That’s a whole separate problem though. I think I’ve talked before about Horror on the Orient Express, in which - spoilers!
the PCs are engaged by someone they barely know to travel across Europe and gather the pieces of a magical artefact in order to destroy it. The pretext is frankly flimsy, but the players have read the title and can work out that they have to be on the Orient Express in order to do the rest of the campaign. So they go along with it.
And then when the inevitable betrayal happens an NPC explicitly gloats over what suckers the PCs were, har har. No, they were forced into it by the plot.
Is it right for a PC to walk given the unconvincing setup? Sure, but the player had better have another character ready, and honestly we’d waste less time if they generated fairly gullible characters in the first place.
I think it’s the same problem. If a scene can only have one outcome without destroying the campaign, that is not a scene to roleplay out. It is, in fact, prologue. The outcome is not in doubt, there are no actual decisions to make, and the character cannot have any goals, motives or personality aspects which might conflict with them making them only acceptable choice.
Hence, the only way that could work for me is if the GM asks me to make a character who would accept the premise, we talk about whether the character can have accepted while knowing it is a trap as part of some scheme of their own, and depending on whether it is possible to create a character which I would want to play who could have accepted the premise, I decide whether I want to play in the campaign.
If the GM expects the PCs to behave a certain way or make decisions based on metagame information, not based on the information the character has and the character’s motivations and personality, the GM needs to specify this ahead of time. The correct time to discuss metagame concerns about the cast chemistry, reasons for being somewhere or whether the PCs’ motivations are compatible enough for them to work as a team is before you start a campaign.
It is, indeed, a vitally necessary part of starting a campaign. Largely because I don’t want to play with people who have been socialized to avoid roleplaying in case it might derail the literal tracks which the GM thinks are necessary. I want to play with people who will create characters who are designed to fit the premise of the campaign, so that when they stick together, it is for valid, in-character reasons, not because the adventure, and/or the GM, just expected the players to metagame.
I actively prefer to play with people who have never played D&D and don’t know the rules to any RPG, because they are less likely to confuse the outward trappings of the hobby with actually roleplaying. Following a bunch of strangers into an obvious trap, when you know it’s a trap, is not roleplaying, not unless you are playing some kind of spectral entity which will stop existing immediately if it leaves the presence of these strangers, and is aware of this.
@jfs’s wife was roleplaying when she pointed out that her character had zero reason to trust the other PCs and, indeed, good reasons to avoid them. If you are arrested with a bunch of strangers, it is likely to arouse more suspicion if you keep hanging around them.
I genuinely don’t know whether this describes ‘most of us’. It does not describe any of my players, some of whom have been gaming for thirty years. Their experience is that how the PCs know each other will be established before the start of play. If they are meant to trust each other with revelations which could get them executed as a heretic, they will have collaborated to come up with good reasons for doing so before play starts. For most of the last twenty years of my gaming life, PCs have known each other for some time when the campaign starts, because that’s generally who people turn to when their lives are in danger, people they know and trust.
Any scene which can only have one outcome should not be played out, at least not as I understand roleplaying. It can be acted out, with as much scenery chewing as you want, but the narrative is decided and maybe even written beforehand, so it is not actually roleplayed in a way where any conceivable outcome could be the emergent outcome. It will be the prologue to the campaign, not the first scene, because the players don’t start making decisions for their characters until after that point.
In its wider comprehension, playing an RPG right consists of both playing your character right and playing the right character.
What “the right character” amounts to depends on circumstances (including both the GM’s notion for the campaign, and the players’ various preferences), and is best straightened out by explicit communication before character generation.
This makes me wonder about my current Wednesday night game.
They are all first year students at a magical Institute. They are of varying ages and three of them are off-worlders, each coming from a parallel Earth with differing history.
What do they have in common? They all live in a student residency, with a Master in charge of it, a House Keeper to remind them to bath and two NPC students, one of whom is a cat.
