Player's Fantasy & GM's Fantasy (Ramblings)
(originally posted July 7, 2023)
Despite allegedly being a writer/creative, I've always had trouble getting fully into the role-playing mindset, especially in video games. I lapse into an almost purely mechanics-driven playstyle. I have no clue about the interiority of my character in say, Elden Ring, other than I as the player built them to use certain weapons. Why did I play as an elf mage in Shadowrun Dragonfall? Because you're designated as the party face and that's the best way to get your Charisma up. I did install the Baldur's Gate 2 mod that lets me do every stronghold mission regardless of my class, thank you very much.
When I can build a character from scratch, I'm almost never building them because I have an idea in mind of what kind of person they are. I'm building them so that I can play as much of the game as possible. I see that there is gaming to be had and I want to play the game. Wherever I go there will be a new chafing dish at the content buffet for me to consume. I partake (often gladly) but I am not immersed.
My favorite CRPGs are Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium. You don't create a player avatar from scratch in these games, but instead select how the existing protagonist reacts to the situation. There are still various avenues for "role-playing", because The Nameless One and the Detective contain multitudes; they have the capacity to make any of the choices you make as the player within the specificity of their characters, the capacity to be any version of what the character sheet allows.
Western RPGs love their "choice and consequence", but limiting that choice and building context around it gives the consequences more meaning. I understand what kind of character the Detective is and how they might relate to someone like Kim Kitsuragi, and consequently I want to pick certain options. I play the role of who I want the Detective to be, even though he fundamentally is not "Me" in the same way that [CHARNAME] from Baldur's Gate is. Perhaps paradoxically, I am immersed.
In one of Noah Gervais' videos about CRPGs (it was most likely the Torment one, perhaps the Neverwinter Nights one?) he talks about a sort of divide/continuum where certain RPGs are a "Player's Fantasy", revolving around You and how quests and companion characters are affected by the campaign's Main Character (that's You!!), and some are a "GM's Fantasy", where all of these things (often including a more rigidly-defined player character) wrap around themes and narrative in a more deliberately cohesive whole.
My personal preference definitely leans to the latter, which I think stems from my background of growing up as a console gamer. While the earliest JRPGs were vague and more tabletop-inspired, they quickly began trending towards the "GM's Fantasy" if we were to apply this way of thinking. Most Final Fantasy games are narratively rigid; their world maps create an illusion of nonlinearity, but the focus is broadly on the party as a unit and their character arcs as scripted out by the developers.
Formative CRPGs like Fallout and Baldur's Gate let you explore freely from the get-go, chasing the feeling of looking at a map in a Player's Guide. I'd say these days the main representative is Bethesda's output, always chasing the whole "see that mountain? You can go there!" effect. What is there? The devs can only hand-craft so many dungeons and quests. Hopefully something emergent, like might happen at an actual tabletop RPG session. Possibly a skeleton with a journal, or a randomly generated baddie camp. Often, only what you take with you.
I don't know where I was going with this, other than that I'm ambivalent about Baldur's Gate 3. The devs have spoken at length about how mutable the story is, how extensively the world reacts to your choices (even if you're playing as one of the bespoke pre-made characters), how many hours of cinematics that most players won't see, et cetera. Cool, I guess? Sounds like a Player's Fantasy. Don't know if I quite want that these days.
Bonus material, cut tangent:
Before I had a PC capable of running games, "RPGs" meant console RPGs - JRPGs. In Tim Rogers' review of "FFVII Remake" he posits that the ubiquitous search for loot in side corridors fundamentally undercuts the characters and narrative, a concession made out of fear of the conceptual "RPG fan", and that Hard Mode - which disables item use - is the truer form of the story.
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