Wish Fulfillment RP
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I'm perfectly fine with people playing into wish fulfilment - I think everybody does it to a greater or lesser extent. The only time it becomes a problem is if your wish fulfilment has to come at the expense of someone else. You're not entitled to be the special one.
So you get to be super pretty, but you don't get to unequivically say you're the prettiest. You might be, but someone else might feel differently about it (and if you're running a stat game they might even be 'objectively' correct as far as the game's system and world is concerned.) The same goes for being smart, or badass or whatever. The moment you start getting possessive about your character's specialness, and find it annoying that others are stealing your shine, it's time to consider why you feel that way.
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@kk I'm a 5'5" guy, and while I just go with whatever height my PB is I am happy as all get out to get some one who is 6'2" and up. c_c
He/Him
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@devrex said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
@kk I'm a 5'5" guy, and while I just go with whatever height my PB is I am happy as all get out to get some one who is 6'2" and up. c_c
Short king!
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Ultimate wish fulfillment.
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Yeah, for all my "these are the weird IC/OOC blend things in the hobby", I'm not above admitting I've done some wish fulfillment, too. I don't think there's anything wrong with it per se.
HOW AND EVER. Here comes my caveat.
I think there are different grades of wish fulfillment, and the deeper the emotional tie to the wish fulfillment is, the more responsibility I think the "player with the wish fulfillment" has to keep themselves in check.
Example:
- IRL I'm overweight and wanna play a totally fit character
- IRL I'm brunette and wanna play redhead.
- IRL my marriage is a fucking mess and I hate my life and want to RP something better than my real life.
Obviously, once you get into #3 territory all I recommend is the player of said wish thinks long and hard about their level of emotional attachment and how it could be a stressful experience for the other player (unwitting grantee of said wish fulfillment) if a level of control and reasonable guidelines aren't kept in check.
Having been an unwitting fulfillee to something very emotionally unchecked by another player, I can say it often doesn't end well and I felt like 50% shit about it. 50% because I can't hold myself responsible for things I didn't know were going on in someone's RL, but the other 50% of me was the empathetic human that felt for the person...even while they were losing their shit on me.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to play something that's better than RL us.
In fact I am pretty sure if that factor was taken out then the RPG genre in general would be in deep trouble.
The issue comes when it's not about playing something better than we are, but playing something better than others are. That's when shit starts to hit the fan, since you now have multiple people all wanting to be the best - the most powerful, coolest, sexiest.
The funny thing is writers subvert this very well. It's actually a very common in-joke among authors about how their favorite characters are the ones they torture the most. Similarly actors subvert it really well too; they welcome a chance to play tormented, anguished characters rather than wholesome, successful, morally upstanding ones. Look at Chris Hemsworth; while Thor was a vanilla hero (up to Thor 2) he was getting really bored with it.
But roleplayers are different. A lot of us want the wish fulfillment of not being better than our real-life selves but also in comparison to others. I can't tell you why, but I suspect it's the root of our issues here.
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@arkandel said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
The issue comes when it's not about playing something better than we are, but playing something better than others are. That's when shit starts to hit the fan, since you now have multiple people all wanting to be the best - the most powerful, coolest, sexiest.
Well that depends on what you want out of MU*ing. The real issue here is if people aren't mature enough to handle wanting something and failing to achieve it or if they ruin someone else's experience in order to achieve it.
At the end of the day it comes back to what we're doing here, a topic that isn't well defined. Is it cooperative storytelling? Is it collective writing? Or are we playing a game: the G of RPG? Games have winners and losers. Most games have more losers than winners. The ideal (in my opinion) is to be a good winner as well as a good loser. Its one of those character traits that seems to be easily overlooked and undervalued as we increasingly see win-at-all-costs and burn-it-all-down-if-we-lose popular models displayed in the world around us.
