Yeah, it was a misunderstandng. Not used to people referring to themselves in the third person.

Quote from: James McMurrayRight, I'm saying that from a character standpoint you decide (or realize depending on your immersion level) that you're attached to someone and don't want them dead.

I know that I'm attached to my wife and don't want her dead, and am pretty sure my motivations are at least as real as most characters.

I don't know about you but "decide" is not the word I'd use to describe why I'm attached to my wife and don't want her dead.  It's not really a decision I made in a distinct rational sense.  It the byproduct of a much more complicated relationship with my wife.  I'd probably put it in terms of, "I know I'm attached to my wife and don't want her dead."

Did you ever meet someone you wanted to like and there was just something about them you didn't like?  Liking or disliking someone isn't simply a matter of deciding that you will feel a certain way.  You just
feel that way or not.

Quote from: John MorrowSuppose I'm playing Scrooge in character.  The GM has Marley's ghost visit my PC.  I don't think of all of those possibilities.  I hear out Marley as Scrooge (and visualize the scene with what the GM gives me) and then just react to it.

Okay.  How do you choose among the possible reactions?

Quote from: James McMurrayYeah, it was a misunderstandng. Not used to people referring to themselves in the third person.

Yes, because there are two perspectives and thought processes in there, the player can see themselves from the perspective of the character, where they are an outside other.  As far as the character is concerned, hints, suggestions, and commands coming in from the player are external unless they are wrapped up so they look internal.

Quote from: TonyLBOkay.  How do you choose among the possible reactions?

The same way I'd decide how to react if personally I woke up in the middle of the night with the ghost of a friend hovering over me telling me to repent.  The character just reacts to it in character.

Quote from: TonyLBOkay.  How do you choose among the possible reactions?

OK.  I know my first response probably wasn't very helpful so let me try again.

The character would hear out Marley in character which would interact with their personality and memories to produce emotions and rational though processes.  Essentially, I feel emotions in character and those help drive how the character responds. too.

Suppose Marley's ghost talked about how my Scrooge was damned and my character, unlike the story Scrooge, put 2+2 together because he remembered his dialog with the people gathering money from the poor (the story Scrooge had the be reminded by the second ghost).  That could lead to an exchange with Marley that might achieve redemption without the three other visits being necessary, just because my Scrooge knew his partner was damned by acting just like he does.  

Or suppose Marley had come up in some earlier sessions and I realized that Scrooge actually resented Marley for leaving him alone by dying.  Maybe the dialog with Marley would have been far more belligerent and tense, with my Scrooge going off on Marley and not wanting to listen to him.  Maybe it would leave behind so much residual anger that Scrooge would ignore the lesson out of spite.

In many cases, the gut response I get and the emotions -- how I feel through the scene in character, contribute to the decision and that's not a process I consciously control.

Quote from: John MorrowI don't know about you but "decide" is not the word I'd use to describe why I'm attached to my wife and don't want her dead.  It's not really a decision I made in a distinct rational sense.  It the byproduct of a much more complicated relationship with my wife.  I'd probably put it in terms of, "I know I'm attached to my wife and don't want her dead."

Did you ever meet someone you wanted to like and there was just something about them you didn't like?  Liking or disliking someone isn't simply a matter of deciding that you will feel a certain way.  You just
feel that way or not.

Note my "deepending on your level of immersion". I'm personally always living my life in deep immersion mode, and no I wouldn't decide I love my wife. I'd realize it. Just like I said in the post.

The "decide" part comes from being a player running a character in a game.  Since you can't possibly have all the input that the character would have if it were real, at some point you have to make decisions. For instance, I really love my wife's laugh. I didn't decide that, it's just how we work. If however, some guy on the other side of the table were describing a scenario and were to tell me "the waitress has a lilting laugh" I, the player, would have to decide whether my character liked it.

Quote from: John MorrowThe character would hear out Marley in character which would interact with their personality and memories to produce emotions and rational though processes.  Essentially, I feel emotions in character and those help drive how the character responds. too.

Okay.  Now suppose Hypothetical-Bob has exactly the same sense of the personality and memories of the character, and he's honestly playing it in the same way you do.  Do you think that would provide so much constraint that, in the same situation, he couldn't help but make the same choice you did?

I think, "No, no way," for all the reasons I've cited.  There are many different ways that the decision can go, all within the constraint that it grow organically from the character as it exists.  You might choose one, and Bob might choose another.

Does that sound right to you?

Quote from: James McMurrayThe "decide" part comes from being a player running a character in a game.  Since you can't possibly have all the input that the character would have if it were real, at some point you have to make decisions. For instance, I really love my wife's laugh. I didn't decide that, it's just how we work. If however, some guy on the other side of the table were describing a scenario and were to tell me "the waitress has a lilting laugh" I, the player, would have to decide whether my character liked it.

