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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2937387" data-attributes="member: 18832">You do whatever is fun for the people in the game, and you find out what they think is fun by talking about it.One, there's nothing that says everything at the table has to be something the other players can react to. Doing an internal monologue as a "voiceover" can be subjected to whatever guidelines the group already has for solo time "in the spotlight", or to whatever guidelines exist for running scenes where one of the PCs is off on their own: with the rest of the party watching, or with the isolated PC off in another room with the GM?(I've played in games that used both, depending on the reason why the PC was off by themselves. The revelation of which Wheel of Time PC was the male channeller occurred when the PC in question was off by himself during a massive battle, with the GM "cutting" between each PC or group of PCs in turn, while everyone watched; prior to that point, the channelling PC's magic had been accomplished in "closed" solo scenes in another room or with notepassing, both activities that the other suspect PC had his own reasons to be engaged in.)Two, the more you know about why your fellow players want to do certain things at the table, the better handle you will have on the "appropriate" response.For instance, why was the player of the rogue in your example revealing this hidden motivation? Was he, as a player, regretting being caught trying to make some extra cash for his character, and justifying his PC's behaviour to the other players by inventing an in-character reason to nick the axe? Was he, as a player, simply making it clear that the other players (or their PCs) had misunderstood his character's secretively generous gesture, so that everyone knew he wasn't suddenly trying to screw the other players (or their PCs) over? Was he letting the fellow players in on his character's resentment simply for the pleasure of knowing what was going on in another character's head? Was he showing how his character felt so that the other players could choose to play to the possibility of even more conflict between the PCs - perhaps by playing more distrustful of the PC from this point forward than they otherwise might have, so as to increase the rogue's unhappiness with being constantly misunderstood and escalating the tension for fun and profit for all concerned - in other words, as a "tell" that the player was really enjoying the conflict between the PCs and wanted to see more of it in the future? Was he showing how his character felt so that the other players would choose to back off in the future, as a "tell" that he didn't mind the PC-on-PC conflict but didn't want it to go too far?The more you know about what the other players at your table want out of the game, the easier selecting the correct answer becomes.If the player of that rogue was me, for instance, I imagine that the second-to-last answer would be the most likely: I would be using my "voiceover" to clue the other players in to how my character was feeling about the misunderstanding, so that they would know I was getting a kick out of how frustrated my rogue was and resentful of their PCs' having leapt to a negative conclusion . . . but then, I am hopefully well-known to my fellow players as someone who delights in his character being stuck in awkward, even terrible circumstances, and seeing how (or indeed even if) they manage to repair the situation.Really, it makes me think of a player in both the Planescape and Wheel of Time games whose characters were often quite angry at their fellow PCs, but who would always take the time to make sure that the players he yelled at in-character understood that he wasn't angry at them, his character was angry at their characters. That is just as much a metagame establishment of the truth of the situation between players and between characters as a "voiceover" which illuminates a character's inner thoughts . . . and it's a very useful and sometimes necessary thing . . . and it's not even in-character.</blockquote>

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