Do you think you need to justify your character’s actions?



Matt over at lategaming.com made a post on the blog there about roleplayers making character choices that seem “out of character”. Originally I was just going comment but then I started scribbling and couldn’t stop.

The gist of Matt’s article is that often players make their characters act “out of character” and justification after the fact can be good (or not required, I’m not sure what his exact position is).

Normally in the groups I play, we define “out of character” to be something quite different: normally the use of knowledge that your character doesn’t know or doesn’t have access to. I don’t like the idea of justifying in-game character choices. In the past, I’ve argued long and hard with another friend of mine who held this theory of the “20/80 character-player split”.

No justification should be required, ever. Maybe it’s just the way I see roleplaying games, but for me it’s not about creating a collaborative story, but exploring and experiencing a story. The players, normally, are not actors, they do not play to entertain others (especially the GM, in fact the GM is there to entertain the players). They are there to be with friends, play a game and roleplay. If you really want to create a collaborative story (where things are completely justified with as much context as the players need), I’ve only play one system that does that: Universalis. It has no GM, players can take over and introduce new characters as needed, etc.

Justification is only for the GM and other viewers (potentially other players). If it is required, just ask the player to justify it out of the game, perhaps to the other players. “Yea, I decided not to do it because my character had a change of heart… he just deep down wasn’t evil enough”. That should be enough. The thing is, as roleplayers we’re generally not trying to create a consistent and complete story but to partake in a group-telling of an experience. You can’t compare a story created through roleplaying with a novel or a movie. At the very least, we can’t do rewrites to make it into a consistent and complete story.

In the normal/traditional model of roleplaying, the fun is the experience of roleplaying, of controlling one character. As a player I dislike things that force me to act “out of character” as describe it by Matt. It ruins the enjoyment of roleplaying. Normally in our group, if someone starts acting “out of character”, the players themselves will call them up on it. Peer pressure works wonders. However if the GM and/or system *force* you to act out of character… that pisses me. Too many rules, weird restrictions, GM ignoring player histories after he asked for them, etc.

But most of the time, if you know what your getting into before a game, you can expand the definition of what “character” is. For example, when I played D&D for the first time, I really got into the mode but the concept of “character” in this case included out-of-game/meta-mechanics and strategy. Hence I enjoyed it as fully as I would, something like Nobilis who’s rules are totally open to interruption and everything is about roleplaying.

The standpoint I took to my friend, was that players are 100% character and 100% players. There is no split there, only parallel tracks. At one point we are gamers, working on strategies in combat or networking in social courts but on another track we ask ourselves, what does our character really know and would my character do that? This is a decision of the player and shouldn’t need to be justified to anyone. How a player enjoys a game should be up to him, no?

Of course there is always some fudging (okay… let’s call it cheating) and sometimes a player makes a choice that can be deemed completely “out-of-character”, but you can’t fault them. They may simply have not wanted to play that, or they didn’t like the way things were going. Players should never be forced to play something they do no want. I curse White-Wolf for introducing that particularly bad meme. Quote from Vampire: the Redemption:

“Some players might not want to role-play frenzy, but the Beast is part of being Vampire. Storytellers should encourage players to portray the frenzy in its full, brutal horror. If they cannot, the Storyteller should take control of a character and decided on her actions until the frenzy ends.”

This is so anti-player, it shocks me. But then again, White-Wolf puts itself above all other games because it’s not a “roll-play”, though in my humble opinion it is about 10 years behind the best indie games. But that’s an aside.

Take the John D character from Matt’s post:

…played by John D, was given an artifact that when activated would give him the power of a Tenth of Hell. The activation was an old curse which, in order to enact, he had to gather the right hands of thirteen friends. The character did this, betraying thirteen comrades and escaping suspicion due to John’s silver tongue and then decided not to enact the curse after all. Too risky apparently. These were the actions of an ostensibly good but perhaps selfish or power hungry character.

Why should the player be forced to raise hell if, as a player, he didn’t want to because he wouldn’t enjoy it?

And he feared to raise up what he could not put down. It made his evil actions which were out of character all the more tragic when it was made apparent that his primary trait was cowardice.

A long time back I posted about character backgrounds and why you don’t really need them. Parts of it are relevant to this discussion I think. Some quotes from it:

You do not need to explain your character stats, thats part of the system…

and

The system and setting should provide enough for you to roleplay your character otherwise, IMHO, the system fails.