You're Always In-Character
It’s not easy to define what a tabletop roleplaying game is. The subject is complicated, in part because the hobby is the product of so many different influences. In my estimation, what makes TTRPGs special isn't their gameplay or even necessarily their roleplaying alone, but the unparalleled agency they afford players in pursuing psychological catharsis. Roleplaying is itself a technique that can be incorporated into any kind of game, adding another dimension to the experience even within restrictive constraints. But in a tabletop roleplaying game, roleplaying is not merely an optional embellishment; it is fundamental to the experience, and ultimately unavoidable. We have yet to create a form of “DnD” in which inhabiting an imaginary person isn’t necessary to participate.
Lately, there’s been renewed discussion in the community about “Pawn Stance,” a term coined and popularized by Ron Edwards in a manifesto published 25 years ago. Edwards, the creator of the now-defunct online forum The Forge, compiled a glossary of terms that reflected the hobby as he understood it at the time. He defines Pawn Stance as a player “determining a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities…” In other words, the player makes decisions without necessarily considering the internal motivations of the character they’re inhabiting.
An article published on Dice Exploder recently made the argument that this mode of play is “objectively correct.” (It’s not.) Ben Milton, on his YouTube channel, Questing Beast, picked up that story and added his own color, titling his video: “Actually, you don't have to play DnD in character.” (You do.)
Both of these opinions betray an overreliance on obsolescent terminology, treating it as though it were unearthed wisdom from a more civilized age. GNS theory is not the work of Aristotle; it’s the product of a guy in 2001 attempting to make sense of the hobby as it existed in his own time, presumably in the hope that future hobbyists would build upon and further refine what he had collected for their own purposes.
Ron Edwards’ definition of a “stance” was descriptive rather than prescriptive: he was describing how people actually play, not how they should play. The original definition also explicitly allowed for constant fluctuation, acknowledging that players might be “shifting among the stances frequently and even without deliberation or reflection.” The stances were never intended to describe mutually exclusive approaches to play, nor was anyone expected to choose a preferred stance and adhere to it rigidly. Rather, they assumed that players would employ some combination of all of them throughout play, shifting between them as circumstances demanded. At its simplest, a stance describes how a person arrives at a decision about an imaginary character’s imaginary actions. And any given action might be arrived at through a different stance.
The problem the Dice Exploder article presents Pawn Stance as a remedy for is that of players finding themselves inhabiting characters whose motivations conflict with the goals of the table or their own enjoyment. One might suggest that shifting into an omniscient, first-person perspective could mitigate this problem, but that doesn't actually address its root cause, because it has nothing to do with stance in the first place. It's conceptual, not procedural.
If stance is defined as “how a person arrives at decisions for an imaginary character's imaginary actions,” then a player's preferred stance is entirely beside the point. The mistake happened during character creation, not roleplaying. You are always yourself when deciding which character to inhabit in the first place. That decision precedes any question of stance and operates independently of it. It simply has nothing to do with the price of eggs in Denver, if you'll pardon the expression. To conflate the two is to conflate fundamentally different aspects of the hobby.
Stances aren't empirically demonstrated, real modes of play. They're conceptual reference points to describe and make sense of how players approach the game. One of them can’t be “objectively correct” because they don’t actually exist.
If the purpose of using these terms is to give people the vocabulary to address problems in roleplaying games that might otherwise be difficult for them to articulate, such as the hypothetical players described in the Dice Exploder article, who seem so committed to method acting that they cannot moderate their own behavior, then we must also consider the implications of telling those same players that they need not engage with the two (or three) other modes of play that the sacred text we’re quoting from cites as being fundamental, in varying measure: “Getting the most out of a GNS mode of play does not mean cleaving unswervingly to a Stance, but arranging Stances relative to specific types of scenes, decisions, and moments of play.”
Besides, what does it actually mean to play according to one's own priorities, rather than those of the character? Is there a meaningful distinction between the two when the circumstances being considered are entirely imaginary, and every character you might choose to embody is a figment of your desire for a fun Saturday night?
There’s a game called The End Of The World by Fantasy Flight Games. In it, you play an apocalypse scenario, but the twist is that the character you inhabit is based on you. You’re encouraged to be honest about your strengths and weaknesses and to build your character as accurate representations of your own abilities. They look like you, they have your name, and they even start with equipment that is within physical reach of you during character creation. It’s as close as I have seen any game come to allowing someone to play themselves in a tabletop roleplaying game. Yet it’s still roleplaying.
Contrary to Ben Milton’s assertion, you are still in character even when you are only considering your own priorities, rather than the character’s motivations. It’s inescapable. You are not in a post-apocalyptic world, hiding from mutant zombies. You are not in the buried ruins of an eldritch god’s temple. You are imagining a fantastic and unreal circumstance and what you would do if you were actually there. Even LARPers—who are genuinely sword-fighting in the park—are roleplaying, because the swords are made out of foam, and they’re all meeting up at the Arby’s afterward.
Playing in “Pawn Stance” and using your character as an instrument of your will is just roleplaying differently. If anything, it’s using guardrails, because you only need to consider yourself. It’s—as the article would put it—just roleplaying “poorly.”
Remember, the intention behind the terminology was never to decide on a stance and use only that. These are not like the Player Types made popular by Robin Law, also in 2001, which taxonomized play styles. Stances were granular. How are you coming to this decision for your character’s actions? What state of mind is influencing your current turn of play? There is nothing wrong with zooming out of the scene and considering your priorities and that of the people whom you are playing with. As stated, it was the expectation that you would shift from stance to stance, always. At some point, we all remember that Susan has a hard out at 9PM, and we do our best to facilitate that.
If you claim that you always play with only your own priorities in mind, without any consideration for your character’s motivations, I would be equally suspicious. Surely that isn't quite true. Your Paladin of Heironeous is named Edrick, not Steve, and you probably aren't explaining to the tavern keeper all the ways he could improve his rat problem using modern pest-control techniques. At least some of your decisions are constrained by what this imaginary character would plausibly know, do, or be expected to do. Whether you make those decisions because you're consciously engaging with the metatextual elements at play or simply because it feels natural, you're still roleplaying.
There’s no wrong way to play a TTRPG, so long as you and everyone you’re playing with are having fun. At the end of the day, I think collective enjoyment is the best measure of what it means to “play well,” and there are any number of ways to achieve it. That said, if you were someone inclined to make the above claim, and unwilling to entertain the possibility that you might approach in-character actions differently depending on their context and the needs of the moment, I would ask you why. Do you really think you're getting the most out of this medium, and everything it has to offer?
You could certainly use a pineapple as a paperweight, but I should think that it's much better suited to becoming a piña colada.