I think I know what bothers me about Tip writing

This is a direct copy/paste of a 40-50 Tip mission, as told by a disembodied narrator about the player (you) as narrative. Now re-read that as a statement coming from the character, and written as though in a journal. I'll swap just a single word (well, two words, technically) to do this.

See what I mean? Not only does the language come off significantly less clunky, it actually also carries quite a bit more weight as a basic statement, not to mention how much more personal it sounds.

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So why is this a problem? Didn't I just describe how well it sounds? Well, this is problematic for a few reasons:

1. The language is stiff. I'm not a native speaker of English, so I may be biassed, but I've almost never read or hear expressions like "you feel" or "you think" outside of questions. It feels forced - as I said, like a word swap. This simply isn't how people speak, and it just sounds bad.

2. It's telling us what we think. A cardinal rule of writing for other people is to not encroach on their own minds, beliefs and opinions. "You think," "you believe" and "you feel" are simply not things you use. Whenever a game writer uses one of these, he needs to back up and rephrase.

3. It's a kludge. Reading this, I can almost tell their writer was trying to present a situation where we're given two options for how we feel and we're supposed to pick one, but the writer has decided not to write words into our mouths and in so doing tied his own hands. You can't have it both ways. If it's a question of what we feel and what we think, say it in our own words. If it's not in our own words, then stop assuming.

I know that writing for morality is a tough task, especially when you have to reach into the core of a character and really play off said character's innermost feelings. However, this is not the right way to do it. I know some people might feel a bit offput if they suddenly saw their characters verbalise their own morality, especially if it's wrong or inappropriately worded, but I get the sense that this is one of very few possible options. It's not ideal in terms of personal freedom, but so long as a choice exists (including the "Dismiss Contact" choice), then players shouldn't feel pressured into accepting the game's interpretation of their internal monologue.

The only other option, realistically speaking, is what I like to call "obvious narrative," in that the narrative presents you with only a select few apparently obvious choices and allows you to pick between them with nary an explanation of why YOU would care. I've both used this before and seen it used before to great effect. It's when the narrative tells you "The next logical step would be to..." It doesn't have to be logical to your character's particular mentality, so long as it's logical in a general sense, and so long as choice exists. And said choice could be morally and ethically challenged, but so long as it doesn't tell you WHY you are picking either option, it does not encroach on concept. The easy example is the conundrum between going after the bad guy or saving the civilians.

Of course, this then raises the Venture problem of tossing a character an idiot ball by presenting a wrong path forward as "obvious" or "logical" when a genre savvy player might have spotted the implications from a mile away. As I said, there are downsides to every approach, but I firmly believe that a writer needs to pick one approach and stick with it. Trying to straddle multiple writing styles while cherrypicking elements just leads to a mutant narrative that never feels quite right.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The sentence grammar is suspect, yes, but I only noticed that after I'd copied it over. I'm not sure it's salvageable without a general rewording.

I do, however, agree with the character-jacking problem. It takes me, personally, out of the narrative since I always end up arguing with the narrator in my head. It's very easy for an impersonal narrator to be wrong when written for a player character that cannot be accounted for. A lot of the game's flavour text is written as though made for a book or a comic, which makes it inapplicable for a game setting.

However, it's important to remember that the game can't give us a free hand in making choices in developer content. There are only a limited number of possible paths we can take, and a player has to be given reason why only those options are available. Character hijacking and telling us what our characters want is one way, albeit a POOR way. Presenting the facts and concluding the "only" logical or reasonable choices is another possible way, but that has its own problems, as well, in that the "logical" and "reasonable" characters sometimes aren't, often obviously in such cases.

And I'd still prefer the latter way just the same.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I actually find "you" to be more ambiguous. If a block of text says "I feel" or "I think," that's attributed to the person saying it, and if the text is explained to be coming from your character, then that's who it should be attributed to. "You feel" and "you think" is a little bit more amorphous, because "you" tends to be addressed to the reader, which in this case is the player. There's an extra step of immersion in reading "you think" and translating it into "he thinks" as regarding the actual character.

It's no more ambiguous, but at least to me a lot less intuitive. Simply because people don't talk like that.

And, yes, I'm aware of second-person narration. It's was fairly popular in point-and-click adventures, for at least one instance, and I did a lot of those when I was a kid. The thing, though, is that in those cases, it mostly narrated events happening on-screen that graphics at the time were too poor to depict. Once you start writing emotional content in the second person, things start to break down, because it's unnatural to speak like this, to me at the very least.

