How do you roleplay? (Forked from Narrative thread)

[Soylent Green]

For example, when players who choose to jump on an enormous serpent or dragon and climb up to it's neck or something are just sort of allowed to do so, as if that weren't a suicidal ridiculous tactic that would probably just get them killed for umpteen reasons, because it seems cool and heroic and oh it would be unfun to have the brave heroic (but highly improbable) move get someone's PC embarrassed and injured or killed. Meanwhile the players using actual tactics that make sense end up being sidelined.

What is the point of having a giant serpent if you can't jump on its back? That's giants serpents are for!

If the GM throws something cool, fantastical and imaginative at me I should be able to respond in kind and have my character do something equally cool, fantastical and imaginative back and not simply stick to sensible tactics. Otherwise it's a bit like the GM gets the full technicolor treatment while the rest of us have to make do with the black and white version!

[Skarg]

What is the point of having a giant serpent if you can't jump on its back? That's giants serpents are for!

If the GM throws something cool, fantastical and imaginative at me I should be able to respond in kind and have my character do something equally cool, fantastical and imaginative back and not simply stick to sensible tactics. Otherwise it's a bit like the GM gets the full technicolor treatment while the rest of us have to make do with the black and white version!

To me, it's not even a game about a giant serpent, if the rule of cool defies physics and suddenly allows a character to do things like jump farther than they could before, get on the back of something taller than they are without explaining how, hang on to and climb an enormous monster which has full freedom of movement itself and would in reality be extremely difficult to hold onto even if it couldn't just move or shake or scrape you off or roll over, etc all just because drool of cool.

Also, jumping on enormous monsters and killing them in nearly impossible ways isn't cool to me - it's some sort of weird contest-of-cool metagame that undermines for me the whole exercise of playing a game about some situation, by not having it be like the situation. If you can think of a way to kill an enormous monster as a human-sized adventurer... a way that would actually work, and you are willing to have your character face the actual odds your strategy would result in, and it works, or even if you die or lose a limb trying, that's what's cool to me. And hey, if you actually do something that has you get on its neck and kill it without bending logic other than by lucking out, then that's pretty wild too. (I also think it's cool if you realize it's not worth the risk and run like hell.) But just saying that you're doing something awesome (especially out of envy for the coolness of the GM's role) and then having the GM let it work for some meta-game reason, is a game I'm not really interested in showing up for.

[Gronan of Simmerya]

To me, it's not even a game about a giant serpent, if the rule of cool defies physics and suddenly allows a character to do things like jump farther than they could before, get on the back of something taller than they are without explaining how, hang on to and climb an enormous monster which has full freedom of movement itself and would in reality be extremely difficult to hold onto even if it couldn't just move or shake or scrape you off or roll over, etc all just because drool of cool.

Also, jumping on enormous monsters and killing them in nearly impossible ways isn't cool to me - it's some sort of weird contest-of-cool metagame that undermines for me the whole exercise of playing a game about some situation, by not having it be like the situation. If you can think of a way to kill an enormous monster as a human-sized adventurer... a way that would actually work, and you are willing to have your character face the actual odds your strategy would result in, and it works, or even if you die or lose a limb trying, that's what's cool to me. And hey, if you actually do something that has you get on its neck and kill it without bending logic other than by lucking out, then that's pretty wild too. (I also think it's cool if you realize it's not worth the risk and run like hell.) But just saying that you're doing something awesome (especially out of envy for the coolness of the GM's role) and then having the GM let it work for some meta-game reason, is a game I'm not really interested in showing up for.

Exactly.  If you want to be a Jedi Knight let's play Star Wars where the genre expects it,

[Soylent Green]

Exactly.  If you want to be a Jedi Knight let's play Star Wars where the genre expects it,

That's where maybe the disconnect lies for me. For me jumping onto a the back of a giant snake is part and parcel of the fantasy genre. I can totally see Conan doing that and he's kind of like the king of all of giant snake fiction.

Granted I'm probably not as widely read in the fantasy genre as some here.

I guess what I am saying is this. I find it jarring that the GM gets to create a world filled with genre tropes, things that are wondrous, imaginative and that cater for the full-blown escapist experience and then expect the players to completely ignore the genre tropes and act as though it were a training simulation exercise.

