Feelings in Role Playing

feelings

There’s an experiment going on at #rpgtweory about RPG rules about feelings. I have feelings about them. But Ben and I were having a hard time expressing ourselves 140 characters at a time.

My original assertion, with subtleties edited out for brevity, was this:

Never write rules about feelings. Write rules about material needs and the consequences of fulfilling them.

Ben didn’t buy it, and there was more to the idea anyway. Let’s discuss!

0 thoughts on “Feelings in Role Playing”

  1. I think it’s a piece of good design advice that doesn’t deserve to be promoted to a principle of good design. (As so many pieces of good design advice don’t, but are anyway.)

    I think that it’s generally very good design advice. Few games, I think, would be better served by rules about feelings than they would by rules about material needs and the consequences of fulfilling them. Those few games exist, of course they do, but they’re few. Odds are that any given rpg, especially any given rpg derived from some kind of adventure fiction, isn’t one of them.

    I’d add material desires – appetites and ambitions – to needs.

  2. Appetites and ambitions are how one experiences material needs, right?

    I think this is the kind of thing that, if you start with this, you won’t go far wrong. I think the odds of failure when starting from the other end — saying, “And now your character feels guilty”, rather than pushing the character to act with the way other characters act toward them — are much, much higher.

    Like, in Shock: people will occasionally stake, “… but you feel really bad about it.” And no one every bothers to invest against that.

    Few games, I think, would be better served by rules about feelings than they would by rules about material needs and the consequences of fulfilling them. Those few games exist, of course they do, but they’re few.

    Can you give some examples?

  3. So, yeah, I basically agree with Vincent. %90 of the time that you’re writing a rule that dictates the character’s emotional state, you actually want to write a rule which incentivizes or de-incentivizes a particular player choice.

    Right? Okay. So we agree on that.

    But that doesn’t mean rules that directly dictate character emotion have no place. In Tenra Bansho there’s this awesome thing where, when you meet a new character, you roll on a chart to see what your feelings are towards them, and their feelings are towards you. This is, in turn, tied into the reward mechanics in a couple of ways.

    So imagine you’re playing an assassin, and you’ve been sent to kill an enemy king. Think about the difference between getting “neutral” vs “angry” vs “in love” on that table? You’re still there to kill the king, but it dramatically shades the how, why, and whether of the action.

    yrs–
    –Ben

  4. “Rules about feelings” does not always have to mean “rules that dictate feelings.” It’s Complicated revolves entirely around the idea that, in order to do certain things, you’ve got to have strong feelings about certain people in your way. You get to decide what those feelings are, but the entire game revolves around how your characters relate to other people through their own issues. And since the game organically forces you to shift how you feel about the other characters in a noticeable way numerous times throughout the game, it gets the players to poke and prod at each other’s characters, create desires and then judge the other characters by how well they’ve helped to fulfill those desires. I think it’d be less fun, and far less true to the source material, if the goals came first and the feelings were freeformed in.

    Of course, IC is probably one of the edge cases you’re talking about, as it’s made to simulate character-driven dramedy and not adventure fiction. In IC, the plot is rather incidental to the character development and relationships.

  5. You get to decide what those feelings are, but the entire game revolves around how your characters relate to other people through their own issues.

    But the rules are about the relating, not the feelings they have, right? Like, the rules are about who’s in a scene, and then you play out your interactions based on feelings you have, right?

    So imagine you’re playing an assassin, and you’ve been sent to kill an enemy king. Think about the difference between getting “neutral” vs “angry” vs “in love” on that table? You’re still there to kill the king, but it dramatically shades the how, why, and whether of the action.

    If that enemy king has something I need? Yes. If the rule is a creative spur, OK, because then it leads to the players figuring out why I like or dislike that king. But “I like him” means that, unless we then have an immediate flashback or whatever that gives me material reasons to like or dislike the dude, it’s just a thing written down on my character sheet.

    I write this really to spur you to explain it more and how it works. But that *sounds* like the kind of rule I’m raising an eyebrow at.

    The way I’d like to see that work is, “OK, I rolled, ‘I like the dude’. My character’s all about guilt about abandoning his teacher when the chips were down, and he’s also about finding his sister, who we know is secretly the princess and power behind the throne. How does he materially and irrevocably impact those proven elements?”

