I had a topic come up in the context of the Thursday night game that reinforced an element of character play that I had come across last time I played: character narration. To discuss this element I want to talk about the magic circle, framing and bleed. If you're not familiar with these topics, EmergentPlay has excellent discussions of all three topics: The Magic Circle, Frames, Bleed.
Imagine when your gaming rituals start. Maybe you start by reviewing your character sheet before leaving for the game. Maybe you sit at the game table, trying to remember what happened last time. When I prepped for playing Crayla, my crass irreverant ranger, I would play certain songs, and even watch scenes of certain movies (the Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver playing basketball).
Entering the magic circle of gaming often involves transforming our behavior into that of the character, getting into their head, their senses, their feelings, and the situation at hand. No matter how we get there, we have to make sure we don't go too far, so we keep limits. Frames in place, we have separated our character's actions and emotions from our own and into the scenario we go. It is a balance between immersion and separation. This is play.
Playing for a while can really alter with the frame. Kill a character off that's been in the game for a while, and you can see bleed. The player feels bad; the other players feel bad; the GM feels bad. As I've talked about before, I think this is a positive part of playing. Bleed shows the players are invested, and that keeps the game fun.
There comes another problem when players choose the character they play. Pick an ordinary character: an elven ranger, a human fighter, a dwarf cleric, a halfling rogue. Players usually have little problem playing these chracters because they are removed from them. There is a distance in playing a character that you can neither directly relate to yourself nor take a keen interest in exploring. Step outside of this box of distanced characters and weird things start to happen. Let me give a couple of examples.
The first example is playing a character that is an exploration. Crayla, my half-elf range with rogue skills, who was both beautiful in form and caustic in personality (thus with average charisma), was an exploration of character for me. I wrote a background for her, linked it to her personality tendencies, and gave her a pyche in my mind. I wanted to see what she could do, where her limits were, and find her path of growth. Iread more psychology so I could figure out how she might really react. I got into her head.
This lead to some problems, that I could see coming right away. She was going to make certain people angry, definitely characters, but perhaps even the players and the GM. This kind of bleed is a dangerous thing. I decided right up front to use character narration as my tool to defuse or at least soften the bleed. I would speak aloud in narrative what Crayla was thinking, feeling, why she was reacting a certain way, and then would jump into the role-play, turning my voice into her voice. It was effective. I didn't make it about my character is better / worse than yours. I explained my exploration. I made it into a group exploration of characters.
The second example is playing a character of what you know. My 12 year old daughter decided to play a 16 year old girl fighter from Neverwinter. Her character is smart and sways between strong and able and helpless and scared. She is intelligent from her time in Neverwinter and yet lacks constraint, being a bit of a brat at times. With having 3 older sisters, the player knows how to play the character and does it well. This could have an obvious drawback that there could be bleed, giving the player too much emotional attachment to the character. That hasn't happened.
Surprising to me, the weak frame problem for this character was found in the other players. They see this character do something typical of the 16 year old character and immediately map it back to bleed from the 12 year old playing her. My daughter plays the character well, and the other players interpret that as her bleeding through. I have to admit, sometimes I even start to think the same thing.
In the last session, Sheena disappears due to some sort of spell attack in the middle of the battle. Victaerus, the 16 year old character, has a breakdown and drops out of the battle completely, taking time to lament the missing Sheena. As a GM, I get a bit critical of her not helping in the fight. Talking to her later, I realize that she was playing the character dead on. Sheena was the only friend she had left from the old ship crew, a place where she was barely accepted. Prior to that Victaerus had been picked up by the pirate crew as a lone escapee from a pirate attack on a Neverwinter ship where she was a guard. Trauma upon trauma upon trauma -- of course, Vicaterus would break down.
To help fix this perception of her playing style, I suggested that she add character narration, to let the other players know she was thinking about her character and playing as her character, not herself. We will see next session how this works. My suspicion is that explaining Victaerus just a bit here and there before taking on her voice will reduce the perceived bleed and show how deliberate (and good) the roleplay is.
In general, I know that serious role players don't like the insertion of third person narrative in place of first person roleplaying, but I think it does have its place sometimes in player's hands. After all, the player sometimes needs to have some control beyond the first person, describing how their character is perceivable by others and filling in the small details that make a character become real. And, in the case of the examples I've given here, I think it can defuse perception problems when interesting characters may be taken the wrong way.
