anyway.

Cool. I was going to ask in the FAQ thread, then figured out on my own that this is probably what you meant. It's helpful to have it all spelled out, though.

Okay, I -think- the lightbulb went on over my head.

-Lisa

Vincent,

You're smarter than me. :)  I've been kicking around these thoughts in my mind for a few weeks now but couldn't ever get them to coallesce into something coherent.  Thanks for making it all fall into place.  It really helps with some real design issues I've been working on.

-Andrew

Nicely and concisely explained!

I agree completely, but then I expect you knew I would.

I agree, but it is a question of which level of technical description you are engaged in, just as sociological technical description cares a lot about people, while particle physics technical decsriptions can't (not don't, can't).

There are things you can only describe by talking at the level where character ownership is either invisible, or else it is a result, and there are other things you can only describe by talking at the level where (some form or another, or even its absense) character ownership is treated as a given.

But I may be misinterpreting what you mean by technical level, or I may not be disagreeing at all.

Charles: Yeah, we agree.

Everybody, please replace the term "technical description" with the term "theoretical level" or something else that means "talking about the common understructure of all roleplaying" in the last like 9 paragraphs of my opening post.

I think a real danger comes from considering long-term single-character ownership as "more intrinsic" than other forms of ownership.

For instance, I think no one would have a problem if I said "My character shoots my other character in the head."

Now, if we're playing (say) The Pool, and I have narration, "your" character is in the exact same position—the rules have given me complete authority in the same way that they do to you when they say "you say what your character acts and does."  So if I say "my character shoots your character in the head," the statement is actually "my character shoots my other character in the head."  Having narration in the Pool is, literally, owning all the characters.

The applications of this are very, very broad, extending basically to every game ever.

yrs—
—Ben

Hey, Vince. Nice post! I'm not entirely sure why any of this should strike people as "scary," but then, maybe I'm just weird that way.

From my perspective, this is really the most important bit, right here:

"From the point of view of design, it's especially important to zoom in on character ownership until it no longer looks monolithic, until you can see the whole family of concerns it represents."

Yes. Excellent. Breaking up the component parts of character ownership seems to me to be a really worthwhile goal, not least of which because it can help to get a feel for what people really mean when they say things like: "I want to be able to make decisions for my own character."

In freeform circles, that's a terribly common thing to hear people say - but it's often not entirely clear what they mean by it.  And since in some prose-based freeform games, all of the aspects of character ownership you cited are not necessarily taken as read (some rules allow for people writing each other's characters, for example), the specifics of character ownership can be a particularly bad point for the group to be fuzzy or unclear on.

This was exactly what I needed right now. In my own design work I've been tooling around so much with the idea of story ownership I've been ignoring character ownership. Character ownership is less important to my current system than story ownership, and I've been neglecting it as a dimension—or design goal—altogether. Enormous blind spot. I'll be holding the idea of "zooming in" on the family of goals in firmly in mind. Thanks, Vincent!

OK, total light bulbs over here.

I've been bristling inwardly every time you've said something like "Character ownership is an illusion"—reading it, I think, as "Character ownership is irrelevant, both to discussion and play." So OF COURSE that's not what you were saying, and OF COURSE I should've known better, but. . .y'know. More a defensive baggage-thing than a considered opinion-thing.

So now that that fog is cleared, I can think about this whole area of RPG-age more clearly. . .I'm still not sure if this Scary Truth means anything more than "It's Lumply Principle all over again." Just a mental ass-kicking to say "And that includes Character Ownership, sucka-fool!" But I'm not "brilliant RPG-design guy" by any stretch ("You, yes you, are a designer" point taken, though), so you folks that actually think steadily and in varying degree professionally about this stuff will doubtless find exciting ramifications that I don't see.

Peace,
-Joel

Good post, Vincent.
This is exactly how I understand it too.

Question, just as I muse, to make sure I'm on the same page....

In Breaking the Ice, characters don't have stats, they have descriptive traits, so although the player owns the character's thoughts and actions and so can affect the world around them freely and (for the most part) without restriction, but, they do not control how effective they are at attracting the other character. The other player, by virtue of bonus dice, has that ownership. This is not ownership of their own character's attraction, it is ownership of the other player's character's ability to attract (because the roll han't happened yet, and the attraction is not determined).

So there is a mild element of co-ownership here.

Would you agree?

Nothing but nods from me.

Of course I'm thinking about this in relation to the too-brief chat we had on Sunday.

