A Return to Action and Profiling

Welcome back. It’s been a while. With my life slightly less hectic now that my company’s office has moved—following a nearly 10-month acquisition and integration process—I’ve decided to revisit the Well and see if anyone’s still stopping by.

I’m hoping to get up a few things on some new topics in the next few days. In the meantime, assuming anyone is still stopping by, I’d like to do a little profiling to talk about what we’re playing and how our experiences are going.

Here are the questions:

1. What’s your name?
2. Where in the world are you?
3. What have you played recently? With whom did you play and where?
4. What’s been your best gaming experience recently? Why?
5. What’s been your most problematic or least satisfying gaming experience recently? Why?
6. What gaming are you looking forward to in the near future?
7. Name one thing your group does that you think could help others make their gaming better.

And naturally, I’ll start.
1. What’s your name?
Thor Olavsrud

2. Where in the world are you?
New York City

3. What have you played recently? With whom did you play and where?
This is gonna be a long one! In the interest of some brevity, I’m going to leave out Dreamation last month, though I’ll note that I played in Judd’s 1st Quest wolves game, Mike Miller’s Mutant Academy scenario for his excellent game, With Great Power, a playtest of Kevin Allen jr.’s work-in-progress, Sweet Agatha, and John Wick’s Wilderness of Mirrors.

So here we go:
The Monday group has continued its extremely fun Burning THAC0 game, a Burning Wheel game that consciously seeks to embrace all the wonderful tropes of the original Dungeons & Dragons game. For nostalgia’s sake, the game is set in Mystara, in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. Our characters have just returned from an expedition to the Isle of Dread, and I have managed to make the grandmaster of villainy, Bargle the Infamous, my wizard’s nemesis. All I can say is, “Die Bargle, Die!”

This group’s core consists of Anthony (the GM), Rich, Pete and myself. Luke has recently become a regular member, and Jared now makes cameos when he’s in town. We play in a conference room of our local Public Television affiliate, Thirteen, which Pete works for.

The Thursday group has been experimenting with Weapons of the Gods, which we’ve been quite excited about. We may get back to it in the near future, but we have some other games on the agenda first. We played a wonderful session of Dogs in the Vineyard last Thursday. It’s been more than a year since half of us played Vincent’s little gem, but it still produces consistently wonderful experiences. My Dog is perched on the precipice between being a force for good and becoming a cult leader and sorcerer himself.

This group’s core consists of John, Drozdal, Mayuran, Alexander and myself. Jon has made a cameo in the past and is more than welcome to return at anytime. Alexander has been out the past month or so dealing with visa issues, but that’s resolved now and he should be back soon. We play in the conference room of Nettwerk Music Group, which John works for.

The Sunday group has taken a break from its usual Earthsea-inspired Burning Wheel game (which Mayuran GMs) while Alexander has been out, so instead we’ve done a short Burning Wolves campaign, using the Great Wolves lifepaths from Burning Wheel’s Monster Burner. Our pack of Spirit Hunter wolves had to deal with the encroachment of the mad forest god as he sought to conquer the god of the mountain. We had numerous tussles with fox god, bear god, moose god, night god and fire god, as well as confrontations with other Great Wolf packs and ravens. Let me tell you, entering a Duel of Wits with a mountain is a scary proposition! This game came to a conclusion on Sunday, with four of the six player characters killed in the godswar. We all found ourselves interested in pursuing another game in the world.

This group’s core consists of Mayuran, Drozdal, Alexander, Luke and myself. With Alexander out, the roster for the Wolves game was actually Mayuran, Drozdal, Luke (as the GM), Danny, Chris, Rich and myself. We play at Game Headquarters, in Luke’s room.

4. What’s been your best gaming experience recently? Why?
It’s my poll, so I’ll cheat a little bit and list two.

First up is the entirety of the Burning THAC0 experience, rather than a specific thing. Burning THAC0 gaming has a lower intensity than most of my other gaming. It is intended to be a fun, casual romp, with lots of nostalgic references to old D&D experiences. We unabashedly game situations, make off-topic pop culture jokes, and kill things and take their stuff. Our teamwork is fun. There’s a lot to be said for the beer-and-pretzels experience.

