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Tanarii
2016-04-16, 10:41 PM
Sharing one of the best comments I've seen on Roelplaying in a long time. From a thread that had nothing to do with the topic.


I think some of the confusion is coming from us taking about different things. There are two primary concepts at play here:

In-Character Decisions and Conflict Resolution.

Roleplaying typically talks about ICD.

Rollplaying typically talked about CR.

Saying the game is one over the other does not make sense, because conflict resolution and decision making are not opposing each other. They go hand in hand and work off of each other.

If we look at just ICD, roleplaying would be you deciding on an action based on your characters knowledge. Rollplaying would be you deciding on an action based on rolling a die, regardless of what your haracrer knows.

If we look at just CR, roleplaying would be acting out the conflict to determine how it is resolved. Rollplaying would be rolling a die to determine how it is resolved.

D&D, both historically and in 5e, determines In-Character Decisions through roleplaying (or meta-gaming, where in character decisions are made based on Player Knowledge). D&D, both historically and in 5e, determines Conflict Resolution by rollplaying (i.e. with dice), and occasionally by roleplaying (i.e. acting it out).

This sums up very nicely several key point:

1) Roleplaying isn't just funny voices, weird quirks and back-story.
2) Conflict Resolution in RPGs can, and in the case of D&D does, involve some degree of both Roleplaying and Rollplaying.

And here, I'm going to add my own point of view, which differs slightly from the above quote:
1) The heart of all Roleplaying is In-Character Decision making.
2) This does not have to conflict with Conflict Resolution unless:
- a) you chose to make Out of Character decisions.
- b) the CR system removes ability to be in-character.
- c) the CR system removes meaningful decisions.

(I'm not sure 2b is really possible. Otoh, some systems assist you in staying in character, as opposed to out of character, far more easily.)

The biggest part of Roleplaying to me is not only being in character, but doing so when making meaningful decisions. And that requires knowing character motivations. Not backstory, quirks or funny voices. All that stuff is window dressing.

Here's another good write up regarding this by Angry DM.
http://angrydm.com/2011/08/defining-your-game/

And here's an even better one talking about Conflict Resolution.
He's writing about resolution, and how to do it. But, like mgshamster is above, he's also talking in-character decision making, aka Roleplaying, and how they work together, and how they are distinct.
http://angrydm.com/2013/04/adjudicate-actions-like-a-boss/

NichG
2016-04-16, 11:22 PM
From a game design point of view, its also pretty easy to screw up and make a system where its very hard to respect the conflict resolution elements but still remain in-character. That is to say, usually it comes down to:

- Conflict resolution involves an element of skill which is expected of the players (associated with the game aspects of roleplaying 'game')
- However, choices which seem reasonable mechanically and choices which seem reasonable in the fiction that the roleplaying attempts to establish are quite different
- Therefore, the system causes players to feel forced to choose between the CR aspects or the ICD aspects

Part of what sometimes hides this is that different people conceptualize the in-character decision making process differently (and also depending on how used to their characters they are). For example, you often hear things like 'a paladin would do/wouldn't do X'. That's a statement that the speaker is thinking in terms of matching behavior to model - that is to say, they have some kind of idea of what actions fit the archetype/personality/etc and what actions don't, and their decision making process looks something like proposing actions then checking against the model to see if it feels right.

However, you could also think in terms of motivation. Even keeping to archetypes, someone could respond 'a paladin would want to prevent suffering' or 'a paladin would want to keep their promises'. In this kind of reasoning, the character may break from archetypal patterns of action in order to fulfill the underlying reasons why those patterns of actions were archetypal. That is to say, even though perhaps getting drunk with someone in a bar isn't very paladin-like behavior in the archetypal behavioral sense, there could be a reason why it fulfills archetypal paladin goals - for example, perhaps they were helping someone mourn a fallen comrade, and remaining the perfect icon of good behavior would have been hurtful to that person.