And I'm thinking about the way rules codify ownership and how that motivates or discourages players in terms of investment in characters. And I don't mean 'discourages' in the sense of not wanting to invest at all. It's more like eggs and baskets and how many and where. Do people like characters more when they have greater influence over them?

My gut says yes on this one. . .and of course, historically this seems to be the prevailing attitude in roleplaying. Sure, there's a lot of defensive "my guy"-ism in that, but I'd say there's also a legitimate claim, that if you get a say in what happens to a character, you're going to care more about what happens. This can be the character that you "own," e.g. the Player-PC relationship, or a character that you don't, e.g. the stinkin' cool NPC villain that you're just dying to see get what's comeing to him. in either case we want to have a say in what happens; in a trad RPG setup we have at least marginal say with the PC, his own feelings and actions anyway, so we expend a lot of energy trying to exert our "say" on the NPCs. And if the situation is nice and dynamic and functionally collaborative, then it pays off. If it's a dysfunctional railroady/illusionist situation, it doesn't. (And of course in suc a situation our "say" is often undercut wrt the PC as well.) And that's precisely where we check out. "OK, guys the wicked cool master villain sneers and postures and gloats and pushes a button and BLOWS UP THE WORLD! Cool, huh!" Players: "eeeeh." Put "say" back in the equation ("He's reaching for the World Destroyer Button, whaddya do?"), and suddenly it's GAME ON.

This isn't about just characters, either (and it seems to me, Vincent, that this is just what you're getting at): it applies to all elements of RPGs. This is about treating characters (and their ownership) exactly as we treat other elements and THEIR ownership. So we already talk about how players will be more engaged when they have a real and palpable say over plot, premise, setting, etc. . .so of course characters too. Right?

A counterpoint that occurs to me is that we DO get engaged in non-RPG stories where we don't have a say—books, movies, etc—but I don't know if that even has relevance to discussion of RPGs, or if Roleplaying being that thing that Roleplaying is and books aren't, negates the point.

Peace,
Joel

I completely agree with what you've said here.

The only thing I'd want to question is this:

I think there's something to the idea that whomever is responsible for the integrity of a character - whoever works to hold the imaginary construct of that character together moment-to-moment - that person (or those people) can naturally be expected to feel a sense of ownership.

If you alter the dynamic of ownership in your system, you're likely altering the dynamic of that responsibility, as well.

Aren't you?

Levi: Well, from the points of view of system design or actual play, sure. But that's only if your system handles a character's integrity by making it one player's responsibility - which, frankly, I doubt is the majority case. I bet it's wicked fringe (remember my third bullet point above).

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.

We can talk more about that if you'd like.

Perhaps this is best saved for another thread, but I think the most interesting (i.e. for me) aspect that comes out of the notion of exploding the character is then to identify which aspects of the character must/should be controled by a player wishing to have an immersive experience of being that character.

I don't imagine that I'll get much push back in the idea that "control of character is assumed" springs from the same well as "metagame is bad"...namely that the former aids and the latter detracts from immersion which many folks believe to be a key source of their enjoyment for playing.

I've long held the belief that one can fully enjoy (at least I can) the sense of immersion in character even when the character is not fully my own and even when metagame mechanics and considerations are rampant; even though others suggest that any hint of either ruins the immersion.

Perhaps there is some utility into digging into the components of character to see which can be ceded to others and which cannot be if ability to immerse is a character goal.

Okay, a simple quasi-example, to make sure we're talking about the same thing here:

We're sitting at the table, and each of us has a character that is (nominally) our own.

We're running those characters around inside the fiction of the game.  At the same time, we're throwing ideas around about what would be cool, obviously including you throwing ideas out about what my character should do or even *does* do, and vice versa.

Now, when an idea gets thrown out there that has to do with the actions of my character, I will generally try to make sure my character keeps their integrity.  So if you're riffing off some cool in-fiction events, and make suggestions that are in line with those events, I'm the one that makes sure that putting my character in on those isn't something that ruins the value of that character.

Now, if you're riffing off those events, and making things happen, and the stuff you narrate is cool for my character but not for *yours* - and you don't seem to notice...

Do I step up and address that?  Do I just kind of sit there being fuddled as to why you had your character did that?  Or do I not even notice it at the moment, but only in retrospect?

My own experience says I might do any of those three, if it's "your" character.

To me, the suggestion of loosening up that "sense of ownership" also means that in addition to getting in on the action of suggesting and describing actions for character other than "mine" *must* be linked to paying enough attention that you'll work to preserve the value of those character when you do.