They stick together. They keep each other’s secrets. They pursue common ends and projects.
Am I lucky to have players who are so familiar with themselves and have played many different games where they are many different kinds of team-mates or am I stuck in a rut.
I think it depends on what the intention was, in terms of this campaign and the relationship of the PCs to each other. Before the campaign started, was there any discussion of what sort of character concepts were appropriate, and what happened when the goals, objectives or methods of the PCs clashed?
For example, if one PC were established as honest and believed authority figures were generally good, reasonable and in the right, would that character be expected keep their mouth shut about anything the other PCs did which was against the rules and/or hazardous, and no matter what, not bring in the Master or House Keeper? Would they be expected to actively help cover up murders committed by another PC, simply because they are both PCs?
Or would the issue not arise, because it was established beforehand that no PC would be the kind of person likely to commit crimes likely to offend and frighten other PCs? Or, alternatively, that the players were instructed to generate characters who were loyal to each other to the death and regardless of right or wrong, and it was the players’ job to come up with justifications for their mutual loyalty?
During Session Zero, I will discuss with the players what degree of common motivation is expected and how much they want their characters to be connected, emotionally involved and trusting of the other PCs. If, in GURPS terms, a mutual Sense of Duty between the PCs is desired, either because the players want it, or because it is necessary for the campaign premise to work, the PCs will all have that trait and the players’ job is to explain why, in their backstory and/or personality description of their characters. We will also discuss the goals and motives of the PCs and while they do not have to be the same for every PC, they do have to be compatible in some way, if the campaign assumes that the PCs are a team.
This is just part of the general premise of the campaign and ensuring that the PCs fit the campaign. If the premise involves the PCs in illegal activity, even just potentially, no PC can have the GURPS trait Honesty. Full stop. If any PC might commit a crime in the campaign and conflict between PCs is not desired, Honesty is a forbidden trait. Not only would it force the Honest PC to turn themselves in even if they make the Self-Control roll to participate in a very necessary, albeit illegal course of action, but in confessing to the crime, an Honest character would have no choice but to reveal all the crimes of the other PCs, in order to avoid becoming an accessory after the fact.
Note that accidents or legitimate acts of self-defence are not necessarily crimes in themselves, but if you leave the scene without calling emergency services, including the police, they can very easily become crimes. Self-defence is an affirmative defence, in that you have to prove it. Not to mention that if you just left your attacker for dead, without reporting anything, you’re probably guilty of reckless endangerment or some local jurisdictional equivalent. People are dead when professionals declare them so, not when some random person believes they are and leaves the scene without calling it in so that professionals can determine if they can be saved. In many jurisdictions you have a positive duty to report a criminal attack on you and your subsequent violent act of self-defence. Even if such a duty is not explicit, if you don’t establish your self-defence claim as soon as possible, you make it much less likely it would ever be accepted by a prosecutor.
In general, if the PCs are criminals and motivated by financial incentives, such as a campaign premise where they are a crew of criminals carrying out a heist, it is entirely up to the players whether their character would risk their own lives without any thought of reward, to save one of the other PCs. In fact, it’s entirely up to the players if their characters are able to trust each other at all. If they want to be criminals with a code, loyal to each other even if they do not live by the laws of others, their characters will take the appropriate traits for that. And if they want to have secrets from the other PCs and potentially worry about intrigue and betrayal among their team-mates, well, their characters won’t have Sense of Duty to each other and might not be very nice people at all.
In the majority of campaigns I’ve played, the players chose to be loyal to each other, especially in long-term campaigns. In short-term campaigns, ones intended to just last until one heist or caper is done, or they’ve achieved some other objective, I think it’s about 50/50. Sometimes they’ll still want the romanticism of outlaws bound by mutual loyalty against the rest of the world, but other times, they’ll enjoy the intrigue and deceit inherent in plotting and scheming even against each other.
