The Vanity of Choice

I think that the below argument is true. It is a belief, I admit that, and I am open to new information. However, I think it is an accurate assessment of reality based on my experience.

Premise 1: The more choices that are made during character creation, the more likely the player is to make decisions in game based on their vanity and ego than on any realistic assessment of how their character would feel about it.

As the time spent making the character and agonizing over the choices rises, the more investment the player has. This is not necessarily investment in the character's character, if you know what I mean. It means they are highly attached to the WORK they have done, not the person that the character represents.

Unfortunately, the general trend in mainstream RPG design is to increase the number and depth/interplay of choices. And as that number rises, the game becomes more and more about the players and less about the world, and as I said in recent post "It's not about you".

Thus a game with tons of character options becomes a masturbation session for everyone involved. Everyone is trying to maximize their choices during the creation process. Then during play they are trying to get maximum value out of their glorious creation.

Premise 2: When a player's interests are paramount, their roleplaying is dictated by what they want the character to be. When a character's interests are paramount, a player's roleplaying is interpretive of what they think the character is.

When discussing the interests of the character vs the player, it is hard to separate the two. Bear with me. I will use two examples to illustrate.

Player Interest Dominant - Example:
A greatsword deals a lot of damage, so the character chooses to use it. They make choices at creation to support this, even if they cannot afford a greatsword at game start (feats, skill choices, whatever). For a while, they are actually a sub-optimal build, but when they find a sword, their build now works and they say "my character really likes this sword".

Character Interest Dominant - Example:
Randomly determined character attributes result in large strength score but low dexterity. Player interprets this to mean the character is large and lumbering, thus the character is going to use heavy weapons like a flail or a heavy mace. When the character finds a greatsword, they are enamoured with the potential, and pick it up. It is advantageous mechanically, but not grossly so. If they later lose the sword, they can easily pick up a mace and still be highly effective.

Premise 3: Randomly determined characteristics of a character prevent the player from imposing their will on the character, however if taken to an extreme it can undermine the abiltiy of the player to interpret.

Original D&D setup is pretty close to an optimal mix. Random basis + some key choices. Some of the more extreme generation methods like in Traveller or Mechwarrior can determine so much about the character background that the player is hamstrung in interpration of what the random results mean. I am only including this premise as a counter-argument to claims that too much randomness can be detrimental. I agree, it can be detrimental to go overboard.

Premise 4: The more vanity and ego placed into a character by the player, the more likely they are to be unhappy with a GM's decisions. The GM is forced to appease the players to keep the group together.

There are terrible GMs that make arbitrary decisions. That can happen in any game. The above premise is simply that it is more likely for even good GMs to run afoul of their players. People become too attached to their character and then get really upset when bad things happen to them. The game becomes about that player and their personal fantasy power trip.

Conclusion: If you want the GM to be able to focus on building that awe-inspiring world with truly great NPCs, they have to be less concerned about your ego-driven power avatar and more concerned with their own world, their own story, their own NPCs. And I think we can achieve this through game design.

There are a lot of great GMs out there who can always deliver this. I am speaking in the aggregate. The GM is not the player's sock puppet. They have their own interests; interests in presenting the awesome creations that they have made. Now that doesn't give them license to run over the characters, but I think we have gotten to the point where the scales are imbalanced and it is detrimental to having quality games.

I think a lot of people have left the hobby due to bad play experiences, bad GMs, and bad games. More so than leaving because of game design. But we cannot train GMs to be better if they are slaves to the player's demands that their egos be satisfied. We cannot design modules for GMs that deliver quality gameplay experiences if ultimately only the player's egos matter.

This was a little more rambling that I wanted it to be, but this is a difficult subject.

Thoughts?