How many characters per player

I have to admit I find the concept of “immersion” kind of obscure. I spend a lot of time as a GM, meaning I have to take on the roles of several or even many different people in a session. I have had the experience of spontaneously thinking of actions or lines of dialogue that fit a particular character, without scripting them in advance, not even a few minutes in advance; I just know what that character would say or do. But this doesn’t involve my experiencing the situation as if I were that character (which I agree would be disruptive). It’s third person rather than first, more in the spirit of “Have you tried acting, dear boy?”

And the same thing happens when I’m a player rather than a GM. I play much more in third person than in first. The character is a persona, a mask.

I had one player, in my first Transhuman Space campaign, who was doing something that might have been immersive play. What I experienced it as was his not doing much with his character and not making her comprehensible to the other players or to me. I talked with him about it and I gathered that he was very focused on how she was experiencing the events of the campaign, but that he didn’t think of telling us, or of having her say or do things that revealed her to the audience; he was focused on his own experience of the character’s point of view. I asked him to adjust his portrayal of her to make the rest of us more aware of how she was reacting—to give the audience more purchase on her, I guess.

But I don’t know if that’s what “immersion” is about, or if that was just a peculiarity of this one player.

However, back at the main topic, I don’t think that playing more than one character makes it impossible to have a strong character concept, or deep involvement with the events of a campaign. Having to play two different characters in the same scene, or to alternate rapidly between the two in short scenes, might be a problem; but if an hour or more focuses on one particular character, that’s plenty of time for most players to get involved in the role, at least in my experience. (My players in the campaign where they each had four characters were very much at the characterization/social interaction/roleplaying end of the spectrum; that was the least action/focused on my three campaigns in that cycle.) Which isn’t to say it would work for what you specifically have in mind.

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For me, the idea of playing multiple charters is not just to have a spare in case one exists the game, but to open up possibilities to work on the story from a different angle that would not make narratively sense for a certain character -all while working within the role a player, with the same tools, possibilities and limitations (kind of).

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When I’m playing an RPG I’m always running a simulation of my character’s mind inside my own. Immersion, to me, is what happens that process of running a simulation becomes unconscious, and I realise “aha, well of course [PC] will do that” in response to a situation without having explicitly to reason it through.

Another example is in email from me to the GM, during setup for a campaign recently begun: “I don’t know whether [my PC] is married; she hasn’t told me yet.”

I’m generally involved in 3-4 different campaigns at a time, usually about half of them as GM, so I’m already doing a fair bit of context switching. Though I think multiple switches per session would start to be hard work.

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I think this is part of the skill set of a GM/DM, to have clear ideals and reactions for numerous NPCs.

I found it takes time to develop this, and preparation is key. You don’t have to have lines prepared, but you have to understand motivations.

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I wonder whether some of this difference of opinion is world-familiarity. That character who hadn’t yet told me whether she was married was going to be played in Transhuman Space, a setting with which I’m quite familiar, so I can spend a lot of time puzzling out her personality. If I were playing in a setting that was new to me, I might be working harder on making sense of that first.

Is there, then, such a thing as third person immersion? I have had the experience of immediately knowing what an NPC will say or do, without advance scripting or reasoned analysis.

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Character immersion, to me, is like method acting. When my character is happy or sad, angry or enamored, I feel the same emotions. I never have to think, “what would my character do?” I just do it and it’s in-character. I just can’t do that with multiple characters. When I GM, I don’t do this with my NPCs. (I GM for different reasons than I play, but the topic was about playing, not GMing). For many roleplayers, their favorite gaming experiences about some great event or thing that happened in the game. For me, my favorite gaming experiences are when I’m just talking in character with other characters and having very personal moments.

Of course, there is never 100% character immersion. I am able to separate out the game from my character thoughts. I can make decisions for my character based on what works best for the game and metagame even if it goes against that they would have done.

I hardly ever do that.

