In article <wICdneZrJ_QBXzvYnZ2dnUVZ_rylnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
gleichman <Fox1_217NoSpam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>But I didn't say you (or anyone) was foolish for this reaction. I said
that
>anyone who feels they don't have *time* to role-play while playing a rpg
is
>foolish. Unless one is doing the rpg version of Speed Chess, it doesn't
make
>logical sense.
There's a couple of senses of "have time".
One is: do the characters have time? If each and every PC must do the
tactically perfect thing each and every round of combat or it's TPK, my
subjective sense is that there is "not time" for any roleplaying, at
least not the kind that is expressed in character actions. I suppose the
PCs could talk or feel, but their decisions cannot express their
characters, because they don't have any "spare" decisions, except the
decision to die.
If the result of making a decision driven by character personality is
predictably character death, I will stop doing it. And if my characters'
decisions no longer express their personalities, I do not consider myself
to be roleplaying.
The other is: does the player have time? This can take several forms.
The player may have goals: I'd like to see such-and-such game events
in the next month. If she has 10 hours to play this month, and needs
to do 6 hours of detailed tactical combat and 4 hours of prep and
item-buying, she has to choose between failing to meet her goals, and
not doing any conversations. I find that if the game moves too slowly,
I lose interest; so each hour spent on overhead is an hour lost to
roleplaying, after a point. And in my hands high-threat games are
very, very high overhead, because you *cannot make mistakes*. Check
everything twice. Prepare backup plans and shop for those too. Count
every gold piece: you may need them all. Redo the spell loadout before
*every* encounter, because one slip and you die. I just may not be
able to do all that and roleplay too, and hold down a day job, and
have anything actually happen in the campaign.
Or the player may simply be overloaded. In _Zenith Trajectory_ I
could not think about what my PCs were thinking and feeling; I was going
crazy just trying to track spell durations and the like. Slowing the
game down does not help because the slower you go, the worse the memory
burden becomes. Maybe "enough time" is a bad phrase for this but
subjectively that's how it felt.
We also didn't want to split _Zenith_ over two sessions; we thought both
GM and player would catastrophically lose their grasp on the mechanics,
with 30+ durationed spells to track. That means, every minute spent on
character thoughts and feelings is another minute of that session, and it
took 7 hours already. I'm not physically capable of much more.
I don't believe tactics and roleplaying are mutually exclusive. But for
me
as a player, the demand for *perfect* tactics is lethal to roleplaying.
And
that is how I interpret high-lethality games. I don't believe I am able
to change that interpretation; I invest too much in my PCs and lose too
much when they die. If I can see that by being tactically better I could
have saved them, I'm going to feel incredible pressure to do it, even if
it's unenjoyable--till eventually the whole thing is unenjoyable and dies.
I do roleplay better when the scenario is easier. I'm sorry you find that
offensive, but damn it, it's true. I'm not claiming it's true of anyone
but myself, but I think you should allow that I know it of myself. And
"not enough time" describes a lot of the problems fairly well.
I'm still tired of being called a fool, too.
Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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