In fact, even if the players decide their characters are loyal to each other in life and death matters, I can name three long-running, very successful campaigns where there was a character who’d have died for his friends, but when it came to some things, they felt they were the only one who should know the full truth and the rest of the characters did not need to be burdened with that knowledge. Granted, two of these were roguish types whom you could trust with your life, just not management of your money. Both of them used creative accounting to steal from the other PCs, but they didn’t deceive the other players, who were quite happy to roleplay their PCs in blissful ignorance of how they were being robbed blind.
If, for some reason, nothing is agreed on between the players about their relationship with each other, the default for me and most people I know has always been to react to the other PCs as you would react to NPCs in the same situation, with the same mutual history, and the same traits evident to each other (Charisma, Status, etc.). And if their personal codes of right and wrong conflicted, they’d do the same thing they’d do if that happened with an NPC.
Nowadays, we’ll always discuss this, as over the decades, our experience has been that the better you prep a campaign, the better the odds that it will turn out good. TV series don’t get good chemistry and fun dynamics among the main cast by casting actors at random and having each character be developed by a writer working alone, totally unaware of what the other writers assigned another character among the main cast is doing. Writers’ rooms collaborate in order to come up with a main cast where the differences between characters help with characterization, through contrast, and their relationship dynamics are the source of fun banter and further establishment of characters. So, it’s been a long time since I ran a campaign where there was no discussion among the players on how their characters were connected, what kind of mutual loyalty they had to each other and what they’d do in the case of incompatible goals.
That being said, in every campaign where there are shades of grey and reasonable characters might disagree about central conflicts in the campaign world, there is an understanding that even colleagues who have always worked well together might make different choices if they ever face a stark moral dilemma. The closeness with the other PCs would be a factor they’d have to take into consideration, but ultimately, I’d be happier with a scene where the PCs choose different sides because it feels true to what the characters would have done, than one where the PCs all stick together even if that goes against everything one or more of them have been established as believing in.
And, obviously, in every setting where there are forces or entities which can corrupt characters who draw upon their power, whether that is the Dark Side of the Force, Faustian bargains or giving in to the Beast inside, there will generally be an understanding between the players that they’ll start out on the same side, but as corruption is a theme of the campaign, no one can guarantee that they’ll end up the same people by the end, let alone on the same side.
I wasn’t entirely complaining that my players know how to knit a team together. I was just wondering if we were ignoring some possibly enjoyable role-playing.
I had not entirely designed the setting nor the themes I was going to explore when I asked the players what sort of student wizards they wanted to be. I was able to incorporate bits of the characters’ backgrounds into the plot which is good and I have elaborated as we went along.
But while I would have done the check for the possibility of hitting their triggers if the tone were darker or if I didn’t know them as well as I do, here it wasn’t needed because I didn’t want to take the story of young wizards together to a really dark place.
All is not well in the City and they will get involved in the troubles. But I don’t want to grimdark the tale nor the characters. I want a tale of people growing up and changing as they learn the arts.
I normally avoid too much expounding what the campaign is going to be like. It not only spoils things but limits the paths the players can take. I said a lot before the campaign began about the way they were recruited to The Institute and the sort of magicians I was prepared to include in the campaign but the City was only an outline.
They did hear things in the outlines I provided that I never said. But that happens a lot in all negotiations and love songs.
Well, I once played a Star Wars campaign with two players, one of whom had zero roleplaying experience beyond playing a pre-gen in some playtest scenarios for me, the other was a veteran of multiple D&D campaigns, of which many were with other DMs and involved not much in the way of roleplaying, more just rolling dice, moving game tokens and adding up loot and experience.
