[Pax]

Originally posted by Stone Mill:
You insist that you enter the game with a clean slate. I submit that it is not entirely possible. You are human, after all. Most of this will be subconscious.

I don't think you understand how fully I RP a race.

I make decisions -- reactions, responses, etc -- relative to the other players, based PURELY, solely, and exclusively on the character and personality of the Role I have assigned to that race.

My emotional responses barely (if at all) enter into the equation. I take the role, and the situation; I put them together, and examine how the two would interact. From those, I select the course of action that (a) best exemplifies the chosen role, and (b) best serves that race's interests. In that order of priority, mind.

I don't just play RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, I also "GM" (stands for "game master" -- think "referee, movie director, mediator, rules guru, casting director, and everything else off-camera").

Now, in some games, I've GMed villains whose actions woudl make me literally sick to my stomache to contemplate actually being done -- by anyone. I've had to, as a result, learn to divorce my sense of "Self" from my sense of "role"; IOW, to keep role and self apart.

You probably don't have esp, so I don't understand how you can possibly enforce your expectations on other players, or know whether the players in your game will live up to your standard. You are setting yourself up for a lot of difficulty. Creating a hot button for someone to push.

I can't, and if I could wouldn't, enforce my standards on anyone else (some of the roles I assume would, and gleefully ... but I would never do so).

Nor, of course, can I know the characetr of a player save by observing them.

However, just as I seperate MY self and my role, I don't let what players do in the role of their in-game persona influence what I think of the player. The two are different, completely so.

...

I suspect you've never played face-to-face, non-computer RPGs, or at least, haven't done MUCH of that. This isn't something that's easy to explain to someone who doesn't "get it" at the first pass, but after a quarter-century of D&D ... it's instinctive to me; I don't even have to THINK about it anymore.

Clean slate is my policy, but I won't be naive and expose myself to the same mistakes against a same player twice. My guess is that you won't either, but you really can't visualize it as you are posting.

LEt me put this in simple terms for you:

If the role I have selected for a race has a weakness, and I encounter someone who I, the player, know will take advantage of that weakness if and when he detects it ... I will do nothing differently. The Role controls what is or isn't done; I don't change that Role simply because I could "win" better by doing so. The race, the Role, has to learn itself, sometimes.

Example: I, the player, may easily see that a player is being duplicitous in his dealings with me. However, the Role might be a naive, overly-trusting one ... so, I the player don't alter the Role to suddenly see through deceptions it was not supposed to see through. Whatrever I might know or see, the Role doesn't neccessarily know or see through.

In the terminology of D&D: it's a matter of refusing to succumb to metagame thinking. IC information and OOC information are not always identical; in fact, RARELY are they even passingly similar.

I myself could, with some time and effort, construct working firearms of various types and purposes, propellant included, if dropped into a medieval setting.

But that doesn't mean every peasant's-son-turned-warrior-hero FROM such a setting, whom I happen to be playing as a characetr, knows how to do so.

That is the defining difference between in-character (read: in-game) and out-of-character (read: out-of-game) knowledge being kept seperate.