Design - What does the player/character/gm do?

[Zak Arntson]

Just in case someone isn't familiar with it, I'll open with one of the standard questions you give a designer: The idea's great and all, but what do you do?

This should really be separated out into three questions, addressing the player, the character and the GM. They really are three separate entities, and they all have different goals and drives in play.

For example, if we take Dungeons & Dragons (using the rulebook as evidence of designers' goals):

Q. What  does the player do?
A. Control her character, make tactical decisions to improve her character, roll dice when survival and adversity is challenged. (i.e., win tactical miniatures battles and survive dungeon traps)

Q. What does the character do?
A. Overcome challenges, primarily through combat. Increase in power over time. (i.e., fight monsters, take their stuff, go up in level)

Q. What does the GM do?
A. Provide a challenge to match the players' power level. (i.e., run the dungeon)

Using these three questions should help design, especially the split between player and character.

Here's another example, this time using InSpectres. Again, inferring design goals based on the rules:

Q. What  does the player do?
A. Roll dice for your character in difficult and stressful situations, and laugh at it. (i.e., poor joe blow fights monsters, impeded by stress and confessionals)

Q. What does the character do?
A. Tries to keep his job, as weird and stressful as it is.

Q. What does the GM do?
A. Provide the initial problem, keep the characters' lives troublesome throughout dealing with the problem.

You can see a statement of Jared's (and a design goal) in the answers: You can only make the player or the character laugh, but not both.

I came upon this method, explicitly, thinking about this year's Iron Game Chef. I know I've done it before, without asking the questions directly, simply through my experience with design and play. But I think making the questions very obvious and asking them up front is a great tool to focusing game design.

That's all, really.

[Astrivian]

There is a certain ammount of schizophrenia that encompasses many devout players i have noticed.  The barrier between player and character gets fuzzy after a while and players begin to 'feel' what happens to their characters.  I have seen players break down in tears when their characters die, for example.  

Indicating that there is a separation between player and character is important to mention in the introduction of a game, i think.  Many neophyte players do not understand the difference; either thinking that their character is sitting at a table staring at others like the player, or assuming that the player is the character.  Either assumption is dangerious for game play if taken too seriously.

First, to make too much of a distinction causes a great deal of the immaginative fun.  The shared imagined space cannot be formed because players cannot get beyond the corporealness of the game itself: they are sitting around a table with sheets of paper and dice, or whatever the game calls for.  

Second, the latter assumption results in the schizophrenia i mentioned earlier.  If players do not make any distinction at all between who they are and their character, you get people killing their parents because it will give them a lot of experience.  

The trick is to maintain a balance between these two extreme assumptions.  Players must identify with their characters but not so much that they feel emotionally crushed if their character fails, is hurt, or dies.  This player/character relationship can be very usefull for didactic purposes, but i will get into that later.

Also, is there a real term for this phenonomon that i dont know?

astrivian