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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8667821" data-attributes="member: 42582">I tend to see these as cases where the contrast between what's real and what's pretend is successfully maintained.Now I have to Google the rant, whose infamy hasn't quite reached me yet!<watches rant, returns to post>As you say, Bale is being directed. And is following a script. He's not authoring his character's response (at the level of generality that we use in RPGing action declarations, like "I point my gun at the prisoner" or "I point my gun at the Terminator"). If there's a cut, and a new bit of direction is given, he has to cope with that. Likewise when RPGing, we might want to know - OK, what's going to happen next? - and we roll some dice and then people go back to portraying their characters.This happens all the time in RPG combat! (Which is what is being filmed in the Bale rant.) Why does the fact that it's talking rather than shooting make a difference? Human emotions are human emotions.And I know that there is an answer to my question in the previous paragraph: traditionally RPG combat doesn't involve human emotion at all but is purely a wargame. But that just shows how this whole "combat needs mechanics but social doesn't" thing rests on premises about how the game has to be set up which are not only not self-evident, but have been expressly rejected by a range of RPGs for 30+ years now. Like in Prince Valiant (1989), where the degree of emotional investment of the character affects their combat dice. Which clearly invites the player to inhabit their character and portray their emotions (which I've seen players do, playing Prince Valiant PCs). But they also roll the dice to find out what happens.To me it seems like there's another issue in play here, too, which I think is driven home by the next part of your post:What you seem to be positing here is a RPGer who can only perform their character if they also get to author their character; perhaps only if they also get to author their character right in the moment of performing them.So first, any comparison of that RPGer to an actor (method or otherwise) seems out of place. The whole thing about acting - as driven home by the Bale rant - is that the performance is distinct from the authorship.Second, what happens if you and I are both that sort of RPGer, and my conception of my character and your conception of your character collide in the moment of performance? Like your character and my character are at odds, and your character is the sort who never gives in, or at least who won't give in here, and my character is the sort who never gives in, or at lest who won't give in here? I gather that, in one of the Fast & Furious offshoots, this issue between Dwayne Johnson and Jason Stratham was resolved by having each deliver exactly the same number of blows and then both falling out the window? (Or being blown up, or some other thing that made it a tie.)As far as gameplay is concerned, it seems to me there are three basic solutions.One is the "neo-trad" solution: everyone gets to play their character as they conceive it, and the GM's job is to manage things - including maybe convenient explosions - to make sure all the character conceptions can all be preserved through the course of play.A second involves the sorts of social cues that [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] describes - someone decides to give in based on some communicated signal or imperative that is not based on the play of their PC but is necessary to keep the game going. (A stronger version of this: players don't build or play PCs who can come into conflict with other PCs; an even stronger version is when they don't even come into conflict with other characters - I saw that sometimes at AD&D 2nd ed tables.)A third involves looking to some external cue, like the dice, to help tell us what happens next. That means that instead of clinging to our PCs in the neotrad style, we play our characters like stolen cars, wearing the dings with pride! That doesn't mean we can't inhabit them, emote them, even identify with them a bit.</blockquote>

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