Portrait Play, a subset of The Dream?

[jburneko]

Hello,

I had started this thread

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=15488

over in Actual Play in an effort to get to the bottom of a particular player's behavior.  Here are some choice quotes from near the end of the thread.

I wrote:

It occured to me that this player is very very good at posturing. He is very very fond of presenting descriptions of his character as if they were somehow resolutions to a conflict or problem.

There was no hesitancy as he described his character skulking up to the character in the dark and emerging from the shadows to place his sword tip at his throat. He then beamed at me with this kind of "ta-da" look on his face as if to somehow suggest that the scene was now over and everything was resolved.

Brand replied:

I used to have a player like this. He lived for the moment of doing something cool, would get worked up about the doing something cool, would get to do the something cool, and then nothing.

I...asked the player, "Cool. What do you think should happen next?" in an attempt to figure out what the guy wanted to happen next.

Turns out he didn't have a freaking clue.  Not only hadn't he thought about what he'd do if he got in trouble or was going to lose, he hadn't even thought about what he would do if he was so utterly overwhelming that everyone fell on their knees before him. For him that one pose was the whole point of everything.

I replied:

Sounds, EXACTLY, like my guy! It's all: POSE! *beam*, followed by, "Oh shit, you mean the game isn't over?!!"

I've since thought of a THIRD player who exhibited this quality.  I once asked her to describe her character and she said, "People avoid her eyes out of respect for her power." Me: "What kind of power?"  Her: "You, know.  The POWER....  in her EYES...."  Me: "Uh, hmm... anything else about her?"  Her: "Yeah, she doesn't talk much.  She communicates everything with subtle gestures."  Me: "Communicates what?"  Her: "You know... the gestures."

In another game she was fond of having her character run off to the nearest beach and stare into the sunset.  Me:  "What are you trying to acomplish."  Her: "It's a deep, thoughtful stare, conveying her emotional turmoil."  Me: "Thoughts about what?  Turmoil over what?" Her: Totally blank stare.

In the original thread Mike Holmes suggested that this kind of play could be cattered to by having the GM cut away once the pose was described and then frame the player immediately into a new situation.  I called this: 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."

The problem is, I can't imagine this being functional.  Let's say you stuck four of these guys in a game together.  What would it look like?  Where would the motion of the game come from?  Is this a functional goal of play or disfunctional grab at something else the players are poor at articulating?

Jesse

[Callan S.]

You could consider it a form of scene framing initiated by the player. The idea isn't that he plays out the scene with his PC from there, it's that something else will do this for him. And he'll watch.

I think its simulationism, because they don't want to decide what happens next...they want to explore it. If they decide what happens next, that's not the same as finding out/exploring it. (actually I'd argue the supposed divide between deciding/exploring , but that wont help here)

It's sort of like those hilarious stories about the sims computer games, where someone sets up a house of death and destruction (pools with no ladders, etc). The player doesn't want to interact with it, once set up, they want to watch what happens next.

[Bret Gillan]

Could it be a general lack of understanding of constructing narratives? I mean, I think a lot of us are primarily educated on narrative by movies, and a lot of the more popular movies are just cool pose after cool pose, a sex scene, and then the bad guy dies.

I'm hesitant to call this a style of play instead of a misunderstanding of game goals.

[Danny_K]

I see this a lot in Vampire players -- there, it's easy to explain: they've seen vampire movies, they read the rule book with lots of pictures of guys in billowy trenchcoats standing on church roofs at midnight, they want to play that guy.  

Of course, in tabletop games that kind of a framed scene doesn't work too well, because you can only describe your guy brooding over the sleeping city for a certain amount of time before the GM gets restless.  

Interestingly, there are some games out there which explicitly make space for the player to "strike a pose" with their character -- Exalted, Prime Time Adventures, Wushu, but Vampire is not one of them.  Heck, in Exalted and Wushu, the player is actually rewarded for providing cool images in play.  

This experience suggests to me that "portrait play" isn't necessarily dysfunctional, but is possibly a strong motivator for players, and can be used in game-strengthening ways.

[Brand_Robins]

This experience suggests to me that "portrait play" isn't necessarily dysfunctional, but is possibly a strong motivator for players, and can be used in game-strengthening ways.

With both this and the "then the want someone else to run it" there is a degree to which you're right, and a degree to which you're not getting the full extent of the players that J and I are talking about.

In at least two of these three cases it is not about "pose and then pose again" or even "pose and then watch things happen" it is "pose once, and that is all you do, trying to do anything more results in confusion and/or stalling."

Most Vampire players I know, and most Exalted players, want to be that guy in the billowy trenchcoat, but they also want to do something else. Swing in with trenchcoat billowing and then kick ass, if nothing more. Exalted and Wushu get you part of your points for looking cool, but unless you do something with the pose it's usesless.

