Is taking responsibility for your character really so hard?

[Mandacaru]

Those last points make me sympathize a little with your guy. For him, it seems, the contest was to jump in and get the sword to the guy's throat. I have a feeling that he might have expected that part to be more difficult than perhaps it was and might well have been prepared for his PC to fail if it led in a new direction.

But to achieve what he set out to do so quickly and have another PC run away, well perhaps to him that seemed like turning up to a football match, the other team haven't shown up and there's a note from his own teammates (already gone) asking him to collect the cup while he's there. Yawn.

What do you do with a defeated enemy? If this is a defining moment for his character, he might well prefer to have more time to think about it. He might well want to use dice to decide, as has been suggested, or to have the GM decide for him. If he isn't enjoying making that decision, well it's supposed to be fun, why force him to decide? Why not cut from that scene to another, letting him know that what he decided is going to crop up later.  You say that you have opted for one way or the other, but he is still allowed to change that when it does come up.

Then it does come up and in fact you can still leave it open. Say he hears that he is "Wanted" for the murder of this guy (or better still some complete innocent is). He could have the dilemma of owning up or not to something for which someone else is going to be executed (whether he did it or no). He could have left the scene but someone else did the dirty. The guy could in fact still be alive. To me, this situation (of course I'll not have read it exactly right for your specific game, so apologies for that) can be left to be decided at a critical moment, or better still to remain a mystery forever.

Those options of what to do with the guy seem to me just to be closing doors about who his character is, not necessarily opening any new ones up. This sort of decision is in a way postponed chargen (as actually most play should be to some degree). When you're making your character, you might want a little room to think about which to choose when offered the options "Coward" and "Murderer".

Just my thoughts.
Sam.

p.s. As for his looking through the rules for the 'right' course of action, to me that was just avoiding making a decision he didn't want to have to make there and then.

[Mike Holmes]

Hmmm. Perhaps you should just cut at those points? That is, it seems to me that, for the players described, the interesting parts of the scenes are done at this point. What does he do with the guy? Does it really matter? We cut to the next scene, and leave the NPCs fate undetermined. We know the PC got the better of him and that's all that matters.

Think in terms of movies. Often this sort of thing happens. If it's not about the protagonist, then it often simply isn't established what happens to NPCs who have been defeated.

What the player wants, apparently, is a new situation to be thrust into so he can have another opportunity to strike yet another cool pose. This is what play is "about" for this player. Now, whether or not this'll work with the agenda of the rest of the group, I can't say. But if you want the player to be engaged with some other part of play, then you're going to have to "teach" them what's fun about it like you instruct any other player - mainly, IMO, by using a system that supports that sort of play.

Mike

[jburneko]

This is a completely facinating idea.  Have we identified a sub-type of The Dream?  Portrait Play, "I don't know how this turns out or even what I'm trying to accomplish but I know what I look like doing it."

Might be time for a new thread.

Jesse

[S'mon]

Portrait play - interesting idea, I certainly have images in my head of favourite PCs that I would love to enact in play, yet have no real idea of what would satisfactorily follows that portrait, and have a sneaking suspicion that trying to actually enact that fantasy - eg leading the cavalry charge on my white horse against the massed ranks of the foe - wouldn't be nearly as satisfactory in actuality as in my head.

[John Kim]

This is a completely facinating idea.  Have we identified a sub-type of The Dream?  Portrait Play, "I don't know how this turns out or even what I'm trying to accomplish but I know what I look like doing it."

Might be time for a new thread.

First of all, Jesse has indeed started another thread for this, in the GNS forum, entitled http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=15568">Portrait Play, a subset of The Dream?.  I'll be following up there for the most part.  

For this specific case, it seems to me that the player is not interested in tactical challenges.  i.e. He's interested in coming up to put a sword to the guy's throat, but isn't interested in finding a way to beat the guy up afterwards.  Similarly, he wasn't interested in figuring out how to beat the soldiers around the caged captive.  The GM should either provide guidance (i.e. "Here's a good plan") or simply abstract the results (i.e. "OK, you beat the guards.").