Role Fulfillment

The fulfillment experienced when being good at your assigned or implicit role in a group, or the frustration experienced when you have fulfilled your role, but the group still fails

This pattern is a still a stub.

Examples

Dungeons & Dragons

Guitar Hero or Rock Band series

Fiasco

Monitor Celestra

1942

Once Upon a Time

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game Shadows of Camelot

Using the pattern

Giving players roles to try to fulfill rather obviously requires that there exists roles. This naturally suggested the use of Characters to create Role Fulfillment and this can further be expanded upon through the use of Character Defining Actions and Player-Created Characters. Generally, providing players with different types of Freedom of Choice for Characters let them select or create the roles to fulfill, which may both make it easier for them to succeed with this and may make the experience of succeeding more pleasurable; Initial Personalization is the most likely the most efficient way of doing this but can be used together with many other ways of giving players Freedom of Choice.

However, there are many other roles possible in games that that of Characters. In fact, being a player can be seen as a role (see Sicart for a discussion on what it means to be a good player) but this is outside a stance looking at specific types of gameplay except that being able to show that one has Game Mastery can become a role in itself. Enactment and Roleplaying require players to behave according to certain role descriptions, and while these may often be tied to Characters this is not always the case (it is for example debatable what specific Character a players is trying to be while performing during a song in any game in the Guitar Hero or Rock Band series).

Being Dedicated Game Facilitators is an example of a role that can be performed better or worse in a game instance while not being based on specific Characters; the more specific pattern of Game Masters also requires Enactment and Roleplaying of various NPCs. Storytelling well may be part of being a good Game Master, but may also be part of being a good player as shown through games such as Fiasco and Once Upon a Time.

Can Be Instantiated By

Betrayal, ,

Traitors

Role Selection and Selectable Functional Roles are more specific patterns dealing with how players can choose roles and thereby the goals of playing these well, while Asymmetric Roles make the distinction between the different roles greater. Player Defined Goals can let players create their own goals of Role Fulfillment if the goals are at least partly defined through any of the roles discussed above. Warming-Up Roleplay Exercises are used in some Live Action Roleplaying Games to help players familiarize themselves with their roles or to flesh out the roles through adding details and relations to them.

Consequences

Both Diegetic and Thematic Consistency have bi-directional relations to Role Fulfillment in that part of the requirements on roles taken on can be maintain these consistencies while the roles can also partly be defined by these consistences.

Relations

Can Instantiate

Diegetic Consistency, Thematic Consistency

Can Modulate

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Can Be Instantiated By

Betrayal, Character Defining Actions, Characters, Dedicated Game Facilitators, Diegetic Consistency, Enactment, Game Masters, Game Mastery, Initial Personalization Player Defined Goals, Player-Created Characters, Role Selection, Roleplaying, Selectable Functional Roles, Storytelling, Thematic Consistency, Traitors

Can Be Modulated By

Asymmetric Roles, Warming-Up Roleplay Exercises

Freedom of Choice together with Characters

Possible Closure Effects

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Potentially Conflicting With

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History

New pattern created in this wiki.

Acknowledgements

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