Have your character break their own internal logic, and you’ve sunk the story along with it.
Yes ♥︎
But troupe play…? Your one character can do things that are bad for your other character? My dorks have gotten so brazen with troupe play that they jump in and start portraying all kinds of NPCs, secure in the knowledge that I’d step in if the NPC really did have a hidden, un-self-evident agenda, like if the NPC is secretly questing for a specific ring and just biding their time to grab it or w/e.
You know that we used to play all the way troupe, GMless.
Our general rule was that we'd play each others' foils, not our own, and that worked great — I wouldn't usually be in the position of spearheading an attack against my own character. But still, my characters were all the time doing things that were bad for each other. No way around it.
This is a stance issue more than a resolution granularity issue. I sometimes think of “are we pretending that we’re writers or are we pretending that we’re characters?” as two different modes of play. That you sometimes (or maybe always) switch in and out of, as all writers sometimes inhabit their characters, although not necessarily vice versa.
I’ve deliberately tried to steer away from “camera”, “cut” langauge for the most part, to encourage first-person play. And no game board or minis, and inist on saying “I do such-and-such” instead of “[character name] does such-and-such]”. Although the latter is tempting when the same player has ten characters in a situation.
I feel like we’ve gradually drifted towards a “sim”* stance where the first few years it was impossibly hard for them to not act on stuff that they knew but their character didn’t, to that now being second nature and they have to remind me that “yeah, our other characters know that but we don’t” and I go “oh, yeah!”. The investment is no longer in “this is my hero who will rule this world” and now more in the game world as a doll house, seeing what would happen to the best of our ability.
I used to be so intimidated by simmy players and systems but in my heart of hearts envied them and now here we are with the world’s awesomest and simmiest campaign.
*: Not in the Forge sense of that word. Think more Sim City, Sim Tower
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