The first post in this series can be read here.
Most players enjoy many aspects of the game at different times. For convenience, we define the primary player motivations as types of players: actors, explorers, instigators, power gamers, slayers, storytellers, thinkers, and watchers.
Actor
The actor likes to pretend to be her character. She emphasizes character development that has nothing to do with numbers and powers, trying to make her character seem to be a real person in the fantasy world. She enjoys interacting with the rest of the group, with characters and monsters in the game world, and with the fantasy world in general by speaking “in character” and describing her character’s actions in the first person.The actor values narrative game elements over mechanical ones. Unlike the storyteller, she values her character’s personality and motivations over other story elements.An Actor:Provides PC background, emphasizing personality.Plays according to her character’s motivations.Prefers scenes where she can portray her character.Often prefers social encounters to fights.Engage the actor by:Facilitating her PC’s personality and background development.Providing roleplaying encounters.Emphasizing her character’s personality at times.Recruiting her to help create narrative campaign elements.Be sure that the actor doesn’t:Bore the other players by talking to everyone and everything.Justify disruptive actions as being 'in character.'
Rating: vaguely true
Ah, 2007. When we dared to dream that behaviour at the gaming table could be managed with a few simple bits of advice. A time before professional actors were hired to pretend to be a DM and D&D characters, in a scripted romp that made so many think that they, too, could be an "actor!"
(slow, patient face-palm)
Do not engage the actor at all. Don't facilitate the actor's personality, or background development, because these are enormously precious, personal things, and if you dare to have the world cater to these intimate, deeply idiosyncratic qualities with something as crass as actual game play, you'll soon find yourself dealing with a wounded sow, whose distress and trauma at the vilification of their cherished character has been insulted past all decency! If you provide role-playing encounters, you'll absolutely bore the shit out of the other players ... or create pissing contests of supposed acting prowess between players that will bring deep, stabbing pains to your bowels. Don't do it. Just don't.
Take the actor in hand and lead them gently from your home. Help them into your car. Drive them to the center of the nearest large city, until you reach a theatre. Get out, walk around the car, help the actor out onto the pavement ... at which time, club them like a seal, kick them repeatedly, drag them to the theatre's doorstep and drive away.
Sorry, this is as positive as I can be. The beneficial effects this will have upon your game world, if you have been miserably subjected to the actor up until now, will be unprecedented. The sun will shine, the birds will sing, the players will become interested in the game world and the intense stink of saccharine ego will have been fumigated from the experience.
I find it hard to identify just when this acting bug infested the game. I never encountered it in my early days, and three of the players I had were fellow actors in high school drama—yes, I was one too. There isn't a word of "being your character" or "choosing your character's personality" in AD&D that I can remember. Here is Moldvay's example of creating a player character; apart from alignment, there isn't a word about the character's personality:
I have to believe it rose somehow out of the Dragon Magazine, or perhaps one of the other D&D copycats that came out in the 1980s. I don't remember it in Rolemaster, Traveller, Gammaworld, Top Secret or Paranoia, all of which I played. Maybe Steve Jackson invented the idea. Wherever it came from, however, it has arisen like a plague on the land, drowning game play in purplish language that wouldn't pass a grade 3 English test. What is it, exactly, that encourages adult players that it's rational to make every character statement sound like it was invented by a medieval-themed fast-food restaurant chain?
It isn't just that it's acting. It's bad acting. Atrociously bad acting. Mystery Theatre 3000 acting. Yet the participant never seems to realize that; somehow, they adopt a demeanour like John Lovitz crying out his superiority to Laurence Olivier.
[Hm. That reference is probably very dated. Well, I'm very old]
The book's advice is probably as well as most people could do in 2007, if the motivation is inclusiveness. And it must be, since the female pronoun is used throughout—which has never made sense to me. Using the other sex is still sexist. It ought to be rewritten using the plural, but I'm quoting here so my hands are tied. My point is that, before so many examples of creating backstory and character traits, with evidence provided by so many media sources that have appeared since 2010, this old 4e attempt might have been a half-decent attempt to encourage DMs to get such players under control.
