What does it take / how long does it take to "get into" a character?

[pemerton]

Yeah, it's almost as if neotrad sees it as strictly performative.

<snip>

The main point of the exercise is to perform for an audience using a crafted persona, with greater rewards for cleverness and ingenuity.

Whereas I'm the guy who a while ago (last year?) started a thread arguing that RPGing is not a literary (meaning "performative") endeavour.

 

[innerdude]

Well obviously the big tension between RPG play and performance is that performance largely assumes there's a script, and if you go off script, it breaks the performance.

Which would beg the point, why are you playing an RPG, with its random chance and die rolls and fickle GMs and players just waiting to tear your script to pieces?

If you're just looking to play and perform a character part for a while, is an RPG really the best venue?

Edit: In context it brings to mind the problems I have with the Marvel cinematic universe.

They are pure performance, with no character. The main characters are never really at risk, it's just an exercise to fly around in cool poses and blow stuff up.

And neotrad sounds a lot like that, too, to be honest.

"What's the point of play?"

"For my character to be awesome, of course! So nothing better happen that calls my character's awesomeness into question."

 

[pemerton]

why are you playing an RPG, with its random chance and die rolls and fickle GMs and players just waiting to tear your script to pieces?

5e D&D - bounded accuracy and general "not super hard above 2nd level" helps with this.

Fate - ability to spend Fate points to succeed on crucial rolls helps with this.

Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, RM, RQ, AW or DW - not good for this.

 

[aramis erak]

There's a strong overlap between these answers, I'd think.

"Stakes mattering," at least in my experience, almost always involves connectivity to the game world through relationships and goals.

Sometimes, it's just players being attached to the story; goals and preexisting relationships are two good tools for that, but not the only ones.

So I'm wondering what other people's experiences with this are --- what system, group, or other factors combine to make a character interesting, internally realized, playable, and memorable?

For me, I've never had a problem with my characters being interesting to me; I've had issues with getting into character in random gen systems, but never them being uninteresting.

For me, the difficulty of finding the character from the numbers has always been part of the appeal of AD&D, BECMI D&D, Traveller, Starships & Spacemen, Star Frontiers, and other old school games with random gen. You don't know what you have, and you find out through play.

The one that most encompasses "Find the Character from the Sheet" is Pendragon, when using the random options in 1st to 4th eds. Even the personality is on the sheet, and the rules will guide you to them if you let them. 3 random PCs and see where they take the group...

But I know some of my players don't enjoy that.

I've had some of mine become uninteresting to me... I figured out who they were, and it was time for them to stop adventuring. They were no longer a mystery, and no longer in need of more...

The hardest part for me is when the players' characters in a game I'm running have become uninteresting to me. That's never good.

 

[Jay Murphy1]

Three sessions and I get a good handle on my concept in play and enough has gone on in three sessions to feed my imagination and connect with the game world.

 

[Jay Murphy1]

5e D&D - bounded accuracy and general "not super hard above 2nd level" helps with this.

Fate - ability to spend Fate points to succeed on crucial rolls helps with this.

Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, RM, RQ, AW or DW - not good for this.

The old school superheroes game TSR's Marvel and Mayfair's DC Heroes were using "Fate" points in the early 80's. Excellent mechanic for the genre. DC Heroes called them Hero/Villain points and the Marvel game called them Karma points. I don't know if it was true for Marvel but Hero Points for the DC Heroes game could be spent to alter the game environment, not just to improve chances on a dice action or as experience points to improve your character.

 

[aramis erak]

The old school superheroes game TSR's Marvel and Mayfair's DC Heroes were using "Fate" points in the early 80's. Excellent mechanic for the genre. DC Heroes called them Hero/Villain points and the Marvel game called them Karma points. I don't know if it was true for Marvel but Hero Points for the DC Heroes game could be spent to alter the game environment, not just to improve chances on a dice action or as experience points to improve your character.

Marvel, all they could be spent for was advancement or improving a given roll.

 

[pemerton]

The old school superheroes game TSR's Marvel and Mayfair's DC Heroes were using "Fate" points in the early 80's. Excellent mechanic for the genre. DC Heroes called them Hero/Villain points and the Marvel game called them Karma points. I don't know if it was true for Marvel but Hero Points for the DC Heroes game could be spent to alter the game environment, not just to improve chances on a dice action or as experience points to improve your character.

Marvel, all they could be spent for was advancement or improving a given roll.

Burning Wheel has Fate Points (of various sorts) too. The difference with Fate is that you can spend points after a roll with a rather good chance of shaping it in the direction you want - because of both the bonuses, and the chance to reroll a statistically unlikely initial roll (reinforced by the very strong centralising tendency of the Fate dice pool).

 

[John Dallman]

So I'm wondering what other people's experiences with this are --- what system, group, or other factors combine to make a character interesting, internally realized, playable, and memorable?

I've been thinking about this since the thread started. I think a primary thing for me is creating a character whose mental toolbox I can understand to some degree. I can't claim to understand the way characters do things that are way beyond my own capabilities, but I can understand, to some degree, the ways in which they decide how to use their capabilities, and the kinds of outcomes they are interested in. A couple of examples:

A dwarven smith (AD&D1e) whom I first played in, I think, early 1980, who has moved between many different parts of a huge meta-campaign, and been involved with many stories and events. The contrast between his social naivety and his ingenuity in smith-craft make him endlessly rewarding to play.

My newest character in that meta-campaign, a priest of a god of commerce, whom I've been playing weekly for about 18 months. He was created to explore that religion, which is very popular in the world he's from, but never seems to have had a PC cleric before. He's far more social than the smith, but less insightful, having only INT 9. His goals are straightforward: peace and prosperity for everyone, but he solves problems in ingenious ways.

 

[John Dallman]

So, just to make sure I'm following what "neo-trad" play actually means --- as I understand it, "neo-trad" play follows "trad" play on the GM side (largely GM pre-authored fiction and situations), but on the player side it deviates from "trad" assumptions. It's not gamist/challenge based, nor is it merely about the players' characters being vehicles to the GM executing their plot. "Neo-trad" doesn't believe a player should subsume their character into the GM's "world" so that the GM's plot gets executed as the GM envisions.

From the player side, "neo-trad" is more about the player being able to express or achieve realization / idealization of who and what their character is. In other words, they've created this character that's supposed to be their own personal "OFC" or "OC" that's going to live inside the GM's world, but the world should (as much as possible) treat the "original character" as a fanfic writer would.

What you're calling "neo-trad" here I'd call "high-quality traditional play" giving the player space to develop the character. Some of us were doing that back in the early eighties.

Anything that would cause the player to have to change or deviate from their envisioned realization of the character isn't just annoying or distracting, it's almost a violation of one of the core purposes of play.

There I have to split some hairs. Forcing the player to change their ideas of the character's mind and thought processes, or asserting that they are different from the player's ideas, is violating. Allowing the character's thinking to change if they want to is fine.

Changing things about them that are more part of the game world can be legitimate: if you're opposing powerful magicians on subjects that they care about, you may suffer consequences. But the GM should not make this personal.