Quote from: mearlsI had a weird thought about this: how many games include systems for creating your character's personality? Would it hurt a game to include a list of personality traits, all tailored to the game's purpose, that players must choose from?

Old school - Pendragon
New school - Burning Wheel.

Obviously it's been done and is being done. I am a little leery of games that attach a lot of mechanics to personality, but those that don't tend to ignore personality, or at best, allocate a blank line to it.

But I'm all for having a "mechanically light" subsystem of defining character traits, I have been ever since the does of Heroes of Legend, and Bankeui's blog regarding flags only reinforced this notion in me.

Some players (I'm probably one of them) aren't too handy at defining personality traits and making them meaningful in play. I think players could use a little guidance in this.

Quote from: MarcoThis is sometimes called front loading (where there is a lot of work done before play starts to help ensure that it goes in a certain direction) and it's, IMO, a very, very valuable concept.

I think that front loading, not only the character but the setting and situation that the GM creates, is one of the most important concepts that gets talked about way too little.  

Quote from: MarcoThe broader the game though, the more carefully you need to narrow down the character generation choices if you want people to reliably and in-character agree to do something.

It has been my experience that even good and experience role-players don't always know how to pick character concepts that will work well with each other.  That's why I started pushing (with mixed responses) players creating three distinct characters and letting the GM pick which one they will play.  That gives a central authority the ability to make sure all the bases are covered and players don't step on each other's niches.

Quote from: mearlsI had a weird thought about this: how many games include systems for creating your character's personality? Would it hurt a game to include a list of personality traits, all tailored to the game's purpose, that players must choose from?

I think it's more important to ask players to know why their characters would leave the comfort of their home to go off adventuring.  

The old Cold War game The Price of Freedom had one of the more interesting approaches to creating character details that I've ever seen.  The focus was on "Why are you fighting the Soviets?"  You could be a Right-Wing Militiaman, a disgruntled Trotskyist, or whatever but whatever your motivation, you had a reason to fight the Soviet occupation.

Quote from: RPGPunditYup, exactly. All this shows to me is that JHKim doesn't seem to have a real idea of how immersion works.

Because typically, you can't have one guy experiencing immersion while everyone else is just playing a game. Immersion is a group phenomenon that happens in the moments where the group synergy and the GM's game is so good/running so smoothly that you "forget" that you're only in a game.

This is a good point, even though I think you and JimBob aren't being quite fair to John's position. John Kim's complaint, which I can identify with, is that immersion is harmed whenever you have to make your character do something just to conform to the social needs of the game. As John M. and others have pointed out, though, the way to deal with this is to try, as far as possible, to create characters that support the social assumptions about interparty relations, character morality, and engagement with the scenario/setting. And if you're a design-in-play type who can't make any guarantees about how their character will act under impulse, then I'd suggest gritting your teeth and going with the flow until you incorporate those assumptions into your vision of the character. This does mean that the group needs to be clear about those assumptions from the start.

But back to the Pundit's point: even if it is socially okay for PCs to wander off in different directions, I agree that breaking up the party is harmful to immersion. This is something that hadn't occurred to me before--I thought it was just a headache for the GM. But if I'm in the game to immerse, then every minute the GM spends dealing with a party that I've split off of is a minute that I'm depriving myself of the enjoyment of playing my character.

So I'm getting some concrete lessons out of this discussion. First, I've played with John's Harn group, and I think I really need to hammer out those social assumptions. I can think of one occasion where my character would probably have tried to attack his if I'd been at the session. (I'd have intervened when he killed Clothotis, as described here.) Would it have been cool, or a group-busting moment? I don't know.

Second, it points up a weakness of the Burning Sands game I've been playing. The GM has been very accommodating in letting everyone go their own ways in the city but the result has been 3-4 parallel games that only barely, occasionally intersect, with a lot of downtime when you're not in the limelight. Something needs to be done--if not bringing everyone together as a party, then at least focusing the characters more onto a central issue so that they can affect each other from different angles.

Unfortunately it seems there is broad agreement with what I've said, this is bad because we learn the most about what we think, what others think, and the world, by discussing things with those who strongly disagree with us. I think perhaps not many people have read John Kim's actual post, only my response to it. Please do read what he's said.

Still, many interesting points have been made.

Vellorian tells us that in his game, splitting the party leads to character death. My own players joke in-character, "in a movie, if a party splits, the smaller party will be wiped out by the monster or enemy."

The real issue, though, is not the success of the mission, or the survival of the characters, or any of that - it's that every player wants to have fun. That's why we complain about Attention Junkies, because if that player gets all the GM and group's attention, then probably some or all of the others aren't having any fun. It's why we complain about splitting the party, because part of the group has to wait while the rest of the group's actions are resolved.

