Casting in Role-Playing

[Daredevil]

Heya,

For quite some time our gaming group has been aware of actively practising casting particular players into particular character roles in the games played by us. The reasoning (for us) is one of pure efficiency : some players do better at other roles than others. For us, this thing works, but lately I've been thinking about it as a phenomenon.

On one hand, (a part of) role-playing (for some) is about playing characters widely different from us and in some sense daring to try something new and challenging. I might, for example, play an intensely charismatic character exploring the trials and tribulations of leadership and while I might at the same time be a very uncharismatic and uninspiring person in real life (but I assure you, in actual fact I'm quite the contrary .. kidding, guys).

This is a thing which pops up in discussions about role-playing quite often. How to play a very charismatic/intelligent/knowledgeable/etc character when I'm not? Certainly, there's been ideas regarding systems trying to minimize the problems of this very thing, but this isn't really the main thrust of me deciding to write about this.

I'm more interested in the use of casting by groups to handle this problem. Is this a topic worth exploring? Could more be done with casting? It just occurred to me that it is quite an unexplored territory (and as one of those daring few ever looking for that El Dorado, the thought of unexplored terriroty immediately appealed to me).

I believe the reason we're (currently) so big on casting is partly the pressure of old school role-playing systems which have fed our hardcore immersionist tendencies to that extent that we'd much rather see a player give us a magnificent oratory when his character is inspiring the troops before combat, than just see a simple "well, my character engages in brilliant rhetoric to raise the morale of troops. After bold and touching words, all the men raise their hands in a salute to their fearless leader", followed by a die roll. Of course, we do walk the middle road and have talked about talented/skilled/particular characters imposing what we call filters into our role-playing, meaning that all the words spoken by the player of a very persuasive character should be appropiately tinted and the appropiate factors taken into account. Nevertheless, we feel uncertain when casting players in roles that may be awkward for them.

Anyway, a lot of this may be obvious, but it hasn't been discussed (or I have missed it) on the Forge. Or maybe it is not so obvious? How many of you have thought about or experienced issues related to this subject?

- Joachim Buchert -

[Synicism]

Actually, I've had a lot of problems with this going both ways.

1. A character who is supposedly eloquent, witty, and charismatic played by someone who, well, lacks a strong personality.

2. A character who is supposedly boorish, rude, and not very persuasive played by someone with a real-life silver tongue.

Honestly, although it comes at the expense of character immersion, the first situation is easier to handle with a system because you have rules for that kind of thing. At the very least, you can have the player make some kind of ability check and at least give it an effort.

I find it more difficult to deal with the latter scenario, and I'm not sure that you can impose a system-based control on it short of imposing some kind of punishment for playing "out of character."

[clehrich]

I'm a little nervous about the idea of casting, which is really what I think of as type-casting.  You're good at boorish thugs?  Great, you're going to play one.  (Player thinks, "But I'm tired of playing boorish thugs....")  A variant on this is that people get comfortable with one role and can't be dislodged from it, game after game, until everything that used to be fun about the character is now just same-old, same-old.  So as a conception in the abstract, I'm against casting.

As far as the "but what if I'm not particularly eloquent" thing, I must say that this only works for me for a short time.  In a one-shot, or a short campaign, I think it's fine; you try something, find it doesn't work too well, and then move on.  But in a longer campaign, it seems to me that you've got a simple choice: practice or change characters.  

For goodness' sake, the audience isn't exactly hypercritical here -- they're your friends, and they want to like what you're doing.  You can ham it up, or have a great little speech just suddenly stop dead because you get tongue-tied, or whatever, and that's going to be just fine.  I know this isn't going to be a popular view, but I genuinely think that a lot of time this sort of thing is just a flabby old excuse for player laziness.  If you can't speak ten words coherently in a row, you shouldn't take a character with a golden tongue, but all you really need is to be able to talk a little bit.  And then practice.  And practice again.  In game time, out of game, on the toilet, in the shower (like Jared!), etc.  Watch some movies with characters like yours, and talk their speeches, or bits of them, to yourself.  Try some silly accents if that helps.  Try some physical acting: get an object that's appropriate to the character, and think about how he or she moves it around, and then talk to yourself about that, in-character.  What's so hard about this?

