Tuesday 14 September 2021

RPG Player Characters and the Patch Adams Problem

When I used to play RPGs as a young teenager (and, later, in PBEM and PBP iterations) the idea was always to come up with a PC who could essentially be the main character of a novel. They had backstories, they had detailed appearances, and they had personalities. "He's witty and incisive!" "She's grim and brooding!" "He's eccentric and strange!"

I understand that this is as big an element of the hobby as it ever was, perhaps more so, and that in fact creating interesting PCs is a significant chunk of the fun of things for a lot of people (indeed almost a hobby in itself).

The problem that I always encountered was that the PC as envisaged by the player during character generation is often a very different beast to that which emerges at the table. Put bluntly: maybe your PC as you imagine him is witty and incisive. But maybe you can't pull off witty and incisive. Maybe your PC actually comes across as a boorish, overbearing idiot. 

I would like to christen this the 'Patch Adams Problem'. Have you ever seen Patch Adams? Don't. While it is not perhaps the worst film I have ever seen, it is offensively bad, the least desirable kind of bad, not so bad that it's good, but so bad that it makes you feel a worse person for having watched it. Peter Sellers is once said to have replied, after being asked whether he would do anything differently if he could live his life over, "I would do everything exactly the same except I wouldn't see The Magus." The experience of watching Patch Adams reminded me of that.

The film has many flaws. But at the heart of its badness is the character of Patch Adams himself. The creators of the film envisage our 'hero' as funny, intelligent, kind, beloved by children, esteemed by his peers as a charming eccentric, and filled with an optimistic passion to help others. And that is indeed the person that the cast of characters seems to be reacting towards. 

But this is not what we, the audience, see. What we see is actually an unfunny, obnoxious, creepy, lecherous, leering, sanctimonious, belligerent oaf, perhaps actively malevolent, but certainly narcissistic and blinkered, and bloody-mindedly focused on pissing off everybody around him for no good reason whatsoever. The film is littered with arguments between himself and others, and in almost literally every single one of these disputes, we find ourselves agreeing wholeheartedly with whoever Patch Adams is arguing against. Yet at the end, it is he who triumphs. It is a bit like a filmic version of A Confederacy of Dunces, except nobody who made it is in on the gag.

The point, of course, is that if you are going to pretend to be a funny, intelligent, brooding, menacing, insightful, charming or creative character, you had better actually be funny, intelligent, brooding, menacing, insightful, charming or creative when in character. And the one most certainly does not necessarily follow from the other.

The approach which old school play tends to favour, and I think by far the most sensible, is to begin as more or less a blank slate. One can paint in broad brushstrokes, certainly at the physical level. And the PC's stats may suggest lack of intelligence, a muscular frame, etc. But it is best for the PC's personality to emerge as you get to know her, and as events shape her. Often, it will turn out that her personality is a lot like yours. But at least if it is she will seem like a genuine person and not a poor copy of some figment of your imagination.

20 comments:

  1. So when I was training to be a hospital chaplain, Patch Adams was required viewing, as in we literally watched a VCR tape of the movie in class. But only a short foray into the real operation of a hospital and the care of patients revealed how completely fantastical the movie was.
    The actual Patch Adams decried the film as well, citing how it focused on humor, rather than the medical reform the real doctor was actually advocating for.

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  2. Yeah, it took me several years (and a lot of uncomfortable and unfulfilling sessions) to realize that while I can envision just about any type of character in my mind, if that character's personality isn't compatible with my own that I'm not going to be able to convincingly portray that character at a table (and, just as importantly, that I wasn't all that interested in trying - that improving my acting skills wasn't something I was hoping to get out of playing rpgs). It's much MUCH more fun to me to start a character as a blank-slate archetype and see what kind of personality they develop through organic play than to be given a pre-developed character and have to try to figure out how to effectively portray that personality, especially without having it come across as a broad comic stereotype. This was one of the big battles I had in the 90s when the rpg mainstream was very much focused in that direction and I had an uphill battle trying to convince anyone that it didn't need to be that way, that (especially in the first few sessions with a new character) playing effectively a fictional avatar-version of your own personality filtered through the stats of your character is not only okay but is in some ways better because it ultimately leads to characters who feel more organic and real as opposed to gimmicky two-dimensional acting exercises.

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  3. It's hard to disagree at a basic level about this side of unskillful role-playing. There are those players whose playing make us wince.

    Still, a certain E. Gary Gygax had hopes for gamers taking on roles that pushed them into new personal territory. As he wrote in his Players Handbook of 1978 (p. 7), "As a role player, *you* become Falstaff the fighter. You know how strong, intelligent, wise, healthy, dexstrous and, relatively speaking, how commanding a personality you have. ... You act out the game as this character... You interact with your fellow role players, not as Jim and Bob and Mary who work at the office together, but as Falstaff the fighter, Angore the cleric, and Filmar, the mistress of magic! ... Each of you will become an artful thespian as time goes by..."

    Or look at his module B2, where he explicitly encourages DMs to "play the part fully" of monsters and NPCs, right down to the noises that creatures make. He uses the word "dramatics."

    "Artful thespians?" cry self-described old-school gamers. Yes, Gygax was all about play-acting, it seems, at least in print back when things were still fresh. There are plenty of other actually old-school authors who wrote this way.

    To be fair, it may be that you have in mind Gygax's "as time goes by" bit here when you are talking about blank slates turning into fully fledged personas, but Gygax was talking about what he termed the individual player's "skill" in playing (not a single character's growth).

