The Strong Silent Type

[Wik]

I like trying to tackle the role, because I'm a talkative person by nature. By trying to be quiet, and NOT the leader of the group, I'm trying to tackle a personal challenge. A lot of my favourite characters were "strong, Silent" individuals. Because it's a hard role for me to play (I have trouble shutting up), I really enjoyed doing everything I could to make it work.

 

[Hussar]

For instance, why was the player of the rogue in your example revealing this hidden motivation?

I think the disconnect here is that I don't care. That's the long and the short of it. Since I can in no way react to the knowledge it makes zero difference to me in game. It adds nothing to the game. If the rogue player wants me to know how he feels, he better do something in game to show that, otherwise it's pointless.

You didn't answer any of my questions. I don't care about the rogue character. What would you do as one of the other players at the table?

Assume, for the moment, that my group is fairly well stable and suffers no major psychological issues. That they are capable of role playing a situation. So, what do you do with this knowledge?

BTW

TheShaman - ROTF.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I think the disconnect here is that I don't care. That's the long and the short of it. Since I can in no way react to the knowledge it makes zero difference to me in game. It adds nothing to the game. If the rogue player wants me to know how he feels, he better do something in game to show that, otherwise it's pointless.

This is why we have the disconnect: it is happening in game.

The whole proposition here is that you can choose, as a player, to have your character "react" - and those quotation marks are important - to something about which they have no knowledge because you, as a player, will have more fun if they do so.

You call this "metagaming". I deny the implicit supposition that metagaming is a bad thing, when it is not the type of metagaming which undermines the "challenge" aspect of the game the DM presents to you - an example of which would be reading a module to find out how to "beat" it.

It doesn't make sense for your character to react to another PC getting angry at him in her internal monologue, obviously, since he can't hear her thoughts.

However, what are the circumstances in which this character got angry at your character? Let's say your character implied that, as a woman, she ought to stay out of the thick of the fighting, and she felt insulted by that because she's perfectly capable of looking after herself, and certainly just as capable as your character is. She doesn't even have to be a "strong, silent type" to have a reason for keeping this anger and resentment to herself - perhaps she owes him her life, and doesn't feel she can voice her frustration because of the debt she feels to him.

(Let's assume that both you and the other player in question enjoy conflict between PCs, and understand perfectly that it doesn't imply any conflict between the players, as you suggested.)

If I were you, in this situation, I would choose to play up the male chauvinist side of my character. This is not because my character heard the other PC's thoughts, or is necessarily even aware of her resentment towards him, but I because as a player I intend to collaborate with the other player in fomenting friction and conflict between our characters, because we enjoy it. In fact, there is an additional level of enjoyment that both players can derive from the fact that my PC is oblivious to the effect his comments are having on the other PC.

This is undeniably metagaming - doing things in-character which are informed by out-of-character knowledge - but it's not necessarily bad. It doesn't do anything to undermine the challenges the DM might present you with - it's not cheating, in other words - so why, exactly, is it bad? We're back to "It's bad because the traditionalist attitude towards roleplaying says you should always play from the perspective of your character". I'm just trying to suggest that the traditionalist attitude is, in this instance, very much not the be-all and end-all of the possible roleplaying experience.

It might not suit your gaming style - in fact, since you tend to phrase things in terms like "I can't react to what they said in their voiceover", I think it's pretty obvious it doesn't suit your playstyle at all - but it's not inherently bad just because it's metagaming.

Deep-immersive players can't enjoy this technique either, because their enjoyment of the game relies upon seeing the game as much as possible from the exclusive perspective of their character. "Voiceovers" from other characters would in fact be directly poisonous to their attempts at attaining and maintaining deep immersion in their characters.

(There's an obvious distinction, to me, between "traditionalist" and "deep-immersive" perspectives. Nothing about the traditionalist perspective necessitates experiencing gameplay solely from the perspective of your character, which is the deep-immersive goal, it simply mandates acting only upon the information available to your character.)

I'm not trying to say that the traditionalist style is universally bad, or that the deep-immersive style is universally bad, or that this style I'm talking about here is universally good. I'm just trying to get across to you that you're making assumptions about what you "can do" at the gaming table which simply don't always apply - nor should they be assumed as the default in discussion.

After all, this whole tangent is about why playing the strong, silent type with an inner monologue that illuminates their character is not very much fun for everyone else - I'm simply proposing a way to make playing such a character fun for at least some people to see.

 

[Numion]

So only being verbose equates to roleplaying? Interesting notion.

That's not what I said. I said that creating a character that is best roleplayed by not roleplaying at all is not going to win RP awards at my table.

I would've accepted other forms of RP besides verbal ones (I have no idea what those might be, though), if the player had tried.

 

[Hussar]

But, again, you have still failed to answer my question.

So, here's the situation again. The rogue steals a part of the treasure. He gets caught. The party berates him and moves on. The rogue player, entirely as an internal monologue, announces that he only stole to give it as a present down the road.