This kind of motivation-based thinking runs into a problem if the conflict resolution system is inconsistent with the setting. If the system says 'paladins wear heavy armor emblazoned with the symbols of their order in order to protect their lives while doing their duty', but actually the game mechanics for armor make it much more likely that you'll be killed than if you just went armorless and had an enchanted shirt instead, that means that the game mechanics end up leaking into the in-character decision-making process.

There's also the kind of in-character decision-making where rather than try to calculate the correctness of the character's actions given some model (of the archetypal actions or of the character's motivations), the player tries to find a mental state where the decision-making is fully automatic for them and they don't have to think about it. Basically, a kind of method-acting for ICD. This can also create problems if the CR system introduces dissociated decision-making (birds-eye view strategy, sharp mode transitions, etc).

BayardSPSR
2016-04-20, 12:21 AM
That's interesting. Using these terms, I'd describe roleplaying (or more accurately, "playing tabletop RPGs") as "in-character decision-making, as constrained by conflict resolution (mechanics and practices)."


From a game design point of view, its also pretty easy to screw up and make a system where its very hard to respect the conflict resolution elements but still remain in-character. That is to say, usually it comes down to:

- Conflict resolution involves an element of skill which is expected of the players (associated with the game aspects of roleplaying 'game')
- However, choices which seem reasonable mechanically and choices which seem reasonable in the fiction that the roleplaying attempts to establish are quite different
- Therefore, the system causes players to feel forced to choose between the CR aspects or the ICD aspects

Which is exactly why I agree with your post, and would say that ICD and CR coming into conflict is a huge problem - possibly the problem - in RPG design.

Tanarii
2016-04-20, 12:41 PM
Okay. That's clearly a 2d, another reason ICD and CR can conflict.

Tha way I see it:
2d) The Conflict Resolution system makes your in-character decisions significantly sub-par to alternate choices they wouldn't normally make, in a way that your character would notice and would cause cognitive dissonance

If you, as a player, experience cognitive dissonance because you are forced to make sub-par mechanical choices to maintain ICD, that's not a ICD vs CR issue. It's a problem with you being unwilling to get in character enough to make those ICD when you know they are mechanically 'worse'. But there's no way the character could know that even from in-game results, so it shouldn't affect ICD.

If you, as a player who is in-character, experience a mechanically sub-par choice and your character would experience the results in-game, and that would make him choose differently from how he should choose based on the in-game world, his personality, and by extension his reasonable expectations, thus causing the character to experience cognitive dissonance ... then it's a conflict between ICD and CR.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that choosing to make poor mechanical decisions makes you a better roleplayer. I'm saying that wanting to choose actions/make decisions that cause a slightly worse mechanical conflict resolution, the impact of which wouldn't be noticeable to a character, isn't a conflict between ICD & CR.

Segev
2016-04-20, 02:56 PM
The best RPG design uses the conflict resolution system and other mechanics to reinforce and support the in-character decisions that fit the feel and fluff of the game.

I'm going to use two white-wolf games to illustrate this being done rather well and rather poorly (and how the latter was at one point somewhat fixed).

In Vampire: the Masquerade, you play the eponymous monsters. There are mechanics for suffering pangs and possibly losing control if you let yourself go too long without feeding, but they are not, in fact, the primary thing that motivates you to feed. Your "blood pool" is your mana reserve for your cool powers. You burn blood to do vampire things like turn into a bat or heal supernaturally fast or the like. You also have to burn blood just to wake up each night. Therefore, you want to keep your blood pool as full as you reasonably can. This gives plenty of incentive for PCs to center a fair bit of their time around maintaining consistent access to a blood supply, and feeding is a rewarding experience to the player because it's refilling mana bars. A vampire can use his powers an awful lot if he can keep feeding.

This plays in to the "temptation to treat humans like chattel" aspect of the game very well, and gives some sense of the temptation to over-feed just because you can keep your mana fully charged the more ravenous you are.

