One of the skills of a good player is to deal with things decisively when you are in the metaphorical spotlight. Recognise what is at stake in the passage of play, focus on it, make it clear what you are attempting do, advance to the point where the outcome is decided, and then recognise whether it has succeeded or failed. and move on promptly. “Scenes” in RPGs benefit from being a bit more stylised, focussed, and decisive than scene of cinema verité dialogue. People in fact don’t take ‘no’ (or even sometimes ‘yes’) for an answer and persist in insistent repetitions. But it’s no fun to play, and even less to sit through someone else playing. Try to get through material expeditiously.
Another skill of a good player is that when they are in character or actor stance, or in the spotlight, or whatever you call it, they strive to amuse the other players who are taking a turn in audience stance. The writers’ conventional wisdom that “everyone talks in first draft” is of no use to role-players, and is anyway only partly true. You can’t plan, draft, rewrite, and polish dialogue (or description) in RPG. But extemporising indirect and vivid dialogue is a skill that you can improve with practice.
In the last year or so I have found myself, as a player, coming up with extempore in-character quips. Not sure why this should suddenly have happened, and I try not to kill the pace with it, but it does provide amusement.
On the other hand, I love it when the players spend time at the table just having a conversation in-character whether or not it advances anything plot-wise.
As long as everyone’s enjoying it. Similarly with the very long planning session, which I’ve heard described as a thing that must always be avoided: not if the players are having fun with it!
The tricky bit is when you have different players enjoying different things and trying to balance out the ones who like the chew scenery, shop, or plan versus the players who just want to get on with it. And sometimes that player is the GM.
Sure, but I don’t think planning is the universally bad thing that some would have it as. (I tend to favour a solid plan and an unspectacular execution, so I am biased.)
That tends to be less well received when one character is in the spotlight talking to an NPC and all the other players are in audience stance.
Being able to extemporise dialogue that gets to the point efficiently and resolves the point decisively while being entertaining and portraying character is nevertheless useful for those passages of play when everyone’s not in a mood and situation to enjoy shooting the breeze.
The skill of being able to do something when you want to is different from the habit of doing it routinely.
Casting my mind back to our ancient discussion of “zugzwang” in RPGs, I wonder whether perhaps part of the reason that some players don’t have a habit of returning the ball over the net whenever it is in their court (so to mix metaphors) is that they don’t have the skill of making small incremental advances. I think that maybe part of the reason that parties succumb to analysis paralysis is that they fixate on finding a decisive move right away, when the situation does not yet admit of making one. It’s like playing chess when you have no mid-game.
Perhaps there is a player skill that involves taking actions (consistent with character motivations and justified by circumstances) that cause or allow the situation to develop, raising the conflict or stakes incrementally and allowing or eliciting developments and revelations. But in a small and “local” way that does not insist on jumping to the immediate resolution of the main conflict.
I think that some of what I call “pseudo-mystery” games cater to this shortcoming: whether it’s Brindlewood Bay saying “whatever answer you come up with is the right one” or GURPS Monster Hunters saying “when you have enough investigation points, you have solved the mystery”, they provide an artificial bridge between “we have a pile of disparate information” and “we have the answer”.
I’m not sure this is a rule applicable to all roleplaying. I detest “focused scenes”, for example, and for me the whole point of roleplaying is the verité approach. But then, I like cinema verité.
Regarding Michael’s current campaign, I wonder if you’ve read John Brunner’s The Squares of the City, inspired by the construction of Brasilia? As a literary experiment it’s more than a little forced, but I liked the shades-of-grey approach to the politics. It’s not simplistic “good” vs “evil” and the problem (still fresh 65 years after Brunner wrote it) can’t be solved by a punch in the face, or indeed with a bow & arrow. Ralph Lovegrove did a Fictoplasm episode about it (though spoilers are possible, even likely).
Yeah. For some reason we tend to treat — have long tended to treat — GMs as a sort of service worker whose job it is to manage everything, including balancing the character-players’ various preferences and occasional caprice. Thus we tend to overlook difficulties that could be more easily overcome, and opportunities that could be better exploited, by players than by GMs or designers. Balancing and accommodating different tastes and preferences among the character-players may be something that character-players could help with.
Absolutely. It is everyone’s obligation to find that balance. My last point is that GMs should not be excluded from “accommodating different tastes and preferences.” For example, sometimes you go along with the plot presented rather than going “off the map,” as it were, and force the GM to run a game that they didn’t prepare for and wouldn’t have fun running.
I am tired and peevish about this so SPOILER for Horror on the Orient Express.
The PCs are engaged to do a thing on a frankly flimsy pretext by someone they barely know. The only reason they go along with it is that the players have read the name of the campaign and if they don’t go there will plainly be no Horror on the Orient Express.
Later the campaign has the gall to have an NPC say “har har, you went along with it, you fools”. At that point you’re saying I’m an idiot for playing your adventure, and I may well agree.
Similarly with a certain class of heist film where the big reveal is “everything you’ve been watchng for the last two hours was distraction, we did the real crime earlier off camera”. Yeah, when you got me to buy a ticket.