Now I'm assuming, based on Daredevil's post, that we're not talking about skills that do not get "acted," such as combat or whatever; this is I think the distinction he's making about intelligence and so on.  I'm just talking about interpersonal skills.  To be honest, I think that in a circle of good friends, anyone can be sexy, charming, boorish, masterful, domineering, or charismatic.  Everyone kind of adds a "friend factor," a +10 to your roll as it were, and anyway they know what you're trying to do.  It's trying that makes it happen.

If you have to cast people, they're probably not trying, IMO.  If you want to cast people, and they want to try that, I say go for it, but keep your finger on the off-switch.

[Tim C Koppang]

How about casting players into roles which go against their typical play styles?  This isn't a new thing actually.  I've tried and participated in games where pre-generated characters were made by the GM and then subsequently handed out according to GM preference.  I met the technique with a positive outlook, but others tend to get very angry when you tell them what kind of character they can and cannot play.  I suppose in my case I was worried about a habit I believe many roleplayers fall into: that of recreating the same character for every game you play in--only switching genres appropriately.  Forcing me into an alternative role was a challenge that I enjoyed.

You could argue much of the player-hostility towards cross-type casting goes back to the game texts wherein players were encouraged to do whatever they wanted with their characters.  Now I think that many games designers are abandoning the idea of pure open-ended char gen in favor of more limited character scopes.  The advantage is of course a more focused game.

Do you think that you could apply further char gen limits with this type of cross-type casting at a formal design level?  Do you think you'd survive the wave of anger such a restriction would provoke from your players?

[Daredevil]

How about casting players into roles which go against their typical play styles?

Yep, this seems like the natural next step in considering casting for role-playing. Indeed, I think both types can be done (and which is pretty much what is happening in our gaming group) at the same, resulting in a successful cocktail. This means that while players are encouraged to not take overwhelming roles (as per above posts), they are at the same time encouraged to go beyond their usual choices. Indeed, my main point behind this thread was to promote an awareness of casting for roles and to suggest that maybe gaming groups should actively consider these factors.

A non-diplomatic player considering playing a persuasive, suave politician is cause for wariness, but with proper attention and preparation (clehrich nicely outlined what can be done) the player's performance can be "maximized". If it isn't, the impact of poorly done casting is that the other players will suffer with their suspension of disbelief, their IC/OOC relation to the poorly casted player being constrained by frex the player's lack of charisma.

This begs a question, though. We are allowed to expect not only adequate performances from stage/movie actors, but how feasible is placing such expectations on your gaming group, most of which are probably your good friends? I think my gaming group is increasingly doing this (but with good spirit and humor, mind you).

[clehrich]

This begs a question, though. We are allowed to expect not only adequate performances from stage/movie actors, but how feasible is placing such expectations on your gaming group, most of which are probably your good friends? I think my gaming group is increasingly doing this (but with good spirit and humor, mind you).

I think the answer here is clear enough: acting quality should fall within a narrow range across the group.  If everyone is an equally rotten ham, then that's fine; if most people are pretty convincing, but one person is amazingly terrible, then that person is going to tend to be problematic, and may need help, support, guidance, or more practice / prep.

As to anti-type-casting, i.e. deliberately pushing people to play against chosen type, I think this can work quite well.  One thing I've seen here and there, and heard good things about in a lot of games, is a process in which everyone designs a character, and then these are shuffled and re-distributed so that everybody has to play a character designed by someone else.  The down-side of this is that you may find people less invested in the characters they play.

I do think that strong restrictions and guidance in chargen are wise, but they do spark resistance.  The most extreme example I know of was a campaign in which everyone was a member of a small mercenary company, at the chargen session of which one player stated that she refused to play a soldier character because all soldiers are vicious killers and that would be immoral.  After much argument, it was made clear that she would either have to play a soldier or do something else, as the entire campaign was (and had previously been stated to be) based on the characters' merc. soldier status.  In the long run, this player does not play with this group any more; apparently she feels that if we are the sort of people who are willing to run campaigns about purely military subjects once in a while, then we are vicious and immoral people.  So here the strong restriction resulted in our losing a player, but on the other hand it kept the game coherent.

