To follow up a bit on my post about Active and Reactive play, and to head in a sort of tangential direction I wanted to talk a bit about non-optimal choices as roleplaying.
One of the things I find fun is simply rocking the boat. Causing trouble, at least interestingtrouble, is fun. I feel like saying this might cause some people to think I’m disruptive when I play. But the core of what I’m getting at isn’t to be a disruptive player, it’s to be an active participant in the unfolding of the plot.
D&D traditionally has a pretty limited amount of ways the player can actually significantly affect the plot. Your interaction is all done through your character, and it’d take some really innovative thinking to truly break out of the network of options your Dungeon Master usually has laid out for you. What you can do is tangle things up a bit — So you’re supposed to deliver a package, but you take a peek at it when you shouldn’t have. Presumably a minor thing like that wouldn’t cause a serious impediment to your relations, either among the party or with the employer, but it does lead to a more dramatic situation. Not appropriate for all character archetypes, of course. This type of mischief always reminds me of Tasselhoff in DragonLance.
There are other appropriate sorts of complicating factors that can arise from other character concepts. If your character follows a strict code or belongs to an organization (including a family — one of the reasons why I think playing an Orphan is a cop-out), it’s easy to introduce quandaries to him, forcing sacrifices that later may need to be paid for. In general I think of this as non-optimal play. Usually it’s fairly easy to identify the path of least resistance to the plot. But the most interesting situations usually don’t arise along that path.
Many D&Ders see Roleplaying as one of two things: Non-optimal choices, and / or characterization through speech and description. Naturally it’s not either, but the two extremes are common to see. The first is the guy who plays a character with low attribute scores and makes bad build choices specifically to say he’s roleplaying his character (I’m afraid I’m turning into this guy!), and the second is the guy with the killer build who peppers speech with “thee” and “thou”.
So I saw this post at the 20′ by 20′ room which leads to this post. Some pretty cool and great ideas contained in this latter post:
One of the Nobilis design “laws” is the [Insert Random Flowery Name Here] Law, which goes something like, “strength is gained through adversity.” This is the model for the Restrictions system, where characters get a restriction like, “I Freak Out Whenever I’m Around Jell-o” (NOTE: not a real example) and then gain extra resource points when their Jell-o Allergy causes them real difficulties. … in Nobilis, individual players are encouraged to take responsibility for getting their characters into situations where they are trapped in a room with Bill Cosby and a lot of Jell-o Pudding Pops. So Nobilis uses Restrictions as an underhanded way of giving players greater narrative control than they traditionally have, but only to cause a world of hurt for themselves (and gain resource points in the process).
…
Clinton does something equally cool with Keys in The Shadow of Yesterday, which are sorta like Restrictions in that they give you resources points (XP) in return for narrating certain things, but Keys are character development goals that must be met (”Destroy All the World’s Jell-o”) instead of challanges to give yourself. …
The post goes on a bit to develop a whole idea of things for character development, although it does have the one pitfall of Assigning Weird and Unusual Names to Make Things Sound Really Cool (see: Chakras. Gah.). Still, solid ideas and I’m really considering how I can incorporate something like this when I pick up my campaign again.
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