IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance

[STD]

Over on the Arx Peeves thread, there was a discussion about players accepting IC consequences for things. This made me think about that in a less game-specific way.

In my personal experience, players tend to be okay with just about everything (including death) as long as it doesn’t hit on any specific OOC baggage and cool.

Most people I’ve encountered in such a scenario are perfectly fine with death as long as their character goes out in a memorable way. No one wants to be the scrub that is just obliterated two seconds into the fight with the Thing That Shall Not Be without being able to do anything. People DO tend to be okay with being the Gandalf who stands on the bridge, fighting the Thing That Shall Not Be and giving their friends time to defeat it or escape. Throw in a soliloquy at death-time and a lot of folks are darn near enthusiastic about their impending doom.

But over there on the thread, it was mentioned that, in someone’s else’s experience, players were unwilling to even be inconvenienced.

So I’m curious… have I just been lucky in my experience? Or is the other person an outlier? What do you, the viewers at home, think? Are you willing to kill of a character if it’s an appropriately cool death?

[Evilgrayson]

@STD In my experience, some players will roll with anything. Some players will roll with anything if they trust the people involved. Some players will roll with most stuff, but have hard lines in the sand. Some players will roll with some stuff, as long as it doesn’t make them look bad, for a ‘bad’ of their own definition. Some players will roll with some stuff if they can make it someone else’s fault. Some refuse to roll with anything that doesn’t fit with their vision of their character. And some just won’t roll.

And there are some who’ll rewrite a scene, a story, or the whole game world, to make themselves right and you wrong, whoever you happen to be or whatever you’re trying to do.

A lot of it’s tied in with the ones who have to win at all costs.

[Ashkuri]

Player feels they had agency and their choices matter = they’re typically ok with consequences

Player feels they didn’t have agency and their choices didn’t matter = they’re typically not ok with consequences

[hellfrog]

@STD yeah I think people tend to be far more accepting of a heroic end than they are of a mild embarrassment.

More people I think will roll with going out in a blaze of glory than being disagreed with and forced to concede the other character was right.

[Third Eye]

I do think a lot of it comes down to trust. Ideal world. Many players occupy an unideal world where they throw fits if rolls go badly or if someone reacts poorly to them, but them aside.

I’ve played on games where character death was common (the old Greatest Generation being the example that lives largest in my mind) but it was also an accepted part of playing and the mechanisms by which it happened were fairly transparent and random. Lousy rolls killed you, in combat situations you’d opted into, in what was a PvE environment (so all the other PC soldiers were on your ‘side’).

There are GMs I wouldn’t play this level of risk with because I lack trust in them/enjoyment of what they’re doing, but in most cases I get a pretty clear vibe about this before things escalate to a point where I can’t just extricate myself from a storyline and/or quit. I tend to think I leave these situations pretty quietly when I don’t see it changing.

[Pavel]

To me, the experience is the most important. I don’t care, generally, what the consequences are. What I do care about is whether it’s interesting or not. The worst crime for a game/admin/storyteller/whatever can commit (aside from actual crimes) is being boring.

The second most in level of importance is, as @imstillhere said, agency. Not just having consequential choices and the like, but also… this is supposed to be collaborative. Work with me to figure out some consequence, unless the consequence is so obvious even my blind sister could see it coming.

For instance, a character jumps off a cliff face-first into some rocks. Consequence? They ded now. As opposed to a character is incredibly rude, condescending, confrontational, or whatever to Evil NPC from Evil NPCs Inc. Consequence? I don’t know, let’s work together on this to figure out something appropriate and an appropriate solution, if necessary.

Just because you the staff person think the consequence is interesting and appropriate doesn’t mean it is. I’ve got to play the consequence, so let me have some say in it.

[MisterBoring]

I would say that the occurrence of players bailing on a character or even a game because of an inconvenience is the outlier, and I say that as one of the people that pointed out the idea that it even happens in the other thread.

It’s not common, but it’s also not non-existent.

Ultimately I feel like the easy way to avoid this is to discuss the situation OOC as early as possible to make sure that both the person running the scenes and distributing the consequences and the person who plays the character receiving the consequences are on the same page for both the extent of the consequences as well as the timetable and course of actions needed to resolve the consequences.

