RE: Introduction to Roleplaying 101: The Group
This is a very good article.
I especially like the fact that you keep focusing on the fact that while you are there to have fun, there are also others there to have fun and that you should never forget that. Tons and tons of people seem to always forget that playing a roleplaying game (or a tabletop game for that matter) is not only about you that you need not forget that you aren't there alone and if you are the only one having fun there's a good chance that the next time you will not be invited to have fun.
I personally believe that this is at least in part caused by people mostly experiencing "multiplayer" in video games where they really don't have to care about others because at worst, they will just have to find a new group by using the "find match" button instead of by real socializing.
You're on to something. I think quite often the pen & paper group is the first time where people really have to work together for a common goal, where they have to rely on each other, where there is no winner. We're too used to look out for our personal gain.
We all have heard "My character is like this" and have thought "No, YOU are like this". A char should have lumbs and bumps, quirks that make him a PC instead of an NPC, things that can be brought into play even if there's downsides to it. But only to a certain extent. You don't sabotage the group's work.
Playing the arrogant young son of high nobility who knows everything better and does everthing better than others is fun - as long as the player doesn't believe that ;)
Yeah, there's certainly a problem with bleed for a lot of characters and players. I've also had issues with people who get too attached to a particular concept and storyline; they want to be the prince who goes out and slays the dragon, for instance, but they never communicated this to the GM so they wind up upset when the story takes a different path.
One of the problems that comes into this (and I wish I remembered better who was the first person who I found to describe it really well, so I could give them credit) is that a lot of people get trained in adversarial or self-focused roleplaying by their experiences with other media.
For instance, a player doesn't say what they want their character to be able to do because their goal is to bring the world to its knees until they get what they want. Perfect in a sandbox, but not great if the GM is spending all this time preparing courtly drama and their plans get sunk by one player wanting to go and explore the lost ruins of Lemuria.
Alternatively, players get in a rut where they think that they're the only person who can move the story forward or describe their character at all, and have problems accepting the mechanics and conventions needed to keep things from going off the rails.
There's a reason I plan to devote a whole article to characters, and it's because I've seen a lot of great, and a lot of really troublesome, characters over the years.
One of the weird things about our age is the way that communication and discourse has become a largely one-sided interaction; not in the sense that it doesn't receive a reply, but in the way that it is increasingly happening via social media and digital interfaces that basically operate on a send-receive basis.
Unlike face-to-face communications, these often have a much larger focus on the response you receive rather than really communicating with people.
To get off on a tangent, while instant wireless communication is often thought of as giving us unlimited instant access, most of our communications with others happens in ways that are not instantaneous. Instead there's a time gap between when we send a communication and when we receive it. Since this is the sort of thing that we experience with our most important parts of our lives; professional e-mails, personal texts and messages, and conversations in forums/chat rooms with communities that we know, and a large number of the remaining interpersonal interactions are scripted (for instance, work interactions with subordinate-superior roles), we've forgotten in general how to actually communicate and socialize without any sort of built-in hierarchy.
In any case, though, sharing attention is very difficult. We psychologically need it, but due to the ways that we're used to interacting we've become used to sort of these small, intense bursts of attention, but we generally don't view our everyday social interactions as really involving attention paid to us. There's an element of balance here, like holding a good conversation, where you need to spend some time listening, and that's a skill that a lot of people trying to break into the hobby don't necessarily even know they need.