As a little thought-experiment, suppose you had a campaign world in which for some reason if made really good sense that there would be no female PCs.  Assuming you have a reasonable mix of sexes among the players, is the flat restriction "no woman PCs" going to cause an initial negative reaction?  You betcha.  Can it be gotten over?  Well, that depends.  If the reasons are very good, and the vast majority of players think the restriction makes sense, then you're OK; if the reasons aren't (or aren't perceived as) very good, and the majority of players think this is a stupid restriction, then you need to redesign or change your campaign.  It's a social contract thing, I think.[/quote]

[Tim C Koppang]

Well if I can turn to the bass player/band metaphor, I think I'd argue it comes down to audience.  A band of course eventually performs for some group of people.  This can make a big difference as far as expectations and critiquing goes.  An audience who hasn't been present for all of the practice sessions of the group has a distanced, outsider perspective on the material produced by the group.  Because the audience doesn't have as much invested in the band they can be unforgiving in their criticism.  However, in roleplaying things are much different.  The performance is directed only to those involved in the session itself.  Add that to the fact that practice sessions are really the same as play sessions, and you'll see that it's much harder to put the same sort of expectations on roleplayers in your group.

Still, I think setting goals for each player could be a good thing.  You might even call these goals standards.  This is where reward systems can really be used effectively on the formal design level.

But my main argument is of course that roleplaying is not the same as acting and to stretch the similarities too far is a dangerous comparison.  On some level I think that we all have expectations from our fellow players.  Think about social contracts (unspoken or not).  These sorts of things are a roleplayer's way of checking his fellow players.  I also think that it's unfortunate that the GM is traditionally held responsible as the sole enforcer for such things.  In a situation where all of the creative force, and all of the critiquing have to come from within the same group it seems silly to delegate all of one task to the GM.

Speaking of the GM, how do you think the idea of casting could extend to him?  I'm sure you know of roleplayers who are better at GMing certain types of games than others.  Do you cast GMs?  Is it possible or rewarding, in the same way it can be for players, to cross-type cast a GM?

[talysman]

But my main argument is of course that roleplaying is not the same as acting and to stretch the similarities too far is a dangerous comparison.

I think this statement, as well as Synicism's comment about enabling character play through system at the expense of immersion, are the important "hidden truth" in this thread. I think type casting -- or attempts to cast players as characters based on personal ability instead of personal preference -- is kind of missing an important point in role-playing: unless the goal of the play group is immersive role-playing, it doesn't matter whether the character's personality matches the player's personality.

consider this: do we forbid people from playing in a fantasy role-playing game if they don't have authentic-looking medieval garments? do we shy away from using alien races, because the players don't really know what an alien race would look like? do we forbid players from purchasing equipment they haven't used in real life?

no. because it's assumed the players can imagine these things sufficiently to get some enjoyment out of play. and, likewise, I think a player saying "my character uses her charm to bluff her way past the guards" is a perfectly legitimate act of play, because we can imagine the character actually doing this.

this is not to say that the questions raised in this thread are pointless. they are certainly relevant to the special case of immersive role-playing. they are also relevant in another way to play in general, which I will get into in just a bit.

but my point is: I think, to a certain extent, players and GMs are burdened by some false conceptions the role-playing must be "realistic" -- not just in system details (a horse we've all beaten here before,) but also in details of character portrayal, which is what is being raised in this thread. and, to continue the point, players and GMs are in part encouraged in these conceptions because there are several game designers who build systems that presume this same misconception that players should speak charismatically when playing a charismatic character, or speak with a stutter if that is part of the character conception, or give accurate-sounding off-the-cuff technobabble when needed.

