A friend told me that role-playing in-character for a pen and paper RPG was a foreign concept to him, but he did it all the time while playing an online text-based game. I was bewildered.
That happened some time ago I ran a game after a long break. The system was Dragon Warriors, and the scenario ran was the first adventure from the Sleeping Gods book “The King Under the Forest.” The group was new, and I was having a hard time getting them to play in-character.
(It doesn’t help that one of the players was a longtime D&D player and he was looking at the bestiary while playing. None of my usual players would bother looking up any references while gaming.)
Something bothered about me about the whole experience. To cut the long story short, in the end I figure that the players were using their abilities score and skills to determine their course of actions. Not that it is a bad thing, and not that they did it all the time. Here’s an example to put it in perspective. One of the players tried to pick a fight with an inn-keeper. Before the fight broke out, some of the villagers brought the militia back. The players’ final decision to back off? They discuss stats, the probabilities of them winning the fight and how many villagers and village guards they could take on.
Now I guess there’s a lot of reasons why things went this way and how I could handle it. I just put the incident one side, and went on with the game, trying to take it easy. After all, there was a long hiatus after my last game, and this was my first time with a whole new group.
The game ended, and I discussed with one of the players over dinner, asking why he did the things he do. It turned out that he understood in-character playing (he does it while playing on an online text-based game), but not while in a pen and paper role-playing game. His reason was that it took him a longer time to think how to describe his actions in “real life”, while online he could edit his input.
That never occurred to me, honestly.
He went on to explain when in a RPG, he see it as a game. His next action is based on what will improve his character, and whether his stats could support that action. He compared it to Oblivion – your next action is what give your character the most improvement.
Our discussion went on for a while, with me explaining how I see the game as a way to presenting stories, using the game mechanics to “cooperatively tell the story” and him explaining his tactical point of view.
At the end of dinner, I summarized my long-winded explanation in one sentence as this “I guess what I am trying to say is I rather my players to make their decisions in context of the story, not in the game mechanics.”
Usually playing in-character (at a pen and paper session, at least) is to think as your character would, act as your character would, in reaction to the situation. This is all well and good, but it is taxing, and some players, like my friend, find it hard to do at a table-top setting. Instead of that, maybe I could try to encourage the player to act “in-style” with the story. I am not suggesting railroading, but rather that the players’ actions fit the mood, theme, atmosphere and the situation.
Or put it this way, if you pick a fight with an innkeeper, it would be because he has insulted your honor or you want to mug someone up to end up in the jail (for whatever purposes) or you want to be evil. Not because you find to kill him, gain some XP and loot his body…and because your fighting abilities way outclass his.
I think there is more payoff in this than flowery languages, props or dramatic gestures.