Let me tell you a story about one of my favorite players. She was in my campaign about present-day British teenagers who strayed into the fairy realms, Oak and Ash and Thorn. Her character, Lucille, had gotten involved with another character, Spider, who was a football hooligan. In one session, her character sought him out for sex at a bad time, when he was in a really bad mental state, and had gotten drunk, and the encounter turned unpleasant for her.* She got away, and in the aftermath one of her fairy woman friends beat Spider very badly, and then dumped him at another pavilion for magical healing—and Lucille sneaked into the pavilion and lay down to sleep beside his unconscious body.

Well, this was pretty intense stuff, so a few days later, when I was having lunch with Lucille’s player, I asked her if it had pushed things uncomfortably for her. And her whole face lit up and she said, “It was great!” Later, she wrote about it, and said that she had experience the scene on three levels: She felt Lucille’s feelings, and at the same time she was feeling impatient with Lucille’s being foolish and self-destructive, and at the same time again she was gloating over how intensely all of us were reacting to her portrayal of Lucille (particularly the shudders as we recognized that her lying down beside Spider was perfectly in character for an abuse victim).

I don’t think I’m that good! (The player had been a theater minor in college.) But when I play my characters, I’m always thinking in terms of “what can I do that both fits my character concept and will play well to the audience?” That is, part of me is back inside my head. On the other hand, I don’t want my characters to live back inside their own heads—I do that myself a lot of the time, and I want gaming to be an escape from it—so I tend to do the first thing I think of, as a way of having my characters be more impulsive and outward oriented. It’s just my good fortune that sometimes the first thing I think of is a good bit of characterization.

*I should mention, I think, that Spider’s player was not doing this to gratify some sort of abusive fantasy. The player had written the character up in GURPS with several psychological disadvantages, and when the situation arose, I had him make self control rolls—and he failed three in a row! And the player paused for a moment or two, and then said, “No, I have to play it,” and described Spider acting in accord with all of those disadvantages. He was as shaken up as the rest of us when the session ended.

it’s not a matter of being “good.” It’s just about what you find fun and what you get out of gaming. “Method acting” has its detractors and it’s not the only way or best way to play.

Lucille’s story was great, but it also illustrates the emotional dangers one can encounter during play. This opens up the topic of trigger warnings, X-cards, and other such things which no one (including me) wants to get me started on!.. : )

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I think you’ve just named it. I’ve had the same experience many times with NPCs that I have thought about, and played for a while.

Well, I’m not sure she was doing method acting. She may have been doing more classic acting.

But I don’t think I agree that it’s not a matter of being good. I mean, if I played a musical instrument and belonged to a band or a chamber group or something, I might enjoy the act of playing, but I also would want to play well and give the other musicians pleasure when they listened to me. And when I roleplay, I want the other players to enjoy my dialogue, to be interested in my character’s actions, and if possible to be moved, and all of that requires a certain kind of skill.

I think for the most part my player group were good with intense emotional content.

But I’m not having the experience of being any of the characters, and that seems to come up when people write about immersion.

It clearly means different things to different people, which is why I tend to qualify it when I talk about it. I have quite often had a PC or NPC pop up in the back of my mind to comment on a situation in the real world; I have never had any doubt about whose thoughts I was thinking. (I.e. the sandboxing on the emulated minds is reasonably good.)

Ok, lots of food for thought here, guys. Many thanks.

I GM as well as play. It seems I am using a whole different skill set when I GM multiple NPCs, compared to when I am forced to RP multiple characters. (Also I’m quite capable of playing in multiple RPG campaigns, so I am playing Fred Bloggs the PC on Mondays and Joe Soap the PC on Tuesdays, without enjoyment and 'immersion’™ in one detracting from playing the other.