Second up is the setting we created for the Burning Wolves game. When we sat down to burn our characters, Luke grabbed an Ilocano-English dictionary to use. We named our characters from it. We also named our relationships and our territories from it. When new NPCs (usually gods) were brought in with Circles, we named them with it. Luke drew a little map of our territories with all the names on it. Horut the Mountain towered over our territory, Daga. Balat the Forest sent his trees and grasses to war against Daga. Karayan the River brought us water to quench our thirst, and was in turn the child of Horut and Yelo the Ice. Aguma the Maker, with his lantern and axe, was allied with Balat, or was he? Agradam the Night made us shiver with terror, while Soro the Fox tricked us over and over and Manaketa the Bear gave us no end of trouble. Bukig the Moose bade us hide from our troubles. Our pups, Uken, Bato and Tiniteg gave us hope. Fellow great wolves Immalsa, Nasaglat, Cayanga, Abaken, Bison, etc., were our rivals and mates.

As these names grew around the things we created, the world really took shape in our imaginations. These places and characters grew organically over the course of the six sessions of the game and really gave the place a unique flavor and character.

5. What’s been your most problematic or least satisfying gaming experience recently? Why?
Interestingly enough, the Burning Wolves game is also my answer for this one and I’ve been struggling to answer why for several weeks. I think it comes down to this: I really cared about the subject of the game. I’m fascinated by wolves: their biology and physiology, their behavior, their pack structure and hierarchy, their hunting strategies, their ability to communicate with each other, etc.

I think it all stems from an account in Barry Lopez’s book, Of Wolves and Men, in which he relates how the pack he followed fed an elderly female that was no longer capable of hunting. Lopez noted the possibility that she had some sort of knowledge that was useful to the pack, and which justified their efforts to feed her. That always resonated with me.

I really wanted to see that stuff take shape in a game, and I pushed for this game. But gaming is a cooperative endeavor, and it’s not realistic to assume that everyone in your group is going to care about the things that you care about to the same degree. I wanted a game that really focused on stuff like pack mentality, pack community, and the communal effort to survive and raise pups. I noted that I wasn’t interested in seeing the game turn into “Man vs. Nature,” with “good” wolves trying to defend pristine Nature against “evil” men. I wasn’t interested in anthropomorphizing these creatures; I wanted them to feel like real wolves.

But there were six other people at the table with me, and they all had their own ideas. That’s fine. In fact, that’s how it should be. But because I really cared about that stuff, I was unwilling to give very much ground in those areas during play, even when it became clear that the rest of the players didn’t really care.

Gaming will never be satisfying if you’re not willing to give ground and allow other people to change your vision. In the end, the problem with the game and the reason it was unsatisfying was me. I was too attached to the subject matter.

6. What gaming are you looking forward to in the near future?
I’m looking forward to a number of games. Starting Wednesday, our friend Bob comes to town for a week from Boston. Between Wednesday and Sunday, we are going to burn a world and characters in Burning Empires and play through an entire phase. We’ll World Burn and Character Burn on Wednesday, play sessions Thursday night and Friday night, and marathon sessions on Saturday and Sunday. I expect it will be grueling! But also fun!

On Friday, the Gotham Gaming Guild returns, and we’ll set the stage for a 6-session run of a Burning Wheel game about Ronin from Hell. I hope to play a Yamabushi spirit-binder aiming to send the demons back where they came from. It should be a blast.

After I return from a trip to Alaska next week, the Thursday group is going to take Ralph Mazza’s work-in-progress, Robots & Rapiers, out for a spin!

7. Name one thing your group does that you think could help others make their gaming better.
It’s all about naming. See my answer to question 4, as well as Technique: The Magic of Yevaud’s Name.

Ok. That’s me. What about you?

The Algebra of Setting in RPGs

I'm going to go out on a limb here and represent protagonist play (or thematic play or narrativist play, if you prefer) as a mathematical equation: Setting + Situation + Player = Story.

But where's character, you ask? Well that gets into what I want to do with this post. I'm going to focus in on setting here. I may explore situation at a later date, but for now, I think Chris Chinn has got it covered. And player? Well, I think that's all over what's happening in the Indie blogosphere and at The Forge. But maybe we'll revisit down the road in a more focused way.

So let's look at Setting. To continue our little RPG algebra: Color + Character + System = Setting.

Color

I probably put color first because I want to start trouble. I think color is probably the element of setting that most gamers value most (if dollars spent are any indication; see below), and at the same time, I think it is the least important of the three (though still essential!).