In Exalted, the Fair Folk are cthulian elves, fae from outside of reality who are known, amongst other things, as rampaging monsters that devour the souls of men to feed gluttonous hungers that are never sated. This is mechanically represented by having them have to spend motes of Essence in Creation each day not to get sick and die, and by their Essence only recharging in Creation by feeding on mortals' souls.

Unfortunately, Fair Folk have relatively tiny Essence pools, and their Feeding abilities converted relatively small amounts of the stats that represented "the soul" (mostly Virtues and Willpower) into more than enough to sustain them for weeks. Of course, if you value fluff over mechanics, the rationale that it "tastes good" means that the Fair Folk gluttonously devour multiple humans at a time, just because they can.

But not only is that stupid because it risks drawing attention and is being evil for evil's sake, but it stupidly squanders a potentially-limited resource: edible mortal souls within easy hunting range. Keeping a larder that you drain only very, very slowly is far more efficient, but doesn't really lend itself to the "marauding soul-devouring raider" image.

So not only did the mechanics not encourage the behavior that is supposedly so common, but it actively discouraged it by penalizing it.

A late-2E errata modified the feeding powers so that Fair Folk could now gluttonously overindulge...and convert the overage into bonus stats and other really cool stuff. Temporary bonuses. So you have to KEEP overindulging to get them.

Now there is a mechanical incentive to counterbalance and overcome the disincentive(s).


And that is good RPG design: where the mechanics support and reinforce what the game is supposed to feel like. Vs. poor design, where the mechanics don't adequately capture the feel, or worse, actively distract or detract from it.

kyoryu
2016-04-20, 03:14 PM
So, a few things.

First, I see the main difference as usually with "conflict resolution" the player spells out the desired result, as well as the action used to achieve it. "I'm going to knock down Bob by bull-rushing him" as opposed to "I bull-rush Bob". I personally prefer this, as most actions take a period of time, and have multiple actions within them, and so you'd have plenty of opportunity to knock down your opponent without knocking him off of the cliff.

As far as doing the optimal thing vs. the in-character thing - isn't that just roleplaying? I mean, a paladin can strike from the shadows or behind, but it's not in his character to do so, so he confronts his opponent straight on. This has been a thing in roleplaying for decades, unless you're trying to argue that the mechanically optimal move and the most in-character move should always be aligned, which for me takes away a lot of interesting roleplaying moments.

Tanarii
2016-04-20, 06:30 PM
Segev,

So it sounds to me like Vampire the Masquerade has CR (or more specifically, resources to power CR) that doesn't cause cognitive dissonance for the character when doing ICD. Not only is there no conflict, it's actively encouraging CR & ICD to align.

Meanwhile Fair Folk doesn't have a conflict, as far as I can tell. There's no reinforcement between ICD and CR resource gain. But they don't actively conflict either. That's where I was talking about the difference between character cognitive dissonance vs player cognitive dissonance. Since you as a player know your Essence pool is full, you may stop making ICD around CR resources not being gained. But that's the player choosing to cause a conflict by failing to stay in character, since there's no active conflict between CR mechanics and in-game reality.

Tanarii
2016-04-20, 06:48 PM
First, I see the main difference as usually with "conflict resolution" the player spells out the desired result, as well as the action used to achieve it. "I'm going to knock down Bob by bull-rushing him" as opposed to "I bull-rush Bob". I personally prefer this, as most actions take a period of time, and have multiple actions within them, and so you'd have plenty of opportunity to knock down your opponent without knocking him off of the cliff.Highly recommend you read the second Angry DM link I posted, if you have time. He says the exact same thing, but with good reasons why ... it assists the DM in adjudicate actions if he knows both what players are trying to accomplish, as well as how. Or as he puts it, Intention and Approach.


As far as doing the optimal thing vs. the in-character thing - isn't that just roleplaying? I mean, a paladin can strike from the shadows or behind, but it's not in his character to do so, so he confronts his opponent straight on. This has been a thing in roleplaying for decades, unless you're trying to argue that the mechanically optimal move and the most in-character move should always be aligned, which for me takes away a lot of interesting roleplaying moments.To a degree, yes. Technically, roleplaying is just making decisions in-character. However, there's a reasonable expectation that the character knows to a general degree what the expected outcomes of many actions are, and that will affect his decisions accordingly.

