Social Intelligence?
I’m a pen and paper roleplayer, been it for nearly 20 years now, and I love it.
As most of those who are into this hobby, I’m playing with friends. Friends who are usually friends first, and fellow gamers later. Not necessarily in the temporal sense though.
Thus I’m often arriving at a strange conundrum: What to do when conflicts arise out of the game?
It’s comparatively easy to be nice about loosing a game of pool, or shaking hands after a nice round of Settlers of Catan. But roleplaying games are by their very nature very emotionally intense games.
This, coupled with a great bunch of different player types, can create conflict. If left unattended, these can destroy friendships. I’ve seen in-game conflicts spill over into the real life friendship often enough, so I know better now.
This brings me to the „now“ in this story: The group I currently play in consists of 5 players, who come from diverse backgrounds and have quite different ambitions regarding the game. Some only join for the friendly company, some want to solve logical puzzles, some live for being able to do flavourful roleplaying, and I love to see a good story evolving.
Such a group can work together just fine, with each mind contributing when it is needed. Alas, we currently keep bickering at each other over how dismal the adventure was, how the other players get all the goodies, how player A gets more attention, how Player C disrupts the adventure…
..it’s a pain in the ass, really, and seriously substracts from my fun. It’s fine to spend time over the week figuring out how to let my character behave in the story, wondering where that would lead. It’s no fun at all brooding over what went wrong among the players, and how to placate everyone.
In an online game environment, I would have simply moved on and seeked another group. The chicken-out-solution really, but the one with the least amount of stress involved. But in the scenario at hand, that would translate into not meeting all my buddies once a week at a fixed time. I’d miss that, so I’ve got to tackle this another way.
I did try speaking up outside the game, raising the issue in a friendly way, trying to sample thoughts and ideas of how we could all pull together..
How do they say? „No cigar“.
I’m going to try another venue next: Applying in-game social intelligence to the solution. Wednesday, my character will instead ask his buddies (ie the other players characters) what they want, as the big mysterious dragon has offered a reward! Let’s see what each character wants (which ultimately is what the player wants anyway), and then I’ll figure out how to get it for them.
More work for me still, but at least it’s in-game work, instead of dicking around with irate fellow players.
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