The Road to Amber

Ah, yes. Trust, cooperation, and communication.

You know, this is a very hard one, and one I'm struggling with badly, recently.

Some people treat their characters like pieces on a chess board. They perceive the manipulation of a character as an intellectual exercise, and they do not get emotional feedback from them. This is a perfectly functional method of RP, and one which many people use, but it is not the only valid method.

Some people feel their characters, no differently really than they might become emotionally involved with a fictional character in a movie or book (who honestly didn't cheer at the end of 'Karate Kid'? Who doesn't cry at the end of Where the Red Fern Grows? I can't even read it anymore). So, if the MUSH character is gleeful in a gonzo scene, the player feels the glee. If the character is angry or sad in a conflict, the player feels these things too. Glee of course one cannot have too much of - nobody ever objects to people feeling glee (or love, or infatuation, or sexual arousal) through their characters - but when it comes to anger or unhappiness…? These seem to be unacceptable, unwelcome. If you feel this emotional feedback from your character - if you admit it….generally speaking, the gentlest one can hope for is "That's not my problem."^*

Well….yes it is. The whole idea of RP is for everybody to be having fun. And if I never learned anything else from Jarrod Norton, 14 years ago when I was a newbie on AmberMUSH, I learned this: "if two players aren't laughing behind the scenes while their characters fight, they shouldn't be playing the fight". Conflicts - especially interpersonal conflicts (arguments as well as combat) are *exactly* the sorts of situations that lead to people not having fun in the name of "it's just a game".

This game is all about conflict, but it's not about winning. It may be about brutal characters beating the less-strong characters down, but it's not about players doing that to other players. And no matter what Awesome, Powerful, Cool characters we may play IC, most of us are *not* the characters we play. God knows….I'm not.

It is not always easy or clear, when a conflict scene shifts from 'fun' to 'not having fun anymore' to 'I really need to escape now' - exactly *how* to say "Whoa, wait, pause, flag on the play" . There are a lot of reasons why someone may hesitate to speak up: sometimes, the IC repercussions of abruptly posing out on some unlikely excuse, or the perceived cowardice of simply disconnecting, may be less desirable than gritting through the conflict at hand. Sometimes one may be afraid of being treated with disrespect because it involves IC emotions slipping OOC. Sometimes one may simply not know what to say.

Might we create something along the lines of a safe-word? You know…+flag, maybe, throws down an RPG: Flag on the play, OOC pause to negotiate scene direction. It would work no matter what the need for the pause was, and would, I hope, be neutral enough in tone to keep people from taking it personally.

^*There are probably lots of other methods of approaching characterization and play. I can't address them all. But the two I have described may have real difficulty playing conflicts together, as their style, goals and expectations are quite different at root. The chess-players might do well to remember to check with their conflict-partners during play, to make sure they're still having fun….and the emotive players might do well to remember that "it's not personal, it's just business".

I would like to add further, after about a day of consideration, this: As a player, I enjoy conflict. I'm terrible to my characters. I put them through hell, and I take consequences beyond anything I'm asked to take, generally speaking, because adversity is interesting, and long-term ramifications, chosen carefully, can be *excellent* story fodder with months or years of residual color.

The difficulty arises in attempting to mesh "my idea of what is fun in a conflict scene" with "what is fun for someone else in a conflict scene". We all know there are people who *thrive* on playing fight scenes with every last detail of the professional fencer (sixte! riposte!); some glory in vicious catty snarky arguments, some who love vast sweeping battle scenes. Some love playing brutal psychopaths. BUT it's very important when you're encouraging cross-playgroup conflict RP, to ascertain that a RP partner enjoys these same things, and isn't (let's be honest) gritting their teeth and hoping the scene gets over soon, so they can not have to play with you again¹. What Scaramouche said about OOC communication and trust? The OOC communication is the most critical point. And the one I find almost never comes up, especially once a scene has begun and conflict is in progress.

We’re all adults, and we all know we are expected to communicate. Yet communication skills – and ideas of what constitute adequate communication - vary widely from person to person. One can know they ought to speak up, and yet be reluctant when a scene shifts from ‘fun’ to ‘please, just let this get over because I’m not having fun anymore’ for any of a number of reasons. Try: not wanting to look like a whiny idiot by complaining at every little thing, not wanting to disrupt the scene, or not wanting to make your character do something out of character.

I want to suggest that people check in with new or unfamiliar conflict partners every so often, just to make sure they’re enjoying it as much as you are. Like “Hey, everything still okay? Having fun? Need to shift directions at all?”, especially if their poses become pale and flat compared to earlier….just in case they enjoy something a little different, and don’t want to upset things by asking.

¹I remember very starkly, a few cases over the years of conflict scenes (generally of the nasty snarling insulting argument variety) I absolutely and totally hated, but which I did not feel it would be IC to leave. I gritted my teeth and bulled through the scenes, and when they were over I never, EVER wanted to play with those persons ever again, or even be in the same room with them. Yet after each scene was over, I was startled every one of those times to be thanked profusely in page for such a wonderful scene! And they wanted to play again! Talk about cognitive dissonance! And I mention these not to point out my personal difficulty with removing myself from unpleasant scenes - although I suppose one could use them as a classic example - but as a stark example of 'how two perfectly good players can have wildly disparate perceptions of the very same scene'.