Mechanics that have visible results in-game will affect expected outcomes. If there is a large in-game visibility of a mechanic and it conflicts with in-game reality (or in-game expectations of in-game reality), that's when you'll get character cognitive dissonance, or a conflict between ICD & CR.

kyoryu
2016-04-20, 07:19 PM
Highly recommend you read the second Angry DM link I posted, if you have time. He says the exact same thing, but with good reasons why ... it assists the DM in adjudicate actions if he knows both what players are trying to accomplish, as well as how. Or as he puts it, Intention and Approach.

I have, and have played Burning Wheel (which is where he probably cribbed it from) and have written a well-received article about the same concepts for Fate :D


To a degree, yes. Technically, roleplaying is just making decisions in-character. However, there's a reasonable expectation that the character knows to a general degree what the expected outcomes of many actions are, and that will affect his decisions accordingly.

Agreed. Which is why aiming for a particular result (Intent) can work a lot better, and doesn't inherently break immersion or character decisions in any real way, as the results will be more in line with what the player is imagining the character trying to do.


Mechanics that have visible results in-game will affect expected outcomes. If there is a large in-game visibility of a mechanic and it conflicts with in-game reality (or in-game expectations of in-game reality), that's when you'll get character cognitive dissonance, or a conflict between ICD & CR.

This basically seems to say that illogical mechanics (more accurately, mechanics which result in illogical outcomes) break immersion... which, I mean, yeah? Bad mechanics are bad.

veti
2016-04-20, 07:33 PM
As far as doing the optimal thing vs. the in-character thing - isn't that just roleplaying? I mean, a paladin can strike from the shadows or behind, but it's not in his character to do so, so he confronts his opponent straight on.

Ye-es... but the paladin case is actually a good example. In the first place, there's a whole much-ballyhooed mechanic (Falling) designed for no other purpose than to punish paladins who undervalue "roleplaying". In the second place, the mechanical advantages of "striking from the shadows or behind" are minimal - unless you're a rogue, there's very little point. And I don't think I've ever seen a paladin/rogue.

There's an issue with many rules-heavy systems: that some players will spend a lot of time studying the rules and working out "optimal" strategies, then build entire characters around those strategies (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0216.html). (I'm guessing, this tendency is where the Stormwind Fallacy comes from in the first place.)

I've seen this justified as "in this universe, these are the mechanical laws of how things work, and they're generally known, so this is what people would do". Which to my mind is a long-winded way of saying "the rules suck".

It seems to me that most RPGs are built to reward in-character achievement - overcoming the "obstacles" that are put before you - rather than, well, roleplaying. Obviously there are good reasons for that - you want the player to be earnestly doing their best to forward the character's goals - but at the same time, it causes this dissonance between "making the decision your character would make" and "making the decision that you, as a player who's read the rules and crunched the numbers, know is the most efficient way to achieve your goal". Speaking for myself here: I can live with roleplaying "suboptimal" decisions up to a point, as a concession to my character's imperfect knowledge of the world and their situation, but there's always going to be a part of my mind screaming "Don't empty your revolver into Cthulhu, that's just a waste of good running time".

I have seen games that are designed from the get-go on the assumption that each player will play more than one character, and with a mechanism for passing on rewards from one character to the next. (I remember it happening in Bushido, but this was ~30 years ago so the details are a mite vague now.) That meant that even if the character died - provided they died "well" - the player would be rewarded as well, possibly even better than, if they'd survived and won the fight.

kyoryu
2016-04-20, 07:48 PM
I've seen this justified as "in this universe, these are the mechanical laws of how things work, and they're generally known, so this is what people would do". Which to my mind is a long-winded way of saying "the rules suck".