While the character doesn't have all of the input a real person has, it's often close enough to get a genuine response and can be filled in with some questions at other times.  If the GM on the other side of the table were describing a waitress laughing at me, I'd decide in character how my character feels about the waitress.  I've had several of my characters fall in love to various degrees of depth (ranging from infatuation to a willingness to die or kill for them) and I've never had to "decide" how my characters felt about those NPCs.  What generally happens is that the character will notice a trait in the NPC that appeals to them and then take it from there through role-playing.  

In the D&D game I've been talking about, for example, my character decided to court the schoolmistress, a young widow, but never really had a romantic moment with her because events kept intruding.  My character was pretty stiff and formal and because of that, and a few other in game reasons, his feelings about her were often more about respect and duty than love or lust, and as a result, his feelings for her were not strong enough to keep him from deserting his post.  He liked her but he never actually fell in love with her.   There was also a scene early on, played out partially in email (not my preference) where the character came off differently than the GM intended (she came off as rude rather than witty) and I had to revise my character's memory of that scene or there would have been no romance at all.  That was entirely an in character response to the dialog.

In other games, I've had characters fall in love with women who were vulnerable and needed my character.  I've had a character pursue a woman he'd be an awful match with simply because he was fascinated by her and had to have her (that's the character where I tried to capture a friend's personality and that's where I succeeded).  I had one character start to go after one character, he realized she wasn't what he wanted during play, and in the process he realized that another NPC not intended to be a romantic lead (a tough unfeminine tomboy in a Western meant to be "one of the guys") was really what he was looking for (he wasn't ready to settle down and needed a woman tough enough to go adventuring with him -- there was more to it but that's a big part of it).  I've had two characters (one after the other one died) fall in love with the same NPC for different reasons and in different ways.  I've had a deeply troubled character fall into unrequited   love with a malicious and destructive woman played by another player.  

In every case, I didn't decide that the character would fall in love with the NPC or like or hate particular traits in them.  It flowed out of the in character interaction with those NPCs and how my characters responded to them.  My character in the D&D game was "supposed to" fall in love with the schoolmistress but that never happened and may never have happened. My character in the Western wasn't supposed to fall in love with the tomboy but did.  And those examples all involved the very real emotion of love.

I dunno.  It all felt very much like falling in love (or not falling in love) feels in real life to me.  Not a decision.

With respect to the lilting laugh, what happens there is that the player translates that for the character so the character hears that laugh.  It's not perfect, but it's good enough to create a genuine response.  In fact, part of the problem with the exchange in that D&D game that my character interpreted as rude rather than witty was that I filled in the wrong vocal tone and body language, in part because the emailed nature of the exchange gave me no GM tone of voice or body language to work off of.

Quote from: James McMurrayFor instance, I really love my wife's laugh. I didn't decide that, it's just how we work. If however, some guy on the other side of the table were describing a scenario and were to tell me "the waitress has a lilting laugh" I, the player, would have to decide whether my character liked it.

Er, let's distinguish some here.  Physically, in both cases, the ambiguity (i.e. does personality X like the laugh) is decided.  What you're saying is that there was no conscious choice involved when you decided that you didn't like your wife's laugh.  You just felt it.  

However, I would say that the same thing can happen in fiction-writing and role-playing.  Something can just feel like the right decision.  In fact, that creative feeling where you just know things is an important part of my enjoyment of creative activities.  

Quote from: TonyLBOkay.  Now suppose Hypothetical-Bob has exactly the same sense of the personality and memories of the character, and he's honestly playing it in the same way you do.  Do you think that would provide so much constraint that, in the same situation, he couldn't help but make the same choice you did?

I think, "No, no way," for all the reasons I've cited.

Well, but hypothetical Bob is a meaningless impossible construct.  For him to have exactly the same personality and memories of the character, you'd have to presume some sort of magical mind-transfer technology which tranplants mental vision directly from my head into Bob's.  I can't really make predictions about the effect of this magical process, nor do I see a point in doing so.

Cool. You guys are much better roleplayers than I'll ever be.

Quote from: TonyLBOkay.  Now suppose Hypothetical-Bob has exactly the same sense of the personality and memories of the character, and he's honestly playing it in the same way you do.  Do you think that would provide so much constraint that, in the same situation, he couldn't help but make the same choice you did?

I think, "No, no way," for all the reasons I've cited.  There are many different ways that the decision can go, all within the constraint that it grow organically from the character as it exists.  You might choose one, and Bob might choose another.

