At the beginning of each scene, or whenever you think your emotions might have changed, turn to your character’s Heart. Ask “How am I feeling right now?”

yrs–
–Ben

It seems to me that your reaction is based on bad experience with bad games, which is completely superfluous to talking about good experience, with good games.

yrs–
–Ben

Under certain mechanical circumstances, you can ask the other PC’s player what your character could do to make her character feel x toward her. “What could my character do right now to make your character like her?” for instance. The other player has to answer, as truthfully as she’s able.

If you then have your character then do that thing, you can reasonably expect the other character to feel x toward her.

That’s hot hotness. But this works *way* better for me than what Ben’s talking about. This is saying, “How can I appeal to your feelings about the character?” What Ben’s talking about is something that I’m just… disintersted in, I guess: “How can I reveal something about the character you don’t feel?”

The former moves you closer to sympathy toward the character, and therefore greater investment. The latter might put the character in more interesting literary tension, but at the cost of your sympathy for them.

So, Ben, I think the answer is that it’s preferential, but bordering on descriptive; that is, it’s hard to make rules that work like this but keep you caring intimately what the character’s deal is. Elizabeth’s rules make it so you run into characters you have feelings about. They make it so you can go deal with other characters you have feelings about, and they make you do other stuff than just deal with them outright. But they don’t give you feelings, they just give you situations and complications.

Also:

Are you saying that there’s no difference, in play, between your character’s interactions with a character he’s going to kill, and hates, and a character he’s going to kill, and is in love with?

I’m saying, you give the players the rules to make that concrete. You don’t tell the player the character’s emotions. You give them the material with which to express them in the world.

I mean, shit, if the only difference is, “give the other player your lowest card if your character is crying”, you’re making a rule about material existence. Give them ways to act on their feelings, by all means. Give them reasons to have strong feelings, yes. Give them feelings, no.

I think that’s what I was getting at.

yrs–
–Ben

I’m all for telling NPCs how they feel. I’m talking about (potential) protagonists. I think mostly, that’s so I know what a character feels when they’re only onscreen for 2 minutes out of the hundreds of minutes of play in a story. That tells me how to act as an NPC. When a character stops being supporting cast, though, they need to be able to follow their heart as much as any character or they’ll be static caricatures, or wildly vasciallating, or whatever. They won’t be sufficiently peoply to play with.

I’d wager that the point they leave supporting cast and become *tagonists is the same point where they start having dynamically interacting material interests.

(I take it we’re limiting ourselves to PCs? Rules about how NPCs feel are much more common, in my games and across the field.)

Under certain mechanical circumstances, you can ask the other PC’s player what your character could do to make her character feel x toward her. “What could my character do right now to make your character like her?” for instance. The other player has to answer, as truthfully as she’s able.

If you then have your character then do that thing, you can reasonably expect the other character to feel x toward her.

Because we’re dealing with human beings predicting how complex characters will respond, sometimes somebody will guess wrong. Both games have fallback procedures for when that happens. But that’s okay – the reasonable expectation remains a perfectly reasonable expectation.

I mean, it’s the same way, we’re playing Dogs, right. And my guy, he gets the 20 fallout and dies.

Hey! I’m the player of the dude. I don’t believe that that rolling “my character is dead” actually *makes* my character dead. So I’m just going to keep playing my character and ignore the roll.

That makes me a shitty-ass player.

Ooh! Ooh! I’ve got a better one. We’re playing In A Wicked Age, right? And we do a roll and I win and I say “okay, your character falls madly in lust with me or I’m going to kick the crap out of you.” And you okay “oh, no, I don’t want none of that” and so you agree to fall in lust with me.

Then, later, you refuse to play it. “Actually, I don’t believe that you saying that ‘my character is madly in lust with you’ is the same thing as my character actually being madly in lust with you. So I’m not going to act it out.”

That’s shitty-ass play.

Oh! Or we’re playing Under the Bed and I just give myself dice equal to all my traits and roll at the beginning of every turn, without justifying them. “I don’t think that the game telling me that my character is slow is the same thing as my character actually being slow, so I’m just going to ignore that.”

Shitty ass!

Likewise, someone playing Tenra Bansho who decided to shine on the zero-act rules would be a shitty ass player. *Not the least of which* because they’re connected to the game’s reward cycle but also because, hey, it’s the game we’re playing. Thems the rules. If we play by them, they’re awesome and satisfying. If we don’t play by them, it’s muddled and crappy.

I really can’t figure out what you’re on about here, other than taking a swathe of good rules and saying “nyah nyah I don’t wanna.” Please help me see that you’re doing something other than that.

yrs–
–Ben

To be clear: “material needs” are, as noted in the Twitter thread, things like love, sex, food, shelter. It’s not just “You own me fitty bucks.” It’s stuff that, without it, it diminishes you.

So, like, in Apocalypse World, there are rules for having sex. They tell you what you must do, but don’t tell you what you must feel. Nor do they work the other way; you don’t have to feel anything particular to have sex with someone. It’s a Move. Your job is to have your character act in accordance with their nature. The rules just say, “Do that.” Then they give you the tools and consequences of using them.

Yeah, let’s figure out a time to play.