Am I making sense here?

A few thoughts, some of which I think might connect to what Levi is getting at.  (I started this out in marginalia, but it's really too big - I hope it's not too digressive for the comments.)

Okay. We're human beings.  We're also social animals.

What that means is that—with the possible exception of those who live at the far end of the autistic spectrum—we have a hyper-keen and quite nuanced sense of what constitutes a "feasible model" of a human being, or of a 'person.'  (I'm using "person" here to refer to anything with a more or less human-like kind of sentience.)

Not only are we much better at modelling people than we are at modelling anything else, we're also a whole lot pickier about models of people.  We are capable of incorporating a great deal of nuance and subtlety into our mental models of fictional people, and we notice (and usually react negatively to) even very minor deviations.

I think that this tendency is reflected in the way we respond to fiction.  A television show, for example, can have all manner of inconsistencies in its plot or its setting, and people will usually put up with it.  They may snark about it mightily, but usually enough people will still be able to enjoy the fiction for the show to remain a success.  It's generally only when the audience starts to feel that the characters are behaving "out of character" that people start muttering darkly about the show jumping the shark.  "Character rape" is considered a grievious offense to suspension of disbelief in a way that plot holes and other inconsistencies simply aren't.

So when Levi talks about the 'value' of the character, what I think he may be talking about (and I hope he'll correct me if I've got the wrong end of the stick here) is the importance of consistency of character in maintaining the in-game fiction as something that everyone can continue to engage with/suspend their sense of disbelief in/enjoy as fiction.  I understand his concern, too, because I think that consistency and complexity of characterisation is, for some very basic and possibly even hard-wired reasons, a pretty vital component to most people's enjoyment of fiction.

In other words, this isn't just an immersion issue (although I do think that there are a host of other issues that relate to immersion here).  It's also a plain, old-fashioned suspension-of-disbelief/this-is- what-I-need-to-give-a-damn-about-the-story issue.

Sharing the authority for characterisation gets particularly tricky, I think, because of the extent to which we demand that our models of people be both complicated and consistent.

You can do consistent, sure - but will it still have the nuance and complexity that our hyper-aware monkey brains require to accept the character as a 'real enough' stand-in for a person?  On the other hand, if you strive for nuance and complexity, will the model still have enough consistency to register to our hyper-aware monkey brains as "oh, yeah, that's the same person, all right."

It's a hard balance to strike even with concentrated authorship, and I think that the more you distribute authority for the maintenance of the character, the harder it can get.

I'm not saying that this means it "can't be done," or any of that sort of nonsense, mind you.  Of course it's possible to spread out authority-over-character.  I think Levi's right, though, in pointing out that in order to make this work, you've got to have players who are willing to accept the attendent responsibilities.  Characters are, for all of the reasons I listed above, unusually high-maintenance fictional constructs.  If everyone isn't willing to put in the work on them—to "pay attention," as Levi put it, to what they need to retain their "value"—then yeah, you can run into problems.

"What would it mean if?"

That's my usual question when I think about suddenly taking a character in a -radically- new direction on short notice.  For instance "What would it mean if Vanessa sided with the demon-lizards and tried to kill you all now?"

If people say (or I predict they would say) "Uh ... that wouldn't mean anything, that's just stupid," then there's no value.  But often, my fellow players say "That would mean ... uh ... OH MY GOD!  It's so obvious!  She's been playing us the whole time!" and then we can go with it.

Which is to say that while there are many models-of-a-person which are clearly invalid, at the same time there are many radically different models that are all acceptable.  Broken cars are broken, but that doesn't mean you can't refit a VW Bug to do stock-car racing.

BUT ... if you want the Bug so that you can go out and get groceries, and your husband turns it into a stock car with no trunk space and a five point harness ... that has not violated the integrity of the car, but it has nonetheless reduced its value to you.  It's no longer as good a tool for the things that you wanted it for.  And Evil-Vanessa is still a character with a great deal of integrity, but if you wanted to use her as a hero then she's no longer as good a tool for the things you wanted her for.

I have never (well, not for decades, anyway) seen somebody break a character, either deliberately or accidentally, such that nobody could believe in it any more.  I have often seen people change a character, both deliberately and accidentally, such that other players could no longer use that character as a tool to pursue their own goals.

Sidenote:  I have seen those short-changed players complain, in a small but telling minority of such cases, that the character is "no longer believable," but I think that is mostly a rhetorical shot that they fire because they don't know how to put words to the actual outrage that they have.