Before I do anything else, I need to define what I mean by color. Color consists of the details that allow the participants in the game to imagine a location and how it works. It's the stuff that makes us feel as if we're there. When we describe the leaves of the trees in the elven forest, the population of a village, the creaking churn of the watermill wheel, the clothes your character is wearing, or the manner of succession for the kingdom, that's color.

One of my favorite Robert E. Howard Conan stories is Red Nails (if you haven't read it, I urge you to follow the link and read it now. It's good stuff!) Howard is a master at throwing in bits of color that flavor everything: the dragons in the forest, Derketa's apples, the roofed city of Xotalanc, the Door of the Eagle, and the black pillar with its red nails. The details are cool, but they're not the soul of the story. We could remove those details and completely replace them and it wouldn't alter the core story, although it would affect the feel.

In RPGs, color is introduced by players and GMs to fill in the gaps and smooth out the seams in the imagined environment we create together. Those details are integral to making the play environment feel real to us, but they don't really serve any other purpose and the game won't fall apart if they're not there, though parts might feel a little flat. Situation can grow out of color (like the method of a kingdom's succession), if the players become interested. That's the point at which we stray over into Chris Chinn's Flag framing. Mostly, though, color remains color.

Character

In 2001, Ron Edwards fired a shot at a little RPG sacred cow called scenario when he released The Sorcerer's Soul, a supplement for his game Sorcerer.

The shot took the form of his technique for Relationship Mapping, in which you graphically map out sex and blood relationships between NPCs in a game (with lines of obligation as secondary ties). While Relationship Mapping's primary purpose is to prep for scenarios (for which, see Chris' excellent work), it also makes a strong statement: Characters are the most important aspect of setting in a session (mostly).

Not the description of room 21, not the population of the village of Mistmere, and not the type of trees in the elven kingdom. That's all color. But the stuff that really sees use is all about characters.

In "Red Nails," Derketa's apples, the dragons in the forest, the roofed city of Xotalanc, and the rest really set the atmosphere. But the meat of the story stuff is about Valeria, Techotl, Burning Skull, Olmec, Tascela and Tolkemec. Everything else is incidental, dashed off in just a line or two of prose. Those characters and the ties that bind them are the elements that make the story work, and are also what would make "Red Nails" a playable and awesome RPG scenario (I've done it and it rocks!).

The relationships between characters draw us in as people and they make situations "grabby." Spoiler alert for those that didn't take my advice and read "Red Nails" earlier: When it is revealed that Tascela has ordered Olmec killed in a horrible way, it kicks us in the guts because they were lovers. When Tolkemec takes his vengeance, the depth of his hatred makes sense to us because of his love ties to Tascela. The whole feud fills us with horror when we realize that the two tribes are essentially one large, dysfunctional family that has spent decades murdering, raping, and torturing each other in the dark. And to place a protagonist in context: When Conan and Valeria arrive, their very presence throws this whole crazy, fucked up culture into a frenzy because it topples the status quo.

Or, if we look at The Lord of the Rings, relationships are what drive our interest in Aragorn-Arwen-Elrond, or Boromir-Faramir-Denethor, or Arwen-Aragorn-Eowyn-Faramir, or Eowyn-Eomer-Theoden. Layer on obligations and the tensions leap out at us.

In protagonist play, dealing with this stuff and the way situation affects the web of relationships is the core of play.

I believe this stuff points to a failure in many of the RPG setting books that so many gamers buy. Mostly, they seem to be pure color. In order to become more than that, they must generate investment by all the players involved (it's not enough to just get the GM invested), and the group must then see the way to translate that color into situation.

I suspect but certainly can't prove that only rare groups are able to generate anything more than casual investment from details provided by such setting material. I think some Tekumel, Glorantha, Harn and Middle Earth fans who are really, really jazzed about the settings and make them core features of play may be able to do it. For the most part, though, I think those bits of color contained in such books are not enough. In my experience, only the broadest strokes of color from such books get used in most actual RPG sessions. The rest never actually enter the shared imagined space (SIS), but get filled in retroactively by individual players according to their investment in the setting. (This paragraph and the one preceding it are all conjecture, by the way. Feel free to tear them apart -- as if you need an invitation.)

Can you sense the big, fat except lurking here?

System

Except when that setting color is reinforced by mechanics.

Mechanical details bring setting color to the forefront in a way that color introduced by players and GMs alone does not.

