lategaming

It’s funny how things in your life can dovetail so nicely when you’re working on a project. I just finished rewatching Episode III of the Star Wars saga, and it really hit the nail on the head regarding perspective having everything to do with alignment. Especially near the end, where Anakin is so certain that he is out for justice and peace and to save the life of Padme… and yet, he’s just slaughtered younglings in the Temple, single-handedly executed the separatists, and assisted the Dark Lord of the Sith in turning the Republic into an Empire seated in the hand of the Dark Side of the Force. Evil? All point of view at that point, isn’t it?

While we’ve talked about Evil in rping, playing and playing alongside compromised characters, really it’s the GM in the hot seat whenever someone decides to play a character that doesn’t “play well with others”.

When an compromised character is in the mix, it opens up a whole other realm of solutions and courses of action that your general vanilla characters wouldn’t dream of doing. As a result, you have to be a bit more prepared for the creativity and the consequences of that wider battery of choices. The same scene that would leave principled characters scratching their heads are nothing for a character who has no compunction about “aggressive negotiations”. It does tend to keep a GM on his/her toes.

Sometimes over the course of a game, a character might start out principled and, through events and experiences, take a turn for the worse. I’m not much of a babysitter of alignments as a GM. I’m just really big into consequences. I’ve also made it a habit of lobbing the phrase “You can be bad, and you can be stupid, but bad and stupid get you dead.” And sure enough, evil characters who make stupid choices find themselves quickly in tough situations or reconsidering that alignment or getting smarter by the minute. But no… I figure characters are like people. They make their choices, they have their consequences, then they either stay their course or realign. As a result, I don’t fret much over it.

When I have dealt with alignments, it was primarily in relation to classes such as clerics and paladins who had to curry favor, or when experience was tied to roleplaying a character well. My favorite way of dealing with alignment in all cases save cleric- and paladin-like classes is to let the players do what they will for a few games and then assign them their alignment based on what I’ve seen them do. But if you’re going to be rigid about it and pick an alignment and base your character around that alignment… well, I’ll make you live up to it.

I don’t like characters knowing anything about each other in advance unless they have concurrent histories that precede game time. We don’t get that special treatment in real life, and frankly, it’s just too much fun to watch the principled characters do something to trip up the unprincipled ones (and vice versa). Makes my life far less difficult when the conflicts and challenges are self-created within the player troupe.

What I do find I have to do regularly with Evil player characters is get them to cultivate some depth to their creation. The psyche of a diabolical or even simply selfish character is a landmine map of places you just don’t want to step. There’s always a lot of potential for both intimate development and later redemption, should the character end up on that kind of path. But because we rarely get to exercise our Evil sides in real life, there’s tendency to play Evil characters rather flatly (or as I mentioned above, rather stupidly), and that gets boring quickly for both player and troupe and GM.

I don’t think I’ve ever restricted someone from playing an Evil character. Like I said, I’m all about consequences. From a GM’s standpoint, an Evil alignment isn’t a carte blanche for mayhem and madness. And I will certainly allow the other characters to take your ass out without even a NPC “Maybe we shouldn’t…” to mitigate their lynching urges. It’s a risk you take when you play out of bounds. But then, that’s why a lot of folks play Evil characters anyway. It’s a walk on the wild side.

My job as a GM is to show you just how much of a jungle is still out there.

So, I’ve been a bad, bad girl about my blogging lately. I’ve not been flogged yet — not that that would motivate me one way or t’other — but damn if I don’t have a bunch of stuff to post about. However, that’s just adult life, isn’t it?

It was so much easier when I was sans l’enfant, and free to ring someone up on any given night and say “Hey, feel like killing shit?”. Can’t really do that anymore. God forbid, I actually have to SCHEDULE my entertainment time. That’s about as bad as pencilling in a date for sex. But we won’t talk about that.

I suppose I miss the days when things were a little less hectic. At the same time, roleplaying in my adult years seems more… necessary to me than it did when I was young. Back then, gaming was frivolity, something just cool to do, another bit to throw out there about my personality that (in all honesty) was great for attracting smart and geeky and imaginative guys. Now, though, gaming is serious fun, total down-time from all the responsibilities that come with the whole adult-with-kid-and-job-and-mortgage shebang. I think I enjoy it more, maybe just in a different way.

A local rping group just tagged me to come along with them. Old AD&D. Gotta see if I have time. I was thinking about running a “Winter Blues” parlor game campaign for the cold months with some friends. That’s the other thing about being an adult… damn if you don’t have to choose what’s worth your time and what you just can’t manage.

I’ll be back on the posting horse this evening.  Reverse cowgirl and all.  I promise.

This post on Story Games I find quite exciting. A month to design a game, using a previously published system? And the additional commitment of having to also be a judge.

As a commenter on that page put it:

“It’s the exact same situation as Game Chef or 24 hour RPG — feel free to draw on old material, but the contest is about writing and presenting new stuff, not dusting off your hoary old setting.”

I’d love to do this. But do I have the time?

Tonight we didn’t play Zombi, which would make that the second week in a row. Instead, we played Zombies!!! which made a small amount of difference. Less plot, more frantic backstabbing.
This is therefore going to be a little review. We played Zombies with the expansions for the Army Camp, the Mall and the University but to be honest we played for 3 hours and didn’t get anywhere. The turns got a bit slow with 5 players but it was funny. The tiles dealt out a twisting map and the cards and dice rolls gave us plenty of opportunity to move, establish grandiose plans and in some cases, execute them. Paul managed a great combo, sadly depriving me of some excellent toys and leaving us neck and neck at the end before he scooped the victory from me (Bastard!).