I appreciate that is actually a very established still of play, one as old as the hobby itself, so it clearly works. But it still puzzles me.

[Nexus]

Depends on the setting. In some setting the proper reaction to a giant flying serpent is "OHSWEETFUCK WHATS THAT!? RUN!!!!!" followed by screaming and dying.

"Fantasy" is an incredibly broad genre that includes innumerable tropes and conventions. Its important for everyone to be on the same page, meta scene editing or no.

[Bren]

Depends on the setting. In some setting the proper reaction to a giant flying serpent is "OHSWEETFUCK WHATS THAT!? RUN!!!!!" followed by screaming and dying.

"Fantasy" is an incredibly broad genre that includes innumerable tropes and conventions. Its important for everyone to be on the same page, meta scene editing or no.

Exactly.

In Tales of the Arabian Nights, Sinbad hides and sneaks then uses his turban to tie himself to the leg of the Giant Roc to hitch a ride out of the Valley of Diamonds.

In some other tale, Maxtar the Mighty leaps more than nine times his height in the air to reach the tail of the rock, then runs up it's back like Legolas* in Peter Jackson's movie, while swinging his surf-board sized sword around his head in a giant windup before chopping the Roc's head off with one super powered swing. And then lightly falls to the ground safely.

Both Sinbad and Maxtar are taking a ride on a Giant Roc, but they probably shouldn't be played at the same table.


* Have I mentioned how much I loath that scene?

[Bren]

Exactly.  If you want to be a Jedi Knight let's play Star Wars where the genre expects it,

Those would be the jumping green frog Yoda and the Clone Wars cartoon Jedis. Our WEG D6 Jedis never could do shit like that. Neither could any other Jedi in the first three* movies.


* According to release date

[Natty Bodak]

I don't think my sense of immersion is as fragile as either Anon's or Krueger's. Perhaps there is some trade off in that it is lower fidelity because of that. I don't know.

What I can tell you is this:

I don't consciously seek out genre emulation for any game that would be longer than a couple of sessions.

I think every campaign, through actual play and cooperation of the GM and players, develops its own sensibility that informs play as much as some external genre might.

I very much dislike metagaming, by which I mean players using OOC knowledge from previous games/characters to short circuit their interaction with the world.

In order to *not* metagame when I'm a player, I need to be conscious enough of what I know versus what my character knows. This means I have to cycle between first and second person states of mind, and if this hinders my immersion, it certainly doesn't do it to the point of hindering my enjoyment.

I do not mind OOC mechanics, and I don't find they bother my sense of immersion. They seem no greater bother to me than the cycling mentioned above.

My preference on the shotgun thing:
If the GM knows there is a shotgun there, then it's there.  
If the GM knows there is no shotgun there, then it's not there.
If the GM never bothered to determine, then there's nothing wrong with the player's implicit suggestion.  GM's call. Always.

I don't think I could play a campaign with someone like Anon. Player entitlement of just about any sort chaps my ass, and that's how their quote came across to me.

I think I'd like playing a campaign with Krueger, but I wonder if my tendency toward some OOC discussion exploring what might/should be IC for my character would make him not enjoy playing with me.

[Nexus]

Genre emulation doesn't affect my sense of immersion. I maybe an exception. I can get into the mindset and envision how the character might think and react with a frame work once I buy into the premise.

[Bedrockbrendan]

For example, when players who choose to jump on an enormous serpent or dragon and climb up to it's neck or something are just sort of allowed to do so, as if that weren't a suicidal ridiculous tactic that would probably just get them killed for umpteen reasons, because it seems cool and heroic and oh it would be unfun to have the brave heroic (but highly improbable) move get someone's PC embarrassed and injured or killed. Meanwhile the players using actual tactics that make sense end up being sidelined.

This is why I think it is important for the group to establish what game world physics they are after. I am open to games where you jump on the snake and heroically survive but also open to games where real world tactical stuff is going to matter. What I like is to know what I am getting into before hand. Usually when I am about to run a campaign I use shorthand descriptors like Real World Physics, Action Movie Physics, Comic Book Physics, etc to give them an indication of what to expect. This stuff matters for exactly the reason you describe. I once had a player who thought we the game was meant to be more action/adventure when I was pretty much playing it gritty and real, so he got confused when his attempt to burn down an imperial fleet simply resulted in a small fire that didn't go anywhere. Once I clarified what the setting and game were about he was cool with it and adapted his tactics to match. Had I been thinking in terms of Action Movie physics, things might have panned out differently.