I would classify immersive role-playing as similar in spirit to "realistic" role-playing: a possible form of play that some people find desirable, but not actually necessary for everyone's play. a couple people here (Fang and Walt, I believe) have occasionally made the statement "characters aren't real, they can't have motivations". while I don't always agree with them that this fact is relevant, it's certainly true, and I think it's relevant to this thread, and to role-playing in general. characters DON'T have personalities. for most games, we don't really need the fiction of "playing a character": the character is really a sort-of "grand motif" that the player chooses to weave into the group fiction being created by play.

Alice likes tough independent heorines who like to solve problems with stealth followed by sudden violence? fine, as long as she weaves such a heroine into play in an entertaining fashion. Bob likes strong, silent men who are born leaders, waxing eloquent just before battle? OK, we know what's going to happen if there's a battle in this game.

we've already seen some games that ditch the concept of a character "needing" to be played "accurately" and instead played entertainingly. heck, we've also seen this used in film, television, novels, and comics: characters who, given their backstory, should in theory act in a particular way, but they instead act according to the requirements of the story: characters behaving courageously when they were never courageous before, absolute nobodies rising up to lead others in times of necessity, and so on. in some cases, this is done clumsily, but in many many other cases, it's done quite well; heck, the common theme of redemption requires exactly this sort of "going against character", because it's the whole point of the story. when the fighter refuses to fight, we know he's learned something; we don't complain that realistically, a fighter would just fight anyways.

this leads to the other bit of relevancy in this thread that I hinted at earlier: although I dismiss the blanket concept of "characters need to be played realistically according to their personality" (except for immersive play,) I certainly don't dismiss the narrower concept of "characters need to be played realistically according to group expectations". it's a fuzzy line, but it's there. if a player's decisions don't assist the group in imagining the fictional events of play, those decisions will "spoil the fun" of the other players and will lead to a renegotiation of the social contract -- or an eviction or group break-up. some of this will be tied up in genre expectations; if people are playing a cyberpunkish game with hardened loner characters, that inspirational speech to the army is going to seem out of place -- even if it is theoretical within the character's personality and even if the player really does give a very inspiring speech.

so, the short version: imagination first. that's what everyone's getting together for, not acting exhibitions (unless that's what the players really want.)

[simon_hibbs]

While I wouldn't go so far as to use explicit casting in anything other than a one-off game (to save time during game setup), I can appreciate the resons why some might find it attractive.

My own compromise solution is, when pitching a new campaign, to provide examples of the kinds of characters I think would fit in. I usualy just give a short description of the character that's easily customisable, or can be interpreted a number of ways. That way the payers can read the campaign introductory material, and get an idea of what kinds of characters I as GM think might fit in. Casting fits into this a little as I do bear in mind the preferences and foibles of the players in our group when describing the sample character descriptions.

This way I get all the advantages of casting - confidence that the characters and campaign will suit each other, characters that are likely to suit the player's preferences - while still offering the players considerable scope in designing their characters. At the end of the day, if they come up with a character concept I haven't thought of, we can discuss it and jointly come to an understanding of how the character will fit in.


Simon Hibbs

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

For those who like this sort of thing, check these out:

on making the same character over and over
Suspension of reality and playing odd characters

Neither are direct answers to the issues posed on this thread, but I think they provide extremely relevant companion concepts.

Best,
Ron

[Thierry Michel]

How about casting players into roles which go against their typical play styles?

This is an idea that interests me (as in "how to attract social gamers ?").

For instance, other players could provide characters ideas, and then you get to pick one.

[clehrich]

we've already seen some games that ditch the concept of a character "needing" to be played "accurately" and instead played entertainingly. heck, we've also seen this used in film, television, novels, and comics: characters who, given their backstory, should in theory act in a particular way, but they instead act according to the requirements of the story: characters behaving courageously when they were never courageous before, absolute nobodies rising up to lead others in times of necessity, and so on. in some cases, this is done clumsily, but in many many other cases, it's done quite well; heck, the common theme of redemption requires exactly this sort of "going against character", because it's the whole point of the story. when the fighter refuses to fight, we know he's learned something; we don't complain that realistically, a fighter would just fight anyways.

