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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7387786" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here is <a href="https://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">the full passage</a>:When a player is an advocate for a character in a roleplaying game, this means that his task in playing the game is to express his character’s personality, interests and agenda for the benefit of himself and other players. This means that the player tells the others what his character does, thinks and feels, and he’s doing his job well if the picture he paints of the character is clear and powerful, easy to relate to.I'm not sure what you mean by "have control of that character"? I guess I'm also not sure what you having in mind when you talk about "telling others what a character I am advocating for does".In playing White Plume Mountain, a player might say "My PC takes the doors of the hinges, so that we can use them to ride down the frictionless corridor without falling into the tetanus pits".In playing Tomb of Horrors, a player might say "My PC uses a 10' pole to probe the floor as I walk down it. I also tap the wall with the paintings on it."But neither of these is advocacy in Eero Tuovinen's sense. No "picture of the character" has been painted, let alone a clear and powerful one. The character has not had any personality, interests or agenda expressed. Nothing has been conveyed about what the character thinks or feels.A minimum requirement for character advocacy as Tuovinen describes it is that the GM establishes situations that permit the player to paint that picture by expressing an agenda, thoughts, feelings. You can have character advocacy in games that aren't "story now" or "standard narrativistic model" (eg classic White Wolf games), but there is likely to be tension if the player's advocacy comes into collision with the GM's conception of how the fiction should be.(One way of describing the function of alignment mechanics, in 2nd ed AD&D (and perhaps since then, too, to the extent that the 2nd ed practice has continued) is to put a limit on character advocacy so as to avoid those sorts of collisions. ("Your character wouldn't do that because she's LG" is the most extreme version of how this can work.))In any event, I think it's fairly clear that the more that the GM decides what flows from advocating for one's character, the less control the player has over the content of the shared fiction. Personally, I also think that the more the GM decides what flows from advocating for one's character, the less control the player has over the character, as it is the GM who is deciding what it means to be someone with this agenda, these interests, these particular thoughts and feelings.</blockquote>

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