With these two it was swing in with trenchcoat billowing and then DO NOTHING. Even if someone else reacts to what you just did, you do not respond to their reaction. You leaf through books for 20 minutes instead, you finally get out the dice and roll -- with no extra narration or interest in the scene -- and then are unhappy until the next time you get to pose.

I do think that it has something to do with seeing "that guy" in movies and with a misunderstanding of how narratives (or at least shared narratives) work. Its a fascination with a single image or moment that toally overrides any other kind of story or creativity, and I really have trouble seeing it, in the extremes I described, as being functional.

[jburneko]

Brand describes the behavior correctly.  Posturing/Posing is Posturing/Posing across all modes of play, I'm sure.  We've all looked at a picture of some guy and said, "cool, I'd like to play him." With the idea that we are bringing SOME motion to that image even it's just to stalk around in our trenchcoats and gleaming glocks to blow away our werewolf enemies and say cheap throw away lines to passing sexy babes.

While these guys work hard at maneuving themselves into a position to pose and then have no further comitment, content or context to their action than the original image they're imitating.  Often they can't even articulate what they were trying to acomplish with their pose.

It's like their priority is to "get this image into play" and then get flustered and confused when they discover that their carefully placed image now has a context they have to address.

Jesse

[timfire]

What these people are doing is adding/exploring Color. If that's the point of play -- which for some people it is -- then it's Sim. (I had a great time playing Metal Opera, which for the most part was pure Color.) But like Jesse said, this type of thing can span all three CA's.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Actually, I'd love to design a game that supported and amplified this posing thing. The phenomenon is closely connected to "MTV aesthetics", and as people have already remarked, it's a basis for much of the poetics of current popular culture. It wouldn't hurt to get rpgs with some more emphasis on posing and color and less on the drama, challenge and procedure. Especially the latter, being THE simulationist priority of the earlier half of our rpg history, is something that could and should be toned down for many happy simmy people to get even happier. I imagine that many WW players would be utterly excited if all these pesky special rules for falling damage and kickback of shotguns just went away, not to talk of combat rounds. It's the whole active/passive dichtonomy all over again. Some people tend to focus on the aspect of BEING, while others want the aspect of DOING. Princes and princesses...

However, supporting exploration of color in a sim way is not easy. My take to date has largely been based on intertextual mechanics - create ways for the players to bring that music, pictures and movies into the game somehow, and use them to support their own color exploration. If somebody wants to play the guy in the picture, at the very least the picture should be there at the table to play with, and should affect play somehow.

I imagine that somebody'll think of even more powerful methods for this at some point. Unless passive art forms actually prove more efficient for such a static form of exploration. Is there something better you can do to appreciate a picture than to just look at it? Who knows.

For starters, start learning from chicks' fiction. This kind of player could perhaps get into a game about, say, fashion world, with the high points of the sessions being these snap-shot scenes of fashion shows and main rewards in the form of affirming the singular, perfect existence of the character as an embodied idea. Male-wise, the simplest sports stories (say, Rocky movies) tend to have a similar idea, where the whole point of the arc is to create or recreate the protagonist as a male ideal in preparation for being what he must be. It's like, the protagonist becomes the champion because a guy with such cool cut-scenes couldn't not become.

By the by, I don't mean to say that someone with no social understanding of the point of play and utter incapability to do anything but pose is a good thing. However, that's no reason to react negatively to this kind of play priority, even if we have little tools for satisfying it at this point.

[Mike Holmes]

While these guys work hard at maneuving themselves into a position to pose and then have no further comitment, content or context to their action than the original image they're imitating.  Often they can't even articulate what they were trying to acomplish with their pose.

So then, the "what they're articulating" becomes the GM's responsibility in this sort of play.

As you said before, it's participationism. You're just not used to how participationism works. Pick up some Call of Cthulhu scenarios, and check them out for how to make this work. Basically the game gives a contextual script, and all the players do is to, well, strike poses and say witty things (and die when the appropriate time comes).

So, the player strikes that aformentioned sunset pose. We'll now it's your turn as GM to say, "Something washes up on the shore, and you see that it has runes on it."

Believe me, with this sort of play in full effect, the player really doesn't have to have any character motivations other than to follow the GM's prescripted plot.

I'll disagree with everyone about this being a cross CA phenomenon. Playing this way with a CA of any sort but a participationist one is, as mentioned dysfunctional. But I think that put it in the subset of sim that we've termed Participationism and it's coherent.

Shall we do an example of play here? Jesse or Brand, you play the Pose Style player and respond as you think they would, and I'll play the Participationism GM.

GM: You're in your dark house. Bright slivers of light coming from around the edges of the shades indicating the lovely daylight outside only serve to make the darkness inside the house all the more impenetrable. You hear a sound upstairs, the sound of footfalls, and see an intruder on the balcony above you. What do you do?

