There's something that's always bugged me around here. It's the way that people justify their characters' actions, saying that they had to do what made sense from a roleplaying angle, that their characters had personalities that were deterministic to a large extent, meaning they simply had to follow through on. From reading this forum, one gets the impression that this manner of playing is the pure and wholesome way to play, while casting an eye to gameplay, doing things that make sense from a gaming or metagaming perspective, is the barbaric and ugly way to play.
To give a generic example (and this has happened many times before), Realm A will declare war on Realm B. The characters of realms C, D, and E are roleplayed by their players as being honorable characters, as most characters are, and so, as they are in a pact with Realm B, they do the honorable thing by standing by their friend and gangbanging Realm A.
This mentality seems to be given credence by the idea that 'character's write themselves,' a claim that a lot of authors make. There is a misinterpretation here. When authors say it, what they mean is not that their characters define the story, but that the story defines their characters. In Macbeth, for instance, Macbeth is an honorable lord. At the start. He does not stay that way for long, though, as the story calls for action and drama, and an honorable character can't always provide those things. According to the needs of the story, Macbeth's personality changes and he becomes treacherous and loathsome, then is quickly eaten up by guilt. It is not the character that is writing the story here. The story has requirements that the character must bend to meet, and that is what it means for a 'character to write itself'. Characters are malleable to a large degree. As we can see in the example of Macbeth, even the most honorable characters can become villains, if the story calls for it.
In Battlemaster, most players like to play their characters as being honorable good guys. Their characters rarely grow much throughout their lives, even when opportunities for change present itself. The honorable kings, as well as their dukes and knights, tend to remain honorable forever. They never think of causing tension in either their own realms or abroad, except for when its done for a noble cause, such as coming to the aid of their honorable allies. This not only negates their own opportunities for dramatic interaction, it actively kills the opportunities for others, as the honorable allies, the unbeatable majority, are driven by their honorable nature to clamp down on any change.
So it seems that the mentality people have is problematic.
But how can it change?
Well, instead of considering characters pure and infallible, we could instead consider them small pieces of a larger story. The story could be considered all-important, and characters could undergo changes in order to augment the story. This, I think, should be the true goal of roleplaying.
