[UA] Reactive vs Proactive Players

[Frank Cord Lohmann]

Chris Cooper <insectking at yahoo.com> wrote:

> How do I make games for reactive characters.

Some friends of mine (both male and female) are avid readers of
romance novels, and they are about the most reactive kind of players
I've ever seen. Three things I learned GMing for them, which may or
may not apply to your present situation:

- Oddly enough, they love it when their character suffers. Especially
when their character suffers emotionally. Often, they didn't even
react to it openly (meaning: in a useful way that could be worked with
at the gaming table), but apparently enjoyed the pain and suffering of
their alter egos tremendously and imagined and thought it through
quite vividly.

- They were total suckers for the wise, mentor-like, old
wizard-approaches-you-in-the-tavern type of NPCs. It's not that they
didn't want their characters to do cool things, it's just that they
had to have these oracles/superiors/allies/sages/confidants spell it
out to them beforehand. Heavy railroading indeed, but with them it's
almost as if they don't dare doing anything without NPC
sanction/approval.

- More things happened in their head during games than with any other
group I've gamed with. For instannce, there's one Underground
adventure we played that they still speak about, mostly because of the
"highly romantic love affair" between two of the PCs. Fact is - the
two PCs didn't even *talk* much between themselves, let alone flirt or
anything. However, certain situations seemed to have triggered their
"romance novel reflexes" or something, meaning that because of certain
things happening in the game, they more or less thought that things
were developing between their characters automatically and never even
bothered to play it out. Thus, when the two characters flew in each
others arms after the showdown, all my players went "awwww..." and I
was wondering where the hell that came from, and why I was the only
one who didn't see it coming (as a matter of fact, I've since come to
refer to this kind of thing as "secret romance novel vocabulary" and
have accepted that I'll simply not get it).

To sum it up - even if they're reactive doesn't mean that they're not
involved, or immersed, or that they don't enjoy themselves. They
simply expect to fill out a mould instead of putting their brand on
the gaming world.