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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8669072" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Sure, but very few people are good actors! The college I attended had a pretty highly acclaimed acting program, so I played a good bit of D&amp;D with some seriously talented actors (like some of them have spent their lives as professional actors, though none you would probably have heard of). I learned very quickly just how much they could bring to the APPEARANCE of being in character. Interestingly though, I don't really think any of those people had any greater insight into real people than anyone else does, except at the level of 'reading' them. In other words, I think people can certainly take a script and play a part, but I don't think people are especially good at realistically predicting what other people will do in an open-ended situation. Doing that really requires deep knowledge of the subject and a lot of subject matter experience. For example in WWII the allies had Hitler's Psychotherapist from when he lived in Vienna, plus a lot of data on him (since he was obviously a public figure). They did a fairly good job of sussing out his likely actions, but they were still pretty much entirely unable to say which possibilities would actually come to pass. Likewise I don't think there's any hope of realistically portraying ANY character in an open-ended sense. So NPCs at least, they act according to some GM agenda based pattern. PCs, well, you have fun imagining what they will do and doing something, and it doesn't have to match with anyone's expectations, obviously. So it works, within that set of bounds.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 8669072, member: 82106"] Sure, but very few people are good actors! The college I attended had a pretty highly acclaimed acting program, so I played a good bit of D&D with some seriously talented actors (like some of them have spent their lives as professional actors, though none you would probably have heard of). I learned very quickly just how much they could bring to the APPEARANCE of being in character. Interestingly though, I don't really think any of those people had any greater insight into real people than anyone else does, except at the level of 'reading' them. In other words, I think people can certainly take a script and play a part, but I don't think people are especially good at realistically predicting what other people will do in an open-ended situation. Doing that really requires deep knowledge of the subject and a lot of subject matter experience. For example in WWII the allies had Hitler's Psychotherapist from when he lived in Vienna, plus a lot of data on him (since he was obviously a public figure). They did a fairly good job of sussing out his likely actions, but they were still pretty much entirely unable to say which possibilities would actually come to pass. Likewise I don't think there's any hope of realistically portraying ANY character in an open-ended sense. So NPCs at least, they act according to some GM agenda based pattern. PCs, well, you have fun imagining what they will do and doing something, and it doesn't have to match with anyone's expectations, obviously. So it works, within that set of bounds. [/QUOTE]

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