A kind of tribalism

The way you choose to roleplay is up to you and your gaming group. Of course it is. But if you’re asking me, I don’t see the point of doing anything if you’re not going to commit to it heart and soul. Roleplaying to me means trying to be somebody else, imagining the reality of their life, and acting as they would. It’s fiction in the moment. And fiction is a parallel reality evoked by imagination that, while the spell lasts, should be taken as seriously as the reality we live in the rest of the time.

The road to Damascus ran through Keble College. It was 1980. I was running a Tekumel campaign and Paul Deacon, playing a pe choi called Keq Yossu, balked after hearing the lead-in to the evening’s adventure. ‘I’m not coming along.’

The others were aghast. ‘But… what are you going to do all evening, in that case?’

‘The whole set-up sounds off to me. You do what you like, but count me out.’ Paul dropped out of character a moment: ‘I’ll help Dave roll for the NPCs.’

It was the first time I’d thought of really getting into the head of a character that way. I admired Paul for it, and I admired him even more when he was proved right a few hours later. The whole party got wiped out. Paul imagined Keq Yossu getting the news back in Jakalla: ‘I did warn them…’

Not long after, in my Medra campaign, Mike Polling’s character Dagronel Kabo-Drasden befriended an NPC who was the sworn enemy of several of the other player-characters. When it came to the crunch, Dagronel sided with the NPC. In the game post-mortem, the other players were indignant. ‘You can’t value friendship with a nonplayer character above your comrades,’ they argued.

Mike pointed out that a roleplaying campaign is a fiction populated by characters. Nobody wears a lanyard saying PLAYER; it isn’t a Westworld style theme park with hosts vs guests. To use Professor Barker’s adage, there are no NPCs. Just characters. It’s only in bad fiction that somebody behaves out of character to ensure the plot goes in a pre-planned direction.

Both Paul and Mike are arts graduates, and it was an eye-opener for this scientist to see them insist on roleplaying as an art form. It was about then I started to eschew underworlds and puzzles. I should’ve known from Columbo that the how and the who are never as interesting as the why. Motivation is what matters. Characters who look at their world and say, ‘This is how it affects me and this is what I must do.’

Without that revelation, heaven knows what Dragon Warriors would have been.

I still come across the old-school approach, but these days it baffles me. A few years back I was playing in an SF campaign set in the Mass Effect universe. One character was a law enforcement agent. Some of the other PCs were rebels or pirates or – look, I don’t know anything about Mass Effect; in Firefly terms most were Browncoats and one was an Alliance officer. When it all kicked off, the agent sided with the local planet’s police and tried to arrest the Johnny Rebs.

Afterwards, one of the players in particular seemed to take it very personally – in real life, that is, not as his character. He went away seething. I asked a friend of his what was the matter. ‘He believes strongly in the players sticking together,’ he said. ‘He’s annoyed that player took the side of the police against the rest of us.’

‘But… what did he expect? The guy was playing a federal agent.’

‘He doesn’t think character should trump party loyalty.’

I honestly don’t know why you’d roleplay if you feel that way. Without commitment to character you might as well be paintballing. If you want PCs to stick up for each other, you have to give them a reason beyond the fact that they're all controlled by people sitting around the same table.

On the other hand, I also care that movies, TV drama and novels maintain integrity to the fiction they’ve created, yet a lot of people seem quite happy to excuse out-of-character swerves that are there to keep the plot on the rails the writer planned. To me that’s just not doing the work. It could explain why when I was a little kid and my school took us all to a Christmas panto it was loathing at first sight.

Everyone’s got their own setting on this dial. An it harm none, do as ye will. But what I want is to plunge right in to the imaginary lives we evoke through roleplaying, convinced there’s something amazing to be found there if just for a few hours we can let go of being ourselves.

Oh no it isn't

"The GM announces that they are making an intrusion and hands the player whose PC is the primary target of that intrusion 2 XP. That player can either spend 1 XP they already have to cancel the intrusion (returning the 2 XP to the GM) or they can accept the intrusion, take 1 XP for themselves, and give 1 XP to another player."

Justin Alexander reviewing Numenera's "GM Intrusion" mechanic there. And although he musters a spirited argument for why the rule is less obtrusive than some dissociated mechanics, something like that would sure snip the strings on my willing suspension of disbelief.

Where this kind of mechanic differs from the kind of negotiation with the referee you get in improv moments of role-playing is in the bartering of XPs. And clearly the main effect of that is to remind you it's a game. Poetic faith withers when you start doing a cost-benefit analysis.

What it reminds me of is boardgames. A lot of RPGs these days try very hard to be boardgames. That's not necessarily a criticism (hey, have fun whatever way you like) but I'm curious as to what's driving the trend against immersion. Is it a stab at Brechtian alienation? Is it because RPGs need to impress as reading material rather than playing material so as to get good reviews (ie most reviewers read them like a book, they don't playtest them)? Is it because new RPGs are catering to the players who are embarrassed about staying in character? Is keeping an authorial distance from their characters something that players have picked up from videogames? Are roleplaying designers coming up with narrative mechanics in a bid for respectability? ("Hey, I'm not just inventing rules, I'm shaping an art form *...")

I'm interested because I'm thinking of putting a (sort of) story-guiding element in my Zenotic Dragon Warriors 2e project, sometimes known as Jewelspider. And most of my thinking has been in the direction of making it work without jerking the players out of character. So if you've played a system like that and found it doesn't spoil your immersion, do tell.

*Re that, listen to this episode of Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice where, from 41m15s onwards, Roger Bell West and Michael Cule discuss the aesthetics of roleplaying, and whether adhering to genre breaks what's good and unique about roleplaying by slaving it to fiction. I note that in real life we don't expect to continually perceive the aesthetics of a story form in what we're doing (though sometimes we experience "atomic narrative" elements that we later weave into a story) but instead react in the moment to the aesthetics of beauty (a sunset) or character (humour) or wonder (a new idea or experience).