People don’t have character sheets.
That is to say that people are emergent within the context of their lives. Perhaps characters in an RPG are better expressed not as statistics on a page but rather as imagined beings whose qualities and weaknesses emerge within the context of the game’s situation. The world proposes characters and we take their role to discover what they might achieve.
Having designed, using Mythras, characters for my game I immediately feel as though they are caught in amber. Static things when I wanted living entities. Defined and reduced to numbers when I was seeking to have them emerge from play. We haven’t even begun to animate them but they are already lifeless puppets rather than imagined beings. In play, we have got this all backwards. I have given in to habit.
We don’t need the mechanisms first. We need the animate beings who emerge from our worlds. We need them to act and interact. Only when we need to rule in the favour of one or another of these animate beings might we invoke a means to decide. That could be as simple as a single throw of the dice, or a turning of the card, as an oracle in a solo game is so commonly used.
The rules are holding me back! I seek to play in an imagined world within the role of a character from that world. What I have is a page of statistics which I am trying to animate in an Frankenstein-like effort of analytical science. I am going back to the intuitions of my right-hemisphere and pulling back from the impositions of my left-.
It seems to me that if we begin with rules, mechanisms, and statistics then we bypass the creative imagination that I so deeply desire to invoke. Perhaps those from the ilk of Free Kriegspiel are, even in their near-total rejection of mechanical system, closer to my goal. I do not seek to excise the left-hemisphere’s skill with system but I do seek to place it back under the tutelage of the right-.
My next step is to begin to play in the world. To take Little Fox out of the page, away from the mechanisms of the wargame, if only until I sense the need to resolve questions with rulings. That will likely not take long but the essence of this experiment is to challenge all the sacred beliefs we hold about RPGs. My first belief was that characters need quantifying. Instead perhaps they are qualitative entities with purposes of their own.
Game on!
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The idea of keeping all the rules and stats behind the GMs screen or even playing systemless with just rulings by the GM and maybe some simple randomization is intriguing. It sounds like it might allow more immersion and identification with the character.
On the other hand, the tactician in me would argue that even though real people don’t have precise, numerical knowledge of their own abilities relative to others’, or to a task they’re facing, they do have a tremendously greater amount of information from their senses and experience about the situation they are in than can possibly be conveyed by a GM’s description. Having the information on the character sheet and a quick numeric assessment of a difficulty rating, bonus, or penalty to a roll evens out that imbalance, and allows more meaningful choices by the player for their character.
I played around with the Mythic GM emulator for some solo play a little while back, and it seems like it could provide some middle ground. Based on a gut feeling of the likelihood of something, it can make a randomized ruling on how it turns out.
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To be clear, I would not choose to play ‘systemless’, even if such a thing were possible. But there’s a world of difference between how we use the mechanisms of character design. Some games start (like Mythras) with random dice rolls. I am leaning more towards descriptive processes, placing mechanisms second. I question needing a quantified sheet up front.
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Interesting perspective. I generally find more creativity within constraints. Without mechanical and setting boundaries, I get unfocused and indecisive.
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Agreed. I am not talking about having no boundaries. My imagined world sets up immediate boundaries – e.g. this is a primal fantasy solo game, so no Space Marines (obviously).
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Yeah, gonna have to disagree with you on this one, although I think that you should play the way you feel it. 🙂
The way I see it we can sit around and tell collaborative stories, or we can play a game.
Can’t play a game without rules. “Here’s you. Your move is like this. Your goal is this.”
Make a character according to the rules. Now you know what you’re good at.
For me, I prefer to have personality and background coalesce through play.
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Wasn’t aware I had said, “Don’t play a game.” That’s not what I wrote about. I wrote about playing solo, just me, and I said, “We don’t need mechanisms first,” in relation to creating characters. We might well choose them second, but I prefer to start with a concept first. I am not sure I need a sheet defining everything up front when I play solo.
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Reading your previous post, I wondered if FKR might reappear 🙂 Could you use it as a “prototype” while you’re getting to grips with your character?
Something like the Landshut system might work well – you could build a character using only adjectives, play for a while and then come back to a more crunchy system once the character themselves has been fleshed out. Hopefully by then they’ll be able to resist the flattening effect of the character sheet.
Thinking about it, I wonder if this would be a good way to create characters in a group game too?
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Hmm, without any rules or constraints, you are just daydreaming or having a lucid dream. I see rules and mechanics as guides rather than a prescription: feel free to use those that you want to use and discard the rest. Especially for solo play – rules really are even more gauzy. But when playing with others, the rules and mechanics create the underlying assumptions of the world and how you react to it. Without that, it will be like a game I overheard while driving Boy Scouts back from camp. They kept having scenarios, and there was a constant escalation of what they could do as there were no boundaries or rules: purely make-believe. It was fun, and there were no limits.
One of the things I like about RPGs: if it is not in the rules, then there is nothing saying you can’t do something. Most RPG character sheets stress the things you do well and are not “this is everything you can do and nothing else”. Classic Traveller, for instance, gives basically all weapon skills at 0 so a character can use any weapon without a negative DM. The Fantasy Trip anyone (well, other than magic users and their need for silver weapons) can use any weapon, but if you don’t have the skill you use 4 dice against your dexterity instead of 3.
But: this is YOUR game, and I am enjoying your thought processes on what you are doing and trying to do. It is always good to see how other people are doing things!
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It’s funny, a couple of comments seem to interpret my meaning as, “Play without rules!” That’s not what I said. I am talking about a) me playing solo, b) character creation, and c) not starting with mechanisms… but I am very much a person who plays with mechanisms (rules). I just question the idea that I need to list everything on my sheet, quantify in a static manner the character before I play. In a group game, it depends on the players but this is not a group game… it’s me playing solo and experimenting. Sorry if that wasn’t entirely clear.
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apparently not entirely clear! but in re-reading with that in mind, I see it now.
and for some reason none of the comments before mine were not visible when I posted. Pretty sure I had this on the browser and wanted to respond, then a day later finally did and did not see the other comments. Should always hit refresh first!
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