Thanks for the thoughtful replies! I'll respond to a couple of them
all in one post since they are related...
From Russell Wallace...
>Hmm, but from what you're saying, she does understand other viewpoints
>when it's physical threats; it's only a problem when the threats are
>social? That suggests the problem might be a slightly different one.
>A guess: maybe she regards combat as a sort of game and therefore
>doesn't take offense, in the same way she wouldn't if her queen was
>taken in chess, but regards social interaction as, well, a form of
>social interaction, and therefore gets insulted when people get nasty?
From Gleichman....
>I suggested at the time that Gamism could well not be a third corner
>to the Threefold at all, but rather just the use of Simulation and
>Drama at different points of the game. that basically the Gamist
>player feels that play should proceed in a Story focus path until the
>battle map came into play, at which point they convert to pure
>Simulation (whatever happens in the battle happens). And then back
>afterwards. Another split could be "we're using mechanics, it's
>Simulation". "We're not using mechanics, we're in Drama mode."
>The first possible effect is that the player expects Story driven
>methods between battles and is upset when they don't occur. Typically
>I would think this would express itself in a different way then you're
>describing.
Seeing these two bits posted one after the other gave me a bit of an
epiphany. Now that I think about it, this player does tend to whine
during combats. One of her spells gets resisted, she grumbles to
herself that she has no useful abilities, her spells are always
resisted, why does she even bother, blah blah blah. I'm sure you've
all heard it before. I suspect that in a vacuum she'd probably prefer
and entirely diceless run, or at least she'd think it a fine thing if
the GM fudged certain rolls so that all the PCs were equally effective
or whatever. Luckily for me we aren't operating in a vacuum. The
other players all respect the mechanics of dice rolling. If I ask for
a die roll in any situation they are generally happy to accept the
outcome, even if I'm asking for them to roll their diplomacy skill.
The other five players all ignore her grumbling when it comes to
things that involve die rolls, she gets no positive reinforcement of
the behavior, and it has become infrequent and thus not a problem.
The thing is that everyone wants to do pure role-playing when it comes
to talking to the king, so there tends to be less die rolling. When
it's not an obvious mechanic, I think the other players tend to
respond more sympathetically when the player in question botches
things and whines about it. It's probably subconscious -- these
people are all friends, they're in a social situation because there is
no combat map or dice involved, their default reaction to to side with
their friend. This tends to drag everyone towards the POV about how
people ought to react to one another, a POV that is valid for the
society of the real world outside the door but not for the fantasy
world that I am trying to ****tray.
I'm not sure if that really gives me a solution. It is an interesting
way of looking at it, as to why the other players react differently in
the different situations. Perhaps I could find some way to ask for
more die rolls in the social situations to leverage the peer pressure
through respect for mechanics. Unfortunately there will still be
situations where that won't work. No matter how well you roll on your
diplomacy skill, it's not going to give you a good result when you
tell the king he's being unreasonable for not telling you the details
of the secret mission that you happened to get wind of.
From Gleichman...
>Perhaps this isn't a style difference or break, but more a case of
>players trained over nine years that "X" works suddenly finding
>themselves in a place where it doesn't.
It is certainly the case that the players could get away with stuff
when dealing with lower rank NPCs than they can't with higher ranked
ones, though I have tried to model all along that rank matters by
having NPCs of different rank react differently. It is also the case
that about half the players have opted to change to new characters
over the course of the run, including the player we're talking about.
I don't think the situation would have been avoided if she hadn't
changed characters, but now that you have me thinking about it, the
fact that she seems to expect the NPCs to react the same way to her
new character as they did to her old character in spite of a huge
difference in backgrounds is somewhat telling.
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