Basically, the "immersion" and "splitting the party" issues are, "I don't want to sit around doing nothing while someone else is having fun. I want to join in." Two online games I've been in this year, we fired the GM because we spent most of our time watching witty repartee between his NPCs, and his uber-NPCs doing everything for whatever the mission was. If we wanted to just watch, we'd turn on the tv; the whole point of roleplaying is that everyone gets to participate, to affect what happens.

But of course sometimes our fun is watching other people have fun. In my tabletop game, two weeks in a row one player had his character dominate the action. One time the other two players hated it, the second time they loved it. The first time, he was in the next jail someone, beating another prisoner until he piss and shit himself. The second time, he wrestled a guy with a helicopter backpack, the other two were participating, but one curious guy pressed the Big Red Button on the thing's controls, and the booster rocket kicked in and took the two guys out of their reach. He ended up wrestling him in the air and kicking him down into a lake.

So in both cases two players spent a lot of time watching a third have fun without them. But in the first case, there was no possibility of their participating, and the fight was just thump, thump, not very exciting. In the second case, they participated at the beginning and at the end, and it was an action of theirs (pressing the Big Red Button) that took the two away, not some GM-imposed prison wall between them. So they hated the first session, and loved the second.

That's why I say that splitting the party doesn't have to mean that the other players sit around bored. You can split the party and deal with one character's actions, so long as the other players have some chance of influencing it all at some point or other, and so long as the separate action is really entertaining, like the James Bond-style wrestling a guy in the air for his helicopter backpack.

Notice that how "immersed" the players are in their characters doesn't come into this. That's because it's irrelevant. The important thing is that every player wants to join in, wants to participate in the action. If they can't participate, then the other action had better be fucking entertaining to watch

Regarding characters and their personality traits, even when I was a teenager running some really crappy dungeon crawls, I had each player describe for their character, "Philosophy, Demeanour, Likes, Dislikes, Habits, Hobbies, Ambitions." Of course there's always a guy who will put, "Bob the Fighter, likes swords, dislikes blunt swords, habits always sharpens his sword, hobbies looking for a better sword, ambitions to have a vorpal sword." But with a bit of encouragement, people can make this stuff more diverse, "likes short drinks and tall women, dislikes being bossed around, habits swears a lot, hobbies home brewing, ambitions to have a vorpal sword."

How do you bring this into play? Well, both the GM and the player are responsible for that. So the GM of Bob the Fighter could present the right situations. "You are in a tavern, there is a tall barmaid selling liver squeezings shots... While you are drinking, the Sergeant walks into the tavern, looks you up and down and tells you for the fourth time today to polish your boots... While trying to seduce the barmaid with smooth words and poetry, you stumble as you try to find a rhyme for "nice tits"... While drinking, you remember that you have better stuff at home..." So the GM encourages the player to remember their character's personality aspects, and play them out.

And of course there are games like Risus and FATE, where Cliches or Aspects may include a character's personality, and where the player is rewarded in terms of game mechanics for describing how the personality applies here and now.

Which personality aspects fit with which takes up whole fields of study, psychology, managerial stuff, etc. I don't think an rpg can do much about this. It comes down to the players wanting to have fun as a group. Anyone who's run convention games multiple times with pre-generated characters knows that you can get two people play the same list of traits in completely different ways. A character be described as "Truthful." They may be a person who believes that the truth must always be told, or one who is happy to lie, they're just really crap at it and stutter nervously as they do it. Both are the same in terms of game mechanics, "Truthful, -3 to Fast Talk rolls." But they roleplay very differently, and it's entirely possible for two Truthful characters to have a huge argument about the right course of action, one based on their conviction that lying is wrong, and the other based on their knowledge that they're really bad at lying.

The important thing is the fun of the group. The idea that this must always be at the expense of the fun of the individual is a silly one, like the related idea that the GM is out to get the players and ruin their fun. And the fun of the group can include intra-party conflict, if the players like that. Years of comics about game groups, and the semi-parody game Hackmaster, tell us that heaps of game groups have constant intra-party conflict and love it!

It's not a matter of picking character personality traits that do or don't conflict with each-other. The fact that two players can read the same character sheet and roleplay the character so different shows that the important thing is the attitude of the player. Any player can interpret the character's traits in ways which will take the character away from the other characters and the adventure, or towards them. Even something as silly as the alignment systems can do this. "Why is the Lawful Good paladin hanging out with these Chaotic Evil assassins? Because he hopes to reform them, making them Lawful Good. He realises this won't happen instantly, and he is patient. In the meantime he will try to make their actions less Evil, at least Neutral. The paladin is not mindlessly Lawful Good, he has a long-term view. Though he may help them do harm today, by hanging with them, moderating their Evil and Chaos, he hopes to minimise the damage they do, and in the end turn them to Law and Good." Hey, that rationalisation works in foreign policy, why not in an adventuring party? :cool:

It's all in the players' interpretations of their characters. They can interpret their characters' traits and personalities in ways which split the party and ruin the mission, or in ways which unite the party and help the mission. If you find that in every game group you're in, your interpretations always take you away from the party and the mission... that says something about you, not about "immersion," which is utterly unrelated.

