I’ve been delinquent in typing up my Grey Ranks summaries for my group (q.v. [Grey Ranks]Playtest over Skype).  This is not really due to procrastination (although I’m certainly a proponent of procrastination), but rather my consternation that the summaries I did write had no real bearing on the experience of playing Grey Ranks.  They provide a tidy précis of the fiction we generated and the mechanical events that informed that fiction but are pretty much silent on play experience.  That's a fairly significant omission. 

While I enjoy the full gamut of activities associated with the act of roleplaying, I derive greatest enjoyment in circumstances when I have strong empathy for my character.  This is often problematic for me, as I typically struggle with getting a handle on the characters I create.  Therefore, I get all het-up with games that give strong mechanical support to defining a character at creation. 

In the realm of actual play, no stronger example springs to mind than my Camp Nerdly experience with Andy Kitkowski's rendition of Tenra Bansho Zero.  While the rules seemed to me to be by and large mired in mediocrity, the Fate system caught my instant attention.  I could just glance at the Fates of the pre-generated characters and know what they were about, and if I would enjoy exploring those Fates.  When I picked up the character sheet for the Kugutsu, Aoi, everything was spelled out for me with big flashing neon lights:  wooden doll manufactured to service humans;  taboo of shedding human blood; needs to become human.

The character sheet and the brief background gave instant situation:  Aoi was created to be an unsurpassed sword-master, designed to serve a master's every command, but suffered from an inability to injure humans. 

I knew where I was going right away, and could build from there.  When, a short while into play, a roll on the bizarre reactions table (a matrix that randomizes your character's initial gut feeling toward other characters, PC or otherwise) yielded “love at first sight”, I understood right away what that meant:  Aoi believed the secret of humans lay in their understanding of how to love, and that by loving this newly- met person better and stronger than anyone had ever loved anyone else in the entire history of loving, Aoi could become human.  It was beautiful and creepy.  The situation was broadened.

I need these big neon flashing lights, because when I looked at my character sheet for Grey Ranks, I was left disappointed.  The only Situation I saw was in the Thing You Hold Dear, but only because I jammed it in there:  I turned Jeremi's “First Love” into a “Forbidden Love” by setting the Symbol as his 13 year-old cousin, Teresa.

Naturally, without anything else to latch onto, all my interesting play was about Teresa exclusively.

But the bigger issue is that without any particular connection or empathy for Jeremi, without any grasp of who he was and how to play him, this character's story became a grand opera.  If I couldn't understand the complex motivations of the character, I was going to turn his life into a grandstanding tragedy.  He became a vehicle for entertaining my fellow players with melodramatic theatrics.  And I drove him as fast as possible to hitting Nervous Breakdown for the second time, and Destroying Teresa while I was at it.

I do enjoy this type of play!  I've gotten great mileage out of it in a number of other games (The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, InSpectres and Polaris spring to mind.)  I have a talent for it, and can be caught frequently preening in the enjoyment (and shock, and delight) evinced by other players.

But it's not my preferred mode of play!  I enjoy myself most when I care about my character, and I  didn't care one whit about the poor Polish farm boy.  I just cared about the dramatic setup and execution of his tragic downfall.

Does Grey Ranks encourage this sort of behaviour?  I can't imagine that to be the case generally, but it does seem to project a very bare-bones approach to character.  How does my experience track with other people's? 

- Kit

Hey Kit,

Thanks for writing about your experience with Grey Ranks.  I think you're assessment is accurate, in that the game's focus is on telling the story of a crew during the uprising, and capturing the essential moments and emotions of that time and place.  Less emphasis is placed on individual characters, and with only three sessions of play (or even one, if playing a short game), you don't have the time to really inhabit the character as deeply as you might in some games.  However, while the game focuses on the tragic downfall, it doesn't force you to play that way.

The basic character elements give you enough material to let you explore a character pretty well, and give you the opportunity to make them matter, if you're willing to invest in them somewhat.  In addition to the thing you hold dear, you earn a pair of reputations after the first chapter, which should guide your play as well.  I've played in games where the reputations I was given by the other players were Aloof and Obsessed, and I used that to develop a back-story (through personal scenes and other interactions) about the loss of his father and his determination to prove himself and get revenge against the German officers who took him. 