Agreed. When what is logical in the game world is illogical in the real world and vice versa, you're going to have a break of immersi


It seems to me that most RPGs are built to reward in-character achievement - overcoming the "obstacles" that are put before you - rather than, well, roleplaying.

GURPS
Champions/HERO
Fate
Almost any PbtA game
Burning Wheel

... just off of the top of my head, these are games that don't do that. D&D does that quite heavily, some other games do it middling, but many, many games do not.


Obviously there are good reasons for that - you want the player to be earnestly doing their best to forward the character's goals - but at the same time, it causes this dissonance between "making the decision your character would make" and "making the decision that you, as a player who's read the rules and crunched the numbers, know is the most efficient way to achieve your goal".

The mechanical reward and feedback loop don't exist in a lot of games. Try one of them. It sounds like that's what you want.


Speaking for myself here: I can live with roleplaying "suboptimal" decisions up to a point, as a concession to my character's imperfect knowledge of the world and their situation, but there's always going to be a part of my mind screaming "Don't empty your revolver into Cthulhu, that's just a waste of good running time".

Right. And it's perfectly reasonable for your character to expect that doing so would be pointless against something of the size and sheer horror of Cthulhu.

Segev
2016-04-20, 07:58 PM
Segev,

So it sounds to me like Vampire the Masquerade has CR (or more specifically, resources to power CR) that doesn't cause cognitive dissonance for the character when doing ICD. Not only is there no conflict, it's actively encouraging CR & ICD to align.

Meanwhile Fair Folk doesn't have a conflict, as far as I can tell. There's no reinforcement between ICD and CR resource gain. But they don't actively conflict either. That's where I was talking about the difference between character cognitive dissonance vs player cognitive dissonance. Since you as a player know your Essence pool is full, you may stop making ICD around CR resources not being gained. But that's the player choosing to cause a conflict by failing to stay in character, since there's no active conflict between CR mechanics and in-game reality.

The trouble with Fair Folk (pre Scroll of Errata) was that wasting your resources like that actively was detrimental to the character. It would quickly take you from "terrifying horror" to "easy and obvious target." To me, any system which says, "Well, you SHOULD play like this, because that's good role-playing for what you're supposed to be, but it's a terrible idea mechanically" is failing in its job as a gaming system.

NichG
2016-04-20, 08:38 PM
Another way to put the thing about cognitive dissonance is that you can end up in situations where the system's rules are such that characters would inevitably discover them, but characters in that setting are not supposed to know them.

When players are in that situation, they try to release the pressure one way or the other - one way is to make the rules more indeterminate via house ruling, making the rules fuzzier in general, relying more on spot adjudications, etc, to enforce the idea that the characters aren't being exposed to systematic evidence of those exposed rules. The other way is to make the setting accept that characters within it have had those same experiences, even if that deviates from the originally proposed fiction (which, at the extreme end of things, results in stuff like the Tippyverse).

In an ideal situation, the setting, the rules, and the realities of players exposed to both are already all mutually self-consistent. So even if the characters use 100% of their intellect and take everything that happens in the game as the true evidence of their senses, they won't be able to conclude e.g. 'I'm living in a game' or other such metagame things. That's a sort of perfect unreachable ideal, but you can (hopefully) notice really glaring failures of this when designing a game and try to fix them, (*cough* drown-healing *cough*).

veti
2016-04-20, 09:15 PM
GURPS
Champions/HERO
Fate
Almost any PbtA game
Burning Wheel

... just off of the top of my head, these are games that don't do that.

Of those, I've played a fair bit of Champions/HERO and a small amount of GURPS, and I'm not sure what you mean. The drive to "complete the mission" is definitely the overriding motivation. In Champions, in particular, I remember spending many happy hours poring over the rules to optimise the crap out of my character.

If you mean "they don't give XP for those things" - well, okay, but XP is not the only form of reward. Even in D&D, it's not hard for a DM to decide to give XP for roleplaying rather than for completing your objectives as such. And - and this is the real kicker - the whole point of the reward (XP) is to make you better at completing your objectives. That's also true in the other systems I know of.