For instance, in Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard, buttes and snowy mountains are pretty easy to forget about when playing, but the fact that life is never more than a few words away from the greasy smoke of black powder is in your face at all times through the escalation mechanics. The fact that these people are your kin is in your face at all times through the spent (and unspent) relationship dice. Your authority and stature as a Dog is in your face every time you call on your Coat's dice in a conflict. That stuff is potent setting.

In Burning Wheel, life is cheap and blood spills easily because of the Fight! and Injury mechanics. Magic is potent as hell according to the spells and dangerous to the caster according to the Tax rules. Miracles are incredibly potent and extremely rare, according to the Faith rules. Grief crushes elves who see too much according to the Grief rules. Words are weapons as potent or more potent than steel, according to the Duel of Wits. Nobles and others who actually own land are wealthy and privileged, while peasants are poor and probably half-starved, due to the Resources and Lifestyle Maintenance rules.

In Conspiracy of Shadows, everyone feels the weight of impending doom that hangs over everything, due to the Doom mechanics. We all know that trust in your fellows is essential for survival and will lead to an inevitable knife in the back, due to the Trust mechanics. We know that dark, ugly magic lurks just below the surface, and Taint will inevitably corrupt those who use it, due to the Witchblood and Taint mechanics.

These bits of color are reinforced over and over again as we turn to the rules to resolve what's happening in play. They become the most potent color in the game.

Conclusions

So what to do with all of this? As designers, I think it provides a few core principles that we should consider when creating:

1. We need to determine what color is essential to expressing what the game is about and what color simply exists to provide flavor and texture to the experience of the game.

2. Color that is essential to what the game is about should be expressed in mechanics.

3. Relationships seem to be fundamental to protagonist play and are key to explaining how to build play with our games.

4. Pure color gets players excited. Even if it's not central to play, it's important and shouldn't be neglected.

For players of RPGs (including GMs), I think it also provides a few core principles:

1. System Matters. Pick the right one for the job. It's important to pay attention to the things that a game's mechanics encourage or discourage.

2. When prepping for a game, allocate the majority of your time for developing NPCs and their relationships.

3. Don't neglect color either. Color shores up the SIS; it's the mortar of the imagination.

Immersionism, Accepted Wisdom and Internal Conflict

Vincent made a fascinating observation today:

"Let's go back to the jumping-off place here, then, which is playing your character in another character's memory. Really what jazzes me about it is that it's a trick like frickin' Matt Wilson's trick: it makes us think of our characters as characters, so we approach our stories as stories, not as made-up journalism."

Vincent reminded me of a post I promised months ago about internal conflict in roleplaying games. I want to see more about what Vincent means by "made-up journalism" as that's not necessarily the phrase that I would use. I would instead propose that it makes us think of our characters as characters, rather than seeing our characters as people. That is, independent people with their own existences outside of us, the people that play them. And yeah, that means I'm diving into the whole, ugly immersion argument.

So, for years, in roleplaying, the accepted wisdom was that immersion was the be-all-and-end-all of roleplaying. Getting into character was the most prized skill of any roleplayer, and he that could go more deeply into character was a better roleplayer. The idea is still common today, and is especially strong among LARPers. The Turku School of Roleplaying, based in Finland, has taken the immersionist idea to great lengths.

Obviously the idea of deep immersion holds great appeal for many players. I can't deny that. But I don't accept that it's the be-all-and-end-all of roleplaying either. I think getting into my character's skin is fun at times, but if I am constantly experiencing my character's life during play, I can't simultaneously appreciate his story.

In other words, I'm suggesting that I can't 'be' my character and think of him as a character in a story at the same time. And generally, I'd rather think of my character as a character in a story most of the time. That allows me to place him in situations that would be terrifying or traumatizing for him, but entertaining for me: I will unhesitatingly put him into the sort of blood and guts conflicts that characters in stories get embroiled in, and real people try like hell to avoid. It also allows me to place him and his actions in relation to the other players (including the GM) and their characters. When I keep an idea of him as a character rather than a person, then I retain the awareness necessary to use him to set up something interesting for a fellow player's character.

The latter is especially important to me. I find that I enjoy games the most when everyone at the table is conscious of and invested in all the protagonists (player characters) and their story arcs. So Mayuran is just as interested in seeing Alexander's character's story play out in a satisfying way as Alexander is. And they're both invested in the shape of my character's story. It's a very different experience than deep immersion, but I find the resulting play to be more entertaining and more rewarding.

And the crux of it is communication. The players need to be in constant communication, as players, about what they are liking and not liking, whether they feel something is stepping on their toes or not, etc. And here's where internal conflict comes in (I bet you thought I'd forgotten!).

