[Norwegian Style] Role-playing epiphany: Characters rule!
Jaakko Koivula:
I might've realized something about my views on role-playing, bear with me.
We played a bunch of norwegian games at the after-parties of Finnish convention TraCon. Matthijs Holter held two small 15-minute freeform-thingies that he had written for the con. At another party we played It Wasn't Me! by Lasse Lundin, from the Norwegian style -anthology of norwegian role-playing games. I enjoyed all the games a ton, but I also was left with this nagging feeling, that there was something missing.
It Wasn't Me! is a sort of collective story-telling game. A celebrity has been murdered and one of the players has done it. In the beginning you only know who was murdered and pretty much all the other facts about the story are formed during the play. We ended up with Lady Gaga being murdered on a freemasons' yacht, by injecting her with horse steroids. A somewhat more detailed play report can be read at: http://story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=12464
The game doesn't really have any characters to begin with. Each player sort of arrives at a character during the story. I ended up as being a cook and we also had a hippie, anarchist and a FIFA-referee in the game as murder suspects. The characters sort of randomly get facts slapped on them during the discussions and end up as being someone tied to the murder. Play proceeds in turns, where first everyone describes a really general fact about the murder and then those are fleshed out by free discussion between the players/characters. It Wasn't Me! really doesn't differentiate between the two a lot.
After playing a bunch of free-formy storytelling-games in a row, I realised that even though they are very interesting and fun, they don't really do for me what I expect role-playing to do. I realised, that I really need a character doing something, for I to get those role-playing-kicks* out of a game.
For me, the character is nearly primary compared to the story. If the character goes around being protagony and getting into trouble, an interesting story should unfold sooner or later. Just straight on telling a collective story with a bunch of friends seems for me like skipping an important step. Show and tell, except you don't get to show at all.
This was my first time playing a bunch of more norwegian styled games. At least these games seemed to differ a ton from forge-inspired games in that they emphasized freeformy storytelling over playing characters a lot. For example, I have this feeling (haven't got a chance to play it yet, but read the book and the APs) that Eero's Zombie Cinema is a pretty character oriented game, even though it's also called a story-telling game. You don't start the game with heavily developed characters and they'll propably die somewhere along the way, but it's still the characters who essentially are at the center of each zombie movie. I also remember some thread here, where Ron wrote that you can't play Sorcerer, if you don't really want your guy doing something. You have to want to play your character, otherwise there just is no point. And that if you do play your guy, nothing else really matters or can go wrong.
How do you feel about characters? Do you need them as much as me in your gaming, or are they just peripheral to the story?
*read: kicks I associate with role-playing
Jaakko Koivula:
Errata: actually the two Matthijs' games weren't written for the con, they were just translated into finnish and published at the con-program. You can check the games at: http://norwegianstyle.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/five_characters.pdf and http://norwegianstyle.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/the-orc-in-the-well/
greyorm:
An interesting element of some of the more Illusionist-play is that character is simply a proxy-viewer to the story: they don't matter except as a window to the events the GM is revealing.
I think some forms of Pawn-stance Gamist play drop character in a similar manner without the negative "proxy-viewer" effect. Because I do enjoy Pawn Stance Gamism, and am playing in a 3E game right now where this is even the case: my half-orc wizard is really just a collection of resources to pit against whatever challenge the DM throws our way. There's very little role-playing, character desire or development -- more like none. Sometimes we'll do a funny voice or a short and ultimately meaningless character bit, but mostly it's just us players goofing around at the table, then trap-finding and monster-fighting.
Now, all my play isn't that way. In games like CoC, I really wanted character to matter. Because in that kind of game, it really should. Unfortunately, the GM in our recent CoC game was from the old "any character ever could be dropped into this module and it doesn't change the module" school of play. So we had multiple sessions of "your characters chance upon this horrible thing that has no real connection to or meaning for any of them, now you need to fight it or escape it" (and then it got really surreal, before he rebooted the game completely). I role-played my guy, did all the stuff you do when you're playing-to-character, but it made for an ultimately disappointing campaign, because, well "Who cares?"
Character-enmeshed-in-situation is the key, I think. Or at least for me, when we're talking about character.
When they're not tied tightly to the situation, in my experience, a game falls back on kind of a disconnected soap opera drama.
Callan S.:
Hi,
Quote
How do you feel about characters? Do you need them as much as me in your gaming, or are they just peripheral to the story?
If your refering to the random fact adding as story, I wouldn't call that story. I think people talking fiction at a table doesn't automatically == story/story generation. So I would say if characters are peripheral, then the activity isn't about story (atleast not first and foremost - for example sports games generate 'a story' as a byproduct, but aren't about making a story)
contracycle:
Not sure I agree with Greyorm's point about illusionism - I think illusionism is probably most succesful when players are fully embedded in their characters and are therefore sufficiently engaged already that they can allow events to roll over them, as it were, without diminishing the experience.
At any rate certainly for me have a clearly defined character over which I have control is important. There have been a few designs I recall in which other players statements could become definitional of your character and I recoil at the prospect. I need to be inside the characters head to make decisions, and I can'y be if my understanding of the character can be altered by others, no matter how procedurally tight. Similarly I dislike taking over an NPC, or a another player's PC, or an aspect of a PC, like the Shadow in Wraith, or even, as the GM, an NPC created by a player. None of them sit well with me; I'd rather have some automated response chart.
OTOH, Ron's highly motivated characters in Sorceror don't suit me terribly well either; I need some time to bed down into a new character (and it doesn't always work), so they tend not to have powerful motivations when they first enter play. It would take me a few sessions of settling in before that sort of thing appears.
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