How do you, as a player in this game, react to this? Is this adding anything to the game for you? In what way is it adding to the fun at the table?

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I answered that question in my original reply to the post in which you told the story.

My answer was this:

It depends on the reason why the player of the rogue had his character say that.

Sometimes it's a weird in-character way of communicating an out-of-character point - the player doesn't want the character to explain himself to the other characters, but he does want to explain to the other players that he wasn't just being a dick and taking the axe for his own profit . . . and, for some reason, he feels like he has to have his character "say" it in-character, but not to the other characters. I don't know why people feel the need to express themselves so tortuously - it probably has something to do with an urge to express a out-of-character message while feeling restricted by table conventions to in-character communication - but I've seen it happen.

Sometimes it's a passive-aggressive way of defending yourself in a way that the other characters can't argue with - I'd associate this most strongly with the "You caught me doing something sneaky for my own profit, and I just thought of an explanation, but I don't want to have to defend it if challenged, and I know you guys won't react to an internal monologue because that'd be metagaming and we know metagaming's bad, so here goes: I was just trying to give the axe to the fighter as a surprise gift, geez . . ." possibility I discussed above.

Sometimes it's an invitation, subtly phrased, to develop the burgeoning misunderstanding between party members over the rogue's apparent greed by letting the other players - but not their characters - know what's going on without the rogue himself trying to further defend himself to the other PCs directly, so they can play to the rogue's resentment at the misunderstanding by having their characters continue to view him with suspicion and mistrust even when he tries to do the right thing, with all the players fully aware of the truth of the matter but enjoying the development of friction between their characters over the misunderstanding.

Sometimes it's a request, subtly phrased, to pass on the chance to develop the burgeoning misunderstanding between party members over the rogue's apparent greed without the rogue trying to further defend himself to the other PCs directly, because the player of the rogue enjoyed the limited conflict over the issue but doesn't really want to go any further with it.

The fact that the latter two are directly-opposite possibilities is why knowing what your fellow players are interested in is so important - though it may also be possible to pick up which possibility was intended by the player from the precise words they used, their tone of voice, and whatnot. It all depends on how well you know your fellow players, and I for one wouldn't have much hesitation in outright asking for clarification (during or after the session, as appropriate) if I couldn't tell what the player really wanted.

As a player, I would hope to be playing with people who would only do such a thing when they intend the third possibility above, because it's a simple way to clue me in to their desire for me to have my character participate in the development of friction (or other complications, such as friendship, romance, et cetera) between our characters, in a way which doesn't rely solely upon in-character cues.

I'm willing to accept this "metagaming" technique as a good thing because there are countless situations I can think of where the character would never explicitly express the way they were feeling or what they were thinking (i.e., cannot communicate directly to my character), but where both players would want to know what was going on so they could develop the friction (or whatever) together. It's a way of remaining true to your characters - indeed, of showing more of who they are at the table, during play - while still effecting the development of stories that the characters themselves would not choose to go through, such as conflict over misunderstood motives.

It adds to the fun for me because it clues me in to possible ways in which I can develop the relationship (for better or worse) between my character and their character immediately, without us having to wait for a post-session "debrief" on the car ride home where the player can explain to me what their character thought and how their character felt about an occurrence in the game. I can know that I can act on the possibility of closeness or conflict right then and there, during the game, rather than having to wait to hear about it afterwards and plan to do something about it a week, a fortnight, or a month later when the next session happens.

When I say "I can act", I do mean "I", the player, because of course my character does not know how the other PC feels - but I, the player, learning how they feel helps me narrow my future choice of actions and behaviours to those possibilities which will drive the development of interesting and fun relationships between my character and the other PC.

So the answer to your question is still "It really depends on why they're doing the internal monologue", but it should also be clear as to why I hope they're doing it and what I'd do if that was, indeed, the reason.

 

[shilsen]

But, again, you have still failed to answer my question.

Though the question wasn't aimed at me, here's my take on it.

So, here's the situation again. The rogue steals a part of the treasure. He gets caught. The party berates him and moves on. The rogue player, entirely as an internal monologue, announces that he only stole to give it as a present down the road.

How do you, as a player in this game, react to this?

As a player, I react to the monologue OOC, since the info is OOC for me. Which would probably consist of joking with the rogue's player a little bit about his poor, persecuted PC. As a character, I respond without taking this information into account, since my character doesn't know it. Personally, I'm very comfortable separating IC and OOC info and do it all the time.

Is this adding anything to the game for you? In what way is it adding to the fun at the table?

Yes. It lets me as a player get to see and learn more about one of the other characters in the game. That adds to my fun at the table in the same way as getting to see other PCs in a scene my PC isn't involved in does - it adds to my sense of the game world and the other characters. It would be a pain if it happened very often, just as having lots of scenes my PC is left out of would be, but if it happens every once in a while it can be quite cool and enjoyable for me.

YMMV, and apparently does.