The Gaming Yips

[AnBe]

The Yips is a type of disorder of the mind in which the subject over-thinks something to the point of not being able to do it competently at all. This leads to frustration and depression. It feels like there are too many questions and not enough answers. Too many solutions, but no final decision. The game becomes an incoherent mess.
I have experienced these Yips many times and I was wondering if any of you have experienced such a phenomenon before.
Also, it would be appreciated if anyone knew how to break out of these Yips.

[Kane0]

Do you mean between sessions or during them specifically?

I see my DM do this often when planning, less so in players. Though I could be mistaking it for hindsight or analysis paralysis.

[Solaris]

My wife has similar anxiety issues. When it's in a game, I generally gently remind her that the consequences of 'failure' in the game can be very often outweighed by the consequences of failing to play the game.

Although "Bad game is worse than no game" is a truism, 'bad game' more refers to the OOC more than the IC. If the party chemistry is good, then there is a huge degree of tolerance for in-character errors and faults.

[Pex]

My friends call it "analysis paralysis" though they're referring to board games. It's not only trying to make the most out of your turn but thinking about how your opponents will respond so you want to mitigate how badly you will be affected. It makes the player take a long time to do his turn. I've seen it happen in RPGs too. When it happens to me I'm worried about the chance my attack won't work because I fail to hit or the bad guy makes the saving throw. Is the risk worth the effort?

Given my opinions in other threads, the ironic thing that snaps me out of it and just do my action is trust in the DM. Even if it doesn't work, which happens but not all the time, I trust I had a fair chance of it. I could have chosen poorly on the action for worse odds than if I did something else, but that's on me. The worse feeling is being social pressured into doing something I know won't work or have a poor chance of doing so. My analysis paralysis already dismissed that action, but I can't figure out what I should do. Everyone else is telling me to do that very thing I dismissed. Since I can't think of what I should do I do that thing anyway and of course it fails.

[Koo Rehtorb]

I get this sometimes with character builds. I haven't really found a cure for it.

[Solaris]

I get this sometimes with character builds. I haven't really found a cure for it.

Step 1: Make all the characters.
Step 2: Start taunting the DM a lot.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit! Play all the characters as natural selection takes its course.

[Quertus]

The Yips is a type of disorder of the mind in which the subject over-thinks something to the point of not being able to do it competently at all. This leads to frustration and depression. It feels like there are too many questions and not enough answers. Too many solutions, but no final decision. The game becomes an incoherent mess.
I have experienced these Yips many times and I was wondering if any of you have experienced such a phenomenon before.
Also, it would be appreciated if anyone knew how to break out of these Yips.

Step 1: Make all the characters.
Step 2: Start taunting the DM a lot.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit! Play all the characters as natural selection takes its course.

We might be talking apples and oranges, but I think the advice advice is actually awesome.

Play lots of characters, until you find one(s) that you enjoy playing. I effectively have to "take a 20" on character creation to make someone I enjoy / am comfortable playing / etc.

For Yips (?) in particular, though I've never heard of it before today, allow me to point out two of my characters who were good for me overcoming my version of it.

Case study 1: Quertus.

I learned in old-school "git gud" player skills mindset. The longer I played, the better I got. But this led to me and more desire to make the "optimal" decision for each action. In addition to Yips-like issues, it also felt oppressive to role-playing, as it felt like, eventually, every character would be, how do you say, The Determinator.

Watching a player who had played the game for a long time still playing poorly, I thought about this simple truth: some people just aren't as good at learning certain concepts as others. Suddenly, I wanted to roleplay that - a character who just didn't get it, someone who lacked at least some part of those essential player skills I'd been building.

Enter Quertus. Quertus is an academia mage - utterly brilliant at magic theory, but lacking in the "practical combat applications" department. Like that player who's been playing for over a decade and still doesn't get it, Quertus is psychologically all but incapable of "seeing the elephant".

Quertus prefers to travel in the company of highly skilled combatants. His preferred action in combat is to read a book - "You guys got this? Good. <flips to the next page>." - or to draw sketches of interesting features (creatures, dwoemers, architecture, whatever). When Quertus is called upon to act in combat, his actions vary from cowering, fleeing, casting spells seemingly at random, or performing scientific experiments to determine the exact capabilities of new and interesting creatures.

Quertus is very easy for me to play, because he has a wide range of options to pick from, which explicitly don't have to be optimal.

Case study 2: Armus.

One of the easiest ways to describe Armus is "moody teenager". Armus is super easy to play correctly, because, if I'm in a bad mood, I just RP Armus as randomly in a bad mood, too.

Armus has the interesting setup of being both tactically brilliant and utterly rash. He could totally create the Master Plan and "Leroy Jenkins" on the party.

Curiously, Armus somehow manages to be a better tactician than I am. That is, I play Armus more intuitively than my usual (Yips?) (over-)analysis of the situation, and, afterwards, when I often realize it worked out better than my best plan would have, I get to have a "WTF was that?" moment, and try to understand just what it was that Armus just did.

Armus is very easy for me to play, because he has a lot of tricks up his sleeve, and can crib from my vast experience with RPGs, while still being played intuitively as an imperfect, moody individual.