First to clarify what I said to you at one point: I suggested your socket was *social* and that it might be possible that you funnel your contribution through the agency of other people’s fun; essentially, an “Other”-based social socket. It’s a fine distinction, but important.

I guess the answer is, you do have a horse in the race because you’re playing in the game with me. I can have this emotional conduit all fully in gear and raring to go, and without you, or Brand or whoever I’m playing with, there’s no catharsis, because nothing happens. What you provide me in game is critical, it’s *life*. Whether you are a GM or a fellow player, you help me get my fun by bringing breathing characters that are willing to interact with me in a high velocity way.If I am the subject and the object of my interaction, then there’s no emotional charge. It’s why dialog is one of the hardest things to write in fiction.

If you want to be an agent of my fun, make a character that I can fall in love with, or that I can like despite hating, or something with a deft and dynamic charge between us. Make a fallible, full out open heart bleeding character that I will put my life on the line to defend. Or, in the right kind of game, give me a character that I will love and who will betray me, or betray himself for me, or who confesses his love for me with his dying breath just after I’ve taken brutal revenge in killing him. These are just examples, but the answer is: bring me a character that brings it personally and emotionally and feels like a real, whole, complex person.

There’s probably more, but that’s huge and it’s late, though I’ll think about it some more in the future for sure.

I’m going to answer some of this, because I have a perspective Mo doesn’t have — as she doesn’t play with herself as much as I play with her. (No, get your mind out of the gutter.)

The truth is that its easiest to support Mo’s play style when you’re either a GM or an adversarial figure — like the Mistake in Polaris. When you have the ability to toss stuff at her and push/pull the character in a direct and supported manner it makes it pretty easy to directly contribute to her fun.

Even in that area there are a few tricks that work. Having an empathic connection to the players is vital — or at least it is for me. My ability to GM a game for impassioned players is directly proportionate to my ability to emotionally read them: both in general and in the moment. The general read is one of the reasons for the group intimacy thing Mo speaks about — the better I know you the more I can read you in and around game. The read in the moment is often harder, and has lead to some specific rules around our table. For example, we don’t usually sit around a table all together, we sprawl about the room. But no player can sit in a place or a way that makes me unable to clearly see their face and make direct eye-contact with them. We had problems with that a couple years ago, and without the face-read and eye-contact I rapidly go from THE AMAZING GM to the SHIT GM.

Of course system things like flags, kickers, and character generated content all work wonders with this. If your impassioned players tell you want they want, then all you have to do is support what they told you. You can then focus the empathy upon varying it and making it creative so you don’t just regurgitate what they tell you.

With Mo, in specific, that part is easier than with some players who are more Othered or more Impassioned than her, because Mo can stop between scenes, drop out of character, and discuss what she wants to happen next, where her character’s head space is, and so forth. You can do lots of setup work for her before and after game and before and after scenes (though I don’t like to spend too much time between scenes, as it destroys my pace). So while it can be difficult in the moment of a scene to not break the cycle, if you pay enough attention between and after you can get a good sense of where it should go.

(BTW, I highly encourage all my immersionist players to develop a skill like this. Being able to talk about things OOCly when not in the moment is a wonderful help to a GM. However, for some people it may be against their goal or payoff, and so it doesn’t always work.)

Now most of that is directly applicable to GMs, but can be indirectly applicable to other players as well. The best key for other players is to use all of the above, but to learn to do a lot of it through pull. Believe it or don’t the reason Mo started talking about Push/Pull back in the day wasn’t because it was important on its own, but because she wanted to open up a discussion about how you work an impassioned/other table.

If you can set things that are interesting and drawing up, bring up ideas that the PC can’t help but engage with, figure out ways to make yourself or your character vulnerable in a way that will impact the I/O PC, then you’ll be able to contribute to their fun just fine. You just have to have a degree of finesse, control, and subtlety because you can’t (without breaking it) just ram force or OOC instant ideas into the game and expect it to work. Instead you have to figure out what they want, what you want, and how you can guide those two things to come together.

There’s something that’s always bothered me when I read posts about your play style or the play styles of folks that I consider to be somewhere in the same ballpark as you. And I’ve never really been able to articulate it, but I think I might now understand what part of the issue might be. And let me say from the beginning that this probably has to do more with projections about how playing in a game with you would work. In real life, we’d probably function just fine.

So, you know how you suspected that one of my primary sockets might be being the agent of other people’s fun? I think that comes from a lifetime of GMing and just my own personality preferences, but it’s definitely there and, I suspect, is fairly common among many roleplayers, perhaps especially so in people drawn to indie games.

Well, when I read about your play style, it sounds like it’s so personal, so introspective, so dependent on how your yourself feel about the game. And, therefore, it feels really disempowering to me as someone who wants to play games to you. It’s hard to see how I, as a fellow player, can regularly be an agent of your fun when your fun seems so subjective and mainly the product of your own agency. Honestly, it’s similar to the feeling I get when I get dumped by some bi girl I’m dating for another woman It’s like “Wow, I really can’t compete with that. I don’t even have a horse in this race.” So there’s a lot of anxiety that comes from even thinking about people who socket into the same things you do.

Now, when thinking about it honestly, I doubt that we’d have any serious problems in play, but that’s the gut-level reaction I always have when reading about this kind of play. It’s like “Wow, Mo’s playing by a completely different set of rules that might make it impossible for me to really connect with her during play.”

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear your reaction to that and would be even more interested in hearing how other players can contribute to your play experience, even players who you don’t necessarily have an intimate relationship with. Because right now it’s hard for me to see the social component of roleplaying and how that connects in to what you’re doing.