Each of these character resources (things held dear, reputations) as well as the other elements (age and district) should serve as hooks for the story you want to play.  You are meant to read more into each of them, to add the detail and flavor to realize that character for you.  My suggestion is to take another read through Parts One and Six of the book (the history and supplementary sections) to get more ideas for how you can make your characters unique and real, so that they matter more to you through the course of the story. 

Cheers,
Steve

Steve,

Thank you for your reply!  It gave me some things to chew on.  I’ll reply to your points, at the very least to provide more data points on how our group played the game of Grey Ranks (though some of it is tangential to the issue I was raising).

In our play, the Reputations didn’t inform play all that much.  Typically we would use them for their resource value and come up with then justify their use.  For example, Jeremi was on the Foolish/Clever track, and I never really went through the thought process of, hey, he’s foolish, let’s do to showcase his foolishness; rather, I’d draw on the reputation for the bigger die size and then say, hey, what he just did was kind of foolish (it was never really a stretch, with these kids running around an enemy occupied city), so I’m justified using this.

I think that was the experience for the other players generally, as sometimes after use of a reputation another player would ask what justified using it, and the response would often indicate that the player hadn’t really put much thought in it.  Sometimes players had to fit very round pegs into very square holes to get it to make sense!

(I heartily encourage the other players to pipe up on their observations!)

Age didn’t really factor into play at all, aside from the pure mechanical changes.  Jeremi, for example, though 15 is obsessed about his personal issues; Mar, 17, is always heavily focussed on the missions.

Districts of origin were indeed used extensively as story hooks:  for scene framing, for background information and flashbacks, and for plot points.

All that aside (or rather, in addition to all that), I’d like to step back a bit to expand a little more on my first post. 

On a general level--as to why I posted in the first place--I’m having some existential sorts of problems with the nature of “character” in general, issues I’m only just beginning to get a grasp on articulating.  I know I’m late to the party in that respect, but my purpose in posting was to make an initial foray into exploring the matter.  I’m using Grey Ranks as a sort of “control group”, a baseline to probe the issue of players engaging with their characters.  It was the most recent and concrete example of how a character was completely consumed by the story being told.

- kit

Hey Kit, I appreciate your thoughtfulness on this issue.  I don't have much to add yet, but there's not really a baseline of experience with Grey Ranks yet to compare your game with.  Speaking as the most experienced Grey Ranks player in the universe (grin), I can say that, thusfar, I have not seen a consistent pattern of use emerge.  I've played games that hinged on Reputation, and games that ignored age almost entirely, for example. 

For what it's worth, Kit, I think I know what you mean about playing without a lot of investment in your character.  Sometimes I've played games where I was essentially trying the character on for size- he or she has some interesting traits, or some colorful motivations, and I'm just using the character to explore the boundaries of the larger story.  Other times I've found myself completely in tune with the character- I really get why he's angry, and I'm driven by his needs.  The character's successes (and failures) become valuable to me, and I'll invest a lot of myself in the game to see to see his story unfold.

I tend to think these different styles are largely about player style and the length of the game.  It's easier for me to get truly invested in a character if I play that character a lot, over an extended period of time. I can imagine this working in a standard D&D campaign, a season or three of <em>Prime Time Adventures</em>, or a run of <em>The Shadow of Yesterday</em>.  However, in a short-run game (one to three sessions, say) like the <em>Roach</em> or <em>The Mountain Witch</em> your characters are just fun, disposable tools used in the crafting of the bigger story.

This is Nick, another player in the same game of Grey Ranks.  With all due respect, Steve, I don't think that short term nature of GR is what is creating this effect for Kit.  We've actually stretched this game out quite a bit (since July), playing only every few weeks and getting through only one or two chapters each session.  I don't know if it's something that is more endemic to our group, but I feel kind of the same way about my character Zofia (Nena).  I *like* her, and I care what happens to her, but mostly to the extent that she makes the story cool.  I do sympathize with her, especially when I narrate something horrible happening to her, but I don't really *identify* with her.

