PlaneShift
Gameplay => General Discussion => Topic started by: Illysia on September 28, 2016, 09:30:36 pm
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Among writers, there are two modes or types of writers: planners and pantsers. Planners like to work everything out first. Outlines, notes, and lots and lots of background work. Pantsers like to write from the seat of their pants and make it up as they go. Among RPers there seems to be a similar division, though perhaps less rigid: plotters and improv'rs.
Plotters like to work out detailed or at least directed stories to lead other players though which is reminiscent of the GMs of old tabletop games. Improv'rs favor the spur of the moment reaction and spontaneous, organic plot development. At times there has been debate as to which of the two methods is the right way to RP, but the truth is that both are right. Whichever you have fun doing is what's right for you and for some that's both. For me, both are useful for different kinds of RPs.
I trend towards improv for character driven RPs that focus on personality. I like to put interesting characters in a single circumstance and watch how everyone reacts. To me it's more important to see personalities bounce off each other than watch what actions the characters are taking.
On the other hand, I like plots for story centered RPs where what's being collectively accomplished is more important than the characters involved. Does the day need saving? Do you have to get to the item before times run out? Is there a mystery to be solved? Then a directed plot that doesn't meander aimlessly or meet a premature or ridiculous end is the way to go.
What about you? Where do you fit in? What methods to you prefer for different kinds of RP?
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Some blend of both I feel.
As for tendencies.. I enjoy the more improv side I suppose as I do not enjoy a stickly directed RP... beyond the initial seed.
I usually dream up vague ideas in case there is no real action and will nudge... i.e. for the fryar liquor... had a scene imagined for Tiler and Llyeth if nobody showed up... but things went in a different direction which is just fine.
I don't seem to like straight up improv in-game though... unless there were hundreds of people in-game and I could play my character in a realistic way... i.e. go about his day and things happen... so I ultimately think I want coordinated improv... start with a seed, perhaps preconceived loose ideas... then see where things go... on a schedule for coordination... or close to it.
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Improv is pretty dependent on enough players to make it worthwhile so I can see that.
However, a directed plot is not the same thing as restricted RP. It does limit your options some; for instance, if you are being led on a dungeon crawl you can't suddenly be in the middle of the tavern, but it basically presents a unified context for people's actions. That's often helpful since many people will do nothing at all if left entirely on their own to come up with a premise or actions.
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Well, I see what you are getting–at. I would, however, say that those two forms of character development are merely one axis of the interaction between occult goals
- what do I, the user, want from this world for myself?
and player goals - what would this person of mine want in their world?
Then you have guided NPCs, settings characteristics, premises, and mutability. Et c.
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Well, for the purposes of this thread I'm only focusing on how the player approaches RP. NPCs, settings, and premises won't necessarily affect whether or not a player desires more or less structure to base the RP on. Further, what the character wants won't affect whether or not the player finds any given mode of RPing fun.
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Well, for the purposes of this thread I'm only focusing on how the player approaches RP. NPCs, settings, and premises won't necessarily affect whether or not a player desires more or less structure to base the RP on. Further, what the character wants won't affect whether or not the player finds any given mode of RPing fun.
Yeah, I tend to look at these from the perspective of a designer of the world.
Then, it also matters whether the world expects users to invent their own nonsimulated aspects, or whether they rely on the simulation to provide most of the backdrop and staging.
The latter would not have much room for ‘plotters’ because you'd be choosing pre-existing events or storylines for involvement, rather than inventing your own and declaring an open RP session.
I guess little of that is pertinent to PlaneShift.
I do think the distinction between user and avatar helps inform the choice between ‘plotter’ and ‘improv'er’. Either could be either, respectively. But, who cares what I think?
To attempt an answer to your question, I plotted out my kran and made kras backstory with personal goals and concerns, but that is the limit of my invention. I expect extrinsic occurances and players to determine the environment of my adventures.
Or, am I yet not getting it?
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I do both. ( or eh... did )
I've found that in order to have story lines that extend past a single session, you need have goals or conflicts that reach into the future and that are not immediately satisfied. Leaving things unresolved ensures that you have something to do the next day when you return. For me, this is very important. This is also what destroys GM events. They are always looking to just "wrap things up" after a set amount of time.
I've learned to make my characters develop long term plans in order to achieve their goals and to reach out to fellow characters for help in getting there. Importantly, my character try to do things that they cannot possibly do on their own. Doing this has the effect of :
1. Generating natural, long term plots and quests.
2. Engaging fellow players ( by requesting the aid of their characters )
With that said, my way of doing this is to let my characters generate and execute their own plans and to pull in whoever they think might be useful to them. Many times such plans will fail due to some character flaw ( like hubris, greed or being naive ). This right here is where the seat of the pants part comes in. When those plans fail in a big way, the thrill of not knowing what will happen next kicks in.
