and @pemerton, you have rightly hit the nail on the head.

For some reason, it is perfectly acceptable for the mechanics to dictate your actions, but, for some reason, things like emotional responses, while just as involuntary and beyond a person's control as missing with an attack, are completely unbelievable and rip people from their immersion.

I would LOVE to meet people whose control over their emotional responses were so completely under their control that no matter what, no matter what the stimulus or in the face of anything, they are 100% in control at all times.

But, apparently, that's more believable than having the mechanics tell you that you believe a lie or that nameless horror from beyond is just really damn scary and makes you wet your pants. Hell, even apparently being beaten literally to death, and then being ripped from whatever just rewards you have shuffled off to to reinhabit your scarred, broken, body has zero impact on a person's psyche.

Back in my hardest of hardcore Rolemaster days - the first half of the 1990s - our aspiration as a group was to have the most realistic depiction of our PCs and their actions that we could.

As part of this aspiration, we had addiction ratings for various drugs and herbs, and one of our dearest PCs became addicted.

We had the Depression critical table (from RMC III, which was always part of our game) and these would be used in two ways: sometimes I as GM would decree that a PC should suffer a Depression crit; sometimes a player would think that that made sense for their PC and would call for a roll.

Some of the more sinister PCs and NPCs had access to "Mind Disease" spells, that could inflict neuroses or phobias on their enemies. We understood these to be like physical injuries caused by a fireball spell - ie not a charm that could be dispelled, but a change to the brain/psyche that would need healing to recover from.

And Cure Mind Disease was a spell that saw plenty of use: to heal addiction, to heal neuroses and so on, to help recover from the more severe effects of Depression crits.

TL;DR - the idea of emotional impacts on PCs as something that might result from factor outside their control, and not under the players' control, isn't just something I associate with "new-fangled" RPGs.

 

[Xetheral]

Heh, @Aldarc and @pemerton, you have rightly hit the nail on the head.

For some reason, it is perfectly acceptable for the mechanics to dictate your actions, but, for some reason, things like emotional responses, while just as involuntary and beyond a person's control as missing with an attack, are completely unbelievable and rip people from their immersion.

I would LOVE to meet people whose control over their emotional responses were so completely under their control that no matter what, no matter what the stimulus or in the face of anything, they are 100% in control at all times.

But, apparently, that's more believable than having the mechanics tell you that you believe a lie or that nameless horror from beyond is just really damn scary and makes you wet your pants. Hell, even apparently being beaten literally to death, and then being ripped from whatever just rewards you have shuffled off to to reinhabit your scarred, broken, body has zero impact on a person's psyche.

From my standpoint I entirely agree that it is more believable that the character is impacted by events in the fiction rather than that the character has perfect control over their emotional responses.

I merely think that leaving it up to the player who best understands the character to decide how the character is impacted by events allows for more believable nuance than any game mechanic ever could.

I personally don't see any increase in believability from simulating the character's inability to control its responses to traumatic events by also mechanically preventing the player from controlling the character's response to those events.

 

[Desdichado]

Ah. But I rant to the wind against denials of your proper agency every time you and your fellow RPGers agree that your PC missed on an attack because of a failed roll.

Thus do I beat you in quixotic universalisation of my preferences.

If you can't express your preferences, then what's the point of this conversation at all? Stating preferences doesn't mean that someone else can't have different preferences that would make their actual playing at the same table incompatible, and that's fine.

In any case, I'd argue that this conversation (as is common here) was devolved from a discussion about preferences into one about semantics and pedantry anyway. I usually agree with Ovi on a lot of things, and find him a sensible fellow, but this whole exploration of your character has to involve something other than authorship of your character, otherwise it's not exploration seems to be lost in the weeds of some kind of semantic nuance that escapes me entirely.

 

[pemerton]

If you can't express your preferences, then what's the point of this conversation at all? Stating preferences doesn't mean that someone else can't have different preferences that would make their actual playing at the same table incompatible, and that's fine.

I'm not responding to anyone stating their preferences. I'm responding to people stating my preferences for me; and/or stating their preferences as universal ideals.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Funny. You keep telling people that what they can't do, despite people telling you that they do indeed find their PCs taking unexpected turns.

I'm not claiming people are channeling someone, but the decisions people make aren't always conscious ones. It may never be true for you, but it's part of the creative process for a lot of people.

Believe it or not, people aren't all like you. When I get into role playing, DMing or writing stories, there's times when it just flows out without conscious forethought. It doesn't really matter how you label it, but your "it's all you" only tells part of the story.

So, yes, you're agreeing that you are capable of surprising you -- a point I wholeheartedly agree with. The character isn't doing any surprising here, it's you being surprised at your own choices. You're making choices and pushing them onto the character, and when you're surprised by your choices, you then reify this onto the character as the character's choice. It's that latter reification I'm pointing out as flawed.

Are you claiming that it's not litterally true that those authors' characters write themselves? Or are you claiming it's not true that those authors feel that the characters are writing themselves?

If the former, sure. It's trivially true that fictional characters aren't writing anything, but that's completely missing the import of authors describing how they feel when writing. If the latter, I reject your claim on the grounds that you can't possibly know those authors' feelings better than they do.

The latter, and not in the sense that the author is surprised, but in the reification of the character. I'm often surprised by my choices, but, in the context of playing a game where character is never at stake, I don't confuse my surprise at my choices for the character doing anything at all. The character in this approach is a vessel to hold my thinking. It never pushes back.

So, you asked me about why I consider my approach to include exploration, and then after reading my response you conclude that I'm not actually exploring my character, I'm just dressing up my playstyle flowery-like?

Possibly an error in wording. I meant I'm not trying to reify the character as the owner of my thinking.

Wouldn't the more natural conclusion be that we're clearly using incompatible definitions of what it means to explore a character?

That was the entire thrust of my post, yes. That you're using exploration as a term for being surprised at a choice you made, and I'm asking if it should instead mean being surprised by character in a moment. I don't see how the latter can occur in a game where I have total and absolute authority over character for my character, because then it's only from me to the character. There's no feedback or pushback possible. I can rationalize anything I want to justify any bits of character I desire. That I don't fully understand my own thinking and so occasionally (or often) surprise myself in these choices of rationalization or justification doesn't have anything really to do with the character. To me, this can still be loads of fun, but my purpose here isn't to find out who this character is -- to explore why they do things -- but rather to put together a fun performative package to share with the other players during the game.

 

[Desdichado]

I also think the authorship vs exploration is flawed, because it rests on the concept of having total control over your character. You NEVER have total control over your character, even in the "default" trad way of playing D&D. You might find that some evil entity with magical power polymorphs your character into, say, a gorilla. That is not something that you had any control over; the only control is, what does your character do about that now? The answer is an exploration of character, at least according to any but a highly unusual definition of that phrase.

And this kind of stuff happens all of the time in D&D. You don't sit around thinking about your character in D&D, you are exposed to stimuli beyond your control, either from the DM, or sometimes from the other players. I don't understand how that is NOT exploring your character. Sure, it's not the same as using mechanics to explore your characters reactions with mechanical stimuli, but stimuli beyond your control is stimuli beyond your control.

Some players may not find certain types of stimuli fun to use, but to me that seems little different than saying something else about mechanics, like "I don't like Action Points" or "I don't like advantage/disadvantage" or something like that. It doesn't fundamentally change anything about what you're doing, just about how you're doing it.