There's nothing at all wrong with the idea of wish fulfillment itself. Its your own little dose of happiness and pleasure with unlimited refills and no prescription necessary! And most MU*s allows you an opportunity to create that for yourselves. Very few games police private scenes between you and another player. Most let you tell the stories your want amongst yourselves (with varying degrees of limits). That's not good enough for some people though.
The problem with wish fulfillment on a MU* is that many people want everyone else to accept their wish as reality. It isn't enough for someone to live out a fantasy. They can do that on their own writing whatever they want without limits. They don't want that. What does it for them is that other people accept their reality and acknowledge it, willingly or otherwise. So they come to a MU* where people gather. Its a power and control issue, forcing your will onto others. And that's a people problem. So not just players. But staff.
That's where things take a hard turn into problems, especially when people start using unfair advantages, which doesn't just include classic cheating, but also more subtle maneuvers like gaslighting and emotional manipulation, to impose their wishes on other people because their wish can't be fulfilled if someone else doesn't accept it fully.
If people kept their wish fulfillment to themselves, things would be fine. But when problems arise, its usually that someone has extended their wish fulfillment out to someone else trying to force acceptance.
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@warma-sheen said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
@arkandel said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
The issue comes when it's not about playing something better than we are, but playing something better than others are. That's when shit starts to hit the fan, since you now have multiple people all wanting to be the best - the most powerful, coolest, sexiest.
Well that depends on what you want out of MU*ing. The real issue here is if people aren't mature enough to handle wanting something and failing to achieve it or if they ruin someone else's experience in order to achieve it.
At the end of the day it comes back to what we're doing here, a topic that isn't well defined. Is it cooperative storytelling? Is it collective writing? Or are we playing a game: the G of RPG? Games have winners and losers. Most games have more losers than winners. The ideal (in my opinion) is to be a good winner as well as a good loser. Its one of those character traits that seems to be easily overlooked and undervalued as we increasingly see win-at-all-costs and burn-it-all-down-if-we-lose popular models displayed in the world around us.
There's nothing at all wrong with the idea of wish fulfillment itself. Its your own little dose of happiness and pleasure with unlimited refills and no prescription necessary! And most MU*s allows you an opportunity to create that for yourselves. Very few games police private scenes between you and another player. Most let you tell the stories your want amongst yourselves (with varying degrees of limits). That's not good enough for some people though.
The problem with wish fulfillment on a MU* is that many people want everyone else to accept their wish as reality. It isn't enough for someone to live out a fantasy. They can do that on their own writing whatever they want without limits. They don't want that. What does it for them is that other people accept their reality and acknowledge it, willingly or otherwise. So they come to a MU* where people gather. Its a power and control issue, forcing your will onto others. And that's a people problem. So not just players. But staff.
That's where things take a hard turn into problems, especially when people start using unfair advantages, which doesn't just include classic cheating, but also more subtle maneuvers like gaslighting and emotional manipulation, to impose their wishes on other people because their wish can't be fulfilled if someone else doesn't accept it fully.
If people kept their wish fulfillment to themselves, things would be fine. But when problems arise, its usually that someone has extended their wish fulfillment out to someone else trying to force acceptance.
Thought this was really insightful. I definitely notice people reacting with OOC unhappiness rather than IC play sometimes when their concept is challenged by another's IC play. I do find it a problem but it's also human nature and seems to happen whether or not wish fulfillment is involved. Here's an example: a player is trying to roleplay a benevolent mafia boss named Ruff Dooley.
This player, if asked about his character, might say something like, "Dooley can be tough, but it comes from a place of love. He deeply cares about his neighborhood and takes care of it, and the people there know that, and honestly respect him. He rules with love, not fear."
And another player ends up rolling in a character that saw her parents murdered by mafia henchmen. She displays fear and resentment towards Dooley...
Now Dooley's player is upset. And it doesn't matter whether he has wish fulfillment towards being a benevolent mafia boss.
