Character "Ownership"

Over at http://www.lumpley.com/, Vincent has broached the subject of character ownership in RPGs (tabletop role-playing games). His key points (as I see 'em):

1) You actually don't own a character like you think you do.
2) This is a GOOD thing (for collaborative and thematic play, anyway).
3) It doesn't have to mean you lose character identification, either.

I think he's entirely right. Oh, and like him, I'm just going to talk about collaborative and thematic play - not that this issue has no meaning in other forms of play (I think it does), but I'm just not up to the challenge of adding that complication right now.

I quoted ownership in the post title, because I actually think ownership is a terrible word to use from the get-go. In demonstrating that characters are basically always formed by collaboration, it seems to me that we discover that fact: ownership is not the right concept here, ever. Thinking it through, the best I can come up with as a replacement label is "character authority", as "person who has final authority about aspects (usually all aspects) of a character" is just too unwieldy. In most traditional RPG's, what is really meant by "a player owns a character" is (to my thinking) "a player is the final authority regarding their character."

There's a lot that could be said about how this (or any) authority arrangement historically has been (and always potentially can be) abused. But for this post, I just want to point out that what we're actually talking about is authority. Because when you do that (it seems to me) , two things happen:

1) The de facto collaboration of the others involved before "authority" is invoked becomes more visible.
2) It becomes rather obvious that the authority can potentially be divided up in an endless number of ways.

Note that (IMO) granting some authority to something like "the dice" can be a particularly useful thing here . . .

Besides character authority, the other concept in Vincent's key points as I saw them is character identification (that is, to take a stab at an incomplete but hopefully useful definition of the term, a player feeling close to, and experiencing the events in play from the viewpoint of, a particular character). I take Vincent's points about character identification to be these:

1) As implied above, it can't be a function of ownership, because we've seen that ownership doesn't exist .
2) Additionally (this is the tough one for some people, I think), it does not require you to have total, final authority about "your" character.

Again, I agree with these points, though I would add the understanding that there will be some personal variation in just how much authority can be split-off to other people before character identification is lost. And the kind of story being constructed matters. And the WAY in which authority is shared matters. And . . . lots of stuff. The nitty-gritty here (System, in all its many senses) is a meaningful factor.

I assume diving into that nitty-gritty is what Vincent is really interested in. It is certainly possible that there are times when having one player with total or near-total authority over "their" character is good (remembering that even this doesn't equate to ownership or the absence of collaboration - a fact which I probably need to make more clear in SNAP). Equally, sometimes it won't be. But starting from this understanding, it seems possible to build both games that do involve high individual-player authority regarding their character and games that don't.

I'm looking forward to seeing these games get built.

PERSONAL ASIDE: My early D&D play (mid-late 70's. Yup, I'm THAT old) involved each player running multiple characters (and serial GMing, for that matter). It is only later that I began to assume that in RPG play I would have only one character. And I'm pretty damn sure I and my group(s) are not the only people this is true of. I'm not sure what that means, but for some reason it keeps coming up as I think about this issue: the "one player gets one character" model was not, for me and (I assume) a good number of other folks, the default assumption of roleplaying. Now, I happen to think it can be really cool, and very much a feature rather than a bug - ESPECIALLY if you back off on the singular authority over each character (and the other elements) in the process. That is, we each have OUR character, AND some ("some" needing much amplification) authority over other things (including, but not necessarily limited to, other characters) - but we don't have total-final (again, amplification needed) authority over "our" character.