Expectations and Difficulties in Roleplaying
I've had some ideas about roleplaying bouncing around, and some discussed, that I've been trying to coalesce into some semi-coherent post. I don't think I've really succeeded yet, but I don't want to let it all slip away either. When I looked the points, they're all tied together in my mind by the expectations in roleplaying.
Part of this came about in a discussion about an RP session that started with something like (paraphrasing here) "Was that okay? Are the political undercurrents of this setup too inscrutible to be fun?" And that got me thinking, and talking, about how some things are just incredibly hard to run well in RP, probably only working out for the best in cases of rare alignment between GM and players. In that particular case, it fell into the realm of what I classify as a puzzle/mystery - working out the motivations of political individuals to try to read a situation and take according action.
Puzzles and mysteries are a bitch to pull off in roleplaying - at least from my experience. Whether that involves figuring out motivations of characters, how to arrange leverls to get through a trap, or how to defeat a megamonster with a specific weakness. In all these cases, the idea is that figuring out the answer should be something of a challenge, and coming up with that answer should feel rewarding to the players. But nine times out of ten that I've seen this, the PCs and GM end up on totally different pages, where the intended answer appears obvious to one, and unguessable to the other.
Communication is a big reason right off the bat. A GM usually wants the PCs to have a chance of figuring things out, so they need to convey a clue that indicates there's something further to examine - but without giving the whole answer away at first blush. That's a tricky line to walk right there.
Then there's the matter of perspective influencing conclusions. Maybe the town mayor acts nervous because he's behind the murder plot, but if the PCs assume his behavior is due to unexpected events ruining a festival or something, they draw a completely different conclusion. And when trying to reason out elaborate dungeon traps, it's real easy for me to reach the point of thinking "No one puts a bunch of death traps in a place where they expect to regularly traverse," which leads to the conclusion that there does not in fact always have to be a safe way through - it's entirely plausible for a tomb to be engineered around the idea of not being accessible.
Presumably, there's a "best" way to handle such things, but it probably varies by group and requires a lot of GM-player familiarity.
In discussing that, I also brought up another element I have found to be very difficult to convey well - horror. The dice may say that a character is scared of that ghost, but I find, as a player, I have a lot of trouble thinking/playing that way, especially when said character may have beaten down hordes of zombies and a dragon or two prior. Maybe that's my failure to some degree. I can work some ongoing psychological fears into a character, but actual situation-induced terror is... difficult, if not impossible, for me.
The distance between character and player acts as a buffer. And as was pointed out to me, when it comes to atmospheric horror, it really only takes one OOC comment to shatter the mood if it can be crafted at all in the first place.
In a more general sense, I've been thinking about what people expect out of a game session, and what is "satisfying?"
Our most recent offline session of Aeranos consisted of cleaning up after a climactic battle and a few hours of searching and trying to puzzle through how to get a magical hammer out of an elaborately engineered tomb that, by all indications, seems designed to not give it up. We banged our heads on this problem for quite some time before reluctantly concluding we simply didn't have the equipment or magic to accomplish this task, so we gave up - and found out the NPC handling the parallel plan (we get the hammer for him while he rescues our friends) also failed, and things had gotten even worse and more difficult to deal with. So there was a lot more planning of trying to figure out how to handle that. With no conclusions at the end of the night, the characters (and to some extent, the players) experienced a lot of failure and frustration with no good goals in site.
Yet I had fun and enjoyable myself that night.
Now, I suspect most of the positive came from the social interaction and non-game table talk that occurred over the course of the night, but that was part of the experience, so I can't discount it. That is, however, an element that is somewhat lessened online. It's easier to keep the non-game chatter out of the way - and sometimes that might actually not be a good thing, I'm thinking. That's not to say that the IC happenings themselves can't be enjoyable. I've had good, memorable RP without the friendly banter on the side plenty of times.
But I wonder what people - those few of you who read this - desire and expect...
Part of this came about in a discussion about an RP session that started with something like (paraphrasing here) "Was that okay? Are the political undercurrents of this setup too inscrutible to be fun?" And that got me thinking, and talking, about how some things are just incredibly hard to run well in RP, probably only working out for the best in cases of rare alignment between GM and players. In that particular case, it fell into the realm of what I classify as a puzzle/mystery - working out the motivations of political individuals to try to read a situation and take according action.
Puzzles and mysteries are a bitch to pull off in roleplaying - at least from my experience. Whether that involves figuring out motivations of characters, how to arrange leverls to get through a trap, or how to defeat a megamonster with a specific weakness. In all these cases, the idea is that figuring out the answer should be something of a challenge, and coming up with that answer should feel rewarding to the players. But nine times out of ten that I've seen this, the PCs and GM end up on totally different pages, where the intended answer appears obvious to one, and unguessable to the other.
Communication is a big reason right off the bat. A GM usually wants the PCs to have a chance of figuring things out, so they need to convey a clue that indicates there's something further to examine - but without giving the whole answer away at first blush. That's a tricky line to walk right there.
Then there's the matter of perspective influencing conclusions. Maybe the town mayor acts nervous because he's behind the murder plot, but if the PCs assume his behavior is due to unexpected events ruining a festival or something, they draw a completely different conclusion. And when trying to reason out elaborate dungeon traps, it's real easy for me to reach the point of thinking "No one puts a bunch of death traps in a place where they expect to regularly traverse," which leads to the conclusion that there does not in fact always have to be a safe way through - it's entirely plausible for a tomb to be engineered around the idea of not being accessible.
Presumably, there's a "best" way to handle such things, but it probably varies by group and requires a lot of GM-player familiarity.
In discussing that, I also brought up another element I have found to be very difficult to convey well - horror. The dice may say that a character is scared of that ghost, but I find, as a player, I have a lot of trouble thinking/playing that way, especially when said character may have beaten down hordes of zombies and a dragon or two prior. Maybe that's my failure to some degree. I can work some ongoing psychological fears into a character, but actual situation-induced terror is... difficult, if not impossible, for me.
The distance between character and player acts as a buffer. And as was pointed out to me, when it comes to atmospheric horror, it really only takes one OOC comment to shatter the mood if it can be crafted at all in the first place.
In a more general sense, I've been thinking about what people expect out of a game session, and what is "satisfying?"
Our most recent offline session of Aeranos consisted of cleaning up after a climactic battle and a few hours of searching and trying to puzzle through how to get a magical hammer out of an elaborately engineered tomb that, by all indications, seems designed to not give it up. We banged our heads on this problem for quite some time before reluctantly concluding we simply didn't have the equipment or magic to accomplish this task, so we gave up - and found out the NPC handling the parallel plan (we get the hammer for him while he rescues our friends) also failed, and things had gotten even worse and more difficult to deal with. So there was a lot more planning of trying to figure out how to handle that. With no conclusions at the end of the night, the characters (and to some extent, the players) experienced a lot of failure and frustration with no good goals in site.
Yet I had fun and enjoyable myself that night.
Now, I suspect most of the positive came from the social interaction and non-game table talk that occurred over the course of the night, but that was part of the experience, so I can't discount it. That is, however, an element that is somewhat lessened online. It's easier to keep the non-game chatter out of the way - and sometimes that might actually not be a good thing, I'm thinking. That's not to say that the IC happenings themselves can't be enjoyable. I've had good, memorable RP without the friendly banter on the side plenty of times.
But I wonder what people - those few of you who read this - desire and expect...
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