Mike

[Adam Dray]

I remember feeling something similar to this. Though I mostly was the DM for my group's AD&D games, I finally got the chance to play.  I was inspired by a ranger picture in the (old) Unearthed Arcana and wanted to "be that guy." So I created him. The problem was that, as I played, he grew beyond the picture and I became dissatisfied with the character. I didn't want the magic items I was finding because the guy in the picture didn't wear a helmet. It was bizarre.

[komradebob]

Mike, may I cut in...

Shall we do an example of play here? Jesse or Brand, you play the Pose Style player and respond as you think they would, and I'll play the Participationism GM.

GM: You're in your dark house. Bright slivers of light coming from around the edges of the shades indicating the lovely daylight outside only serve to make the darkness inside the house all the more impenetrable. You hear a sound upstairs, the sound of footfalls, and see an intruder on the balcony above you. What do you do?

"I slowly reach into the pocket of my trenchcoat, feeling quietly for the comforting heft of my .45. Maybe, just maybe my mysterious pal hasn't seen me yet. My mouth is sudddenly dry and I can still taste last night's bourbon. Hopefully this mook didn't hear the soft swish of the coat, but then I learned to be quiet doing picket duty "Over There" in '18. This guy doesn't have that same catlike softness of tread those Heinies did ..."

Would that be the sort of "pose" you're looking at? I'm not really actively doing much other than exploring my character's color. I'm still leaving pretty much everything open to the GM- for example, I suggest that I'm being quiet and hoping my characater hasn't been seen, but I'm not attepting to declare that. I'm just letting the GM do what he wants to.

[Brand_Robins]

GM: You're in your dark house. Bright slivers of light coming from around the edges of the shades indicating the lovely daylight outside only serve to make the darkness inside the house all the more impenetrable. You hear a sound upstairs, the sound of footfalls, and see an intruder on the balcony above you. What do you do?

The intruder, looking down, sees darkness as deep as the pits of a Stygian tomb. One thin sliver of light falls across the room, striking Arjuna (my character), in a line that divides him perfectly in half, illuminating a narrow band from foot to the center of his face. On both sides of the light there is darkness, almost as though he swallowed all illumination save that narrow band, but in the area that can be seen is a smirk, and the glinting metalic reflection of light off the bent steel bow in his hands, the arrowhead itself like a shaft of lightning ready to be loosed.

(Unlike komradebob, who I cross posted with, I am inserting some declarations about things that have already happened: me having a bow up and ready, for example, and assuming the guy has seen me -- because if he didn't, and I didn't, the image wouldn't be what I want. My experience with Pose Players is that when they do involve in a scene they tend to want to pose in as they want, even if it means taking on a degree of director stance in games that normally would not permit it.)

[Mike Holmes]

Actually this is good, because I can narrate the same result for both players.

GM: The guy, seeing he's been detected, flees!
[Note that if the player wants to do so in either case, he can declare a shot. But I'm assuming that the player will not want to do so as that's not a "pose" sort of thing to do. But feel free to interject another pose here.]
Chasing after him, he manages to escape out the window and into the night. He does, however, leave behind a clue - a scrap of paper with an address on it.

Following up on it, you find yourself at the door to an antiquities dealer that looks like it specializes in occult stuff.

Mike

[komradebob]

Eero :

It wouldn't hurt to get rpgs with some more emphasis on posing and color and less on the drama, challenge and procedure. Especially the latter, being THE simulationist priority of the earlier half of our rpg history, is something that could and should be toned down for many happy simmy people to get even happier. I imagine that many WW players would be utterly excited if all these pesky special rules for falling damage and kickback of shotguns just went away, not to talk of combat rounds.

Yes, yes that sounds like something that would make me personally very happy! But then I freely admit to the heresy of thinking of Participationism as a Good Thing(tm). Actually, I like it as both a GM and a player, and have been disappointed when it isn't present. As for the second part of your comment, about rules that could be done away with to make happy simmy people even happier, count me as supporting all of those suggestions.-

Chasing after him, he manages to escape out the window and into the night. He does, however, leave behind a clue - a scrap of paper with an address on it.

Following up on it, you find yourself at the door to an antiquities dealer that looks like it specializes in occult stuff.

Which, if I'm following this argument properly, should be the point where I get to make another pose/color monologue, correct? In other words, this is a GM cue for me to get the spotlight?

[Brand_Robins]

Following up on it, you find yourself at the door to an antiquities dealer that looks like it specializes in occult stuff.

The front of the building has a big window, and from the inside looking out you can see Arjuna standing in the darkness outside, his eyes preternaturally bright as he stands looking in at the camera. Under him is a shelf of books, with the label, “Devils and Demons” centered under the dark and glowing eyed so that it looks as though he is what is labeled. There is a flash of lighting, and everything beyond the window is whited out in the afterimage. By the time it clears the glowing eyed figure is gone, and the door is swinging in the wind.