Imagine when your gaming rituals start. Maybe you start by reviewing your character sheet before leaving for the game. Maybe you sit at the game table, trying to remember what happened last time. When I prepped for playing Crayla, my crass irreverant ranger, I would play certain songs, and even watch scenes of certain movies (the Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver playing basketball).
Entering the magic circle of gaming often involves transforming our behavior into that of the character, getting into their head, their senses, their feelings, and the situation at hand. No matter how we get there, we have to make sure we don't go too far, so we keep limits. Frames in place, we have separated our character's actions and emotions from our own and into the scenario we go. It is a balance between immersion and separation. This is play.
Playing for a while can really alter with the frame. Kill a character off that's been in the game for a while, and you can see bleed. The player feels bad; the other players feel bad; the GM feels bad. As I've talked about before, I think this is a positive part of playing. Bleed shows the players are invested, and that keeps the game fun.
There comes another problem when players choose the character they play. Pick an ordinary character: an elven ranger, a human fighter, a dwarf cleric, a halfling rogue. Players usually have little problem playing these chracters because they are removed from them. There is a distance in playing a character that you can neither directly relate to yourself nor take a keen interest in exploring. Step outside of this box of distanced characters and weird things start to happen. Let me give a couple of examples.
The first example is playing a character that is an exploration. Crayla, my half-elf range with rogue skills, who was both beautiful in form and caustic in personality (thus with average charisma), was an exploration of character for me. I wrote a background for her, linked it to her personality tendencies, and gave her a pyche in my mind. I wanted to see what she could do, where her limits were, and find her path of growth. Iread more psychology so I could figure out how she might really react. I got into her head.
This lead to some problems, that I could see coming right away. She was going to make certain people angry, definitely characters, but perhaps even the players and the GM. This kind of bleed is a dangerous thing. I decided right up front to use character narration as my tool to defuse or at least soften the bleed. I would speak aloud in narrative what Crayla was thinking, feeling, why she was reacting a certain way, and then would jump into the role-play, turning my voice into her voice. It was effective. I didn't make it about my character is better / worse than yours. I explained my exploration. I made it into a group exploration of characters.
The second example is playing a character of what you know. My 12 year old daughter decided to play a 16 year old girl fighter from Neverwinter. Her character is smart and sways between strong and able and helpless and scared. She is intelligent from her time in Neverwinter and yet lacks constraint, being a bit of a brat at times. With having 3 older sisters, the player knows how to play the character and does it well. This could have an obvious drawback that there could be bleed, giving the player too much emotional attachment to the character. That hasn't happened.
Surprising to me, the weak frame problem for this character was found in the other players. They see this character do something typical of the 16 year old character and immediately map it back to bleed from the 12 year old playing her. My daughter plays the character well, and the other players interpret that as her bleeding through. I have to admit, sometimes I even start to think the same thing.
In the last session, Sheena disappears due to some sort of spell attack in the middle of the battle. Victaerus, the 16 year old character, has a breakdown and drops out of the battle completely, taking time to lament the missing Sheena. As a GM, I get a bit critical of her not helping in the fight. Talking to her later, I realize that she was playing the character dead on. Sheena was the only friend she had left from the old ship crew, a place where she was barely accepted. Prior to that Victaerus had been picked up by the pirate crew as a lone escapee from a pirate attack on a Neverwinter ship where she was a guard. Trauma upon trauma upon trauma -- of course, Vicaterus would break down.
To help fix this perception of her playing style, I suggested that she add character narration, to let the other players know she was thinking about her character and playing as her character, not herself. We will see next session how this works. My suspicion is that explaining Victaerus just a bit here and there before taking on her voice will reduce the perceived bleed and show how deliberate (and good) the roleplay is.
In general, I know that serious role players don't like the insertion of third person narrative in place of first person roleplaying, but I think it does have its place sometimes in player's hands. After all, the player sometimes needs to have some control beyond the first person, describing how their character is perceivable by others and filling in the small details that make a character become real. And, in the case of the examples I've given here, I think it can defuse perception problems when interesting characters may be taken the wrong way.
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