I think this is a normal human thing. When I was in my late teens, I noticed it in myself, and thought I was being immature... So I taught myself to revel in misunderstandings of my character and roleplay through those as happy narrative conflicts, and take them as proof that I was playing a layered and multifaceted character. But then when I got a lot older and came back to these games, I realized that veterans of this hobby show the same sorts of OOC peevishness when their concept is challenged through IC events.
And it probably just gets way more personal when wish fulfillment fantasies are involved, because in those cases, people are more liable to insert more of themselves into a roleplay character and take everything more personally in general.
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I think also some of the competitiveness about a character taking over another player's "niche" has to do with MUSH rising out of tabletops.
In a tabletop, if Player A takes a wizard you don't take the wizard, you take the cleric or the rogue or the fighter. It's the same impulse that has people asking "what does the game need?"
And when sometimes opportunities to get involved and get the good RP (which I define as the story-based RP or deep character-development RP that would not be edited out of the book or movie, as opposed to sort of random-aimless-small talk RP that you mostly have to suffer through to get to the good RP) are limited, when someone comes in and wants to fill the same niche, I think it's not...entirely just due to being shitty to sort of tense up and go, "Great, what if my RP group no longer needs or wants me cause Captain Shiny New Guy can do everything I can do? I'm super screwed."
It's not always being aggressive and mean. And of course the onus is on the old player to manage their own feelings about new guy, it's not new guy's fault, but...that's where some of this arises from, and knowing that can help sort of the game as a whole find ways to sort of...be reassuring to the fact that there can be two characters with the exact same character build and everyone can still have a good time.
He/Him
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@hobos said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
Thought this was really insightful. I definitely notice people reacting with OOC unhappiness rather than IC play sometimes when their concept is challenged by another's IC play. I do find it a problem but it's also human nature and seems to happen whether or not wish fulfillment is involved. Here's an example: a player is trying to roleplay a benevolent mafia boss named Ruff Dooley.
Yes. My (quite real, albeit from a few years ago) example of this was when a friend rolled a chef in a World of Darkness game... and an existing PC's player who also happened to be a chef complained to staff about it. There can be only one. This was in a game set in freakin' New York, too.
@devrex said in Wish Fulfillment RP:
In a tabletop, if Player A takes a wizard you don't take the wizard, you take the cleric or the rogue or the fighter. It's the same impulse that has people asking "what does the game need?"
Also yes. This comes from a place of social insecurity. "If I just play <X> people will want to hang out with me". Of course that's a fallacy; it's nearly never the concept that matters, it's how they are played. How fun you, the player, are is an infinitely bigger draw than what's on your sheet.
That all said, there is *still nothing wrong with wish fulfillment. Play that elegant, sexy, deadly Fae assassin whose parents were murdered by vampire mobsters and grew up being trained by ninjas. Fucking go for it, why the hell not? Just... don't begrudge anyone else for being special, too, or compare their flavor of 'special' to yours, and it'll all work out in the end.
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I think the truth is, everybody does wish fulfillment RP at some point or another, and as some element of nearly every character. Not all the time, and not only. Same way everybody wants to win some. Of course they do.
Every so often, yeah, one runs across a player who really seems, from every angle you look, to be doing only wish fulfillment and want all and only triumphs and glory. But more often, it's just an accusation used to promote the idea that somebody deserves less consideration in a conflict. It is also very often projection. Abelard wants to roll, protests being simply declared to have failed, but Brigid will not get the glory if Abelard succeeds, so she says Abelard "just wants to win," or "just wants his character to be super-cool all the time." In reality both want to win and be super-cool, and neither wants only that all the time, but both are likely to suggest the other is greedy for wins and wish fulfillment and rejecting other play. Just how likely they are to make these accusations depends on individual temperament, individual mental state at the time, individual past experiences of such claims working or not, how much OOC-cooperative vibe/tradition exists on the game, and (as mentioned in the incentivizing failure thread) how confident those players are of getting more chances.
