General Notes on "I'm Only Playing My Character"

Thoughts on the In Character Issue

From my zine, #211:

re me re the problem of the classic loner: That's a separate problem, I think. I wonder if there actually were rpg groups where all of the PCs were loners, and the players all insisted on playing them as such. re maelstrom: I don't think Stephen's D&D 3.5 group ever leveled up that fast. I would have guessed that a gm could prevent this by making sure that PCs ran low on spells and hit points and the like, requiring them to rest, or having them spend some time recovering back in town.

re Brian Rogers re turtling, not liking the cliche of making the PC a troublemaker, and that being why you have a GM: I see both sides of this, as, I'm sure, do you. On the one hand, as a player, I'd like to think the GM is at least trying, not sleepwalking, and to be offered hooks my PCs would take. As a GM, I have been in the position of saying, "Okay, you're maneuvering around anything resembling an adventure, and you say you want your PC to have it."

The usual answer to this is, "Well, yes, _I_ want it, but my PC doesn't, and I have to play my character." I'm getting increasingly impatient with this answer. If there's some specific carrot that I have to dangle, I need to know what it is. That said, I've certainly messed up many times. In the Sorcerer game I ran, Dave Demast pointed out that manipulating his PC was a simple matter of manipulating the NPCs closest to him. I saw this time and again, both when I did it successfully, and in what his character said to others. Nevertheless, I still dropped the ball a lot.

In Naomi's Altclair game, I started off by having Justin, my PC, settle firmly into his college dorm, and turn down invitations to be social. After a few minutes of this, Naomi pointed out that if he kept doing this, there wouldn't really be a game for me. And she was right. Justin was not being invited to set out on a dungeon crawling expedition; he was being invited to explore campus life. There's an implicit understanding that my desire to play comes with a responsibility to have my character do the sorts of things one can expect from (semi)normal folks in the setting. In other words, I was falling into the trap of playing the classical loner, and Naomi was calling me on it.

For convention games, as a player, I'll accept "Okay, you're just on an adventure because that's what you do." I've agreed to play those particular games with some understanding of what I'm expected to do. It's possible for a GM to do something at odd enough angles to what I'm expecting that I'll balk, but I'm not about to say, "I'm on a caravan? What's my motivation? I mean, really, why would I be going on this caravan in the first place?"

That's different from playing with genre conventions. If I'm playing a game that Brian Rogers is gming, I'm expecting that I'm not supposed to be deconstructing the genre. If I'm playing in a game with Avram Grumer, regardless of who's gming and who's playing, I'm not going to be terribly surprised if genre conventions are challenged, unless there's a clear statement up front that we're expected to play to them, rather than with them.

my ct to Myles on how yes, players should not foreclose plot threads lightly, it being everyone's game. More an acknowledgement than me having a thing to add.

From my zine #215

A couple of issues ago, I said that playing a child meant I didn't have to worry about why the PC was making suboptimal choices that happened to move things along in interesting ways. On the one hand, I'm leery of and more than a bit tired of the "But it's what my character would do" for decreasing the fun level of the game. On the other hand, I've been in positions where I feel that I really need some in-character reason that I just don't have if my PC is to do what folks want / need done. Otherwise, I am not playing a character, but a piece on a board game. Or, looked at another way, I want to avoid a trap that I think late (5th season and later) _Buffy: The Vampire Slayer_ fell into, that of making previously intelligent characters dumb so that the plots the script writers had would work. The troll episode, where Willow and Anya both know it's dangerous to interrupt a spell in the middle and both get into a dumb argument in the middle of their spell was the first of those. I don't care that this is, by some definitions, realistic. I demand greater consistency from my fiction than from real life.

And:

I think we have general agreement that "I'm just playing my character" is not sufficient justification to be a jerk.

From my zine #216, ct to Eugene Reynolds:

re me re "but my character wouldn't": When reading this, it occurred to me that, for you as a GM, the world is your character. I've discussed this at greater length in the igthoughts section below. Let me know if I'm on target. In general, one bit of advice Josh gave me for larps helps in the case of players who really want to cooperate, but are temporarily confused: Pay attention. You can almost certainly find an in character reason to go along with things.

When I talked about this in the labcats blog (http://community.livejournal.com/labcats/55364.html) (*) Brian Rogers noted that players who are genuinely stuck will probably not say "I'm just playing in character." They are more likely to say, ""I'm not sure why my character would do this," or "I don't see any way my character wouldn't to this." Either of these, as Brian pointed out, leaves an opening for someone to say, "Well, how about X?"

(*) Wiki addendum: Itself triggered by Brian's post here: http://brianrogers.livejournal.com/127312.html which, in turn, was triggered by what was going on in his game at the time, as discussed elsewhere in Alarums and Excursions, and maybe on his blog as well.

And, there are actually times when the player is right. Fr'ex, in the case of the missing explosives and the mine, it really, truly was "in character" for at least two of us to say, "Okay, pull the plug right now. We are calling the police." That said, we did the right thing on the meta-level, and said, "Okay, it makes no sense, and it is not in character, but we don't want to screw things up for a 4 hour convention session." _That_ said, it is bad gming to require players to go through such contortions. If they have to give up their characters' integrity, they might as well not be playing.