I have a problem with disembodied narration in general, to be perfectly honest, and when parsed through the sensibilities of physical communication - which is to say a conversation between two people - it becomes almost insulting. Telling another person to his face that "No, what you REALLY want is this!" is, to be perfectly honest, the height of intellectual insult. I'm probably biassed, since I tend to be an easy target for that sort of expressions on the forums. This is often the case when a person chooses to paraphrase another's words and distil another's meaning, but more often than not this ends up producing a straw man, be it intentionally or otherwise.

In simple terms: Telling another person what he thinks, how he feels and what he wants should be a no-no in practically every circumstance.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

In my several decades of tabletop GMing I never once told a player what his character's emotional reaction to something was. Physical reaction, sure; if the character (e.g.) touches something hot "you burned your hand" is an appropriate response. But I never did anything like, oh, say, telling a player "you now consider Frostfire, the murdering scumbag who blew up an entire Longbow base, a hero".

Never Once? Seriously? You never once slipped and said something like, "This is the scariest thing you've ever seen," or "The scene fills your heart with joy and hope"?

I was a DM for a few years myself, and I occasionally found myself doing these sorts of things. And when my players called me on it, I usually checked myself. But to say you never once did it?

All due respect, but sorry, that gets an askance look from me. I might believe it if you were a computer program or a robot...

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

The fact you yourself called it a slip, and your players called you on it, should give ample evidence that it was, in fact, not the right thing to do.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Whenever I play tabletop RPGs and one of our regular GMs tells us how our characters feel, we, the players, get the dice out....just sayin'.

Not unless the player's emotions were being controlled by an external agent.

I ran that mission earlier today, actually

Venture makes a good point that I neglected to mention - there's nothing wrong with telling the player what sensation a physical interaction created, because this isn't specific to the character and doesn't rely on the character's interpretation.

For instance, if I were to say "You touch the mysterious object and find it covered in alien goo. Your hand sticks to it like in glue." then this is not inferring much of anything about the character. He touched alien goop and this is what happened. Granted, one can argue that "My hand is covered in super-slick forcefields!" or "But I'm a ghost, I can't stick to things!" but these concerns are far rarer and far easier to justify, even by the players themselves, especially when they occur in situations that aren't terribly important.

Telling people their physical reaction, such as "he punched very hard" or "this room is very cold" is necessary and unavoidable, and that's A-OK. Even if your character is a creature made out of frost and ice, he should still be able to conclude that, yes, it's very cold. Not necessarily uncomfortable. Just cold. "It's cold" is a fact, not a matter of interpretation.

This is as significantly distinct from telling a character what his conclusion from said experience is, or what his mental reaction to it should be. This assumes several things which are never safe bets - it assumes a mentality which would lead to this conclusion, and it assumes a certain psychology which would produce this reaction. Telling a character that something seems like a good idea is distinctly better than telling him he thinks it's a good idea. Both statements are vague and possibly wrong, but the latter is far more intrusive, to say nothing of insulting, especially when it's wrong.

I tend to pay less attention to the distinction between player and character, and I've simply never felt that problem in either first or second person, but I'm probably biassed that way. I've often said I approach the game more as a writer than a roleplayer, which means I never so much as even have the option to confuse. Anything which happens on-screen happens to my character, because "I'm not even there." That doesn't mean I won't get the odd moment of saying "I have Team Teleport, I can help you." when I get into the actual gameplay element, but story-wise, I've never so much as tried to identify with any characters on-screen. Possible personal bias, I admit.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Agreed, but in a tabletop RPG, you can lean in, inflect, scowl, even play ominous (or lighthearted) music... things that are difficult in this game. Not impossible, of course, but difficult. So I can see that this sort of thing is sometimes an expedient route to an otherwise difficult course.

Edit: Just thought of a good example: Anyone here remember a little AD&D expansion called Ravenloft? If you could properly play even one session of that game without at least one time ascribing feelings to the characters, I will give you One Internets.

Speaking only for myself, I've never done this, and I come from a background of writing where this actually standard practice. I've gone out of my way to never, ever have a narrator or another person explain a character's emotions, motivations or personality, at least not as certainties. If such have to be explained, it's either the character doing the explanation personally, or another character operating under the "apparently-possibly-probably" rule of giving subjective impressions.