The disease has become so widespread, however, that zero tolerance is the only practical solution. I simply don't allow players to "pretend to be another person" while gaming with me. I have no problem with them gaming their characters in the first person or the third person, so long as they make no special distinctions between "What I as a player do" and "What my character would do." I am a fan of roleplaying. I stage conversations between my players and me all the time, and do so expecting the player to adhere to the dialogue without anachronism or derailment. But for the love of cheeseballs, talk like a human being; act like a human being. Don't behave like a pantomime stock character from a children's Cumberland Lake District performance in July funded by the Conservative Party. Have a little decency around other people.
This series continues with Where No One Has Gone Before
As much as I WANT to believe it's wrong...
ReplyDeleteI do get pretty bored and over people talking how angsty their angsty half-orc thief is.
But I am more into solving problems and rolling dice. And optimizing to have more tools for solving problems. I usually have a few bullet points of origin for the character, but yeah, just do the thing. I'm not going to ask for the character's motivation, and only going to ask for the player's when it comes to harming the party intentionally.
Once I read the Jon Lovitz mention I understood how to say the title of this one.
ReplyDeleteTwas precisely my thought, Sterling. I spent half an hour picking out a Lovitz bit to embed in the post before deciding I'm just too old.
ReplyDeleteOddbit,
ReplyDeleteMaybe there's room for it being a phase that young D&D players go through, and perhaps I ought to have inserted a positive word or two about that. I didn't think of it until now.
Alexis,
ReplyDeleteOne thing that comes to mind is the idea of practicing.
If when you practice you make the same mistake every time, you will be practicing the art of making that mistake.
That said, I do see a place for it, but it's when everyone has signed up for it and knows what they're getting into. Which I'm not sure nearly as many people would. Especially given the desire to be in the spotlight.
Years upon years ago I used to visit Yahoo Chat Rooms for role play. Most of them were some sort of tavern and people entered and pasted their 3 paragraph overblown "I'm a have angel half devil vampire that rips off the roof, falls from heaven, and sits in the dark corner while pounding the hardest drink available after an awesome guitar solo" (NO this is NOT exaggeration) I eventually set up my own tavern to draw attention to it by offering a round, well lit tavern without chairs and nobody tending the bar. Didn't really solve anything, but it was fun once the players started correcting each other. One of my youth social experiments on the internet.
It was really just what the whole acting thing comes out to, shouting your RP into the void at people who don't give a shit and are just waiting their turn to scream, and if anything thinking of what they're going to say rather than listening to what is going on.
Oh, I know it's not an exaggeration. I've certainly been in those rooms. Well done you, capturing that moment.
ReplyDeleteMy page views really fell off yesterday, so I know I drove people off with this post. More's the pity, for although you and I may be in complete agreement on this Oddbit, the population is thick out there with waiting their turn to scream—and probably incorporating that turn formally into their games, for the sake of inclusiveness.
The pool has been thoroughly pissed into by productions like Critical Role.
I don't see myself what value there is in massive mugs that make me "feel like a halfling;" I'd just feel like a stupid human with a great big difficult-to-drink-from mug. People are easily misled by such gimmicks, however, as they don't realize that the actor's drinking from the mug is JUST FOR SHOW, and not really something the actor cares about or feels affection for. Theatre is a shallow, hideous business that pretends to be glamourous and really isn't.
For a lot of people, an example that hits home is acting the part of Santa at Christmas. Last year at this time, I was arranging the rental of hundreds of santa suits to people all over western Canada out of the costume shop I worked for. Some of these people did it every year. Most had never done it. Some paid for $500 suits that looked and felt real; most paid for $50 suits that a kid wouldn't care about but which the wearer would.
We play Santa for the kids. But it is filthy, sweaty, repetitive, exhausting work; you act jolly and friendly, but after the 75th kid that day you're definitely pretending to be. Thankfully, the kids don't know the difference. At the end of the day, you take off the suit, you swear a bunch of times to blow off stress and you drink. You behave exactly like Santa wouldn't. This is show business.
It irks me that a bunch of paid actors, who probably grunt and disparage D&D as a garbage fucking job they do while waiting to get "real work," have become the icon of "What a real D&D game looks like." But clearly, players have decided they'd rather pretend to be a D&D player than be one.