lategaming

Now that we’ve had a bit of introductory discussion about Evil, let’s move into the most intimate placement of Evil in a game: within the Character.

An interesting comment was made regarding whether or not an Evil character knows that what s/he is doing is wrong. Are Evil characters simply misguided?

The idea of “misguided” is actually a crucial key in developing the background to an Evil character. We are the sum of our experiences, good and bad. For a character in a game, there is a dividing line between their experiences: all that will come from roleplay, and all that came before and made your character who s/he is. Just like real people, well-developed characters had things occur in their pasts that changed them forever. And, also just like a real person, the characters’ perceptions of these events in their pasts usually makes all the difference. Creating a compelling history of how a character wandered down a darker path gives a character a sense of realism. And really, it’s realism that makes an Evil character frightening. To see traits you have yourself magnified, to see how easy it could be to slip away from the Light.

Playing an Evil character presents certain challenges. For one, chances are you can’t make your intentions known. Troupe play tends to require a certain amount of togetherness, and face it… if you’re serving a dark overlord and running around with a paladin bent on making the world safe from jerks like you, chances are you’re aware that honesty is not your best policy. So that presents a challenge to act true to your character’s intent, but not end up as a meat ornament on someone’s lance. For two, chances are your character is not much like you. Anytime you play a character that’s not like you, it can be a stretch to get into the role. Worse, because of the need to keep your wicked wiles on the hush-hush, you tend to be forced into a playing a character not like you with required subtlety. Let me tell you, subtlety when you’re trying on an ill-fitting character is hard as hell. I will also say that the best Evil characters aren’t the wild megalomaniac ones. They’re the ones that are finessed to the point that you find yourself emotionally or mentally wound up with them. Nothing is quite so evil as making someone abandon their own ethics in favor of yours. Except making them love you.

I have played one Evil character in my life, and it was some of the most rewarding roleplaying I’ve done. My character was a Doppleganger, and it was an obvious suicide mission. The GM warned me that my character was likely going to die once her cover was blown, but we’d see how far we could get. I had someplace to lead the party, a certain thing to filch out of the pack items, a relationship within the party that I had to wither in order to make it work. Everything I did in the game was calculated to my ends, I lied when I needed to lie, I found ways to pass their truth tests, and there were some close calls. However, I did manage to get the party to where they needed to be to get their asses kicked, and I did, indeed, get killed by one of the other characters when I revealed myself.

Perhaps I shouldn’t smile so much looking back at that game, but there is a certain satisfaction of watching betrayal hit the faces of people you’ve been gaming with for months. One person was so angry at me they had to leave the room, one almost cried. The one who had to kill me called for a break so he could “deal with it”. The entire party (once they survived their encounter) was radically shaped by that betrayal. They didn’t trust ANYONE after that, and that in and of itself tarnished their ethics and ideals. Once you’ve been used, it can become far more easy to be corrupt and to use others. I guess the interesting thing to me is that people STILL remember that game and that character, even better than I do.

I’ve only touched on a couple of challenges with rping an Evil character, but I’m attempting to prompt discussions, not write dissertations. So I’m interested in hearing about others’ experiences with playing Evil characters, the challenges you faced, what you enjoyed about it or not.

And if you’ve never developed or played an Evil character, I invite you to give it a try if the situation presents. It will challenge your character creation skills and your actual non-mechanical rping skills. You might even develop an appreciation for why “wicked” means ‘incredibly cool’.

I really enjoyed this movie. It showed all of the overt magic and illusion which we would associate with stage magery albeit with the benefit of camera tricks to make them seem all the more unreal.

Edward Norton plays the title role of ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, a cabinet-makers son who falls in love with a Duchess. There’s also a nastybad Crown Prince and a moral but compromised man in the middle. If I were a cynic I could say that you should watch The Princess Bride and get the same kind of plot with even more laughs but I was sufficiently immersed in the film that it dealt me a plot twist or two and that made it even more fun. Rufus Sewell plays the villain as he does so well and Paul Giamatti the protagonist of the tale as the unsure-of-himself Inspector Uhl.

This film, and The Prestige (which I have not yet seen), makes me want to work on Qabal even more though it’s apparent that Qabal is a different beast altogether. I’ve therefore resolved to use the “Feits and Tricks” rules from Qabal to have a go at emulating the feel of these movies. I think it could be a lot of fun.

The Illusionist had me thinking that Eisenheim was the villain of the piece at the start but halfway through I was enraptured. And by the end I was cheering, actually cheering. I may have disturbed other viewers in fact. It twists from a romance, to a thriller to a revenge story and back.

I’d better get my finger out, eh?

Comments really are the sweet spot on a blog, aren’t they?  I get such great ideas from someone bouncing off a post I’ve written and before you know it, you have a chain reaction of kinetic ideas.  The hardest thing is ALWAYS remembering all of the great “You know, I should write about that” topics.  Because I am, on occasion, as wise as I am intelligent, I started keeping a pen and paper (a WORKING pen and something NOT a bill envelope) next to the computer.  It has paid off. 