Internal conflict is a staple of comics and novels. We get inside the character's head and see what makes him tick. In those media, internal conflict is easy to convey: the writer/author shares it with the audience/reader. 'I'll never be good enough for her, Marius thought.' Simple.

But it gets tricky in a roleplaying game. Our instinct, especially if we've grown up with the immersionist thinking, is not to share the conflict, but simply experience it. But that creates a problem for me, because then only the player of the character gets to appreciate the conflict. It exists only in that player's mind, much as Scott's Outsider-ness existed only in his own mind.

So how do you open it up to allow the other people to appreciate the internal conflict?

The first step is to recognize the lesson of the comics and novels. The writer has to communicate the conflict to the audience. In the case of a gaming group, the writer is the character's player, and the audience is the rest of the group.

Once we recognize that, we have some choices that can turn internal conflict into a real vehicle for serious play in RPGs.

First, we have the soliloquy, a favorite solution in the theater for dealing with this very problem. An excellent example of a soliloquy solution is the Thought Balloon from Michael Miller's phenomenal game, With Great Power (fair disclosure: I edited it). Whenever your character is experiencing an internal conflict, you grab the Thought Balloon, hold it over your head, and express the character's thoughts to the rest of the group. Once that happens, the rest of the group is aware of the conflict and is able to bring their resources to bear in stressing that conflict. It's fantastic.

The other method is to find a way to externalize the conflict. Try to take the conflict that is inside the character, and show it with an NPC relationship. One of the easiest ways is to develop a flag about the conflict. Flags are game elements that communicate a player's desires for his character to the GM and the rest of the group. For instance, let's say you have a character that is all about the following: "I believe life is sacred and no one has the right to kill, but some of these bad people might really have to die ."

In this case, I, as the GM would encourage the player of the character to look for an external factor to represent the obligation toward holding life sacred, whether it's a connection to a family that holds this philosophy, or a temple/church, or what have you. Once the group has that, they can start adding weight to the obligations. They can use their own scenes and characters to push the player's buttons for his character. If the player chooses to have his character kill, it's going to put the obligation in jeopardy. The nature of the relationship will have to change.

The GM, working with the other players, can create scenes that add to the obligation, juxtaposed with scenes that show that allowing these bad guys to live will spread disaster and death all around them. The climax comes at the point of serious choice: kill them and betray yourself, or stay true to yourself and allow them to live.

The group can also play up the human side of the villain. Show their obligations to their own family, the good things they do. And juxtapose it with scenes of the violence and horror they spread. Eliminating these people will stop the devastation, but will also destroy the lives of innocents around them. Now the climactic choice has much more weight.

All this works best when the entire group is on board to make this stuff happen; to bring that character or church or whatever into center stage whenever appropriate.

I'm Done with This Guy!

Neat post from Alexander over at his blog today.

"One of the very exciting things about (maybe I'll just cave and call them 'Story Games', which I am not sure I like) is that when they're done right, they allow us players to tale those things that our subconscious has popped up as 'creativity', and to address them in the context of the game and story. The setting is usually sufficiently abstracted from our reality that it is safe for us to explore modes of behaviour that we would not otherwise use, but as Bettelheim suggests fairy stories do for children, the scenes and events still resonate for us in a meaningful way. When we've explored them enough, we can put that character away (or we'll find that the character is now 'boring'). This is healthy."

I'm Done with This Guy! is, in many ways, the mirror image of the Eight-page Character Background.

I see recognizing that you are done with a character as healthy, functional play, whereas the 'eight-page character background guy' attempts to bring his character into play at the moment that 'I'm done with this guy! guy' is hanging him up.

Warning! Extensive Character Background

For the past few days, RPG.net has been discussing "I just wrote an eight page character history."

For many, a massive exercise in character backstory is seen as the hallmark of an invested player, something to be admired and encouraged. While I won't claim that all such backstories are dysfunctional, I do suspect that a great many of them are.

In a nutshell, I think that many instances of multipage character background are symptomatic of what I tend to call "damaged player syndrome." These are players, often quite creative ones, who have repeatedly had their creative contributions stomped on by GMs, or occasionally fellow players. More explicitly, I mean that their attempts to put their own creative stamp on a game have either been ignored (e.g., "No one cares about the brother who left you for dead!") or their contributions are deliberately sabotaged (e.g., "your lothario attempts to look suave as he flirts with the queen. You failed the seduction roll? Ok, you spill wine down the front of her dress.")

