One Simple Thing

What the hey. We've got a Wiki. I'll archive.

These are the records of the One Simple Thing series of posts. In those posts I tried to use simple words and phrases to get across points of theory that are (to me) important and useful. Was it successful? There's evidence before you, go and judge for yourself.

My Guy

Original posts, and 40 pages of discussion, here.

My Guy: In RPGs you can play a guy (or a girl, or a wombat). This guy is not real. He does not have a brain, or a heart, or courage. You pretend he has these things. He can not make you do things, because you are real, and he is not.

You make this guy, in your mind. So it's cool for you to want him to act one way, and not want him to act some other way. After all, you made him. All you need to say is "I want My Guy to be brave," and your friends will say "Cool!"

But if you say "I can't have My Guy run away, that's not who he is ... I have no choice," then you are wrong. You do have a choice. You could choose to have him run away. Now maybe you really don't want him to run and (see above) that's cool. Maybe if he runs away then you can't have fun playing any more. That would stink. But if you mean "I won't" then you should not say "I can't." That is just not true. Your friends know it is not true, because they are not dumb. If you lie to your friends it pisses them off, even more than they were pissed off in the first place because you would not run away from a great big troll and all their guys got killed dead.

People who disagreed with this post did so by contending that the words "real", "can't" and "lie" were used in arguable ways. Notably:

• Just because something has no physical reality doesn't mean that you can say it's "not real"
• If having your guy run away would, in that action, mean that you are no longer roleplaying then you "can't" have him run away within the context of roleplaying, because doing so takes you out of that context
• Lie can connote intentional deceit, as opposed to just untruth. Even after it was made clear that this was not the intent, argument continued around whether the word should have been used, and whether it was an attack to use it.