Then again, in some cases, the player of the PC in question believes that PCs are inviolate to a certain degree and anything that proves otherwise is a personal attack.

I’d also probably point out that I feel like this happens more often in WoD games than elsewhere.

[Pavel]

@MisterBoring said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

because of an inconvenience

I’d also wager, in my new life as a person who tries to see the best in people, that most folk who do dip after a so-called inconvenience disagree with that idea. Sure, some folk will rage against any minor consequence because they’re The Protagonist in Life and can’t ever be contradicted. Still, for the rest, I think it’s a fundamental difference in acceptance. What you see as an inconvenience, another person might see as a fundamental departure from what they want their character to be. And, honestly, if they choose to depart for that reason I can’t fault them.

This is especially true when it is the first instance of such a consequence.

[sao]

I do think that people hate being wrong more than they hate losing the character because they didn’t think the character was wrong - they, the player, were wrong, if the character’s opinion was wrong, so that’s a loss to them, the person, rather than the character.

I’m a woman with anxiety issues so I have to train myself not to apologize when I’m not wrong - I feel like it puts me in different perspective than some players who don’t share that trait.

[SpaceKhomeini]

I usually operate under the assumption that the character I’m helming is largely an idiot and does idiot things that will result in idiotic self-owns.

Sometimes I forget that I haven’t communicated this loudly enough with everyone around me and they get kind of cagey when I do stupid shit IC.

[Faraday]

Some players will roll with things - I love that. But I’ve had some players quit over what I considered natural (non character-ending) consequences of their PCs’ actions, and others throw gigantic fits over the smallest of setbacks.

PC death is my personal hot-button because it ends the story and makes you start over from scratch. That’s not fun for me, so I don’t play (or run) games like that.

@SpaceKhomeini said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I usually operate under the assumption that the character I’m helming is largely an idiot and does idiot things that will result in idiotic self-owns.

Sometimes I forget that I haven’t communicated this loudly enough with everyone around me and they get kind of cagey when I do stupid shit IC.

The fact that this needs to be communicated at all is kind of emblematic of the core issue. Most players in my experience don’t want their character to come off looking bad (in their opinion) because they think it makes them look bad. There’s such an over-investment in IC success, glory, and coolness that if someone is actively trying to embrace natural consequences or have their character do something stupid, it’s looked upon with suspicion or disdain.

[Pavel]

@Faraday said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

There’s such an over-investment in IC success, glory, and coolness that if someone is actively trying to embrace natural consequences or have their character do something stupid, it’s looked upon with suspicion or disdain.

This is a bit of a side-tangent, but I’d be curious to know whether this behaviour is solely intrinsic or if it has somehow ‘evolved’ through a trend of over-rewarding success, glory, and/or coolness rather than simply playing an interesting person.

Not curious enough to actually work out a study or anything, I’m not a masochist.

[MisterBoring]

@Pavel said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

And, honestly, if they choose to depart for that reason I can’t fault them.

I can’t fault people for that either, with the exception of cases where they throw a total tantrum on their way out and drag the game.

[Pavel]

@MisterBoring said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

@Pavel said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

And, honestly, if they choose to depart for that reason I can’t fault them.

I can’t fault people for that either, with the exception of cases where they throw a total tantrum on their way out and drag the game.

Oh, absolutely agree. I want to heavily advocate for the idea of leaving being totally fine if you’re unhappy. Feel free to express why, of course, but if it’s just a difference of opinion or whathaveyou, then try and be diplomatic about it.

[Faraday]

@Pavel said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

This is a bit of a side-tangent, but I’d be curious to know whether this behaviour is solely intrinsic or if it has somehow ‘evolved’ through a trend of over-rewarding success, glory, and/or coolness rather than simply playing an interesting person.

I have no hard data obviously, but in my experience, the behavior has always been there.

I think a lot of it stems from MU roots in RPGs, which have always been geared around success, glory, and/or coolness. Both extrinsically in terms of how you get stuff in the game (XP, loot, levels, etc.) and intrinsically in what society tends to value in storytelling and what most players find fun.

If your PC has to take on a team of assassins, most players are going to want to be John Wick rather than The Dead Body. I think that’s only natural.