That would really depend on the people you're playing with. Some are more easily suggestible and less bothered by these kind of intrusions, but some - and I use myself as an example - do get bothered by these instantly. It just sounds "wrong" to say things like these, and my immediate instinctive reaction is to respond with "Oh, yeah!" I tend to run with a pretty good idea of what each character involved is like and what can be expected of said character, so whenever something aberrant happens, it's pretty quickly obvious.

Now, whether people will mind if the game assumed their characters thought what the players had in mind for them to think anyway, my guess would be no. However, the chance of a static system guessing even a single player's ideas spot on is very low, and thinking people don't do much better as they usually perpetuate their own ideas, instead.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I ran a Call of Cthulhu campaign, along with any number of horror (sometimes Lovecraftian) themed scenarios in my ten year or so superhero campaign (run across three different rulesets) without doing this. It really is not that hard.

I will sometimes tell a player how their character "should" feel about a certain situation, NPC, etc. But this ONLY happens when said player has a character that had a specific character trait that is relevant to the situation, NPC, etc. For example, I recently had a player with a character that has a disadvantage called "Hidebound". This disadvantage states that the character doesn't like new things, and reacts to "newness" and change at a -2. Now in GURPS, a player can make a Will roll for his/her character to resist their own disadvantages, but it is expected that a player will not do this often. In fact, if a player tries to resist their own disadvantage all the time, the GM can require that the character spend points to buy off the disadvantage (e.g., someone with the Addiction (Cigarette Smoking) disadvantage who continually makes will rolls to not smoke, eventually can be told by the GM, "Hey, you've kicked the habit! Buy off the disadvantage"). Anyway, the game I'm running involves the PCs getting access to a lot of new, high-tech gadgets. The one player whose character has Hidebound once stated, "I'm really loving all these new toys!" I told him, "No, you're not. Or at least the Hidebound disad on your character sheet says you shouldn't be liking all of this newfangled tech."

In the absence of specific, character-related things like the above, I do try to avoid telling the characters how they feel, such as "This makes you sad" or "You've never been this scared!". I try to take a step back and tell them what the situation evokes, often with NPC reactions, such as "Everybody around you is crying at the sad scene" or "All the citizens flee in abject terror!".

I've seen City of Heroes attempt to use Origins in a similar manner, actually. Take that large bomb of the Destroyers, for instance. If you Tech, you can spot the hidden wire, cut that and disable the bomb that way. If you're Natural, you're fast enough to yank the wires simultaneously. If you're neather, you do your best but trigger the rest of the explosives. It... Kind of works... Sometimes.

However, even that is a bit wonky, in that the exact meaning of any of the five origins is rather a very loose concept. Does Natural mean "very skilled human" or "super alien?" Does Tech mean one who makes machines or one who IS a machine? Is a Magic character a caster or does he just have a magic sword? These are all questions which become relevant once you try to use origins for... Pretty much anything, really. Even SOs are questionable. After all, how many cybernetic eyes do I need to implant into my face before people start mistaking me for a bipedal insect? How many cybernetic hearts can I fit into my chest before my rib cage starts sounding like a kickin' drum beat?

Assumptions about a character are very dangerous in instances where specific characteristics and their implications are not set in stone. And in City of Heroes, no such thing exists.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'd really rather prefer this were in the first person, as said by my character (even if it's not technically true to his character) than this. And I now realise why - because I wouldn't mind giving my character a "voice," as it were. Have you noticed that throughout the entire game, we're essentially silent protagonists? We're assumed to be saying things, but none of that ever seems to come out in print.

It's the old telephone conversation trope. "So what did you find out? Crey is stealing our brains? What's that? Repeat everything you say?" It's a cheeky way to avoid giving us first person dialogue, but much like Gordon Freeman, this does eventually begin to grate to the point where you HAVE to lampshade it, and once you start lampshading and parodying your own game, I start scowling and taking down notes for a large-scale rant.

But really - I wouldn't mind giving my character a voice via first person text. As I said before, I'd seriously rather have that than second person narration narrating my character's thoughts to me. If someone should be talking about my character's thoughts, it should be him.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I knew there was a reason I found the various Going Rogue conversation options so strange. For instance, in the Praetorian tutorial when talking to the Clockwork, you can say 'I can't understand a thing you're saying.' Your character can actually say things and have them be responded to. I'd never seen that before in text choices.

I'd actually like that more often. Tip missions though would be better with a lot of ambiguity behind your choices, or at least have it given you might not be doing the things you do because of the one reason the writer in question thought up.

I can't quote it any harder than this, sorry.