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The stated intent of the game is to provide a world that is dynamic but leave most of the story crafting up to players. The game merely provides a context or a framework to make stories in. What you did with your Kran is good, Can, but it's not good in a dead RP community. You need a living, healthy community for other players and the environment to contribute significantly to your own character. I know this because that's how I developed my PS characters originally.
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As for you Rig, you are definitely somewhere in the middle. However, you occupy an interesting space in this plotting versus improv spectrum. While we each used both methods, we used them in very different ways. In PS, I generally did spontaneous personality based RPs when I had to drive the RP. In SWTOR I learned how to jumped in on other's plots and filled in any gaps with spontaneous personality based RP. I did learn how to do my own plots but I still didn't do them very often.
In spontaneous PS RP, I usually didn't give my characters goals beyond interacting with other nearby characters. However, I did learn in SWTOR to use some kind of overall purpose to drive an RP, whether I planned to drag someone else into a story or it just kinda happened. I didn't necessarily commit to a "plot" for that though.
The closest I used to come in PS was to head back to some central topic when the RP floundered and build from there. For instance, if Illysia were in the tavern, any lull would be filled with something about the tavern. With Zandral, it would be filled with something about one of her gripes.
Now, if I wanted to explore a backstory or lore, I learned to use or join a specific plot. I assume it's something like table top games where you are given some goals and a premise so you can RP within a framework, but you can do almost anything as long as you stay in the framework. Admittedly, this is something I didn't do until after I left PS, but I learned the value of it.
Plot RP are good for exploring morals, the implications of a specific circumstance, and strengthening your character's connection to the settings. For instance, testing the limits of the Jedi code, how would my characters react to people from different factions, and the occasional plot based character study. One of my favorite RPs to this day was when my character's friend kidnapped her in a "spur of the moment" action and took her engine shopping on a pirate planet... My character was left with an increased hatred for plants, bugs, and blue water... ;D Not to mention she had stories to tell spontaneously at the bar later.
Now in that case, I knew she was going to end up on that planet with her friend to get the engine. Most of the intro narration of the engine related scenes were done by the other player. It was going to end in them safely leaving the planet with the engine in tow. However, the customs issue at the starting spaceport, the reactions to landing at an "uncivilized" spaceport, the melodramatic reaction to being "attacked" by a bug, the reaction of being a rich girl on a planet of shady people, and being dunked in water by a Wookie were all spontaneous scenes that arose within the framework of the plot.
I still end up writing dissertations even when I deliberately cut out large portions of commentary and heavily edit what actually makes it in. :-\
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One of my favorite off-beat characters was "Trash can man" from Steven King's The Stand. This guy was totally screwed in the head, but he was on a mission and was going to find a way to accomplish it one way or another. If memory serves correctly, he really didn't know what the hell he was doing, but he was determined to find a way.... and eventually a way presented itself!
I thought this was a neat example of both planning and improv. OK, it was the voice in his head that gave him his mission or calling, but isn't that true for all of us? The voices in our heads just start saying shit that might or might not make sense, and then more head voices pass judgment on those ideas. The "feelings committee" might even step forward and interject a thing or two - though whether or not they are taken seriously is another story. Eventually, another head voice dismisses the idea or else is like, "Gnarly man, we're gonna do that."
It makes you wonder what would happen if your head for no obvious reason at all, just started saying really bad things and then the head voices that pass judgment on your thoughts and the "feelings committee" were all like, "Gnarly man, we're gonna do that."
At this point, I don't think it matters much if you identify said voices as your own self or as external entities. They are in there, and they are pulling the levers, so to speak. Also, they have differing levels of influence. The "feelings committee" usually has a bit more sway than the so called "bad pants and funny glasses brigade." (Politicians and advertisers know about this inequality, btw )
The funny part of it all is the illusion that we ( identified as the head voice that calls itself "I" ) (not to be confused with the Knights who say NI ) think they we are in control of this whole process. We think that we just decide on shit and it happens. If that were true, then fat people would able to "get skinny" just because, assholes could just "be nice" to people, and poor people could just "think rich and prosper".
Did we just take the red pill? Oops....
( A blue pill is available to those who do not like the red pill. Just argue that you are the master of your own destiny, that you forge your own thoughts out of "nothing", that every thing you have done, do and will do is deliberate and calculated. )
So what does all this nonsense have to do with role playing and planning and being all spontaneous and whatnot anyway?
I think it's a strange ( or in some cases, perverse ) reflection on how people think. We spend hours on line enjoying the blue pill (Dabbling in a fantasy world) , yet trying to drag some sort of truth or order into fiction. It's like we want to have reality within fiction so that the fictional moments within our real lives feel more like reality than fiction. Kind of a weird hall of mirrors effect.
(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/de/9a/da/de9adabde9f2a0837cacae06cbcac048.jpg)
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Huh... ??? I don't think most people have as distinct a set of voices in their head Rig. :p However, I will grant that most of the time we are unaware of all the factors, external and internal, influencing our decisions. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean much for RP since we have to be more aware of what is influencing our characters because we have to decide what to react to.