I don't know what it is.  I've played plenty of games in which there is even less personal info about my character on the sheet than in GR, but I identified more with my PC and felt less like a writer.  Many of them weren't even all that long-playing.  I'm wondering if this kind of play is something of a defense mechanism against the rampant bleakness that we tend to throw into our games.

Nick

That's a good point, Nick- it may be that the serious and graphic nature of Grey Ranks makes it a little hard to embrace the characters too closely.  I guess there's a natural tendency to want to keep "trainwreck" characters at a bit of a remove so that when things go downhill you're not too emotionally invested.  I know I've felt that way watching movies.

Thanks for the thread, guys!  This is really interesting to me.

Hi,

I'm Aaron, I also play in this group.

See, I'm going to have to say that I don't believe this is a specific quirk of Grey Ranks and is instead limited to player preference.  Why?  Because I never feel the same need to attach myself to a character that Kit and Nick are describing to any character in any game.  I personally don't need to immerse myself in the character and "feel" them in order to enjoy RPGs. 

That's not to say I view them as disposable tools for my enjoyment.  I do like my characters and enjoy getting into the "role" concept of trying to act or react as them, but ultimately, I'm the player and I'm using this fancy, complex game piece to play a game that brings me enjoyment and fun.  Whether or not it that enjoyment is from telling a cooperative story or ransacking a dungeon while killing orcs.

So, yah, I think this is a player preference thing.  However, I can easily see how games that are focused on a specific, driving end goal might not facilitate the generation of that attachment or immersion of character.

Hope that sheds some murky light on this topic.

aaron

Aaron, I don't think that Kit and I are saying we need to have that immersion to enjoy the game, I think we're just saying that certain experiences (possibly due to the game itself, possibly not) generate a particular kind of gaming pleasure, distinct yet equal to character immersion.  Am I reading that right, Kit?

Kit,

I played in a Grey Ranks game and found myself more attached to the frighten, immature girl I played than nearly any other character I've ever played in a game. Knowing that something terrible was waiting for only made me care about her that much more. So I'd be willing to bet that it's an individual thing. I'm of the mind that player investment in characters is an individual, player-side thing that can be affected by a game system, but not reliably or predictably.

ironick wrote:
Aaron, I don't think that Kit and I are saying we need to have that immersion to enjoy the game, I think we're just saying that certain experiences (possibly due to the game itself, possibly not) generate a particular kind of gaming pleasure, distinct yet equal to character immersion.  Am I reading that right, Kit?

Kit and I actually talked about this recently.

Kit asked me what my experience was with roleplaying and my characters, if I ever struggled to find empathy with my characters. And for the most part, I had to say no (though there have been exceptions). We talked about it more, and I think we might be operating under different assumptions during character creation.

Personally, I favor as little character creation as possible. I love letting my sense of a character develop organically through choices I make during play. But the sense I got from Kit was that he preferred to have a better understanding of his character before getting started. Not necessarily sitting down and figuring out everything about a character's background, but at least taking the time to figure out a character's motivations.

So maybe what's needed is a bit more attention paid to this during character creation? Rather than jumping immediately into the action, taking time to let those who want to get a handle on their characters.

Of course. I may be putting words in Kit's mouth here. I had a hard time grokking where Kit was coming from, since my own preferences seem to be so different than his.

~Anna

Did you guys play a full 10 chapter game?  I can't recall.

We're not done with it yet, actually.  We play over Skype, so the medium, time constraints, adding a player after two chapters, and scheduling conflicts have meant that we've only gotten through one or two chapters every session.  We're up to Chapter 7 now, and we're hoping we might be able to just buckle down and finish it next time, considering one character is dead and another is going to be resolved in Chap. 7.

Nick

wunderllama wrote:
Personally, I favor as little character creation as possible. I love letting my sense of a character develop organically through choices I make during play. But the sense I got from Kit was that he preferred to have a better understanding of his character before getting started. Not necessarily sitting down and figuring out everything about a character's background, but at least taking the time to figure out a character's motivations.

Jason,  when this post was originally put up we had just finished Chapter 6 and Kit's character had just died, and my character was going to die in Chapter 7.  We finished chapter 10 a couple days ago(hopefully we'll get an actual write up done soon).