    I've seen players taking on roles unlike themselves brilliantly and vividly. I've also seen players who take on exactly the same role every time, like the player who is always the same gruff, honor-bound dwarf with a slightly different name in every single game. The blank slate stays blank for these players, and tedious for the rest of the players, changing only as its edges become encrusted with GP and XP and HP. I can't say which is worse: awkward acting or lifeless "roll-playing," as they used to disparage it back in those youthful days of the '80s.

    On a lighter note, I'm sure RPG enthusiasts can have fun both ways, while we each harbor personal preferences. For my part, I'm all for encouraging players to play as something they aren't, when they feel up to it. I also like just to start the game and find out what the characters are through play, as you do.

    Another take on your argument is simply to dump the useless intellectual stats (INT WIS CHA), for which players don't measure up to your standards.

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    1. I wonder about dropping the intellectual stats. That feels like a blogpost in itself.

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    2. LotFP emphasizes that INT, CHA and WIS reflect various in-game powers (number of languages, number of henchmen and magic resistance iIRC) and don’t replace the player’s personal intelligence. No making Intelligence rolls to solve puzzles!

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    3. Ah, it was a blog post in itself! Unless you knew about this and were just teasing me:

      https://lichvanwinkle.blogspot.com/2020/09/player-skill-should-mean-dropping-int.html

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  4. I've come to the same conclusion. I'm upfront with my GMs that I like to figure out who my character is during play.

    I've found that not overthinking my character also helps with group dynamics. I might decide my character is going to be the smartass, only to find that everyone else had the same idea. To quote the Law & Order episode of Community, "We can't both do the stinger."

    If I leave my character open, I can see someone else is playing the smartass, leaving a perfect opening to be the no-nonsense straight man, allowing us to be foils.

    My thinking on this is probably influenced by being a GM, as it leads me to think about how to create interesting opportunities for PCs to interact with each other.

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    1. Yes, there is a competitiveness about who can start off with the most interesting character that always used to annoy me.

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  5. An easy trick that I've always relied upon is to make sure that your character (PC or NPC) believes at least one thing that you know to be false. It doesn't matter how intelligent or admirable a person seems, almost invariably you will eventually find that they're mind-bogglingly wrong about at least one thing. And they should have a good reason for thinking so.

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    1. That's a nice idea. It reminds me of the type of thing Monte Cook would come up with.

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  6. I have encountered not only those characters envisaged in a particular way, but also those created with a weird over-reference to the stats (as here: https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2017/04/popular-mechanics-charisma-highs-and.html).

    In creating a character, a few pre-arranged tells may be of use - then you can distinguish between speaking in character or not. But there's a limit; do we want the Lizardman ranger to hiss his way through every social interaction? Far better to allow the bulk of character to emerge slowly.

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    1. Yes, a bit of reference to stats goes a long way, I think - not least because it's really, really hard to try to be stupider or cleverer than you actually are.

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  7. I think a similar corollary to your Patch Adams is actors (and I'm sure plenty of players of RPGs) who envision themselves playing a laconic Clint Eastwood type character and just end up sort of wooden and uninteresting (actorwise I'm thinking of Kevin Costner in say Waterworld as a prime example).

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    1. Yes, definitely, although I do have a soft spot for Kevin Costner.

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  8. >>The point, of course, is that if you are going to pretend to be a funny, intelligent, brooding, menacing, insightful, charming or creative character, you had better actually be funny, intelligent, brooding, menacing, insightful, charming or creative when in character.<<

    I find as GM it's easy enough to play different personalities. In a trad RPG it seems much much harder to play a Player Character whose personality significantly differs from my own. I think the problem is identification - the PC in a sense is 'me', so they inevitably behave like me. NPCs are 'not me', which frees me up to play them according to their listed personality.

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  9. I've really struggled with playing against-type, and often felt aware of and uncomfortable about this. One of the biggest things holding me back has been my nervousness about stepping out of line, of acting against the wishes of the other players (even, in some cases, my reluctance to interfere with the GM's carefully railroaded plans for the session).

    Last year I learned a big lesson about roleplaying from a 19 year-old player whose character died and whose subsequent character, as well as being poles apart from their predecessor, destabilised everything the party had been working towards and turned the campaign in a new direction (I'm well aware that this kind of disruption can be, probably more often than not, annoying, and can ruin games; in this case it did the opposite, adding depth and a new subplot to the campaign. It certainly helped that the player was a semi-pro actor and improviser. Also that the character was extremely well thought through, a three-dimensional embodiment of banal, bureaucratic evil).

    I'm no fan of alignment in RPGs, and have hardly ever played an evil character - partly because it would go against my instincts but mostly because it's hard to pull off without undermining the other players. But encountering the richness of that character made my try making my own next character - https://peakrill.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-adventures-of-bleaklow-part-1.html - evil. The result was some of the most fun I've ever had gaming (fortunately the other players shared my enjoyment). Sure, the character was a stereotype - the psychopathic dwarf trope - albeit lightly spiced with a high charisma which I used to inject a performative and narcissistic element. But it was one of the few times when I've felt like I was truly playing a _character_, rather than being swept along as some version of myself. And it helped me step out of the travelator of kill monsters, get treasure, level up, repeat: my character's first combat was against were-rats and, lacking a silver or magical weapon, I turned a negative into a positive by making it an opportunity for potentially never-ending performative (albeit non-damaging) violence. That was in itself its own reward - I didn't need death and treasure, just violence and an appreciative audience.

    I've done some acting in the past, and found the excuse of "being" someone else very liberating. Somehow at the gaming table (or Roll20 session) I rarely feel protected enough by signs saying "THIS IS NOT ME" to be able to do that. I wonder if there are mechanics other than alignment which can provide a free pass to be who we aren't? I feel that the open nature of D&D makes it harder to play against type than in some other more restrictive games.

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