This gets at an important issue in casting and type-casting, which is the question of stereotypes.  I would read the better examples of what you're describing as discovery, rather than acting against character; to put it differently, it's acting against type, but not against self.  For example, Merry and Pippin appear to be relatively harmless, not really guided by much but friendship.  Over the course of their saga, they discover reasons to care deeply about what's happening, and they mature into heroes.  Have they changed?  Have they just discovered a side of themselves they didn't realize was there before?  Gandalf seems to interpret things the latter way -- he's never really surprised by hobbits turning out to be tough as oak-roots, because he understands them better than they understand themselves.  Similarly, the unimportant farmboy who turns into a brilliant and charismatic war-leader was perhaps already good at this, but never realized it.  Part of the quest is self-discovery, after all.

While games do not have to be this way, they can be, and I think too much focus on "the characters don't exist" tends to discourage such things.  Merry and Pippin don't exist either; does this make their motivations not worth consideration?  Too much of this makes all characters into essentially static types, turning all gaming into melodrama.  I think one of the nice things about immersion can be that you discover the character as a person -- a figment of your group's imagination, to be sure, but a three-dimensional and complex figment.

For this reason, I see no necessary requirement that everyone shift types all the time; for me, the time to force someone to shift character types is when those characters have become only types.  What happens in such cases is often that the player just sort of goes through the motions; he's not really working.  But gaming is work, requiring effort.  This is why I think it's important to make a stab at playing your character realistically: it requires real effort, and fleshes out the character for yourself and everyone else in the group.

I agree that the acting metaphor is often overdone.  The requirements here aren't particularly large.  All you need to do is to act well enough that you and the other players can fill in the blanks and gaps effectively.  But constantly assuming that "well, it's all imagination anyway, so everyone will just fill in the blanks even if I don't act" is just going to make a lot of roleplaying flat and stale.

[Tim C Koppang]

clehrich,

I say right on!

The only thing I'd add would be in response to your mentioning of characters as people--or more precisely: do they exist or not?  Without sounding like a loon, a roleplayer has to at once realize that characters are real and fake at the same time.  Characters can exist in your own mind and in the minds of those fellow players sitting around the gaming table.  As you put it, "a figment of your group's imagination, to be sure, but a three-dimensional and complex figment."  As you rightly put, immersion is one way to help encourage this sort of complex development, but of course it's not the only one.  I don't think you were implying such, but I wanted to point the fact out explicitly.  Even if players act upon characters in a removed author stance they can still create characters as "living" as those players acting out their sessions.

Now, as far as casting is concerned, I think your comments on roleplaying being work sums up my viewpoint nicely.  Thumbs up.

I think something interesting to consider would be the use of casting to help enforce social contract.  If the social contract included stipulations to the effect that everyone must play their characters with a certain requirement of uniqueness for example, how could casting be used to solve problems?  In what situations would casting help enforce social contract?  And, more generaly, in what ways could you integrate casting into game design?

[Walt Freitag]

A couple people here (Fang and Walt, I believe) have occasionally made the statement "characters aren't real, they can't have motivations". while I don't always agree with them that this fact is relevant, it's certainly true, and I think it's relevant to this thread, and to role-playing in general. characters DON'T have personalities. for most games, we don't really need the fiction of "playing a character": the character is really a sort-of "grand motif" that the player chooses to weave into the group fiction being created by play.

I have to plead not guilty. I've stated on occasion that characters don't have certain things, such as stance; this isn't so much because they don't exist but rather because they're not players so they don't have all the qualities, characteristics, or states that players have. I don't believe it's necessary for something to physically exist for it to have meaningful properties; saying "lines don't exist so it's impossible for two of them to have a point of intersection" wouldn't have gotten me very far in geometry class.