Campaign started with the two Jedi PCs leading Clone Troopers to deal with a planetary rebellion against the Republic. As Jedis did in those days, they dispensed high-handed justice, backed up with swift and sure violence from their highly trained Clone Troopers and their Low Altitude Assault Transport. One PCs was a calm and diplomatic type, good at leading their men, cared about them. The other was a warrior, righteous and quick to judge. During the fight against a corrupt planetary governor with grand ambitions and his elite bodyguard legion of Interior Troops, the warrior dabbled a little in the Dark Side, as he had more courage than sense, got into situations where he’d have died otherwise.
After that adventure, in fact, just as the PCs are congratulating their loyal Clone Troopers in the LAAT, there is a message. “Execute Order 66.”
As it turned out, having gotten to know their men was a pretty good thing. The Clone Troopers replied they did not have eyes on the Jedi and were still scanning the battlefield to determine if they survived the destruction of the governor’s residence.
After this, the PCs went on the run, stealing spaceships and making common cause with smugglers, outlaws and dissidents. They achieved a lot of successes, so to speak, meaning they killed a lot of Clone Troopers and naval personnel. As they had known other Clone Troopers and Republic Navy personnel as friends and allies, they couldn’t think of them as faceless nonpersons. The warrior kept performing titanic feats with the Force, but trying to fight against the pull of the Dark Side, as all the anger which drove him was directed at the Republic which betrayed him. The more philosophic of the two Jedi felt more deeply the tragedy of the end of the Republic and feared the consequences for the galaxy if the Republic which had kept law and order so long were to fall.
Long story short, the PCs parted, the warrior Jedi raising forces to fight the Republic under Chancellor Palpatine, his reasonable companion caught by Clone Troopers, these ones strangers to him, and using stun settings of their weapons. They took him to a black-clad man of power and authority, who asked him to imagine two futures. One, in which every planetary governor, pirate, warlord and criminal can legitimize their rebellions, looting, smuggling and rackets as morally-justified Resistance to the Galactic Republic, spreading chaos and disorder through the galaxy until there was no civilization left, just endless wars. The other was the future where the Republic faced the challenges head-on, there was a terrible war, but while the casualties were regrettable, they were less than the casualties of endless war.
So it was that one PC had collected under his banner a heterogeneous band of misfits and was training them and marshalling forces at a secret base on a remote planet, while a fleet of brand-new warships built under Chancellor Palpatine’s Emergency Powers Act, led by a a Star Destroyer with the other PC on the bridge, bearing down on them.
That was maybe twenty-five years ago. Both of them still mention that campaign more or less every time anyone mentions roleplaying games. They still think I somehow planned the ending from the first session, but since all the decisions which drove the events were theirs, I couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. All I did was figure out what the impact of their actions on the world would be and what important NPCs would do in response.
As I said, and repeated - it’s a socialisation outcome.
When a group of people get together for a common purpose, especially if they already know each other, certain outcomes are sociologically more likely.
In our case, the common purpose is a role playing game, with two types of player - GMs, and PCs. It’s a collaborative group activity, where the GM describes a world / plot and the PCs describe how their characters interact with it. (massive generalisation).
It is not surprising that if the ‘expected’ outcome of the first meeting is that the PCs will have bonded enough to actually find common cause, that many groups will short cut that to make sure that the game works, and to get on to the more interesting part, which is the plot / exploring the world etc.
Personally, I get bored of either convoluted discussions about how the characters know each other or an overly laboured first session where we pretend that the outcome is anything other than ‘the characters will work together to a common end’. I’d much rather mutually agree that they do, and then we can bring out examples of those common ties in play, when they’re appopriate, necessary, and follow the flow of the story collectively being told.
I’m not sure I can face another wall of text from @Icelander so I’m not going to engage on this any more because I really don’t think he and I are arguing the same point.
I’m not saying ‘don’t roleplay’, and I’m certainly not criticising my wife for roleplaying. My only point was that gaming socialisation was so strong that we, the experienced players, were surprised by her actions because they were outside our experience.
Given that both @RogerBW and @MichaelCule have mentioned similar situations, I’m not alone in that observation.
- it’s a socialisation outcome.