Basically agreeing with Tony—I've never, ever seen a character actually break.  It seems to me similar to "suspension of disbelief—" it doesn't actually break, it's just a way of arguing to get what you want.  Characters are resilient things.

Now, enjoyment can break, particularly when a disagreement about a character's actuion drags out into a long systematic exercise (say, a 5-hour long combat in D&D, or a week long huff in consensus freeform*, both of which I have seen.)  But that's just a question of not having a crappy system.  I'm wondering if character breaking isn't simply enjoyment breaking.

yrs—
—Ben

P.S.  Not saying that all freeform is crappy, but merely that you want a freeform system in which week-long huffs are not encouraged nor effective.

I've been spending a lot of time this past year observing games in which it's standard operating procedure to "recast" characters when players leave the game - in other words, for a new player come in and take over playing the departing player's character.  Usually this works fine, even if the new portrayal is somewhat different from the old one.  Sometimes, though, it doesn't work - sometimes, in my experience, characters really do "break."

I don't think this is by any means always "just a matter of arguing to get what you want."  When a character 'breaks,' it's visible to the spectators of the game - to people who aren't even playing.

Ben and TonyLB,

Are you guys actually arguing that trivial simulationism doesn't exist as a technical agenda?

Since a character that is no longer believable is often neither enjoyable or useful, it is difficult to see how the fact that the character is no longer enjoyable or useful means that the problem isn't really that the character isn't believable, all three problems can be there.

Also, Tony,

If people say (or I predict they would say) "Uh ... that wouldn't mean anything, that's just stupid," then there's no value.

Which means that you don't see character's get completely broken all that often because when you suggest (or think) something that would break the character as a believably coherent entity, other people say, "No, that's just stupid, that doesn't make any sense," and you don't so it.

Charles—I'm just saying it's a very easily fulfilled technical agenda, that's all.  Sarah and Levi were making a big deal about the super-fragility of characters.  I've seen way more people underestimate the robustness of fictional characaters than overestimate it.

yrs—
—Ben

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.

Ben,

It seems to me that it is generally an easily fulfilled technical agenda item because people/game players generally do a very good job of allocating responsibility for character coherence in a manner that matches concern for character coherence (whereas Tony's argument would suggest that we generally do a less good job of allocating responsibility for character utility and enjoyability in alignment with concern for character utility and alignment).

While the fact that we are generally pretty solid at distributing character coherency maintenance authority to match interest in coherency in a particular character, it does not necessarily imply that the question of maintaining that balance remains trivial for all possible potentially interesting distributions of either concern or authority, particularly if we note that there are styles of distribution that are largely unexplored. It is worth considering whether 1) those authority/interest distribution styles are unexplored because they don't balance authority/interest in a manner that doesn't violate trivial simulationist goals 2) there are hidden balance issues that haven't been explored as well that will need to be resolved if those distributions are to meet a trivial simulationist standard.

It is worth noting that it has seemed to be much easier to come up with examples of games that radically restructured control over characters, such that character ownership becomes a non-issue, or traditional ownership styles (1 player per character has final say on all internal intent and back story questions), than it is to come up with games that retain something like traditional ownership, but add in an element of mixed ownership over certain aspects of the character (as Vincent has talked about finding interesting).  That these imagined games largely don't exist raises the issue of why, and of how will they differ from either of the two dominant methods of handling character coherency authority.

It may also be worth noting that games that distribute responsibility for character coherency broadly amongst the play group seem to tend to be games of shorter duration. Maintaining coherency is certainly much easier in a short game than in a long game, particularly if there are differences among the players of degree of attention to and memory of details of a particular character from previous sessions.

Ben,

It seems to me that it is generally an easily fulfilled technical agenda item because people/game players generally do a very good job of allocating responsibility for character coherence in a manner that matches concern for character coherence (whereas Tony's argument would suggest that we generally do a less good job of allocating responsibility for character utility and enjoyability in alignment with concern for character utility and alignment).

While the fact that we are generally pretty solid at distributing character coherency maintenance authority to match interest in coherency in a particular character, it does not necessarily imply that the question of maintaining that balance remains trivial for all possible potentially interesting distributions of either concern or authority, particularly if we note that there are styles of distribution that are largely unexplored. It is worth considering whether 1) those authority/interest distribution styles are unexplored because they don't balance authority/interest in a manner that doesn't violate trivial simulationist goals 2) there are hidden balance issues that haven't been explored as well that will need to be resolved if those distributions are to meet a trivial simulationist standard.