Character motivations exist. Because they're not real agents capable of action, characters cannot act on their own motivations (any more than two lines can find their own point of intersection). But a player can act on a character's motivation, and it is certainly possible for a player's motivation to conflict with a character's -- or to be more precise, it's possible for two different player motivations, one to act on the character's motivation and one to act differently so as to accomplish some other goal, to be in conflict. The character might be described as a coward, but the player wants to kick ass in the game. This wouldn't be a problem if player motivation and character motivation were always entirely synonymous. They're not, so it is, and it's obviously more likely to occur when players are cast as characters instead of generating their own characters.

"Interactive Literature" style LARPs (more information in this thread) use pre-written characters and therefore raise fundamental issues about casting. A great deal of ink (and a little blood) has been spilled in discussing such questions as what information that can be elicited from players is most useful for casting, when a player can be cast completely opposite to type, and how much (if at all) should a character description describe or imply the character's personality. Role-playing of transformative changes in a character is another big issue, albeit (in LARPs) primarily a stylistic matter and not a mechanical one. But this is one area where LARPs and tabletop can be quite different, so I'm not going to go into these areas in any length. Briefly, here are a few of the principles I personally, from trial and error, found useful:

1. When authoring the character, separate motivation from personality, and leave the personality out of it as far as possible. Write down the part about the character being a successful Roman general who wants victory in the current campaign. Leave out the part that specifies whether the general wants victory to satisfy driving personal ambition, to exercise cruelty to the enemy, to advance the glory of Roman ideals, or to end the war as efficiently as possible to return to peace. Usually, for the purpose of planning the game, that part doesn't matter, so you can leave it up to the player.

2. If the character's role does for some reason depend on it being played with a specific evident personality -- such as, if you want the general to be peace-loving and unambitious so as to contrast with another general who's cruel and vengeful, anticipating that the two will vie for the Imperial throne, then your best bet is to cast a player who you know in advance -- or who has agreed in advance -- will play the role that way. Putting personality description and/or acting directions into the character description ("you are cruel and arrogant, so be sure to sneer a lot") is a loser all around. It's annoying and it doesn't work.

3. If asking "what kind of character do you want to play?" ask for adjectives. A player who wants "ambitious" will probably be happier playing the ambitious towel-boy at the baths (provided the game provides means for the character to actually achieve ambitions) than a general who has an opportunity to prosecute a difficult campaign but little opportunity to advance politically in the scenario. But he's likely to ask for the general on the erroneous assumption that the general's role would be a better venue to express ambition.

4. Unless the social contract is explicitly set up otherwise, the player's ownership of the character is not the slightest bit lessened by the fact that someone else did the original authoring. So yes, the player-character you wrote as a sadistic tortuerer can decide, even before play is firmly underway, to turn over a new leaf and make amends by giving charity to orphans. Someone obviously made a casting mistake, and the player isn't getting any points for style, but attempting to overrule the decision (or worse, punish it ex post facto) won't help.

Note that relative to a crunchier system, a rules-lite LARP presents fewer mechanical barriers to such changes of heart in a character -- the "you can torture people" skill probably isn't very important to what's going on in the game and characters are generally less defined or constrained by mechanical effectiveness -- but more in-game social ones -- all the other characters know what the torturer's role among them would normally be and will be surprised, inside the game, that the character is behaving otherwise. Changes of heart or "type" are therefore possible, potentially dramatic, and often important to the outcome, and in practice they rarely occur without in-game justification even though they're entirely up to the player.

This all appears to agree pretty well with everything Chris (chlerich) wrote.

- Walt

[Bankuei]

I think what is very interesting to note, and very relevant to this, is the difference between the role of protagonists in traditional media and that of roleplaying games.  

In a traditional story, the protagonists are identified with by the audience, and through the character's motivations and emotions, create emotional bonds in the audience, and second, elicit emotions from the audience.  The audience reflects the emotions of the protagonists based on how well they identify with the characters(usually referred to as "acting ability").

In roleplaying games, the audience(the group) controls the protagonists, therefore it is impossible for a player to reflect the character's emotions, since the player his or herself is the origin of those motivations/emotions and is in control of how they get expressed.  Unlike traditional media, emotions start with the audience, and work their way to the characters, not the other way around.

Chris