Do PCs ever talk to eachother?

[TonyLB]

But why should relationships be important to "whatever kind of play that you have"?

[Eric J.]

Alright, I'll retreat again from 'whatever kind of play that you have' to 'many kinds of play that you can have.'

By lucky card is that relationship is such a broad term that I can use it for lots of stuff.

For every game with multiple PCs that I can think of, PC to PC relationships are important.  I mean, if they interact or not is part of their relationship.

My point, if I have one, is something like:

In character PC to PC communication is important for completeness of game (in solidifying and validating interPC relationships).  How can interPC communication be encouraged?

I think that sometimes PC to PC relationships are based more in the metagame than in the in-game.

So yeah.  Thanks you guys.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Empyrealmortal

[nellist]

NeelK wrote:

Because the player characters are inevitably better-realized than the NPCs, and you can get richer and more subtle interactions between round characters than between flat ones. I'd really like to figure out a way to get rid of NPCs altogether, and make the set of PCs be the set of important characters..

Which seems to me to be at the heart of the observation. OOC is felt, IMO, to be less well realized, or a method of realizing characters that is less effective than IC. I am not entirely convinced of this myself but am whole convinced that IC speech is a good, fun, thing. But this conviction is not really supported by a specific reason. IC is hard to do, it is difficult ot maintain and it is often very "unrealistic" - long speeches in the middle of combat, people saying things that just do not work, the nod and nudge body language of the troll example, being unable to be a person more eloquent than oneself. There are a whole lot of problems with actually doing IC.

Trying to draw on analogous situation where we might see something useful - most plays are almost all dialogue (IC), a lot of fiction is but a lot less, comics seem to use a lot of IC dialogue. I think movies, specifically action movies, probably use the least dialogue  - or use it in a way that most resembles roleplaying use with a few choice phrases being what would be said IC.

That is not progessing things much. Poll-wise I would like to encourgae more IC speech in my games and would wlecome any system that would facilitate it - from Dying Earth's taglines, to Puppetland's "say what you say"

Keith Nellist
Keith [/quote]

[neelk]

NeelK wrote:

Because the player characters are inevitably better-realized than the NPCs, and you can get richer and more subtle interactions between round characters than between flat ones. I'd really like to figure out a way to get rid of NPCs altogether, and make the set of PCs be the set of important characters..

Which seems to me to be at the heart of the observation. OOC is felt, IMO, to be less well realized, or a method of realizing characters that is less effective than IC. I am not entirely convinced of this myself but am whole convinced that IC speech is a good, fun, thing. But this conviction is not really supported by a specific reason. IC is hard to do, it is difficult ot maintain and it is often very "unrealistic" - long speeches in the middle of combat, people saying things that just do not work, the nod and nudge body language of the troll example, being unable to be a person more eloquent than oneself. There are a whole lot of problems with actually doing IC.

Actually, I'm not talking about IC versus OOC -- I'm talking about PC versus NPC. Regardless of whether a player chooses to talk about their character from a first person in-character point-of-view, or whether they stand outside and authorially psychoanalyze the character for the entertainment of the other players, my experience is that the PCs have more depth and nuance than the NPCs do. This isn't surprising, mainly because the PCs a) see a lot more play time, and b) have an entire player devoted to making up stuff about them. That's why I usually find PC-PC interactions more interesting than PC-NPC interactions: the players have a richer palette to draw action with.

[TheLHF]

This is not really a split from the Red-Box D&D Example of Play thread.

Here's my question?  Is it just me where it seems that PCs don't talk to eachother as much as the player talk out of game.

Sometimes in-game conversations seem incomplete to me.

So... either link me to the appropriate thread if this is a clone or share your experiences.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Pyron

In games I run, I try to encourage IC comunication as much as I can, both between characters and to NPCs.

I think something that should be noted however, is the context of the communication. For example, if one player asks another to teach their character how to dance while the characters take a month long boat trip, it's ok to say, "Hey Fred, will your PC teach my PC the Dance skill?" On the other hand, if your PC needs to lean how to dance in the next 10 minutes or the world will end, I would rule that you must say the in character.

One of the more amusing games I've run was an impromptu HeroQuest game. The characters were a scholar, a petty noble and a fisher woman. The petty noble had a very nice, jeweled sword which she had NO idea how to use. So, as they are being chased by evil monsters, the scholar grabs the jeweled sword from the noble and hurls it toward the badies, hoping to distract them. The plan worked and bought the characters a little time. But for the next 20 minutes the scholar and the noble had a heated argument about the loss the the sword (while being chased by the monsters at the same time). The whole argument was IC and wonderful.

--Victor

[Callan S.]

Because the player characters are inevitably better-realized than the NPCs, and you can get richer and more subtle interactions between round characters than between flat ones. I'd really like to figure out a way to get rid of NPCs altogether, and make the set of PCs be the set of important characters....

Multiple PC's per player? Just a quick thought.

[John Kim]

Because the player characters are inevitably better-realized than the NPCs, and you can get richer and more subtle interactions between round characters than between flat ones. I'd really like to figure out a way to get rid of NPCs altogether, and make the set of PCs be the set of important characters....

Multiple PC's per player? Just a quick thought.

Also or alternatively, just set the game in a place which doesn't have a lot of people.  i.e. The PCs are the only people on a space station, say.  

Now, I say that as if it's trivial, and it is in a sense.  However, it also vastly changes the dynamic of how games are played out.  i.e. How do adventures work if the PCs aren't continually exposed to NPCs like patrons, victims in trouble, etc.?  This is a difficult problem that we should talk about more, perhaps.  A common element of many of my games has been to restrict what I call the Scope of the game.  I've never completely eliminated NPCs, but I reduce their number and importance to the story.  

