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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5654823" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sorry, but I'm not sure this makes sense.What does it mean to experience something through the perspective of a character? The only sense I can make of that is that I imagine someone else experiencing something - that is, I imagine a story/fiction - and then I identify myself in some fashion with that imaginary person.It is the identification with the protagonist that (in my view) tends to be characteristic of roleplaying.Here is <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">Vincent Baker on the issue of fiction in roleplaying</a>:Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players and GMs, if you've even got such things) have to understand and assent to it. When you're roleplaying, what you're doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they're actually true or not. So you're sitting at the table and one player says, "[let's imagine that] an orc jumps out of the underbrush!" What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush? 1. Sometimes, not much at all. The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment, and everybody else just incorporates it smoothly into their imaginary picture of the situation. "An orc! Yikes! Battlestations!" This is how it usually is for participants with high ownership of whatever they're talking about: GMs describing the weather or the noncombat actions of NPCs, players saying what their characters are wearing or thinking. 2. Sometimes, a little bit more. "Really? An orc?" "Yeppers." "Huh, an orc. Well, okay." Sometimes the suggesting participant has to defend the suggestion: "Really, an orc this far into Elfland?" "Yeah, cuz this thing about her tribe..." "Okay, I guess that makes sense." 3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" The thing to notice here is that the mechanics serve the exact same purpose as the explanation about this thing about her tribe in point 2, which is to establish your credibility wrt the orc in question. 4. And sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing. Wave a stick in a game store and every game you knock of the shelves will have a combat system that works like this. (Plenty of suggestions at the game table don't get picked up by the group, or get revised and modified by the group before being accepted, all with the same range of time and attention spent negotiating.) So look, you! Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table. That's their sole and crucial function.What is at stake, in the contrast between playstyles, is not whether we are "roleplaying" or "storytelling", but how we distribute authority in respect of the fiction across various participants in the game, and what variety of tools are used to help achieve this distribution of authority, and make it work.</blockquote>

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