Does that sound right to you?

Yes, I think that sounds correct, but not because Bob is directly choosing a different different path for the character.  

While the character feels very different from the player and can think independently of the player, it still depends on the player as a filter to translate table-speak into character perceptions and for understanding of things that the player hasn't learned in the game.  I'm also reasonably certain that the player injects a certain amount of themselves into their characters, intentionally or unintentionally, simply because both share the same brain.  So how Bob interprets the encounter for the character and how the character feels about the encounter is going to be different than John's version because there are differences between Bob and John.  In other words, there is no way to make my version of a character and Bob's version really identical.

Now, to answer whether a clone of me running the same character would do the same thing, we get into issues of free will and predestination and so forth that we aren't going to resolve here.  It's like asking whether the same person in two identical parallel universes can make two different decisions.

Quote from: John MorrowWhat I've learned over time is that I can either (A) nudge the character to react some other way (the key there is finding the pivotal spot in the character's psyche where a small nudge produces the desired big change in thinking) or (B) identify what's going on inside my character's head so I can explain what other characters need to do, in the game world, to get the desired result out of my character.  I've also learned to identify the warning signs of a character heading toward game-wrecking decisions in some cases, so I can give it the attention it needs to avoid wrecking the game.

I can't nudge, but the response can be different if I get different inputs.

For instance, in a game I was joining, even before I got into play, I had very deep IC.  And I realized while watching the session before I was supposed to join that, given the historical situation, given the way the other PCs were behaving, given their capabilities, and given my own character's nature, he would certainly perceive them as a serious threat; and under the circumstances the only effective response to the threat he'd see was a pre-emptive strike against them.  This was actually the wrong answer, in view of some things I knew OOCly, but the character didn't know.

Now, obviously this wasn't the intent of the campaign setup, and nobody would have enjoyed it if we'd played it out.  But if my character didn't react that way, under the circumstances, I had no idea at all who he was -- I had a very strong sense of him already.  And I wouldn't have enjoyed smashing the character to bits in my first session, to play a wavering shadow of him thereafter.  So I went to the GM (another immersionist), explained the problem, and said, "Is there any reasonable way we can get my character enough information to stay his hand?"  The answer was no, so I didn't bring the character into play.

In this case, I'm not sorry that the answer was no, because on further observation, it became obvious that the problem with the other PCs' behavior was that one of them was a jerk character played by a jerk player (as they typically seem to be, in my experience).  If we'd avoided the first disastrous IC clash, there would have been other clashes later on (OOC and probably IC), because this other player was spending a lot of time jabbing at the GM for no good reason and otherwise being an annoying jackass.  I was not sorry not to be playing with the fellow.

QuoteMaybe Tony has a good point, that it's a just a matter of learning how to do it all together at the same time so it doesn't take an overwhelming amount of conscious energy to make it happen, like learning how to play cords on a piano.  But I still think it's correct to say that you can't count on every Deep IC player being able to do that, since it's very difficult to do deliberately.  The player needs to have developed that sort of tool for their toolbox.  They can't be forced to "just do it".

In the example I just gave, I have no clue how I could have done it, because I didn't anticipate the behavior of the other PC during the creation of my character creation. And if I had -- "You must design a character who will react to a destructive, threatening, heavy-handed probable psychopath in a way that's fun for everyone, including the player of the psychopath" isn't a design criterion I think I can fulfill.  I've created characters whose range of likely responses to behavior like that doesn't include violence; I haven't created any whose mindsets around such behavior would be pleasing to experience.  If I'd known what the other PC was like before I started character creation, I wouldn't have accepted the invitation to the game at all.

I've been playing since 1989, and in that time there've been maybe eight times that a character of mine has reacted in a fashion that it's awkward to have them reacting in.

On two occasions, it was strictly an internal affair -- my character was in a most uncomfortable state of mind, and it didn't have much effect on anybody but me.

In three cases, including the one above, the problem didn't originate in-world, even if it first manifested in-world.  It was originated in a conflict between players.  In the other two cases, my characters had to deal with the very powerful and aggressively controlling characters created by very aggressively controlling men.  Their SOs were also playing, and in both cases the women wanted to set up secret channels of communication with the other participants because they didn't want to deal with the men's reactions if they spoke openly.  It's my best guess that both men expected all female players to be as willing to put up with their attempts at domination as their SOs were, and to make characters who would tolerate their playing out the same dynamic in the game.  Both campaigns wracked up badly, because I had not done any such thing; nor do I propose doing any such thing in the future.  In these instances, my characters' reactions didn't cause the real problem, and I don't believe that my adjusting them would have done anything but delay the wreck.  Certainly it wouldn't have made the game fun for me.