However, the reason you need order in fiction is so that people can pick up on what is going on intuitively and understand with minimal struggle. Truth is a lot less necessary than consistency. For instance, Dermorians aren't real and nobody really cares. However, magic comes from glyphs and the crystals; if suddenly you try to introduce some extra-settings magic sources, things will feel goofy and out of place very quickly.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicAIsMagicA
This is an important even if off topic point for RPs.
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“Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.” - Stephen King
It doesn't really matter if you see the head voices as angels and demons, multiple personalities, hallucinations, distinct voices, thoughts, audible voices, or as one big blur. They are there and they are working around the clock!
meh... anyway...
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Most RPers are just concerned with player direction in their character's head and it's really not going to help significantly to work in that many inputs for your character.
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off topic, but...
Did you know that the Wachowski brothers later on became the Wachowski sisters? I just found this out the other day...
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I knew about Lana but I did not know about Lily until now.
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Random thought - maybe much like plotting and playing an rpg, perhaps the trick to getting ahead in life ( regardless of how you define "ahead" ) is to just establish and goal and chase it - pulling in other folks as needed along the way, working around all the random shit that happens, and taking pleasure in not knowing what will happen next when your plans go off the rails. ::|
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I don't know about always taking pleasure when your plan goes off the rails but that is what would make me say a certain amount of conscious direction is needed. You don't have to force players along one path but you need to keep things moving. Often players will destroy a plot once they come in contact with it. Nothing malicious, it's just unpredictability. Regardless, you have to be ready to adjust to keep the RP going so that it doesn't die an unsatisfying death. It's OK for an RP to end differently but when no one is happy with the outcome it's a bummer.
I still think complete improv is more of a goal-less way of RPing. It's better if there's little to nothing at state when you are using it.
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To me, this thing about a "satisfying ending" implies that you have a preconceived notion of how the story "should" go. This, from my experience, works far better in single author stories than in multi player games. The story does not need to end when a failure occurs. As in real life, failures and setbacks are just a part of a much larger picture. They can even be turned into stepping stones.
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IC failures are fine. OOC ones are no good. When Zandral was dumped, I had a bunch of things she was going to try to do and then real life intervened and I didn't get back to any of it. That was not an IC ending to the story, real life just stripped the RP of a bunch of the story.
Sometimes it's a matter of the story ended worse than anti-climatically, sometimes it ends with the players wondering what there are doing or why they even wasted their time. That is not an IC failure, that is an OOC failure. These are not good endings and it leaves players unsatisfied.
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OK, I see your point. Yeah, that's tough. lol
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endings... and improv/goal based... I am kind of running into this in they fryan liquor thread...
On the one hand there is the most realistic action for the characters to take... on the other there is the desire for an option to have my character, or any of them participate in an interesting ending...
A lot of interactions have relatively boring endings... which may lead to satisfaction failure... is there pressure to always create a near contrived "AWESOME" ending ?
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The ending doesn't have to be awesome, it just has to be entertaining. A fairly mundane ending can serve that purpose. That is one advantage to knowing the people you are RPing with. It means you can manuever to a satisfying ending easier because you know what everyone wants.
However, some generic things to keep in mind would be to make sure people got to do what their character wanted to do. So making sure no one gets entirely or mostly cut out of the RP. Make sure that the characters don't fail ICly for some poorly thought out, stupid story, or OOC reason. And I guess.... don't be so tied to an ending that you aren't willing to deviate from the story to keep a player from being unfairly messed over. This is more of a problem if you rely on dice rolls for the outcomes. The dice can be cruel and unreasoning. >.>
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A lot of interactions have relatively boring endings... which may lead to satisfaction failure... is there pressure to always create a near contrived "AWESOME" ending ?
I think it can be tempting to try to nudge the story in a particular direction but whether or not it's OK to do that kind of depends on who you are playing with and the type of game. I know some players would spot an attempt at OOC manipulation and be put off by that while others might be more tolerant of it.
Obviously, If it's a guided game and you are the DM, then it's your job to make and steer the game. I think most folks here tend to expect a decentralized game ( no DM ) for the most part.
I think it's a judgment call, personally.
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Ok, cool, thanks for the advice Illysia and Rigwyn. I think for me I will lean towards asking myself what my character would feel/want to do in general before deciding which direction of actions to take.
Would they be mad, sad, scared, bored... and then go from there... and try to be true to things as if this world were real...
sometimes it feels as if there is a difference attempting to RP a character in a world... verses attempting to RP a character in a RP game... get's tricky.
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sometimes it feels as if there is a difference attempting to RP a character in a world... verses attempting to RP a character in a RP game... get's tricky.
How do you mean?
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I am probably just talking about OOC seperation... try and view things as if you were actually in the world instead of being a dude playing a character in a world.
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Yeah, your level of immersion does make a difference. This is why some people get so cranky when their immersion is broken.
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I plot first and improvise once I'm in it.
Not that it matters... I don't really play anymore.
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Half the people in this thread don't play anymore so you are in good company.