Alignment is a wonderful discussion topic for any gamer or gaming group.  Roleplaying — the process of bringing characters to life and giving them “experiences” — presents very unique challenges not found in other entertainment pursuits.  When you watch a movie, you aren’t concerned about religion or ethics any more than what is presented to you.  In rping, the script is written by you, for characters that must have some reading on a moral compass.  I don’t believe you could dissect a character from their ethics.  Our entire formative years are based in categorical classification:  light, dark; soft, hard; right, wrong.  No matter what you do, we’re going to analyze and try and fit ourselves in on a spectrum.  And I’ve yet to see a player create a character that didn’t have any moral center.  It’s just something we feel we automatically must have.  Which is scary.  Because the other thing that we swear we have to have but can’t lay hands on is our soul.  Another debate topic entirely.  *smile*  Do characters have souls?  Hrm…

In rping, we encounter new and vastly different worlds where the ethical footprint doesn’t resemble the tracks we leave in our real lives.  This is part of the excitement with rping… to take a foray into something different, do things we might never do (or that we would do given the opportunity but are either afraid to admit or don’t like to admit).  And despite the stickiness of the discussions that alignments and ethics entail, an ethical stance with a character is one of the EASIEST risks we can take.  Playing the opposite sex is actually one of the hardest things you can do because you have no frame of reference for that experience.  But being self-serving, greedy, heartless, cruel, nasty, angry, vengeful… oh, we’ve all felt those.  Those emotions and thoughts aren’t reserved for one sex or the other.  It truly is one of the easier paths for experimentation in the gaming world.

All the traits I listed above — self-serving, greedy, etc. — are those really, truly EVIL, though?  Stop yourself before you answer that question and ask whether or not those are selfish traits or is the classification of them as EVIL something handed down through a religious or social institution in THIS world.  As background in THIS world, modern Satanism would count all of those traits as “of the flesh” and not evil at all, but rather self-preserving, making the most of Prometheus’ gift to mankind.  On the other hand, these things are eschewed by modern dominant religion, seen as being “of the Devil”, and thus here you go.  Things that serve the flesh and the body and the self are inherently evil.  That’s the dogma and diatribe of THIS world.

But in rping, we’re playing in a new world, one with different cultures and mores.  Granted, we often take the strictures of this world and apply it to that one as a basis for the ethical ebb and flow of a game.  No one wants to reinvent the wheel, and truth be told, how many players can play such a paradigm shift off the cuff?  Not many.  However, redistributing the traits along the axis of good and evil is one of the best ways to make a normal-to-the-eye world seem alien, indeed.  What if sexual conduct was considered public and private sexual displays were considered heathen?  What if one must kill the parent of the same sex when one reached a certain age as part of population control?  These are wild extremes, however, we have just altered the entire fabric of the world and the realities of those coming into that world by changing the moral axis on which that world spins. 

I think it’s important for a GM or a writer to define the boundaries of the world for the players, many times before the players make their characters.  If Good shines a light into the darkness, then there are depths of shadow to be explored.  However, I might also make this statement.  A light in the darkness is still a light, and unless that light goes out entirely, there is no place in total darkness.  Translation:  as long as you have Good in your world, nothing will be ENTIRELY Evil… you will only have deepening shades of it.  Something is always, ALWAYS worse.  A fact that your players should be kept aware of.  A fact that YOU should be prepared to elucidate for the player who thinks they are the epitome of Evil.

So, I think that’s enough to chew on for now regarding Evil, what it is and isn’t, and the importance of defining in your game.  I’ll be continuing this run by tackling the topic of evil from various perspectives:  as a rper playing an Evil character; as a rper who has someone running an Evil character in their group and has to interact with that character; as a GM dealing with an Evil character; and the prospects of running an entire campaign of compromised characters.  There are challenges and rewards to be found in all these potential situations, and we all can relate.

As I said… villians, aren’t we all?

I hate the fact that I’m crap at drawing. I can describe stuff but I’m finding more and more that I want to find a concept artist. I want to have some images to post with the content I’m writing.

I’m nto quite at the stage where I’ll post something onto RPGnet and I’m not sure how it would work out with that most dreaded of things “payment”. I’d like to talk to someone about it and see what we can do….

“Ladies and gentlemen, some dice stacking moves”

I don’t want this to be a link blog but….go watch…it’s a flash video…

Good gaming blogs are hard to find. I’m building some of the better ones into my blogroll there but one of the best I’ve found is Story Games.

I love it. And that’s saying something. The key here is thatt it’s REALLY a blog pretending to be a forum or vice versa. I can’t work out which. Posts like this are just lovely. Add it to your feed list!

I like a lot of the roleplaying blogs that are out there. They’re straight-talking affairs and whether you agree or disagree with th definition of “swine” or whether you agree that “Wrongist” behaviour is simply not-on, they’re usually varied enough to give you something to read.