  6. … rules like, “Play your character’s emotions accurately” are, to me, totally kosher. I’m not sure if that’s a problem with this idea. Cuz it could be expanded to, “… and if you’re happy about someone’s presence, roll a blue die instead of the red one.”

  7. Joshua, uh … what? I included a basically complete scenario. You’re apparently on this marxist materialism tip, apparently where it’s all about things you need. Which: whatever.

    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?

    ’cause I’m reading you saying that. And that basically seems to boil down to “I don’t believe in color, at least as applied to a character’s feelings?”

    yrs–
    –Ben

  8. It’s that I don’t believe that rolling “I’m in love with the king” makes my character be in love with the king. We need a way for them to *act* in love, and we need *causes* for them to be in love. If the roll says, “And this is the story about how they fell in love,” then OK, I bet we can play to that.

    You know what this is? This is an emotional random encounter table, right? Just like I think random encounter tables are usually boring and occasionally inspiring, I think that dictating a characters emotions is usually boring but can be occasionally inspiring. A lot of people have figured out how to use random encounter tables in ways that are fun. Just not me.

  9. But the rules are about the relating, not the feelings they have, right? Like, the rules are about who’s in a scene, and then you play out your interactions based on feelings you have, right?

    (hope I got the markup right [Fixed it fer yez])

    Actually, it’s the opposite of what you describe. It’s explicit in IC’s text that you can have whoever you want in a scene, whether or not the people in the scene are people you’re supposed to relate to at the moment. The text says:

    “Crossing a character means declaring that your character has a relationship with the character whose line you crossed. However, a character can only declare their side of said relationship! You cannot say or imply how the other character feels. And remember, they can’t either! Not until their turn, anyway.”

    So like I said, the rules demand that you feel SOMEthing for another character, but it is up to you what that feeling IS. There’s also a common situation where you want to reveal how your character feels about another specific person– you’ve already got it figured out, it’s important to your character’s story– but in order to be able to reveal how you feel, the game board makes you update your relationship with one or two other characters, as well. It forces you to reevaluate how your character feels about everyone else on a regular basis.

  10. the game board makes you update your relationship with one or two other characters,

    That is, it makes you cross others, too, right? It puts you in situations where you’re going to develop opinions and feelings about other characters, then complicates your ability to act on those feelings by requiring you to interact with other characters along the way,right?

    It’s not telling you what your feelings are. It’s just giving you the opportunities to develop them, then complicating your ability to act on them.

    We gotta play this game. I’m confident that it’s doing things I’m not inclined to do.

  11. Yes, you’ve got it. Like I said, they’re not rules DICTATING feelings, but it does fall under the broader umbrella of “rules ABOUT feelings.”

    Let’s figure out a time and place to play, I think it’d be big fun and super useful. I think the general structure could do with something to anchor it a little more firmly to the ground, and that’s the kind of thing you’re good with.

  12. Huh. Gotta think about that. It seems to fall under the “Write rules about material needs and the consequences of fulfilling them” clause.

    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.

  13. Hey, Joshua.

    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

  14. Storming the Wizard’s Tower and Apocalypse World both have rules about how PCs feel, which I learned from Synthia. In broad, the rule looks like this:

    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.

  15. …Nevertheless, almost 100% of my games’ rules are not about how PCs feel.

    (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.)

  16. (I’ve got more coming, but I wanted to respond to Vincent, since I have to finish something important before I get back to this discussion.)

    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.

  17. Hey, Joshua. Can you clarify for me if you’re being:
    1) Descriptive (rules cannot have this function)
    2) Prescriptive (rules should not have this function)
    3) Preferential (I had rules that have this function with the great hateness.)

    yrs–
    –Ben

  18. OK, finally some time to answer this.

    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.

  19. Okay. That’s one way to do things. It’s not the only way, or the only successful way, and there’s history to back that up (there are successful games where your character’s feelings are not entirely in your hands. I’m not sure if there is one, but I bet I could write it, where your character’s feelings are entirely not in your hands.)

    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

  20. Hey, here’s a simple system (on the level of Shadow/Light, which got spun out into Polaris.) It’d be good for a game about intense, passionate people.

    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

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