Arabian Nights week 24

NeilNjae

As per last week, these are the bare bones of stories. It brings home, to me, the importance of the inner change in characters in a story, as well as just the events. I've been thinking on this in relation to RPGs recently, where most games describe characters in physical characteristics or abilities, but there's little to no description of inner ideals, objectives, issues, struggles, and how that inner perspective of the character changes over time. There's lip service to story forms like Campbell's monomyth, but even here it's all about external change and very little to do with how the protagonist changes internally: how they grow, mature, consider the world in a different way.

Jealous sisters: no mention of the princess stuffin her ears to reduce the intensity of the shouting.

RichardAbbott

I agree: not a great deal to stay except the mild curiosity of seeing what features of the story were thought important as a bare-bones summary.

In the world of games, how do players / GMs balance the two levels of character involved, viz their own and their characters? One can imagine a player changing their own personality and priorities over a long series of games as real life washes around them, but how many players try to adapt their characters' internal worlds? Are there incentives that particular game mechanical systems use to promote this?

NeilNjae

@RichardAbbott said:
In the world of games, how do players / GMs balance the two levels of character involved, viz their own and their characters? One can imagine a player changing their own personality and priorities over a long series of games as real life washes around them, but how many players try to adapt their characters' internal worlds? Are there incentives that particular game mechanical systems use to promote this?

In my local group (the Milton Keynes RPG club) there are quite a few players who will make strong choices about how their characters will change, even over the space of a few sessions. In the game I'm currently in (Everway), one PC went from hunter-of-undead to questioning-orders-about-destroying-undead to actually-undead to confessed-new-situation-to-another-undead-hunting-PC. In about four sessions.

I think it helps when systems either mechanise things other than physical actions, and when the game it set up to allow expression of character in ways other than hitting things.

Apocryphal

In campaign game play, these changes can happen quite organically as the circumstances around the character change. This is especially common in horror games, where a character is exposed to increasingly surreal or unsettling events. At a very basic level, the player must begin to choose whether the character believes in the increasingly mounting evidence of the occult , or continues to rationalize these. Eventually the latter becomes almost impossible and the character flips to acceptance, and changes their behaviour - maybe becoming messaianic, or going postal.

Several games, like Fate and PDQ and Heroquest, which have ‘prose descriptive qualities’ (hence PDQ) have character advancement that revolves around changing these qualities, so there’s a bit of mechanization involved, though it’s somewhat passive as nothing really forces or encourages change. In PDQ your qualities can be attacked and impaired (this is in lieu of hit-points) which can put certain qualities out of reach for a time, but this is generally short term.

The most effective use I’ve seen of the his kind of thing is the ‘Pillars of Sanity’ in Trail of Cthulhu, where each character has 3 core beliefs that define them. When hit with one mythos chock after another, their sanity erodes and eventually they will take a mental effect (like paranoia). But they can avoid the effect if they lose one of their pillars of sanity (and change it to its sort of opposite). By having these belief defined, the player has a very strong incentive and stage direction by which to play the character, and changing the pillar of sanity changed the direction of how the character is played .