whats wrong with ensuring that when the dm puts you in a situation, to force you to have a chitchat session with an npc you dont care to chitchat with or about a subject you dont care to chitchat about, instead of sweating over what to say, on the fear that your words will be your doom, you pull out ol' faithful and show why you are a hero in this story and not a victum? {what is wrong with being a powergamer?}

And



Why do I have to tell the DM what I will do before I do it? and telling the dm about my char in much detail is that.

And

Why do I have to make the players tell me what they will do before they do it?

edited for clarity

Nan desu ka?

It's not about liability management or such for me. As a GM I want to be able to picture the PCs in my mind. To see why they can be cool, how they'd be in the movie. Part of the game is imagining the game world; the GM needs to know how the PCs look in that world, just like the GM has to describe the world to the players.

It's like in a movie, a scene meant to showcase a character doesn't necessarily allow you to predict that character's actions in the rest of the movie. It does help you picture the character, so the character's later actions make sense when you see them.

Something my group started doing a few years ago along this line of thought is every character, pc and important npc, gets assigned an actor that could play the part.

I like a little supprise in the game. there are few things more enjoyable than when I get a look of sheer disbelief from the DM because of something I just did. That said I dont play as just a random bunch of actions designed to confuse. I just like either 1) figureing out what kind of character I want to play as I'm playing or 2) dont want the DM to know what I'm playing so can get that wonderful look when the DM learns something about my char. Sometimes I do enjoy making a backstory though and sharing it ahead of time with the DM.

All you need for that is really the actor's direction. "You're a Hell's Angel biker who goes home to work in his flower garden."

[Bonus point for the reference]

Because life generally goes smoother when you meet people halfway, and some GMs like a bit of structure and approach gaming less in terms of creating memorable scenes and more in terms of creating worlds, and that can be difficult under the best of conditions. Really, my quibble with the Jake's earlier statements really come down to a minor disagreement on necessity and whether backgrounds are always an asset.

Personally, I DO see how backgrounds can be handy in many cases. For example, if I ran longer campaigns, it'd be nice to have nicely outlined backgrounds so I could at least create a timeline to sort things out and to avoid having to retcon and ignore sloppy details and to keep long running plot hooks from pushing each other out of the picture. But until the last 5 years or so, much of my RPG gaming experience comes from running groups with sketchy attendance for an array of fellow college kids attending art schools and theater programs in the greater twin cities area. As you can imagine, long running master plans have tended to be for naught in my games simply due to raw turn over. Improvisation and throwing dice out the window ended up being the order of the day. Sometimes it didn't work out, but at other times we've had some damn fine sessions. Plus, let's face it: many rpgs simply have a messy time handling advancement. Short adventures and one shots have advantages of their own.

Also, this. I had a group entirely composed of theater nerds* at one point. Sometimes I didn't require backgrounds because I assigned them parts beforehand for a one shot. Perhaps they didn't feel as connected to the character that way, but that has its own advantages at times. We had characters getting killed off and doing dumb things when their quirks could reasonably lead them into getting in trouble, for example, as opposed to people constantly following RPG best practices and burning Edge shenanigans. There's really all manner of ways to handle this.


*I miss those guys. I had to stop being their GM when I a nice chunk of metal introduced itself forcefully to my skull and had me rather laid up for a while, which also forced my prolonged absence from dumpshock.

and a smooth life is desireable? even for a character?

I don't see what you're getting at. Painting a coherent picture and keeping a clean timeline isn't the same thing as dumbing down a campaign. If a player character dies to making a dumb decision, that's fine. If the player dies only because the GM portrayed the scene in an obtuse manner and denies them information they should have definitely given the situation, then we're starting to get into problematic territory. For example, if you never, ever describe the building they enter, then you should probably mention that it's on a skyscraper or that they are on the 24th floor before automatically killing them for trying to jump out a window to safety.

I think what was meant was that while the GM described a character--as a director would to an actor--the player took the reins and said, "this character would make this mistake and die" because that's how they felt that character would act. The GM never forced the player into the position.

Then I am doubly confused since I thought I had indicated in my previous post that I consider such things to be a rather interesting advantage to assigning roles. Sometimes a little bit of distance can convince a player to follow through their character's quirks to their logical conclusion rather than suddenly turn into an ice cold pro whenever things get the least bit dangerous. On the other hand, one of my few long running characters actually killed themselves over an addiction they picked up in play as well, so again, it really rather comes down to the player, in the long run.

must have crossed wires somehow... of course the DM should describe the world as the characters can see it. I'm not sure how doubt was ever laid on the DM describing the world.