Casting Shadows

In a significant percentage of roleplaying games, playing a character is a core activity. From the start of the hobby, this has been one of those things we expect to find in an RPG. Once the hobby began to broaden with more titles and with more approaches to play, that notion of character and how one actually goes about playing one have broadened as well. What it means to play a character is a question that can be answered very differently now than in 1974, 1984, 1994, 2004, 2014, and so on. Sadly, although our ability to observe and communicate what goes on across the hobby as a whole has improved, our ability to describe it and so further share and discover it has not commensurately grown. Where discussion exists, it is often contentious or based on division based solely and laughably on preference, or it circles an echoing drain for a time before sinking out of sight into the dank pipes of forgotten ideas.

There is not much we can do about that other than to stop basing argument on preference and to put productive and descriptive ideas about play into the games being written so that others can consider and build on them. You know – just defy human nature; that’s all we have to do.

This post, such as it is, as the title indicates, is a stab at preference in defense of techniques. Techniques used in our play have effects, on the events of play, on our experience of them, and the act of play itself. They, being a specific gambit in the conversation that is our play, shape how that play is perceived without changing what play is. In this case, let’s – as the introduction to this post suggests – look at characters, shall we?

IC and OoC Play

One of the fundamental aspects we can recognize early on about playing a character is expressed in the borrowed theatrical terms, in-character (IC) and out-of-character (OoC). If we are lucky, we can avoid having all of that couched in the blinding term ‘diegetic’ until we are practiced enough in actually looking at play to see the broader picture, not just that popular and partial conception. The desire to import critical and descriptive terms from other sources can be very tempting, but when they hide as much as they reveal, they need to be abandoned in favor of the natural language we ourselves come to in our discussions, until such time as actually and functionally useful terms arise on their own. The use of IC and OoC work, are easily understood, have room for nuance to be gleaned from them as we grow in play experience and in experience observing play, and importantly – do not impede or limit our understanding of the broader activity which is the play of RPGs. Yeehaw. Diegetic, on the other hand, is by its nature a description of information encoded into a narrative (the explanation of a story) and is inextricably tied to the presentation of completed fiction – even branching completions like video games. Where that falters in RPGs is that not only is there no completion, play does not and often cannot conform to that limitation – and more importantly – is regularly assessed as poor play when it does. The typical RPG activity stops where the typical storytelling activity begins – relating a fictional series of events to an audience. In play, we create. Telling comes later. What the importation of diegesis as a term obscures is the active, reactive, and interactive behaviors of imagination and conception which are in progress during the conversation which is the core act of play, hiding them behind the poorly chosen term “fiction” – as in, “What is important in the fiction is the character’s realization of what they are being asked to do.”

Get back to the characters!

We can see the two most distinct stances for character portrayal, IC and OoC, as simply being the difference between using information from inside the parameters of play as the character, or from outside them. A lot of games, perhaps most, will involve interactions from both of these stances. By that we mean that when we speak and act in the role of the character, that can be seen as IC play, and when we speak and act as ourselves, that is OoC play, and in order to play smoothly in terms of using the system while acting on the imagined world, reacting to it, and interacting with each other in these overlapping contexts, we need to do both. Once we get that in hand, the nuances of each stance start to appear.

One of the first rejections of this sort of thinking flows along lines of personality. If we invent a personality for a character, there are challenges to be made to the quality of play in that style, just as there are if we do not. Where a strong grounding in grasping the information-handling basis of IC and OoC play is useful lies in recognizing that IC and OoC play exists regardless of whether there is effort to produce a difference between the personality of the player and the character or not. When Carter turns to his buddy the GM to ask, “Did my die roll under your chair?” or “Is a 5 good enough?” or “Did you say, ‘left’?” those questions are seen as being OoC. When Carter states actions or things the character is saying or doing, this can be seen as being IC. These extreme examples are explicitly focused on the world in which we play on the OoC side, and the world in our imaginations on the IC side. Again, over time, the nuances become more apparent from these fundamental observations. Arguments like the passion for or hatred of “….it’s what my character would do!” suddenly lose their teeth in the fight for division and simply become elements of description of what is happening in play and if that effect is of use to us in the way that we have chosen to play. Of course, without assessment and understanding of how we play and what we want from our play, we are powerless to have any say in what play we actually get.

To touch on such a nuance, we can look at the things we actually say and what their sources are. For some people and their discovered preferences, Carter’s stated actions and words need to be consistent with the role that is being played for it be considered to actually be IC. This means that whatever elements of personality and social standing have been established for Carter’s character, not to mention the truths of the world in which that character lives, must inform, define, and set enjoyable boundaries for how Carter plays them. For others, the access to information is more important than questions of personality. If the player knows more about the world or the current situation of play than their character does, what they choose to do or not do with that information is crucial to a group’s enjoyment. Some groups would want Carter to leverage any and all knowledge, IC or OoC, in the pursuit of whatever goal the group has for play. Others might expect all the players to artfully maneuver through their play (metaplay) until whatever useful piece of information was ‘legitimately accessible’ to them IC. Still others might expect that this division in access to information was prevented so that they could focus solely on play – either IC or OoC – without the burden of pretending not to know things.

This all leads us to look at the play of characters as being a little more than just in or out of character. There is play where the information I have about a given moment is identical to the character’s and I can act, react, and interact as they would: IC: As Character. There is play where I don’t know more than my character does about the moment, but I am free to do more than act, react, and interact as they would, I can also base my decisions on them as a personality separate from my own which I might like to steer in some sort of direction, such as mechanical improvement, development of attachments or emotional conditions, or the traversing of parts of a perceived archetypal arc like in a story. IC: As Author. There is play where I don’t know more than my character does about the world that they are in, the moment we are playing through, or their chances to do things in the system, so I base my decisions on what I want as the player of a game within that framework of information, speaking to my fellow players as players about the events taking place in the game. IC: As Player. All of these vectors of attention and information handling in the game might shift back and forth throughout a session. We might have one that comes to us naturally and one we have chosen as a preference. All of these fall within the confines of the In-Character stance. When we move beyond what the character could reasonably know about things, we move into the Out-of-Character stance, and we can see the same sort of patterns and others emerge about our play. OoC: As Character, As Author, and As Player. It doesn’t stop with these three examples of vectors for our attention, on either side of IC or OoC, but these examples make a strong start in establishing a more stable view of what goes on within the conversation that is play and how much variation can exist even within a single group.

The spectrum of character in RPGs is beautiful, beguiling, rich and varied, and puts any rainbow to shame in its impact, apparent simplicity, and seeming triviality~

NOTE 1: This post has been resurrected from a draft I chose not to release in May of 2014 because I couldn’t find a way to couch it in the commonly accepted terms in use online at the time. In those days, I was trying to get into the ideas of others through the portals provided by the terms they gravitated toward. Sadly, that effort confirmed my suspicions that those terms are often not used consistently or with real intention. So, now that that experiment in borrowed terminology has ended for me, I have restored this post to its original form. I don’t intend for it to be spicy. If it seems to you to be so, that is something for us both to consider~

NOTE 2: I have launched a new page to support easier discovery, reference, and sharing of episodes from my podcast, Casting Shadows. The episodes are, of course, easily spotted on the homepage here, but lack any means of returning to older episodes, or seeking them out by content. The new site addresses those issues and a few more – such as an easier to use and remember link: castingshadowspodcast.com
I hope you will consider subscribing to it or in a fit of generosity, passing the link on to someone who might enjoy it~