On my previous post, I suggested an alignment system – a declaration of a character’s moral inclinations – could be a useful tool to avoid some of the annoyances I’ve had in players having wildly inconsistent characters. But why does that bother me?
On one level, the obvious. Hard to plan the overarching path of a story if you have no idea how a character will respond to it. But there’s something more.
I can’t help but see TTRPGs as an act of creative writing. I’m bothered by shit characters because they are shit writing. If I could just get with players on their level I’d be ok, right?
I can’t. I can’t see it as disposable fluff time, a meaningless jackoff session. Why not? If it is, I’m just the fool distributing handjobs for free.
I would literally rather hold the unhygienic penii of strangers in both hands and tease them to climax on my t-shirt than GM for bad players.
Does that make sense of where I’m coming from? heh. coming.
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yeah i used literally correctly. i’d get some kind of excitement from handling random dicks, i get none from telling flattering stories to people writing characters like tommy wiseau.
i reached for wiseau as an example of a bad writer, but honestly his characters make more sense than most PCs. should GM v PC be a thing, a war of the ages to be fought every game? no, but i’m feeling that adverse relationship a lot as i reflect on the shit-ass losers i’ve had to deal with.
Technically the plural is penises. Penis is a third declension noun in Latin, hence it uses the third declension -es plural form, rather than the i/os second declension form. My penchant for pointing things like this out is why people rarely let me anywhere near theirs.
The problem you’re having, I think, is simply a mismatch of expectations as to what the game is meant to be about. That’s sometimes because your group is made up of very different people, but just as often it’s because players bring preconceptions to a game from other RPGs they’ve played, other groups they’ve played in, or other fiction in general.
My own example is from the very first TTRPG I ever ran as GM. My players, though very familiar with fantasy fiction, video game RPGs and even tabletop wargames, had never played a TTRPG before. Because they were sophisticated adults in their 30s (or, at least, made a passable attempt at pretending to be such during the week) and new to all this, I decided to try Promethean: The Created for our first game. The thinking being that it’s a game where you start off as blank slate Frankenstein’s Monster style created beings with no awareness of who you are, what you are, or how any of the supernatural mechanics of the world work. The “World of Darkness” setting is also our own world with a hidden backdrop of supernatural creatures, so they wouldn’t need to familiarise themselves with it – they know what our world is like because they live there sometimes. So they could learn about the supernatural elements as they went, and their fumbling towards understanding as first-time players would mirror the fumbling of their characters learning about themselves for the first time.
That was the plan, anyway. The problem was that I had read all the Promethean books, so I was trying to present a game which conveyed its abstract themes of isolation, rejection, transformation and hope through alchemical symbolic resonances and emotional musings on the nature of humanity and its contrasts in the monstrous and the inhuman. My players, on the other hand, had not. I had just told them that it’s set in a dark and grimly decaying version of the real world with supernatural creatures lurking in the shadows and let them create characters they thought interesting from that.
One of them took “dark” to mean “noir”, because he was a fan of film noir, and created a supernatural detective character styled after classic film noir characters. He was expecting a Hitchcockian thriller with Lovecraftian elements and a focus on investigation.
Another took “dark” to mean “violent” and created a Frankenstein’s Monster made from the bodies of Chinese gangsters dumped in Hong Kong harbour. He was expecting an ultraviolent Martial Arts film and the opportunity to mow down hordes of baddies with spin kicks.
The third had actually read Frankenstein, and thought the game would be based on a Victorian Gothic novel. So he created a willowy, fainting Galateid thing, prone to fits of high emotion and hysteria. He was expecting windswept moors, social commentary on a world in flux and hammy out-of-time melodrama. Also Buffy the Vampire Slayer vibes, because that’s Tim for you.
These four sets of radically different expectations did not mix well. The body parts did not stitch together in any mutually satisfying way and failed to come properly alive. In every situation Max Kincaid Private Eye would look for clues or brood silently, while Kam Wing-Li spouted insults in poor English and tried to beat up any NPC who seemed to treat him with anything less than total deference, then Zephyr would try to befriend anything that could speak, and halfway through the attempt would cough, do some unhelpful histrionics faint dramatically when something even vaguely out of the ordinary happened. The complex symbolic resonances I had written into each scene went entirely unregarded.
aw i missed ya cartomancer. thx for the big comment.
If you don’t want to play or DM a game in a certain style that is fine. Go looking for players who fit with what you want to run. I know a bunch of players that I wouldn’t include in a group trying to run a serious role playing campaign. I know a couple that I wouldn’t include in a plotless dungeon crawling campaign because their characters are always over designed and acted. It’s a mistake to think people with a different style of play are doing it wrong. As long as everybody is having fun it’s good.
There’s a lot of overlap between the kink and the geek communities, so it’s a good idea when you sit down at the table to make sure everyone’s on the same page whether the group would rather be playing a game or exchanging handjobs.
In my experience, the problems you’re outlining with alignment and character consistency go away as long as everyone is clear about the characters’ motivations. Get those sorted as explicitly as possible as soon as possible. I will even go as far as simply telling my players what their characters’ main goal is, and work with them to establish any side goals they’re interested in. Then the game is just me providing their characters with different ways to accomplish those goals, with various challenges or compromises they might have to make.
Many years ago a friend and I distilled much of our role-playing experience into a simple game which could be played anywhere; no dice, no paper, no characters; nothing but a few options. The name of the game was, “I Kill It!”
The game is simple.
The DM says, “You walk into a room with a monster.”
The player says, “I Kill It!”
The DM has the option of saying one of two things:
1. “You killed the monster. The monster is dead. Would you like to play again?”
2. “The monster killed you. You are dead. Would you like to play again?”