On GMing multiple NPCs in a session… there is no engagement for the majority of them. Reasons include:

  • After this scene, the PCs may never speak to this person again. Maybe they’ll have finished their info gathering and moved on in the plot. Maybe they’ll have killed the NPC stone cold dead!
  • Some of the NPCs are invented by the players, and have to be made up on the spot. “Ooh look, there’s a bus stop on the map! We go to the bus depot and speak to the driver who was driving that route on Thursday night.”
  • My acting skills are rubbish. I find trying to do accents and quirky mannerisms stressful, off-putting and a drain on energy (both creative and physical). I might do a teeny bit of this in a PC. No way I’m doing it for dozens of NPCs. So different skillset.
  • For recurrent, regular NPCs… I’m very twitchy about accidentally turning them into the dreaded GM-NPC. As a player I’ve met too many Mary Sues with Plot Immunity. I guess this means I engage less with these NPCs when playing them?

Whenever I create an NPC I think is interesting and has potential to be a long-term contact, the players chat with them, get the information they want, and move on. But possibly I’m hoping my players will be more soap-operatic than they actually want to be.

Well, that part, at least, wouldn’t seem to be an issue if you were playing in a campaign where you were expected to have two or more PCs. Rather, you would be expected to bring them both/all to life. The failing I try to avoid when I have players do this is different: I don’t want them to play two characters who are closely allied and have the same agenda, as that oversimplifies the field of social relations. Having each PC in one category be required to be linked with a different player’s PC in the other category often works for this; for example, in my first Mage campaign, we had one player playing a reclusive Virtual Adept and also a detective who was the non-Awakened ally of one of the traditionalist Wu Lung “dragon wizards.”

This is definitely a problem I have. When possible, I try to mentally model important NPCs as a close associate who I have a strong mental model of but is not like me in personality. Prevents the NPCs from being too monotone, and the personality fits in a single sentence note. “Mora is Fang with a death wish,” “Lydia = Tanya,” etc.

It helps that I have moved enough to know many people my current group does not.

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I rarely do that sort of thing. For one thing, I spent a lot of time in one city, and my circle of friends was largely my players/fellow players. But also I don’t often have a sense of personality Gestalt for them. Though in a Changeling campaign, I decided that my pooka character was going to be a habitual liar and trickster, and I modelled him on someone I knew whose relationship with truth was distant . . .

I also modeled a character in one campaign as “a young Sidney Bristow” from Alias, with idealistic motives for being involved in covert operations, but not the hard experience Sidney had had.

With NPCs, I think there are several levels:

  • A purely functional NPC just gives information, or sells something, or tries to kill the PCs, and then vanishes.
  • For more personality, I can roll for reactions and then figure out what accounts for the NPC being especially friendly or hostile.
  • I can come up with a couple of personality traits, especially if I’ve made up the NPC in advance.
  • I may come up with a bit of dialogue that characterizes the NPC—not necessarily a catchphrase like “I’m a doctor, not a[n] X!” bit often just a style of speaking.
  • I may do a fully detailed character sheet for an NPC. This varies with the system; writing up a Big Eyes Small Mouth character is much faster than writing up a GURPS character, so I do a lot more of it.

For example, in my current campaign, Tapestry, when the PCs were first getting ready to sail to unknown shores, they had to hire sailors, so I made up nine or ten characters with different profiles, and let them pick: the old hand with more skills, the kid with no actual experience, the personable sailor who played the fiddle and loved cats, the easygoing one who cooked, the elf/nixie half-breed with a sense of inferiority, the exiled human nobleman, the petty thief, the bully, the decent strong guy who was a bit slow, the shirker . . . that’s ten, isn’t it? They picked six, one of whom was the bully, who gave them some trouble. The only one who didn’t really get significant camera time was the fiddler, for no obvious reason.

Using existing characters as a template is always a good suggestion.

I recently had to have a character prosecute one of his friends. His honour meant he had to uphold the law, but his loyalty to the accused meant he felt tremendous guilt.

Luckily, I had a ready made popular culture reference.

Doesn’t that risk there being a scene where one player has to argue with himself?