"But it's what my character would do!" is a weak defence, because characters, if they're meant to resemble real people, they won't be entirely consistent and predictable. The thing that made me spin out in anger yesterday may not make me do so today. The kind of woman I lusted after, the religious beliefs I had, how much violence I thought was morally right to catch some murderer - these things all change, not simply over years, but from day to day. Humans do have consistency, but they're consistent within a broad range. For example, I am essentially a "loner", being introverted, and preferring individual action over group action; I'd rather take care of things myself. But in several years involved with the military, while in the field, I never once wandered away from the section, except to take a crap. Though essentially a "loner", I am quite capable of group action. I tend not to go to parties, but when I do go, I bring a slab of beer for everyone to share, and I talk to everyone there if I can.

People have personality traits, but unless those traits are pathological, unless those traits are so extreme as to be a mental illness, people can from time to time ignore them and act against them. Personality traits tell us what you usually like to do, and feel most comfortable doing; they don't tell us what you'll do each and every day.

Quote from: RPGPunditYup, exactly. All this shows to me is that JHKim doesn't seem to have a real idea of how immersion works.

Because typically, you can't have one guy experiencing immersion while everyone else is just playing a game. Immersion is a group phenomenon that happens in the moments where the group synergy and the GM's game is so good/running so smoothly that you "forget" that you're only in a game.

I think the misunderstanding here is the idea that I was talking about one lone player among everyone else playing the game.  If you look in the comments, you'll see the example of myself and Jim -- both fairly immersive -- in our played out fight.  

My point was that there are style differences.  In this case, Cullen and Jim and I were fairly immersive -- but Mark and Liz were not.  And Mark had a problem with how we were playing things out.  

A problem in this thread is that JimBobOz took an offhand comment about "splitting the party" and took it as the centerpiece -- as if I was arguing that immersive characters are always loners who never interact with other PCs.  

The point of my comment was that "splitting the party" is a common example of an unspoken metagame assumption.  Many players, in my experience, assumed that the party was never supposed to split up, even when there were good in-game reasons for the characters to want to.  

In general, I'm not in favor of splitting apart PCs in tabletop games.  I prefer to maximize interaction.  However, I don't favor trying to accomplish that by an unspoken rule to ignore in-game logic to keep the PCs together.  I think it's much better to provide a good in-game reason to stick together.  This is not just something for individual character creation -- it should be considered for the game itself.  In particular, I suggest that it's best not to rely on "the PC's are good friends with each other" as a reason.  (For more details, I'd plug my article for Jonathan Walton's journal PUSH, Vol. 1.)  

Even good friends have reasons to leave each others' proximity for short or even extended periods of time.  So it's better to have really strong reasons outside of the characters to stay together.  For example, the PCs could all be ordered to be together if they're part of the military or similar hierarchical organization.  They could have other social ties such as being family members.  In my Water-Uphill World game, the PCs were all kids from Earth -- they were the only ones who knew each other in an alien world.

edited to correct URL formatting

(John Kim, you can do links in forums by (url=http://link.com)linkname(/url), replacing the round brackets by square brackets... though probably, like me, you post both to LJs and to forums, and sometimes mix up the different formatting... I keep putting and so on in forums, why can't they use the same bloody formatting!)

Now, as to the comment, I find I can reply basically as I did in my LJ post on this topic.

Correlation is not causation. The cause of parties sticking together is not "non-immersive, thin character play", but simply the social nature of roleplaying. It's easiest for players to be social, everyone having fun, if their characters are also social and sticking together.

As I noted here, I don't think gamers are really against splitting the party as such; they're just against being bored. In my other roleplaying posts I talk about sessions where the party was split: one where the non-acting PCs were bored, and one where they loved it. The real issue was not whether or not they were participating at that particular moment, but whether they'd been able to choose whether to participate, and whether the events they were merely watching were interesting to them or not. Players want choice and fun in their social game. Most of the complaints about bad gaming are lack of choice - "GM railroading", "Attention Junkies", "stupid rules" , etc - and lack of fun - "man that game was depressing", etc.

"Offhand references" are important, because when discussing things abstractly - as you did in your LJ post about "immersion" - those offhand comments provide the applied examples of the pure ideas. If the applied examples are wrong, then that strongly suggests you need to look at the ideas themselves.

The applied examples are missing the point of roleplaying for most people, which is having social fun.