So much of our role-playing experiences were encapsulated into that short game that it’s become a running joke to play a round or two when we get together. (Tongue firmly in cheek) I must insist that we hold the copyright to this game, because we came up with another, similar, game we called, “Falling”, which dealt with the fun of defenestration. Later on we found someone had made a card game which was surprisingly similar to our delicate little effort. (We could have been million…, wait, no. We could have been thousand…, wait no. We might have gotten a buck and a quarter to split between us!)
More seriously, when I was running games I tried many different techniques to get the party to work together. Because when that happens it’s a great time for all. I’ve tried giving players pre-rolled characters. I’ve tried giving them well-known settings (my favorite was Zelazny’s Lord of Light novel, it worked surprisingly well.). I’ve tried a multitude of different systems. Characters have met in a bar, been hired by a patron, been sole survivors of some catastrophe, even been cursed to work together by an evil warlock (why does warlock sound more evil than wizard?).
What seems to work best for me is to allow players to play themselves. They may be half-elves, or Vargr, or intelligent venomous wasps, but they bring their own personalities to the table. Forcing a person to play a personality very different than their own is not only very hard, it quickly leads to a wide divergence in behavior. E.g. the player may be deeply engaged in the puzzle set up by the referee, but then realizes their character sheet tells the player that the character has no patience for puzzles, but enjoys cooking. So the player spends time role-playing making a meal for the rest of the party, who are now frustrated not only with the distraction but mad that the player is going to refuse to help on the primary puzzle. Yes, I’ve seen that happen. As a player I’ve seen characters be calm, thoughtful, and docile one moment, then glance at their character sheet and do a Leroy Jenkins.
The most successful, and enjoyable role-playing games I’ve ever played revolved around problem-solving, not characterization.
Give the party a task to complete, be it defeating a dragon or setting up a stag party, and let the party figure out how to do it. Give a good party a task and the boundaries, and you will be amazed with what they come up with. But don’t be surprised if the players smash through the carefully set boundaries.
I have found that as a game runs over time the characters become more fleshed out, developing more complex personalities. I think this is not due to the player becoming better at role-playing the character, but because the experiences the character goes through during the game allows the character to grow. It is very different for a player to write on their character sheet that they have a history of mining, and then have a good referee take them through an underground labyrinth where the entire party depends on those mining skills. That difference in experience allows the character to grow, and the player to grow with them. But this doesn’t, probably can’t, happen with one-session games or even those which last for only a few sessions. Character development takes time.
@flex
there’s a line in Apocalypse World: play to find out. part of that is finding out who the characters are. which is getting into the creative writing stuff, the game is exploring the setting and characters as a collaborative creative writing exercise
which is why i never come to games with a fixed plot, i want to see how the NPCs react to the PCs actions
making sure everyone involved is onboard with these different approaches is a major problem of course 😛
ok, i see where y’all are coming from, but consider this – anyone who does not want to rp in my prescribed way is bad and wrong, but they can catch a hand job.
dangerousbeans wrote, @8,
Brother, you said a mouthful.
As a long-time corporate drone, one of the many seminars I’ve taken on how to build a team talked about the following idea. That a team develops along a rather standard path; Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing. Unlike a lot of the team-building exercises which I think are complete hogwash, this concept seems to have some merit.
The problem is that every time a person is added or removed from a team, the entire process starts over. Trying to tell management that they get reduced performance by moving people around like they are checkers on an infinite board (no kings for you!) is, quite frankly, impossible.
I’ve been in a lot of games, and teams at work, where we never get beyond the storming stage.
@9, GAS,
We used to call that “Boarding the Plot Train”, where the GM had already laid down the rails for the plot and the characters were just along for the ride. Some of the more memorable rebellions, and subsequent train wrecks of games, have occurred when the GM tries to force players to conform to the plot. Although you adding an incentive to rebellion by offering a hand job is a new twist.
More appropriate to the OP, there have been a few novels I’ve read over the years which read like they were originally gaming sessions, but cleaned up for publication as fantasy fiction. I can’t say I thought them particularly good, but they were published, which is a higher bar than many people realize. I’ll have to rummage through my library over the next day or two and try to identity them.
Designing a good RPG scenario is certainly writing. And it can be good practice for fiction writing too. But, in my opinion, there are some real differences. The biggest one is that a good RPG scenario gives details of where, when and why, but allows the players to figure out the who and how. Yet with that in mind, a good RPG scenario can be replete with purple prose, or as sparse as a noir film. The writing of the setting can, nay should, invoke emotions in the players and prepare them for the game. The chittering and scrabbling of rats in the walls can evoke horror. The flickering, sparking, neon signs in a rain-washed alley at night can prepare players for scar-faced thugs wielding tire-irons. Even a quick description of people encountering a slippery patch of ice, and tumbling onto their prat, can set the mood for a session of inanity (although even in RPGs, good comedy is hard).
I don’t think the rules of the RPG really matter for the writing. Aside from how the rules may affect the setting. It would be difficult to play in a warriors and wizards setting using Traveler rules. But the imagination and descriptive skills of the GM are important. It is also important to be able to communicate the imagination and the descriptions to the players, which is why writing can be so important.
flex@12:
Not just fantasy. Also milSF. In Death Ground, for one.
Then hypothetically there should be a lot of truly obvious cases of this in the fantasy and milSF subsets of the giant public slushpile known as “Amazon self-published ebooks”. Anyone care to hold their nose and test this eminently-testable model? 🙂 (Warning: this will entail giving Jeff Bezos money, even if only a few bucks of it. Are you sure? Y/N)
don’t talk about mouthfuls, this is about handfuls.