In a sixth case, while I don't have anything against the player, he'd made a character of a sort that I'd tried to tell him not to make because it wouldn't work with the rest of the party.  I was right: it didn't work.  If I'd somehow managed to adjust the reactions both of an immersible NPC and another immersionist's PC, it again only would have served to delay the disastrous clash.

In a seventh case, the character I was playing reacted with no violence, but the fury of the betrayed, to a slur against his honor by a character he'd come to trust farther than that.  I couldn't change my character's reaction, but I offered to retcon the scene in order to dial down the feeling between the characters.  The other player decided to have her characters drop out, instead. (She'd just taken to playing two characters, one of whom was hostile to the one I was playing and the other of whom had been something of a friend.  It's my best guess that she was having a hard time flipping back in between the characters and making them distinct, and what happened is that some of Mr. Hostile's attitude got transferred to her other character.)  I have nothing against the player and we asked her back to the next campaign.

In the eighth case, my character reacted badly to another PC because of a botched portrayal.  The other player intended his character to be an ultra-suave highly persuasive heartthrob, but this wasn't in the range of his own portrayal abilities.  My character watched Mr. Would-be Heartthrob trying to put the moves on a young female PC and read him as one of these dangerous jerk that thinks he's God's gift to women and can't imagine that he's ever really been told, "No."  This created a bond between my character and the girl, but my character strongly distrusted Mr. Would-be Heartthrob, and my character was proving to be the driving force in the plot.  That still wouldn't have been too bad if Mr. Heartthrob had a reason to be with the rest of the group, aside from making a purely social connection with them.  But he wasn't part of the interacting societies they belonged to, and was underpowered so he didn't have any unique abilities to offer.  The result was that he didn't have a good entry into the plotline because the character had been designed with only one avenue of approach, and my character's reaction tended to cut him out.

So I have three cases where I think it's accurate to say that the unadjustable nature of my deep IC play caused some difficulty for someone besides me, and two where I would have offered to rewrite my character's reaction if I could.

But I have no idea how to rewrite an immersible character's reactions.  Rgfa's discussions of immersion were years in the future, and I had no idea that the effect even existed, when I first hit deep IC in session 7 of my first campaign.  I didn't learn how to do it consciously and intentionally.  "Hey, if I do this, my character will look at the situation this way instead of that way, even though the situation is exactly the same" -- I don't know how to get there at all, let alone to do it without a lot of conscious attention.

Quote from: KeranI can't nudge, but the response can be different if I get different inputs.

[...]

But I have no idea how to rewrite an immersible character's reactions.  Rgfa's discussions of immersion were years in the future, and I had no idea that the effect even existed, when I first hit deep IC in session 7 of my first campaign.  I didn't learn how to do it consciously and intentionally.  "Hey, if I do this, my character will look at the situation this way instead of that way, even though the situation is exactly the same" -- I don't know how to get there at all, let alone to do it without a lot of conscious attention.

I want to start out by saying that I used the word "nudge" for a reason.  The change has to be fairly small and has to be something that will stick.  It won't protect against players who are jerks nor will it solve all ills.

Your "Mr. Would-be Heartthrob" (Mr. WBH) example points to the key of what I usually do.  You mentioned how your in character perception of Mr. WBH as a "dangerous jerk" (assuming the player wasn't really a "dangerous jerk").  That's the sort of thing I fiddle with. What I do is translate that into something closer to what's intended for my character or simply ship it along with a feeling that goes along with it.  So long as the feeling is at least reasonably sensible, I can use it in character.  So, for example, if I realized that Mr. WBH was simply portraying his character badly, I might pass a more suave version of what he's doing along to my character or I might just pass the scene to my character with a mental note to the effect "You feel that's really suave" and just plug that in.  To a certain degree, I've learned to accept those cues along with descriptions such that I can nudge my character to like, trust, distrust, dislike, etc. NPCs.  No, it won't work if everything else about the scene is screaming for a different interpretation.  But when it's easier, I can pull that off.

Quote from: James McMurrayWhy can't you think about how you're attached to someone and wouldn't want them killed and still be thinking as the character?

Khameris the character would be thinking about what's good for Debroan security, and about how reluctant he is to kill Shazemar for his own reasons.  But "Keran wants Shazemar to survive because she likes playing him" isn't something he can take into consideration.
-- Oh, I see what happened.

Khameris has a couple of strong reasons to kill Shazemar and a couple not to (one of which is that he's fond of Shazemar too), and I can't tell you which way he'll choose frome outside his viewpoint.  Moreover, I don't think he'd know immediately, either -- I think it would be a dilemma for him, and he couldn't immediately say what he'd do.