So let's say that a guy comes up with a character. And part of getting really into that character is imagining how cool he is. He might imagine the scene where all his wizard's careful plotting comes to fruition, and he's able to set up his former master before the Council of Wizards, finally gaining his revenge. Or he might imagine his sailor lashing himself to the helm as he attempts to ride out a massive storm as a kraken rises out of the depths. Often a player will imagine a number of these scenes. This is the stuff that makes a player care about his character! That's incredibly important! GMs and other players should fuck with it at their peril.

So what if the wizard's player never even gets the opportunity to exercise his political muscle because the GM or other players aren't willing to go in that direction (or just ignore the implict request to go in that direction), or the GM doesn't provide any opportunities for the sailor's player to take the story onto the high seas? The players start to feel frustrated. Even worse, what if the GM makes your wizard look like a political hack, and has the former master see right through your machinations before you even approach getting to the cool stuff. Now, not only are you not ever going to get the cool scene you imagined, but the GM is literally making your character look like a schmuck, which is totally against that awesome concept you were imagining when you created the character.

As I mentioned above, this is the stuff that makes you care about your character. It's why you were excited to play him or her in the first place.

A natural reaction, then, is to attempt to codify the coolness you've been imagining by turning it into backstory, and thereby hardcoding it into the game's setting. That way, even if your the character's coolness never comes out in play, at least that coolness is "protected." Everyone that writes lengthy back story assumes that the GM (and possibly fellow players) will be eager to read the backstory and care about it as much as the writer. Hopefully, this time things will be different. This time they'll be really into your awesome character and let him be totally awesome in the game.

Naturally, to make everyone truly appreciate the coolness of your character, you've got to paint the coolest picture you can. And that means taking those scenes you've been imagining and making them part of the story. That way, they've already happened and no one can fuck with it.

The problem is that when all the cool stuff has already happened, it can't happen in play. All your character's issues are resolved and you'll never get that cathartic moment in play. Sure, you might develop some in play, but it's going to take a lot of fumbling around between you and the GM.

Players that have sunk into a protective shell this way are often difficult to draw out, even when they join a group that embraces everyone's creative input. But it can be done. And recognizing the signs, like the eight page character background, is often the first step.

Musings on the Role of Social Contract on Play Decisions

ScottM made an interesting response to Jere's post Musings on Social Contract in The 20' By 20' Room last week.

He wrote:
Your werewolf story reminds me of a similar situation I ran into not long ago. I was playing a character in a Buffy game who was an albino (I know, I know). What was in my mind when I chose that admittedly bizarre characteristic was a desire to explore -- in that foregrounded, metaphor-made-literal Buffy kind of way -- the issue of being physically marked as different, the issue of feeling like you were born an outsider, like you weren't given a choice about your nature, etc. (Said character was also, of course, a Slayer). I ended up pulling out of the game in part because I realized that what I wanted to explore with the character, and how I wanted to explore it, really wasn't fitting in with the rest of the game. Her outsider-ness was being constructed more as a psychological roadblock in her own mind than something which was externally true.

The last two sentences really struck me. This is a perfect example of how Social Contract, in the absence of textual rules concerning the issue, need to feed back into actual play to prevent dysfunction.

Scott had a very specific aim with this character: he wanted to explore character and the issue of being an outsider that has been marked as such by circumstances outside her control. Great! It's an interesting concept, and he's chosen to externalize this largely internal conflict (hoo is this the subject for another post) with a cue that can be used by everyone else at the table to bring the issue into the foreground.

But it fails. Why? As he puts it, "Her outsider-ness was being constructed more as a psychological roadblock in her own mind than something which was externally true."

How could Scott have gotten what he wanted out of this character? It seems to me that the missing component is an understanding by all the other players at the table as to what Scott wanted out of the character, and a commitment to helping Scott explore that in play?

In English: The other players (including the GM), needed to make Scott, as his character, feel like an outsider with their role-play. More than that, they needed to make him, in his character persona, feel like an outsider because she was marked!

Since that didn't happen (and to be fair, I'm only guessing here based on Scott's post) the only way for Scott to fullfill that aim in any way was to imagine it as "a psychological roadblock in her own mind."

This sort of thing cannot be done on one's own, regardless of one's "role-playing ability." It requires the group to come together in support.