It is worth noting that it has seemed to be much easier to come up with examples of games that radically restructured control over characters, such that character ownership becomes a non-issue, or traditional ownership styles (1 player per character has final say on all internal intent and back story questions), than it is to come up with games that retain something like traditional ownership, but add in an element of mixed ownership over certain aspects of the character (as Vincent has talked about finding interesting).  That these imagined games largely don't exist raises the issue of why, and of how will they differ from either of the two dominant methods of handling character coherency authority.

It may also be worth noting that games that distribute responsibility for character coherency broadly amongst the play group seem to tend to be games of shorter duration. Maintaining coherency is certainly much easier in a short game than in a long game, particularly if there are differences among the players of degree of attention to and memory of details of a particular character from previous sessions.

Oops!

Also, as Sarah pointed out, there are a large category of roleplaying games in which character coherence violations are a significant potential problem, so it is probably foolish to assume that you are not doing a lot of unacknowledged activity to ensure that your games don't have those problems or that there are deep strucutral reasons that your games are less prone to that particular problem.

So, if character ownership isn't part of the rpg understructure, what is, that's often reflected as character ownership?

My suggestion is that it's trust.  Trust probably needs its own whole big essay, though.  I should throw some ideas together.

Roger: I agree.

Sarah: I agree.

Charles: It is worth noting that it has seemed to be much easier to come up with examples of games that radically restructured control over characters, such that character ownership becomes a non-issue, or traditional ownership styles (1 player per character has final say on all internal intent and back story questions), than it is to come up with games that retain something like traditional ownership, but add in an element of mixed ownership over certain aspects of the character (as Vincent has talked about finding interesting). That these imagined games largely don't exist raises the issue of why, and of how will they differ from either of the two dominant methods of handling character coherency authority.

I don't see it that way. I see overwhelmingly mixed ownership, across the hobby.

Check it: the most serious tool I know for character co-ownership is "really?" In every game I've ever played - probably really every single game - if you say "my character feels [x]" and I say "really?" then a) I expect you to think about it and possibly reconsider, and b) I'm totally within my rights to have done so.

So, I say "really?" and you're like, "yeah, on account of blah blah," and I'm like, "huh, okay." You've totally answered to me for your character's internal state. If you really owned it, you wouldn't have to put up with my meddling.

Furthermore, in terms of textual support, far more common than the 1-player-1-character arrangement you describe is the arrangement where the GM and I share responsibilty for my character's integrity between us.

Sure.  The games where this isn't true tend to be one of:

Games where the players don't discuss the characters' internal states, so "really" ends up being, say "you've lost all your paladin powers; sucks to be you.  Want to atone and try to read my mind some more?" when/if it shows up.

Games where the logistics are such that nobody else can really check your roleplay—LARPs are more or less what I'm thinking; with a 1/10 GM/player ratio and distributed immersive scenes, there's much less chance for someone to mess with your internal image of your character.  They may try anyway, but the interaction is a lot more complicated.

Vincent,

Yeah, the "really?" clause is what I'm calling the secondary gatekeeper role, or the right to call "bullshit." The "really?" rule is a broader form of it (and a softer form of it), but not a hugely broader form. It is also a less expansive relative of the procedure I described of actually providing a guessed motive, which the nominally owning player is given some motivation to incorporate into the character.

However, the "really?" rule doesn't violate the 1 player - 1 character rule, in that the nominal character owner is expected to come up with some form of explanation, but generally is not required to come up with some form of explanation, and the player asking "really?" is taking a major step (into the calling "bullshit" rule) if they reject the offered explaination (or even refusal to explain - "trust me" or "yes, really" is generally a minimally satisfactory response to "really?" in my experience). Also, the "really?" rule is entirely a gate keeper rule, not an active shared ownership rule. The step from being able to challenge or reject another player's declaration concerning the character they nominally own to being able to speak for that character is a fairly sizable one.

GM participation in active character ownership is certainly a form of shared ownership. It would be interesting to work out what the range of GM shared ownership options are (in traditional play), and how they relate to expectations of the GM - player relationship (in terms of adversity, collaboration, opposition, world creation, etc).

GM's certainly frequently have the authority to create backstory for PCs to some degree (most often in relation to creating aspects of the character's relationships to NPCs), and have some power to specify reactions (wihtin some range, and often with the player having some degree of right of refusal). I'm not sure what other forms of shared ownership they usually get.