Gonna drop this into my toolkit.

L

There’s a lot of advice out there in the blogosphere about soliciting more roleplaying and engagement from players who are conditioned to play in ‘meta’ terms or at best, tend to sloppily blur the line between “my character is more like me than who I proclaim him to be” and “my character is just an escapist me, with an axe.”

Okay, fine I’m talking about my own group. But I think trying to get a monologue like the example you presented above out of your players might encourage them to RP a bit better simply because they have to say their character’s thoughts out loud. It holds them accountable to their character’s personality in a manner not unlike “any declarations before we continue?” but from an RP perspective.

Still, if you get gamers to do it for a reward, maybe you’ll condition them to start doing it for free! Go Pavlov!

I do think there’s a subtle but substantial difference between using a monologue to respond to/discuss a particular incident (say, to get a reroll) vs the completely open-ended “what’s it like to be you” that I’m advocating. The former is cool and informative, but the latter can elicit completely unexpected insights, precisely because you aren’t asking the player to talk about anything in particular. You’re letting the player decide what their character is thinking about.

I can’t say how it plays, as I haven’t gotten a chance to play H&S, but it seemed like a fun mechanic!

Lately, I am much more aware of the efforts I go through to help players be aware of what the other players are trying to do. To me, players are collaborating writers on a narrative series, not just cooperative players in a game. Asking them to suss out the player’s hopes and plans for a character (not just the character’s) through roleplaying alone is a little like expecting a TV writers’ room to communicate solely through unfinished drafts of scripts — it’s inefficient. Personally, I’m eager to maximize the story I get out of each session, even if that story comes across in a mix of sketches, unfinished monologues, and fully rendered dialogue. An RPG is played in jam sessions, not rehearsed performances. The players all benefit from knowing more about each others’ characters, even if that means the player sometimes knows more than the character — it serves the player-as-writer even as it gives a short cut to the player-as-character. That’s fine with me.

There are a lot of interesting implications about roleplaying in the first or third person (including some counter-intuitive cases where third person can actually promote stronger examination of the character, because you are highlighting that the character is someone separate from you who might have a very different personality) but that’s for another discussion.