Player Success Versus Character Success

It’s easy to think that when a character succeeds—whether it be an action from a successful die roll, discovering a great treasure, mission, or quest, or winning the heart of the prince—the player succeeds. In other words, it’s easy to think they are the same thing.

And that’s often the case. But designers can and should separate the player from their character conceptually, both in terms of success and even more when it comes to failure.

Characters succeed or fail using mechanics. Players can too, but much more significantly, they can also succeed or fail based on their choices and decisions. Characters are imaginary figures made of backstories and stats. Players are people around the table. If the character blasts the alien menace for maximum damage, it’s based on their stats and very likely a random die roll. It certainly isn’t based on the player’s skill at firing heavy plasma weapons. However, the choice to fight the alien rather than run away or try to communicate with it is entirely the player’s choice. Even if the player makes a choice based on the faithful portrayal of the character, and it’s not what the real-life player would do in the situation, the player is choosing to do so.

The distinction is obvious, if you consider it. This might be so obvious that game designers may even forget about it. Because games can be designed to reward player success over character success and vice versa. If, to defeat the alien creature, a player would roll dice and use their character’s skills and stats and whatnot, that’s one kind of gameplay, but if instead it’s a tense but potentially peaceful negotiation relying on the player coming up with the right things to say, that’s a completely different type. Different players will appreciate these types of play to different degrees, and if the design doesn’t consider this, the gameplay can become muddled.

(Keep in mind, I use common terms like “skill,” “stat,” “bonus,” and so on generally. I’m aware that not every game utilizes them, or even the concepts behind them.)

Player-First Versus Character-First

In the first type of gameplay, which we can call character-first, the player doesn’t have to rely on any of their own knowledge or skills. (Despite what some will contend to their dying day, rolling dice well is not a skill.) It’s all embedded in the mechanics of the game and the essence of the story. The character Atta Rodrigues is a veteran space marine and experienced at fighting aliens, and so it fits the narrative that she blasts one with success. And the mechanics emulating that narrative play into that idea and very likely reward the character for doing just that.

In the second type, which we’ll call player-first gameplay, Atta’s player, Theresa, is loquacious and smart, and so she talks rings around the alien negotiator. That success has nothing to do with Atta in either stats or narrative. All the responsibility is Theresa’s. Alternatively, if Atta is being played by Tom, who is shy and not good with words, Atta fails in the negotiation. Atta’s success at shooting her heavy plasma rifle is character dependent but her ability to negotiate is player dependent. As this applies to players, anyone can be successful at being a warrior, but only some can be a negotiator.

Art by Matt Stawicki

Issues with Player-First Gameplay

The player-first gameplay type gets even more complicated. What if Atta is monosyllabic and gruff? Despite Theresa’s own skill and proclivity, she chooses to accurately portray her character and performs poorly in the negotiation. She is, in effect, choosing to fail in order to fit the narrative. In the character-first type of gameplay, Theresa didn’t have to think about it—the mechanics emulated the narrative. In the second, Theresa’s got to do it herself. It’s like one playstyle is automated and the other is manual. 

The player-first style of gameplay can be supported with a game system that rewards careful planning and brilliant ideas over dice rolls. For example, Atta might find her plasma rifle is useless against the hide of the aliens she’s fighting, so she must find another way to defeat them, such as luring them into the airlock and ejecting them into the void of space. This flips the script, putting the success or failure on Theresa the player rather than Atta the character. In such a situation, the mechanics reflect this emphasis by making the aliens too tough to fight in a conventional way. This works particularly well in horror or horror-adjacent games, a genre where the protagonist rarely wins by just hitting the monster over and over until it’s dead.

This approach is best for games where actions normally handled with a character-first style are less common. In a combat-heavy game, for example, it’s going to get frustrating really fast if the normal mechanics for handling combat, whatever they are, barely ever come into play. The players will begin to wonder why they even have combat-related stats or why they bother to carry weapons at all.

But that’s a problem with player-first gameplay in general. If persuading the NPC to do what the character wants has nothing to do with stats or skills, why have those stats or skills at all?

Issues with Character-First Gameplay

In a character-first game, success and failure rely solely on mechanics. In other words, it doesn’t matter what Theresa or Tom actually say in the negotiation, just like in the fight, success actually relies on the die roll. While many players will feel this is more equitable, others will find it unsatisfying.

Taken to its ultimate iteration, character-first gameplay turns players into little more than die rollers and record keepers. The narrative is being well-emulated (good fighters fight well, good speakers are persuasive, good climbers climb well, etc.), but is it fun? For some players, yes. It’s a perfectly viable way to design a game. But for others, it’s dry and dull.

Combining Both Styles

A game can choose one style over the other. Or, the designer can try to walk the line between and use both in the same game. This is tricky, however.

Player choice, both in the game and in character creation, needs to be rewarded. That means that the player who chose to be great at acrobatics and climbing through selecting the right skills, stats, etc. should get to use the mechanics as they understand them to excel at that activity. It also means, however, that if a player figures out a legitimate way to get over the obstacle before them without utilizing the mechanics for acrobatics or climbing, that should be okay too.

Game design that is more open-ended is going to enable both gameplay styles. This means multiple paths toward success have to always be available to players. Advancing progress can’t be trapped behind a successful die roll, like a door that must be overcome by a lockpicking roll. Similarly, it can’t be trapped behind a riddle the player must solve using only their own cleverness to deal with such things. Ideally, there would be both a lock to pick and a riddle to solve and either gets the character and the player beyond the door.

Of course, this comes more down to scenario design than game design, but the game needs to advise the GM of this design methodology clearly and likely often to ensure the gameplay works as designed. However, the game itself needs to enable the mechanization of any task if needed. In other words, the tongue-tied player with the eloquent character needs to have the opportunity to apply their skill and roll for their speech rather than coming up with it on their own.

It’s also possible to marry the two even more closely. The game can mechanize player-first gameplay by instructing the GM to include some type of bonus to a roll when the player introduces an idea that would help. Maybe it’s the description of how they make their attack, where they search for the secret panel, or the words they use in their attempt to fool someone. In other words, the resolution involves both character-first and player-first elements.

In the end, I think you can see that I’m not advocating for one over the other or even suggesting that the same game can’t embrace both (although that’s a tricky line to walk). It’s just something to carefully consider.

And now I see that this topic took longer to discuss than I thought it would, and I didn’t even get to the topic I was most excited to cover, which involves player goals, intentions, feelings, and when success actually is failure and vice versa. Well, something to look forward to next time.