As a player, you have to at least try and keep yourself under control slightly, and if not you at least have to know that when the GM or the GM's representative bitch-slapper says "OI PAY ATTENTION" that you have to go "oh yeah, we're here for roleplay." If you're like, "SHUSH, WE'RE TALKING ABOUT MY NEW SHOES", you might as well go home, 'cause you're not there for roleplaying, you're there for discussing shoes.
Okay, so that's one thing. Are there any more? We've talked a lot about sessions getting derailed, and I have in the past been taken to task for this series focusing a bit too much on things going wrong, believe it or not. I was shocked too...
If things are going right, you don't have talk about it, really, you can just go "i'm on a ride, of joy and roleplays!" That's mainly it. As a player, you want to have fun, you want to challenge yourself a little bit, or a lot depending on how you're playing it. If you're playing a dungeon crawl the challenge is pre tty much "how hard can i hit this creature - "
Is it, though? We had this conversation earlier, and I can't remember how we got into it, so I'm going to engage in some slightly artificial flim-flam where I break the fourth wall* and say "here's something we've got to talk about" - we were talking about the players' opportunity to be clever?
i can't remember... but i do like the opportunity to be a bit clever...
You are, bizarrely enough, for the baby-est RP'er in most of my groups, also one of the most old-school. You're the first to reach into your pockets, and look at your -
Grab that frog!
- yeah, to look at your character sheet and go "I've got a lucky toad, what can I do with that?"
i loved that lucky toad, it was great fun. You have to challenge yourself a bit and say "i won't just hit it with my axe, sometimes i might hit it with my toad, sometimes i might dig a big trap and lead it in there and throw rocks on its head" -
So you sort of expect the opportunity to be clever, as a player?
Yeah. And sometimes, you know, you might talk to it, and discover that it has wants and needs of its own, and will be perfectly happy to to give you the loot, and you gain XP from negotiation.
Yeah, 'cause experience points tend to come from 'defeating' things - defeat doesn't mean kill, you can win an argument with it and I'll give you the XP for it. My expectation, as a GM, is that players will be clever about things, because it's not much fun for me if all people want to do is whittle hit points off one damage die at a time. I like when players are prepared to think creatively.
If I say "you walk into a ten foot square room" and someone says "well what's in it, what fixtures are there, what can I buckle my swash on with, who's in it..." - when people are searching and don't just say "oooh, I make a Search roll", they have to say "I search this box and here's how I'm going to search it", because that makes it worth my while to describe things in detail and not just "roll a d20, roll a d20, roll a d100 on the treasure chart, there you go."
You have to be in it, and be part of the particular world. So I suppose the responsibility of various people is to be in the world.
For a given value of 'in the world'. You can be engaged in a world as a series of intellectual challenges to overcome, or you can be engaged with it as a series of opportunities to do silly squeaky goblin voices. Either is good, as long as you're engaged with something. What if you're bored? If as a player, you're just going "*sigh*, can I just kill something already..."
Then either you hope that you've been given a character that can just do that, like in the Star Wars roleplay where we gave the one person an ex-Stormtrooper, who was a clone warrior and then he'd got free and was like "I'll be a freedom fighter instead!", but his idea of freedom fighting was still crashing into things and hitting everything and setting it on fire and running away.
We named him Crash.
We did name him Crash. And that was it, we knew the guy was a bit of a 'hit it with my axe' type of person, so we gave him a character that he would be at home with, so he could say "this character is just gonna go in and blast everything." It was a good thing, it gave us all something to react to, 'cause whilst we as players were all "OH GOD THAT WAS HILARIOUS YOU SLID ALL THE WAY DOWN THE ROAD BOOOOOM!" but we as the characters had to be more like "Oh no, Crash has done something again, let's run away and hide..."
I'm not sure how cool he was with that in the end. Squirrel does have a spot of bother with - I've told the Tale of Squirrel before. So, we've done some stuff about expectations, you like a challenge, I like people to be challenging.
You can be challenged by the "mmm, this is a clever situation" - but then again there's your Mage games, which tend to challenge people on a bedwetting level...
I don't know what you mean, right? Just because Gina was sleeping with the light on for a week.
... which is another cool thing, 'cause you're going into that and saying "we want to do Mage, and we want to do a Really Fucking Psychological version of Mage where we'll want to sleep with the light on for a week, and we completely destroy these characters IN THE BRAIN-POCKET - "
Which is fun, guys!
Which was hilarious to watch. That bit with Gina and the house that was in love with her and also was a mausoleum and AAAH NECROOOMANNCCYYY - i was there going "oh my God" because it was thrilling and slightly scary and ohmygodit'sgonnadothis and waiting for it.
And there was that sense of legitimate consequence to it, as well, because - one thing that I expect as a player, on the rare occasions that I do play, is that my actions will have some sort of consequence, that there is a risk that my character could die. It's the trade-off for trying to be clever, that sometimes it's gonna go wrong, and it's why I don't like playing characters that are particularly smarter than me, because I can't live up to that.
That, I think, is where you find yourself getting into "well my character wouldn't have made that mistake", whereas if you'd thought about it, if you'd built a character that shared some of your - I don't want to say 'limitations', but you'd built a character that you could live up to, and didn't have to sort of scrabble to bridge the gap between your skills and the character's skills.
Even if you're playing some sort of -
- genius protocol droid?
- i was thinking parkour acrobat, and say you were a person who is not a genius parkour acrobat, but if you knew enough to say "oh, i bounce off this and spin off that, i backflip - " if you know enough that this thing is called backflipping and you do it, you can at least fake being it for a completely intellectual exercise. With your protocol droid it was slightly more dodgy because -
- he was smarter than me -
- and you could fake that, for the most part, but there were occasions where you were like "argh, he'd do something really clever now, i'm pretty sure..."
There were a lot of times where I'd come up with this plan and then outside the game someone would say "you do realise there's this hole, this hole, this hole and this hole" and I'd be kind of "ach, well, I didn't think of those so let's roll with it", but there was that slight dissonance between who I am and who I was playing and it was an unsatisfactory one because I felt like I was somehow inadequate to play the part.
You do have to think that, as a player, you do have to think "can i actually play this?" It's good to challenge yourself and go "yeah i'm gonna do it, i'm gonna try this", and then if you fail utterly, then it has to be reworked slightly.
I think you can fail utterly but it has to be your failure. I can own making mistakes and I can take control and say "that was my mistake and I'm proud to have made it" - it's when I feel like I shouldn't have made the mistake and there's something there giving me a reason to say "that shouldn't have happened" - I suppose what I'm saying is, as a player, expect the challenge but expect risk as well...
TO BE CONCLUDED...
* - I do actually know what the fourth wall is, I just mis-spoke in this recording and we'd already spent all morning on this so we didn't want to go back and do it again.
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