thread: 2006-05-25 : System and character sole-ownership
On 2006-05-30, Charles S wrote:
Vincent,
From the point of view of theory, we're all responsible for the integrity of every character, of course. In actual play, across the hobby, I'd be willing to just bet that our shared responsibility receives full (if unacknowledged) expression.
While I agree that there is a sense in which this is undoubtedly true, and I'd be interested in talking further about that sense, it does seem to me that one of the major ways in which the predominant play style in the hobby handles our shared responsibility is that we allocate the continuous maintenance of character integrity and the major gate keeping role to one player for each character, with other players having mostly a secondary gate keeping function (with the GM-role player having a somewhat larger secondary gate keeper role). So each of us has a character, and we have a huge degree of control over the internal consistency of our own character, and a huge degree of veto over anyone else attempting to modify our character (not have something happen within the fiction to our character, but reveal something about our character that should be treated as having been true all along within the fiction), and everyone else has a relatively limited degree of power to call bullshit on what we choose to do with our character if what we choose to do violates other people's sense of the character. Likewise, players are expected to be more concerned with the coherency of their own character than with the coherency of other people's characters.
Certainly, this is the boring part of the description, the taken for granted part, and there are other aspects to maintaining coherence of character even within a very traditionally structured game, but I think that this is also the majority of the dynamics of how the maintenance of character coherence works in traditionally structured games.
Also, certainly, choosing to distribute power and responsibility in this manner is a collective decision, actively maintained, so my continually refraining from introducing character background details for your character is a way in which I am participating in maintaining your character's coherency.
What do you see as being the other major ways in which we all participate in maintaining all of the characters coherence in traditionally structured games (and on this issue, I think that, for example, the current Known World game that I play in is pretty much traditionally structured)?
One that I can see, thinking about my own games, is the practice of discussing (usually out of game) what a character's motivations are, where the players participating in the discussion may or may not be the player of the character under discussion. Again, the player of the character in question generally has some degree (usually a lot) of right of veto over the proposed motivations, but the discussion itself is likely to be an influence. These sort of discussions can either occur because the players find the complexity of the motivations interesting, or because the complexity of the motivations is beginning to teeter towards incoherency. I suspect that the ambiguity over this question serves both to decrease the threatening aspect of these discussions, but also to increase the likelihood that the suggested motivations a re adopted by the player of the character in question.
Of course, I have no idea how much of a typical practice that sort of discussion is within the hobby.