It's a matter of degree and frequency, as well as context. I'll be a lot more forgiving in a convention one shot, and a lot more forgiving of "Okay, work with me for the set up" than I will over a long period of time. If I'm constantly required to play my PC as precisely as intelligent as the plot requires, or if there's a situation like the one that happened in an L5R scenario I reviewed (http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_2181.html), where the GM is supposed to force the PCs to abandon pursuit of bandits and then force them to go after the bandits later, No Matter What, why the heck am I playing? The GM has already decided exactly what will happen.

And igthought comments to Eugene in the same issue:

Interesting division between plot- and character-oriented threads. I'm not entirely easy with the idea of GM as Defender of the World against the Horde of Adversaries Known as Players. That said, I think part of what is going on is that the world is a character. It is your character. This means two things.

The first is that "This is integral to the world" should not be used to browbeat the players any more than "I'm only doing what my character would do" should. If you are constantly running into the trouble of running worlds that the players don't like -- worlds where plot threads they detest are woven in so deeply that you would rather kill the game than kill the plot thread -- there is a problem.

I am guessing that, if this is the case, the problem is one of communication. How much do you and the other players talk about your assumptions ahead of time? Do you talk about what is referred to in the Indie community as Lines and Veils? Lines are lines not to cross, while Veils are to be drawn over certain things that players are all right with happening -- so long as there is a fade to black or they happen offstage.

One can compromise. Fr'ex, in the Strange School game, Naomi had a problem with anything even hinting at inappropriate relationships between teachers and students, but this is integral to Myles's PC, Reijn, who finds himself attracted to one of his teachers. Naomi's request was not that we drop the plot line, but that we label any threads dealing with teacher-student relationships. I put "T/S Warning" in the subject header so that she'd know to skip them.

What sorts of plots have players objected to? In what cases are they easily removable and in what cases are they integral? And, just as I'd ask a player who feels stuck playing in a way he doesn't enjoy because it's what his character would do, I'll ask you the same question Josh taught me to ask myself when I felt like I'd larped myself into a corner: Are you limiting yourself? Is there some kind of compromise that you can make, that the players would accept and that you would feel did not compromise the integrity of the character that is your world?

Of course, it is always entirely possible that you are simply right, that whatever the players are objecting to really is woven in too deeply to remove, that they agreed explicitly to conditions that would lead to this plot thread, and that they darned well ought to have seen it coming. If this is the case, they are saying, "Well, you can just rewrite your character to fit the needs of the current story, right?" And, that is a problem.

This is one reason I am hesitant to cry foul at the slightest hint of "My character wouldn't do that." Yes, it is a player's job to fit the character into the world. But, it is also my job to make the world generate things that would interest the character.

It is one thing for me to say, "You need to have a reason for your character to keep seeking out dangerous adventure. He can complain all he likes and be miserable, so long as you understand that this is a game where the characters go on adventures." If I get no interest in such a game, so be it. I can run something else, or I can choose not to run a game. If I get players, they have agreed that "It's not in character for my PC to go on adventures" is crap.

But, it is another matter if I am constantly coming up with plots that require the PCs to react in highly specific ways, especially if these ways are focused not on what I have reason to believe the characters are like, but on what I need to make the plot work.

I almost killed a plot because I realized that it required utterly uncharacteristic stupidity on the part of the Cthulhupunk Plus Twenty PCs. The more I tried to fill the gaping holes, the more holes popped up. Forcing the plot on the PCs would be saying, "I don't care who you're playing. I don't care anything about your PCs. I just want them wading into my plot." If I'm taking that position, I should be writing novels.

The reason I was able to use the plot was that one player, Matt Stevens, couldn't make it, and I had a justification for that player's PC to get into the kind of trouble I'd had in mind, along with a few NPCs for company. The remaining PCs could all be as smart as they always were, because they were now on a rescue mission, not on a "let's get into the kind of trouble we'd never allow ourselves to get into" railroad. If Matt had decided at the last minute to show up, I would have shelved that plot and run my back up plot.

There's an interesting amount of give and take in the Strange School game. As the player of the world and the bulk of the NPCs, yes, I am there to defend their integrity. But, when a player has an idea, I also have to take a hard look at what this entails and ask myself, "Is the integrity of the world really at stake? Or are you just too much in love with your creation that you're stomping on the player's fun?"

Fr'ex, when Naomi and Beth wanted their student PCs to room together, one NPC went from being someone I had seen as secretly not hating her PC roommate as much as she pretended to being a complete bitch. I regretted this, but it was not an unreasonable request. The character had acted like a complete bitch. I had planted seeds of growth, but not all such seeds come to fruition. So it goes; so be it. I can find in-character justifications for her attitude.

I have occasionally said no when asked if one of my NPCs could do something specific. Or rather, when asked if one of my bipedal humanoid NPCs could do something specific. I think if one includes the world as an NPC, I've said no a lot more often.