[Bren]

My preference on the shotgun thing:
If the GM knows there is a shotgun there, then it's there.  
If the GM knows there is no shotgun there, then it's not there.
If the GM never bothered to determine, then there's nothing wrong with the player's implicit suggestion.  GM's call. Always.

I agree with everything you said, but this was so nicely said it bears repeating.

[Natty Bodak]

I agree with everything you said, but this was so nicely said it bears repeating.

Thanks!

Thinking about it some more, my response is from a point of view of not playing very many games where there are rules explicitly giving authorial control to the players.  

I have enjoyed short runs with Spirit of the Century (which is both very genre-specific and full of things like player declarations), but other Fate-based games haven't played very well for me.  The collaborative setting design and character creation of some Fate games has been quite fun (e.g. Dresden Files) but the actual game flew like a fossilized dinosaur turd (e.g. Dresden Files).

[Phillip]

Unlike Anon Aderlan, I don't have a ... existential? ... crisis when the world doesn't meet genre-standard expectations (such as an untended shotgun behind every bar). Whence the assumption that the world is so beholden to one dude's limited imagination? That seems bizarrely solipsistic even with just the usual supposition of a 19th-century American character that he's living in a real world, OR the out-of-character fact of playing the game with other people.

With both considerations? Most peculiar, mama.

[Gronan of Simmerya]

This is why I think it is important for the group to establish what game world physics they are after.

I am a firm believer that step one is the referee clearly and unequivocally states their expectations for the campaign, and the players respond and negotiations happen.

[Skarg]

That's where maybe the disconnect lies for me. For me jumping onto a the back of a giant snake is part and parcel of the fantasy genre. I can totally see Conan doing that and he's kind of like the king of all of giant snake fiction.

Granted I'm probably not as widely read in the fantasy genre as some here.

I guess what I am saying is this. I find it jarring that the GM gets to create a world filled with genre tropes, things that are wondrous, imaginative and that cater for the full-blown escapist experience and then expect the players to completely ignore the genre tropes and act as though it were a training simulation exercise.

I appreciate that is actually a very established still of play, one as old as the hobby itself, so it clearly works. But it still puzzles me.

I'd say that you are thinking of a different style of fiction mechanics than I am. I like realistic/logical/consistent simulationist fiction and games. I infer that you relate to fantasy as having the action and results determined by coolness/fun/imagination/epicness in a "narrativist" (I don't like the term, but it seems to be in use) way. Fantasy (fiction and games) includes both modes, with different works (and different parts of some works) ranging somewhere between one end or the other.

When I want someone to be able to have extreme heroic abilities in my game, I assign them the values (and/or magical or divine assistance) to be able to do extreme feats within the same system that includes realistic limits. Of course, even if you _can_ leap onto the back of a giant serpent, you might be much more likely to succeed by staying on the ground and using a long metal trident, and deploying some other men to distract it. To me, that's a game actually about a heroic / extreme situation, where the nature of that situation is actually present and available to interact with. In a game where the mechanics are about generic comparison of levels, or about PCs getting to be the cool heroes, or about the GM/narrator saying something cool happens, to me that's not really about a serpent and a hero - it's about symbolic storytelling or abstract gaming or something.

The thing is, although I do sometimes want to play games and read/watch/hear stories about amazing heroes doing amazing things, if they do the amazing things just because the author/GM/rules bend reality so the amazing deeds are actually just allowed because they're heroes, so the universe just makes it just as easy for them to do things that don't make sense, then I tend to notice it and it degrades my interest because now it's clearly a silly universe where the amazing events aren't actually amazing - they're being forced and aren't really happening in any way worth paying attention to.

I'm totally interested in playing a game where a few heroes with extreme but plausible skills have to use actual tactics and face actual risks against overwhelming odds, to see what they can pull off, and how the situation actually develops, and having to choose what to do to try to survive unpredictable events as they develop. I'm totally not interested if the rules don't represent the situation realistically, or if the GM is going to hand-wave all the fighting with mooks until the designated "big bad guy" appears, or if the players are just going to be allowed to not really be at risk, or if the GM is going to declare that we automatically lose.