In a previous game (and for those of you who don't want to bother reading between the lines, I mean the Sleeping with the Enemy campaign) I had a player whose character's "central concept" was, in the words of another individual, "extraordinarily coercive to the other players."
When you build a character, how much interaction and input do you have on the building of other players' characters?
This is one of my "suspension of reality" breaks especially in the ADRPG. If you're not taking the, "born and raised independently in Shadow" view, you have to look at the background of how your neoAmbBaby handled siblings, cousins, and others in their life.
To some extent, this is often raised as one of the rationales behind the Amber Attribute Auction, allowing it to take the place of years of sibling rivalry.
So what Benedict did in his youth, affected what Eric and Corwin were allowed to do, and why they weren't allowed to play in the Moonriders' yard. How Oberon treated Osric explains why Caine's grudge against Random is so sharp. Fiona's jealousy of how Deirdre was treated leads to her conspiring with her brothers to send Oberon far beyond Shadow.
It could have happened that way.
In the situation described, the concept was not a comfortable one, but I allowed the question to be asked. It made the other players think of how to handle it, while I never forced anyone's hand.
If you were playing Corwin, I might ask you, "How did you handle it the first time Eric tried to kill you when you were just boys? How did you feel about Osric and Finndo's jealousy of Benedict's 'favoured status' with Oberon? How did it feel to know Caine was born so near your sister Deirdre, and your mother's death?"
But if someone was playing Eric, or Benedict, or any of the others, I might ask them to control the questioning. I might ask them, "What did you do to try to kill Corwin?"
If Eric's player wants to respond, "Nothing, he just thinks I started it because of this one time..." I'm cool with that. GM coercion is different. It's a guide.
But players have the right to ask, and set up scenarios "within character," to an extent, too. Obviously, Eric didn't kill Corwin, or Corwin wouldn't be here...unless, of course, he's UberGoth-Undead-Corwin... but that's another game entirely.
Where is the line drawn?
Posted by Meera at May 20, 2002 01:58 AMWhat *I* found objectionable about the character in question was that there was no mutuality in the character hooks. Sibling relationships run two ways. The background issues and power flows in that case were all unidirectional. That's no more realistic than acting as if the elders have no background together.
(There are also trust issues in such a case, but that's another blog post. Maybe I'll go write it.)
I know when Rikibeth talked to me about SWTE, that character was on my mind, and he was one reason I tried a Chaosian for the first time. I'm not the only latecomer to SWTE who felt that way, either.
All this brings up another issue for elders games generally: how you handle bringing new players into the game, especially when you have something in the background that many players won't agree to. No easy answers there either.
Posted by Ginger at May 21, 2002 05:50 PMMaybe I'm missing something there, then, because as far as I was concerned as GM, it was up to the player(s) in question. What exactly was the trust issue? [And was that a problem with the character, plot, or player?]
If you did not agree to it, [the action] _didn't happen._ I wouldn't have operated any other way.
Posted by MT Fierce at May 21, 2002 06:50 PMI guess it just seemed to latecomers that the player in question presented it as "This is what has gone before. How did you deal with it?" in such a way that we couldn't say, "I didn't."
Compound it by some of us taking previously played characters who agreed to such background and it gets worse.
Posted by Kris at May 22, 2002 12:59 PMThe background element as described gave you two possible results as the player of an elder: either you let the PC in question shape a key background experience in game context, or something else bad happened. It's not just the fact that it shaped the background, it's how, and in what ways, and under what circumstances.
It also came off as all-or-nothing. How many players have to say no to such a request before it's a vetoable story element?
Latecome players were not even offered the option to say no, which isn't your fault or your problem when you weren't GMing, but is a trivially forseeable outcome. Latecome players were told "this is what happened" and asked how they dealt with it, and merely offered the choice to ignore it in a continuity-breaking way if they were not comfortable.
The player was asking to share background. Under most circumstances, reasonable requests to share/develop background in a cooperative (non-competitive) game shouldn't be denied. Denying such requests is often a mark of player hostility, or a cause of one.
The case to hand was a nontrivial request. What happens when another player comes up with a concept that absolutely excludes the request? The player is faced with three unpalatable choices: (1) break your PC's concept; (2) break the other PC's concept; (3) break continuity/the world.
None of these are palatable answers, and only one is really under the player's control. It's not a workaround of the sort of, "I don't see Fiona as that sort of parent, but have you thought about Deirdre instead?".
You need to trust the GM to say no and not have it be a problem when it may be a character-breaker, or trust the other player not to abuse a seminal experience.
I see where a bunch of other issues *could* crop up, but what I've described here would be enough for me to veto it. I don't know where I'd draw the line in every case, but this case is on the far side from me.
Posted by Ginger at May 22, 2002 01:07 PMI just wish I knew some of it before it had degenerated into the "bad feeling" stage, because I do not like nonconsensual storytelling, and that was one retcon that would have been easy to make.
Posted by MT Fierce at May 22, 2002 03:28 PMThree points to remember:
A. What happens when you aren't GM isn't your fault, even when your decisions may have cracked the door for someone else to barrel through with bad things.
B. I see things like this character concept and think "trouble" because I have a nasty, suspicious mind as a player and GM after years of playing with people who like to mindfuck other people.
C. Hindsight is 20-20.
You took a chance and it didn't work out. That's OK. I don't think it invalidates the general point you were trying to make in your post.
Posted by Ginger at May 22, 2002 06:39 PMI've tried not to sound HYPER defensive, but I wanted a -fun- game. I wanted a -silly- game, and years later there's still fallout.
Thank you; I DO feel a lot better having been reminded of those points.
Posted by MT Fierce at May 22, 2002 09:09 PMCan I just apologize here for the general bad feeling that happened on my watch? "This is what happened" seemed, at the time of restart, to be the best way to maintain plot continuity... and I wasn't the one who let it all start happening.
I do consider it significant that most of the original players who answered "yes" to the option eventually wound up leaving the game over it, thus saddling later players picking up those characters with a big "this is what happened" problem. Perhaps if I were a more skilled GM I could have retconned around it. I still have a lot to learn.
Posted by Rikibeth at May 23, 2002 05:13 PM