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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Danny_K wrote: 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 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

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.

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.

jburneko wrote: 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.

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.

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?

Mike Holmes wrote: 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?

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

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.

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

Well, that's a heck of a lot of director stance, Brand. Meaning that you're actually making it easier for me. That is, I have less and less to make up.

Now if your point is that director stance like this interferes with a pre-plotted game, well, that's a problem of player power division, and has nothing to do with the issue at hand. You're creating a new problem for the player. Simply tell the player no, if you want to do participationism. They'll have plenty to do posing with "just the character."

But as far as freeform plotting goes, you and I can narrate back and forth like this all day. You're providing more than enough elements for me to make a plot out of them with my part of the narration.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Well, that's a heck of a lot of director stance, Brand. Meaning that you're actually making it easier for me. That is, I have less and less to make up.

Now if your point is that director stance like this interferes with a pre-plotted game, well, that's a problem of player power division, and has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

But as far as freeform plotting goes, you and I can narrate back and forth like this all day. You're providing more than enough elements for me to make a plot out of them with my part of the narration.

This thread seems to be going really well, by showing rather than dry theory.

From Brands demonstration of what he's seen, it looks like taking turns at participationism. First the player was in the participationist seat. But with what Brand demonstrated from his play experience, it basically puts the GM in that seat. As Mike noted, he has a lot less to describe...unless HE starts describing poses now.

An observation...thoughts?

Noon wrote: From Brands demonstration of what he's seen, it looks like taking turns at participationism. First the player was in the participationist seat. But with what Brand demonstrated from his play experience, it basically puts the GM in that seat. As Mike noted, he has a lot less to describe...unless HE starts describing poses now.

John Kim wrote: Is it really participationism if the narrative power is being passed back and forth? My impression of participationism was that it was by definition following a single person's lead.