"My Guy Syndrome"
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MY CHAR IS UNCONTROLLABLE 🤪🤪🤪 I’m going to crash out.
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Ok let me be productive, I more often see people making subtle but socially hostile decisions in RP without considering the results or how it looks, buckling down on their own character’s principles, as opposed to anything truly blatant. I think most folk generally know enough to avoid openly saying “it’s what my character would do” these days. Maybe.
Threading that needle of doing what your character would do while ensuring it results in fun for others can be tricky, and requires a measure of thoughtfulness.
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I have had someone try to weaponize this the opposite of this concept against me, an online game’s GM telling me, “I don’t think that’s what’s what your character would do,” and it’s one of the most infuriating memories I have from tabletopping. Turned out they were very corrupt and regularly gaslighted many of their players.
Now that I vented lol, nice article, thanks for sharing. The “Same Page” tool they reference is a great concept to apply, this is a huge part of what session zero is about for me. I think you can articulate this well enough to translate it to online games and even online games with strangers, you just gotta make sure your leadership reports on and enforces it broadly which means they need to be personally aware of what players are up to.
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You have to walk them through the absurdity of their actions, framing each rung of their decision ladder in the most ridiculous way possible, as a “just double checking…” that’s what their character would actually do.
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@howyadoin When it works it’s so good. I am acutely sensitive to the question, “Are you sure?” XD
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@howyadoin I don’t think this works for the context @Yam mentioned, though, which is why I wanted to have the discussion in a purely MUSH context.
I think in MUSH we see a lot of things like:
- I’m not leaving the spaceship to go walk on the planet we’re visiting, my guy wouldn’t think it’s safe.
- Sorry for making this social scene awkward with both of us here, but my guy wouldn’t forgive their grudge against your guy.
- I won’t RP where you suggested. My guy wouldn’t go to that side of town.
- Sorry for disrupting this town meeting, but it’s what my guy would do.
- My guy already knows that information so I’m not interested in RPing passing it on to others.
- I wish I could RP but my guy wouldn’t go out in this weather.
- I can’t help you. My guy wouldn’t find that interesting.
- Sorry I hurt your feelings with the way I acted IC. It’s what my guy would do.
etc etc etc
Many of the times we run into this, there might not even be a GM involved to say “are you sure” and the actions they’re doing aren’t inherently absurd. The My-Guyer’s actions might even be sensible. Sure, that planet we’re visiting does look dangerous.
As a GM you can definitely say “fine, stay with the ship then, guess you aren’t playing in this event” and as a player you can say things like “well you pick somewhere to RP then,” but the bad vibes are already there at that point. Other people are uncomfortable. Most players don’t want to leave the My-Guy person out. Most My-Guy’ers know that.
My-Guy people disrupt a feeling of collaboration and buy-in that is pretty fundamental to the improv we depend on in this medium. That’s what the top guy in the link is talking about: he got his way, the other players agreed, it was all very “in-character,” and it still felt bad.
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@Ashkuri said in "My Guy Syndrome":
I think in MUSH we see a lot of things like:
But a lot of those things aren’t inherently bad. If your character wouldn’t think the planet is safe, and it’s really important to you to honor that, I don’t think it’s a cardinal sin to politely sit a scene out. Same for RPing out an IC grudge, or some of the other things you listed.
“My guy syndrome”, for me, is all about attitude.
“Hey, want to RP at the spaceport?”
“Nah, my guy wouldn’t go do that part of town.” vs “Well, my guy has a thing against spaceports, but I’d be happy to RP with you at the marketplace.”“We’re going down to the planet for the plot.”
“I’m not leaving - my guy wouldn’t think it’s safe.” vs. “Have fun! I’m going to sit this one out because my guy wouldn’t want to go down there.”There’s nothing wrong with being true to your character, as long as you’re not a jerk about it OOCly.
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I REALLY struggled not to my guy a lot. Two of my heart characters were older men (late 40s, 50s) who were generally conservative af and not generally open to new anything. To a lot of things my first thought was literally " X would NEVER…" Then I had to sit myself down and go, “But is the never fun for anyone?” Sometimes it was, but most of the time it wasn’t. Sometimes the conflict of new ideas vs old ideas was great. I had some excellent scenes with their children where they wanted to be wild and out there with a father behind them going “This isn’t right!!!” Other times that conflict was going to kill the vibe.
Over time both mellowed a lot. I would like to think they didn’t lose their core conservative root, but they saw a ton more gray when I stepped away. That was fun too.
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@Ashkuri said in "My Guy Syndrome":
- Sorry for disrupting this town meeting, but it’s what my guy would do.
help im crashing out again
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I think as a medium we tend to err by not reinforcing enough the expectations around roleplay. It is natural to not want to tell people how they should play their characters, but if the expectation is that people should be fun to RP with and not miserable, and you can kind of tell what RP sucks and what doesn’t, I think we do more harm than good by not explicitly saying so.
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@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":
But a lot of those things aren’t inherently bad. If your character wouldn’t think the planet is safe, and it’s really important to you to honor that, I don’t think it’s a cardinal sin to politely sit a scene out. Same for RPing out an IC grudge, or some of the other things you listed.
And sometimes this goes all the way around to what @Muscle-Car described as weaponizing my-guyness. “Hey, I’m sorry I blew up your character’s car that she got from her grandfather and rebuilt with her own hands, that’s just what my guy would do. Wait, why are you being such a My-Guy jerk and holding a grudge about it? Why can’t we just go back to being friends? You’re not being a very good collaborative roleplayer.”
Acting and reacting in-character isn’t binary, and, like a lot of things, it’s good up to a point and bad when taken too far. Of course, not everyone agrees on what constitutes “too far,” and that’s kind of the root of the problem. Some things are almost always not OK (the thief who murders everybody else in the party and steals all the loot because “that’s what my character would do” – but even this might be fine if the expectations are set appropriately). Some things are almost always OK (holding a grudge against whoever murdered your character’s best friend – but this can still be taken too far and become not-OK). Lots and lots and lots of things fall into a gray area where some people think they’re fine and other people think they’re not.
Communication helps, but even then you sometimes run into disagreements between players. What to one person feels like raising a reasonable concern over what someone else’s character might be contemplating, might from the other side feel like inadequate player-character separation (“gosh, she’s getting really upset over something that’s happening to her character”).
There’re just an awful lot of ways to misunderstand what’s going on in someone else’s head, and many (most?) of us aren’t really that good at putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. I don’t think there is a single solution here other than to try to listen to what people are saying even when they aren’t saying it out loud, and that’s a really hard skill to learn.
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Just in general, MUSH RP is a “yes, and” medium. Players would do well to remember that. There are always, always ways to work around “my guy would/wouldn’t do that” scenarios if players would just put a modicum of thought into it. Why the hell would anyone want to or continue to RP with players who are always throwing up roadblocks to RP, or finding ways to make it unpleasant for other players? It’s a collaborative environment. So collaborate.
