Exchange of Realities

Most of us have heard, one way or another, about people who can’t keep a balance between in character and out of character events. For those who haven’t, this explains it at least as well as I can.

But fewer people look at what happens when out of character issues start interfering with in-character matters. It’s not as likely to destroy a group as the other way around, but it can be deadly to internal consistency.

One of these is the perennial issue of what happens when someone can’t make it to a game session, or stops posting in a play by post. Now, for a beer-and-pretzels game, where all that matters is the whole kill-monster-steal-treasure issue, this can be worked around; my old calculus teacher’s approach was “You notice that some of your companions have mysteriously vanished, and others have just as mysteriously appeared.” But when suspension of disbelief actually matters, what do you do? Particularly if you’re in the middle of a battle? (Actually, this part’s easy; it usually involves either the character being turned into an NPC for the fight, or being chucked against a wall and stunned. The latter option is recommended if the missing person is merely late; after all, then they can get up and do the heroic-cavalry “You underestimated me, DIE!” thing as they plunge their [insert weapon here] into the back of whoever chucked them into the wall.)

Other things get slightly more difficult. For instance, there’s the issue of simple miscommunication. I was once in a game where the GM and the players were suffering from a lack of understanding. A pebble got mistaken for a crossbow bolt, a spell misread, and an entire plan was nearly hashed. There have also been less intense situations for which these things can happen; I’ve seen the order in which things were posted completely destroy a conversation. For situations like this, you have to ask yourself: Does it really serve verisimilitude for you to keep that, even though it’s not what would have happened? I find the best thing to do is just to back up a few steps and try again.

The toughest situations, though, involve decision-making for the players and characters themselves. In one of my games not long ago, there was a conversation that could have been done with only one of the characters, so a few of the others slipped off. An understandable decision on the surface, but one needs to take into account a few other factors. One is the fact that the player being left with this work wasn’t too fond of operating alone. Another was that they were planning on going on something that probably should have been a full group activity—far more interesting than being left behind collecting information. Yet a third was how irritated the character left behind, IC, ended up being at having been ditched without any more than a “You’re better off not knowing”. Most of the problem came from this last one, since there was a rather deep set of issues involved—particularly afterward. It left us in an odd position: on the one hand, there was quite reasonable in-character irritation, but on the other hand, it really wouldn’t have happened if the reasoning had only been in character. So on the one hand, there were bad feelings, and something needed to be done, but on the other hand, there was no real effective way to resolve it, and half the group was sick of the situation anyway. While it was resolved by a quick out-of-character discussion of what went wrong and how to avoid it for next time, it isn’t always that simple.

Situations like this are highly subjective. The best thing to do with them is to figure out ahead of time how to balance in character and out of character concerns. At what point does verisimilitude become more important than smooth transitions between scenes? How do you handle it when the situation gets in the way of the storytelling?

What do you think?