One difference is that in a TTRPG, you know the GM (probably) isn’t just there to screw you over and you’ll (probably) still get to be Big Darn Heroes in the end. This can make players more tolerant to setbacks. But even in TT I’ve seen players get bent out of shape when things didn’t go their way.

I think that behavior is partly tied to whether one falls on the game/story continuum, and how much enmeshment there is between PC and player. These are also factors in TT.

[mietze]

I think this is one of those things that is highly dependent on the situation, even more than the individual.

I think IF people feel oocly that they are seen and getting to contribute, and are having fun, there’s a lot more that they’re willing to bend for and roll with.

I think the tricky issue with NPCs in particular is that it can be really easy for that part to be lost, and for some people that does trigger a desire to poke the bear just TO be seen. I don’t know about any of the specific situations people are referencing here (I don’t think). But I have absolutely seen on several games people sitting through scenes that are largely NPCs roleplaying/talking primarily to each other and pretty much ignoring other people and forcing everyone else into audience role OR showing up to PC run events to blow them up without checking in with the person running the scene, and an ICly they get reactions from the spectators that clearly the staff running the NPCs didn’t expect, or they feel are disruptive. Both types of behavior were really super common on the WoD games in which I was largely raised. So sometimes I wonder when I see someone really stepping on that edge if they aren’t reacting to the perception of ‘oh well, might as well have my kind of fun since there’s nothing I can do here.’ Almost like the reverse behavior of the PC who comes to scenes exclusively to pose at the NPCs and dodges all other PCs’ poses to them like some kind of ninja.

When a PC is finally penalized for negative interactions with NPCs, if it’s in that context of feeling like they aren’t part of things enough anyway to feel concern or attachment (either because of something they’ve internalized or misunderstood or they’ve just hit their limit feeling like they’re spectating because that is in fact what they have to do) then they’re much less accepting OOCly of consequences. The people who are just in it to be as obnoxious as possible in my observation/experience really don’t care about losing their pc or whatever, they’ll just walk but be as obnoxious as they can be on their way out.

But I think most of the time MOST people are actually fine with consequence. But also even some of those people might have just had a bad day or something else going on where they were not in that moment able to make something fun out of an unexpected major setback or failure. (I don’t qualify poking the bear out of boredom as unexpected.)

[KDraygo]

@Faraday said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

Some players will roll with things - I love that. But I’ve had some players quit over what I considered natural (non character-ending) consequences of their PCs’ actions, and others throw gigantic fits over the smallest of setbacks.

PC death is my personal hot-button because it ends the story and makes you start over from scratch. That’s not fun for me, so I don’t play (or run) games like that.

@SpaceKhomeini said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I usually operate under the assumption that the character I’m helming is largely an idiot and does idiot things that will result in idiotic self-owns.

Sometimes I forget that I haven’t communicated this loudly enough with everyone around me and they get kind of cagey when I do stupid shit IC.

The fact that this needs to be communicated at all is kind of emblematic of the core issue. Most players in my experience don’t want their character to come off looking bad (in their opinion) because they think it makes them look bad. There’s such an over-investment in IC success, glory, and coolness that if someone is actively trying to embrace natural consequences or have their character do something stupid, it’s looked upon with suspicion or disdain.

I believe it’s not only the player not wanting to come off looking bad, which is part of it, but there are some who already have a concrete roadmap planned out for their character. Their character progression is like Lockheed Martin’s stock, the only way is up. In their mind, they already have an expectation that after one event, their character’s coolness and popularity is at this level, then after another event, they will attain a higher level, etc.

This means, if they perform an action that they feel is perfectly fine and cool, and the GM in that scene throws an unexpected wrench which may sidetrack, delay, or even mar their roadmap, then their character is ruined. They’re out. They do not want to go through the effort to take this new, uncertain Path B, because it was not part of their original plan. They play for the ‘W’, they don’t play for the collaborative story telling.

[MisterBoring]

@KDraygo said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

Their character progression is like Lockheed Martin’s stock, the only way is up.

The antithesis of this, the player who’s character progression is meant to repeatedly bounce off of rock bottom, is possibly every GM’s unicorn.

[Wizz]

@MisterBoring

it is? why is that your unicorn?

[Pavel]

@MisterBoring My unicorn is everyone being available at the same time on a consistent basis…