A good exercise for doing this is to try playing in and/or writing LARPs.  LARPs don't have real "NPCs" -- since every character needs a person to play them.  Some LARPs have characters called "NPCs" where the player is given special instructions.  However, many don't have any such distinction -- the game is driven purely by players.

[Emily Care]

In character PC to PC communication is important for completeness of game (in solidifying and validating interPC relationships). How can interPC communication be encouraged?

I know my roleplaying experience is not quite the norm (see these threads for more examples), but intercharacter interaction is central to our games.  'Course all three of us play all the characters so there isn't really the kind of distinction between pc and npc you're talking about.  More, really of primary and secondary or supporting characters. This makes our situation similar to the LARPs John described, but with fewer people.

Here's an example from last night's session:

Some of our characters have been off on a (misguided) dragon hunt and were due to return home to our main covenant, Griffon's Aerie.  It's been months since we played at GA, so we took some time to check in with all the characters there.  We went down our list of covenfolk (servants, essentially) and mages and talked briefly about what they've been up to and had some intercharacter interactions as appropriate.  

We remembered that we'd had a new family come to the covenant, so we got to name and describe them and see how they fit in to the community.  Turned out that most of them had formed connections with our old covenfolk.  The father in the family, Dumitru the shoemaker, had become friends with our cartwright Willem.  Willem is a quiet fellow so we determined that Dumitru is a talkative bloke, giving us the new comedy relief duo of Willem & Dumitru.  When the "away team"'s arrival was signalled by a magical warning device, we got a nice scene where Willem baffled Dumitru and pulled his leg about how serious it was when he went to tell one of the mages about it.

This is small potatoes, I know, in terms of how most people look at role playing--no great conflict, no dramatic question being answered--but it's the meat and potatoes to me in gaming.  Little interactions like this flesh out the world and make it a place that I can believe in, so to speak. Or at least care about and want to return to and visit again and again. It's also just plain fun to have many different characters to play.

So, the things I'd say we do that might be helpful for other groups to encourage inter-pc interaction would be:

[*]play multiple characters, or if you only play a single character, give the character breath and life outside of aspects relating to "the plot"
[*]allow for time for your characters to have not only interactions, but inter-relationships, so that it doesn't feel forced & contrived to have them "have" to interact
[*]"check in" with all your characters and see what they might be doing, and what they would have to say to one another
[*]look to small moments in play to give your characters greater dimension.  Don't just dive in for the kill/exciting conflict/big moments.[/list:u]
Anyway, as has already been said in this thread, there are many approaches, some are more suited to inter-character interaction than others. In some, that's where the juiciest bits lie. Hope this gives insight into one such approach.

best,
Emily Care

[contracycle]

I also noted the excision of planning discussion in the reb box sample of play; it parenthetically notes "after a discussion with the others" and then goes back to what is happening in game.  IMO, this presumably tactical discussion did not occur in the game at all.

When I gamed as a teenager, OOC discussion was very much the norm.  the game existed primarily as a gamist, tactical exercise.  As we got older, more and more IC interactions appeared in game (somewhat reinforced by industry exhortations toward 'story' and in-character play), not least because we moved onto games that required more deception and strategy than simply firepower.  Subsequently play developed a much more IC style, even using formal indicators (like raising a hand) to indicate a conversation taking place OOC.

[GB Steve]

IC player communication is central to our games, and is partly why it takes so long to play anything. I ran a short horror scenario recently that I'd expect to be played at one sitting at a convention but with my group it took 3.

The PCs had all manner of discussions about anything and everything: their favourite TV shows, bondage and cowboys, go-karting, the state of the railways, what's the best beer.

These discussions are really important to me as a GM. They really get under the skin of the PCs and move them away from being pawns in a game to be real characters in their own right. And it gives me plenty of food for thought when developing the story. It's a bit like having Pulp Fiction as opposed to Death Wish.

[GreedIsGod]

The most insanely under-conversated thing I can imagine, both OOC and IC is tactics.  These people are risking their lives yet they don't make the slightest effort to communicate tactics, make use of terrain, coordinate attacks or learn from experience.  This is why the group fighting that would occur to any normal human being can take a dozen play sessions to ingraine into a group of PCs.
Whenver I play I always make a point of being the person who views things from the perspective of a rational, self-interested person which can lead to some rather long conversations when they try to convince me to walk through two weeks span of snow and kill some guys I've never even heard of.  Players who I don't play with often are usually astounded that anyone would question the orders of the Wizard/King/Village Elder.

[John Kim]

I was going to comment on a technique I used, but I started a separate thread on it, called http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13345">NxN PC Relation Chart.  

So, the things I'd say we do that might be helpful for other groups to encourage inter-pc interaction would be:

[*]play multiple characters, or if you only play a single character, give the character breath and life outside of aspects relating to "the plot"
[*]allow for time for your characters to have not only interactions, but inter-relationships, so that it doesn't feel forced & contrived to have them "have" to interact
[*]"check in" with all your characters and see what they might be doing, and what they would have to say to one another
[*]look to small moments in play to give your characters greater dimension.  Don't just dive in for the kill/exciting conflict/big moments.[/list:u]
Anyway, as has already been said in this thread, there are many approaches, some are more suited to inter-character interaction than others. In some, that's where the juiciest bits lie. Hope this gives insight into one such approach.

I agree with all this a lot.  It sounds much like some advice of Sarah Kahn and Al Petterson from an old RGFA article, http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/roleplay/encouraging_rp.html">How to Encourage ROLE-playing.  Something that happens often in some of my games is to just keep dragging the PCs together.  If two PCs are alone in a bar, then we'll have two of the other PCs walk in on them.