It was an excellent filler for this week and the only issue is that you need a LOT of table space.

Over the last few years I’ve come to appreciate different methods of character generation. I’m not especially keen on point allocation systems due to concerns that they are unrealistic because a) not everyone is equal and b) they’re prone to abuse by min-maxing. (I find the latter to be more evident in games where you have hundreds of points and points give traits which different advantages and yes I am pointing the fingers straight at Champions even more than anything here).

I did however opt for point allocation systems for all of my games so far (with some minor exceptions in the generations, most notable in Testament/Creed and Zombi).

I really don’t like random generation - even though my randomly generated character in kinnygraham’s Delta Green scored lowest in his stat rolls and yet is arguably the most stoic player character (the other two being dead and mad).

An idea which I love is mentioned today on Collective Endeavour. Character generation by interrogation - which fits in well with the “1984″ theme of his game.

Which is best? Heck, I don’t know.

What I do know is that in the 20-odd years I’ve been a roleplayer I’ve spent far too much time generating characters (including hours and hours spent making characters for MERP for games that were never played).

We played Zombi at the local TTN meeting because it allowed us to have character generation done within 10 minutes of sitting down.

Amber! Now there’s a game. I never got to play it due to not having any players but I loved READING the character generation system even if, having never read the books, it was a bit beyond me.

My personal favourite was the generation system in HeroWars. I loved the idea of writing a short paragraph about a character and then underlining the bits that could be used as traits.

Rayden Kauppinnen was born in the Northern Reaches of Volyvia. He was apprenticed to Master-Jarl Tuppenijk and on his 19th birthday became a Journeyman in the Lore. During his Challenge of Certainty, he was given a Return Thread as a gratitude from the village of Chernetzy. These days he travels the roads as a Lore Mendicant with only his wits and a piebald pony with a stern temperament for company.

Oh….just writing that makes me want to play it…whatever the game is???

And the reason I’m a crazy-magnet may be entirely due to me being interested in shit like this.

Maybe I’m a normal magnet? I’m the crazy one….

There must be another way.

Not really sure whether I’m pleased or depressed….
But Qabal and The Project Sourcebook didn’t make the grade for this list on RPGnet of Legendary Vapourware even though it’s 9 pages long!.

Of course, they’re too wrapped up in wondering about FRUP (which, in the tradition of the very best vapourware, is back under development.

A Fathead (genus Psychrolutes) trawled during the NORFANZ expedition at a depth between 1013 m and 1340 m, on the Norfolk Ridge, north-west of New Zealand, June 2003 (AMS I.42771-001). Photo: K. Parkinson © Australian Museum. The scientists and crew on board the RV Tangaroa affectionately called this fish ‘Mr Blobby’. Note the parasitic copepod on Mr Blobby’s mouth.

It’s one thing to go head-to-head with an Evil being. And still another to play an Evil character. But what happens when you’re minding your own damn business and someone else in your troupe decides they don’t want to be Mr. Nice Guy? Now, that’s a real dilemma.

Probably one of the biggest difficulties is that being forced to play with/hang out with an Evil character TOTALLY doesn’t mirror real life at all. Someone treats you badly in real life — you know, steals your money, slices your brake lines, sticks a knife in your back — you get the hell away from them! You can’t exactly do that in a gaming group. I mean, I suppose you could, but who wants to roleplay a bunch of solitary characters that have little interaction because they can’t share a sandbox? Yeah, no fun. So, you find yourself in a situation where you have to play with someone that, under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t let within spitting distance.

Another real challenge has to do with the separation of “player knowledge” from “character knowledge”. Do you KNOW that their alignment is Evil? If you don’t, then no worries. You’ll figure it out and it’ll happen in character, and you will be justified in what you have to do to them (that is, if you don’t join their cause). But if you do happen to know they’re Evil-aligned, well… hello! Time to see just how good a roleplayer you are. Can you leave what’s written on paper alone and separate yourself and your knowledge from your character’s knowledge? Harder than it sounds. And really, I prefer for players not to know each other’s ethical center. That’s not something you get in real life. We don’t run around with ethical “mood rings” on letting each other know if we’re a right bastard or not. But sometimes it happens. And it’s hard as hell to leave that knowledge out of play once you know it. See it all the time… suddenly everything that player does is suspicious, though it was fine not half an hour before. Yeah, real challenge. Better you just don’t know.

Then there’s the challenge of working someone with ulterior motives into an overall greater scheme, the residual doubt in what s/he has to say or do, the heightened tension wondering if the knife’s going to come from the back or the front… it can be downright harrowing. And exciting!

Because Evil characters provide tension and extremism, they also offer the opportunity for experiential character development for the other players in the troupe. Not all experience is in points and money. Character experience — what shapes and defines who your character is and how they go about making future choices — has to come from successes and failures in decisions and relationships. And truth be told, there are few things that will change a character’s fabric faster than dealing with someone not nice. One encounter can wither an idealist, birth a cynic, and give a realist concrete shoes.

Have you ever played with an Evil character in your troupe? What kind of experiences did you have? Did you know their alignment while you played? How’d you feel when you found out?

Or… did you try to save them? Cause that never works.