New to the blogroll is Malcolm Sheppard’s Shooting Dice blog which hits on immersion and alienation due to rules which I kinda agree on. Rules are necessary to reach the whole market but the kind of people who don’t pay attention to rules won’t care whether you have rules or not. However, people who like to have a rule for everything will be turned off by a game that just says “Roll 2d6 and get over 7, woohoo!”. Hey, it’d work….

Malcolm’s blog entry on immersion is very verbose and reads a little dry so you have to read it and then go away and digest it. It’s otherwise a cracker post. Go Malcolm!

It seems it’s a hot topic. There’s a thread on TheRPGSite about it as well (mine is post #87). I think that there’s a trend to label “in character” playing as “Immersionist” and now we have some backlash on that. I sense a lot of hostility in the Intarweb!

And isn’t there a lot of labelling? Gamist? Simulationist? Narritivist? Immersionist?

Jeff Rients writes about 5 old games he feels were overlooked. While I can agree with the ancient (James Bond, Lords of Creation) and the venerable (SpaceMaster) and perhaps even the weird (SenZar - though I always thought it was an internet joke-meme) I was shocked and surprised to see number 5 on his list was … ZOMBI. Go read and give appropriate linkage willya. Jeff’s blog is one of the blogs I read with my morning cereal and it was very cool to see something I wrote just there. I was interested in the “5 old games” article anyway and BOOM, he surprises me with this nugget!

He also liked the name “SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO” and sometimes I feel fortunate that I never completed the script for SpaceFleet HyperDimensional WarFortress 44 which I think was only mentioned in WildTalents 3 as:

“Taking SNCC to the stars, SF44 brings you the background for the Archon War. The rag- tag remnants of a hundred worlds now follow the banner of Earth to grind the Horde under their Meka-Tek heels. New rules include starship and zero-G combat. New races and new guns!”

Anyway, Thanks Jeff, for the review, the walk down memory lane and the description of LoC, which I’m going to chase in the IntarWebbage.

This thread on Story Games reports an interesting statistic.

Dogs in the Vineyard has sold between a thousand and two thousand copies.
The sales figures for DnD aren’t ten times that, they’re more than a HUNDRED times that, and that was for the FIRST print run. More have gone into print since then.

The 23rd Letter has sold a few hundred copies worldwide and would have sold a lot more if we’d continued with the Key20 distribution a few years ago. We’re starting up distribution again though and working on some new materials.

Looking at TableTopNorth it would seem that straight RPGs are certainly on a par with wargames but it’s such a subjective point. Back in Slayers in my day the club was filled with tables and tables of RPGs even in the heyday of the card gamer. Slayers seems to be doing alright but gaming in general really seems to have retreated to the “dining room” brigade. Maybe that’s a consequence of age - after all I’m 34 now and hanging around in a “games club” does seem a little silly. Fun, but silly.

Face it - role-playing is a minority within a minority.

And people who play games other than D&D? That’s…um…

Minority to the power of 3…or maybe 4…

We’re not talking about games which are designed to get the GM a date with the hot new girl in the gaming club (as mabmorrigan will likely relate happily later) but rather games which can be started quickly, how to pick up a game and get started and the pitfalls of doing so.

Games that can be started quickly

I designed SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO and Zombi to be pickup games. Small size books, really simple character sheets, simple rules, only using d6 dice and strong, easily identifiable genres. Likewise, The 23rd Letter, though more involved for the GM is good for In Media Res gaming and I think that qualifies. Another excellent pickup game in my opinion was the Quick Play Vampire rules from White Wolf. Not only were they free, but the rules were vastly simplified. You can download the Demo rules from White Wolf’s web site. Similar games might include Mikko Kauppinen’s PowerGame or some of the games from the Indie RPG Designers Forum. There are some indie games which are very limited in scope, being more like Adventures with Quick Play Rules added (and The Mountain Witch would be a perfect example of this).

How to pick up a game and get started

Okay, you’ve an idea of where to start and assuming that you’re going to avoid the “Adventure with Rules” type of games, then you’re going to wonder where to get started. We’ve recently had a post telling us that pregenerated characters are bad, mmmkay. So, you’re going to need to make up some characters. Just tell them what you want. You’ve a grain of an idea in there and you need that to get the game started. Ivor and Paul in my TTN game will know this as I just told them “Make up characters who work at a TV station.” Without further prompting from me they made up a roving cameraman and his anchor. They’re good players so despite the fact I only had the bare bones of a plot (it’s Zombi, what else is needed), they threw me a few bones. As the game went on, my imagination started working again and soon I had a plot, an idea, a conspiracy and a game!

Pitfalls

The biggest issue for me is longevity. I really enjoy long campaigns and pickup games don’t really provide for that a lot of the time. I’ve told my TTN players to make some more characters in their spare time as mortality is a real danger and it’s easy enough to find ways to introduce them. Without longevity of character (an issue I often have with Call of Cthulhu), I tend to find games a little unfulfilling.

Conclusion

I’m already writing some game design notes for WotW and Viride and I see these as Action games and Culture games (more on that later) and I have a couple of idea for Pickup games. Games that are little more than Adventures with rules….Watch this space.