Would you pay $7.50 to see an undeterrable protagonist?

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Red,

I appreciate that it's time to wrap this up.

Let me just quickly add then, that your premise, "Do I live by the philosophic code of honor, or allow myself the relief of death and reunion with my wife and child in the after life," is still a choice.  And a damned good one.  One can have a relationship with one's self, after all!  What's at stake in this discussion of attachments and choices is simply that there are choices.  And even if Maxiumus is choosing to act by his own code time and time again, it's a choice, and that's what matters.

I'll offer this up as well, if you get to see the movie again.  Remember that Maxiumus and Marcus, the good emperor Maximus serves, have close relationship.  The two men share the same philosophy and support each other.  Marcus clearly sees in Maxiumus the kind of son he wishes his own son had been.  Am I going too far to suggest that there is a familial relationship between them?  I am not.  Watch it again -- you'll see it's there.

Now, one doesn't have to see this to enjoy the movie.  Maxiumus is, after all, making the tough choice to follow his code on his own.  But it is in the movie: an emperor you serve with your life, who has taught you the philosphy you live by, and treats you like a son he loves and trusts, and would like to have as the heir to the empire.

Maximus may be the one making the choices as he goes, but if one wants, one can find the emotional core that drives his noble choices in in the relationship with Marcus.  Now, whether that is what drives Maxiumus, we'll never know.  But when I take apart a movie, I look at all the clues...  And all that screen time between Russel Crowe and Richard Harris are there for a reason.  They have a strong relationship.  They've both served and honored each other the empire.  It's a connection.  Whether its what makes Maximus do anything I don't know, but it is a connection.

And that's the point of Sorcerer.  No matter what the connections, the PC, via the player, always has to make his or her own choices.  Just like each of us in life.

Christopher

[redwalker]

Hi DannyK,

Since this topic is near and dear to my heart, I'm going to tweak your reference to CoC a bit.

Yes, it can be played as a supernatural version of Law & Order.  But it can be played straight Nar as well.

In  my favorite game I played years ago, my guy was Bill, an uneducated dock worker who caught a glimpe of his little daughter taken away by something...  uncanny ... one night, and devoted himself, against his wife's pleadigs, to find out what happened.

Yes.  He went mad.  He had to find out.  But the knowledge that he was getting deeper and deeper into something that he knew more and more could bring no good to him only offered up more and more choice.  There were plenty of scenes -- plenty of standing at the entrance to a dark tunnel, plenty of books he could choose to open or not, plenty of times he could have just walked away -- that were rich in choice.  And the hovering moment in that decision is what made the game compelling for me.

Look what we've got here:  a) Connections (daughter, wife), and b) choice (does Bill pursue the truth at the expense of all he's ever known to be true).  A Narrativist, premise driven play.

Now.  One can also set up the Group o' Investigators.  They're "job" is to go find stuff out.  They know the risks, do cost benefit analysis of opening the tome on the spot.  They're Guys at Work.  We can be playing it to bring up the "bits" from Lovecraft (and knowing we're succeeding because we're doing this well); we can play to get out of the session with as much HP and San as possible left; we can go all Delta Green and use our frickin' best Black Hawk Down tacticts to torch the mother fuckers and go home to a six pack.

In my Call of Cthulhu campaigns, groups would often start out without much motivation, but the thrill of the weird outweighed their mundane lives.

We would typically start with a group of literate, urbane, middle-class strangers -- but they were all curious, and when put under the stress of mystery, they developed a very plausible group loyalty.  They were the only ones who had seen the Phenomenon.  They couldn't very well find anything else as thrilling in the mundane world.  They couldn't discuss it with folks who hadn't seen it.  Thus they started out as drifting individuals without too many connections, but over the course of play they became loyal each other and to the quest for knowledge.

Of course, that didn't stop them from shooting each other when I would have preferred them to be shooting the monsters, but every group has its quirks.

However, they never acted like a disciplined team of commandos -- they inevitably acted like a group of folks who had met on vacation and who decided to make new short-term friends for the duration of the vacation.  They never had a "Guys at Work" attitude -- they were like a bunch of Agatha Christie stuffed shirts who were at some posh party when a body was discovered in the drawing room.  They all felt compelled to go and gawk together...

Of course, while all of them had different back stories, they were all designed as potential investigators by the nature of the rules.  Every single one of them had an independently written back story, and every single back story stressed one of three forms of curiosity:  1) research (as in libraries); 2) investigtion (as in cops and reporters); or 3) poetic fascination with the weird.

I suppose it's inherent in the setup of Call of Cthulhu that all the player backgrounds tend to stress investigative skills, so that simply by looking at the rules, one is inspired to think up a back story that stresses curiosity.

I think in one of Lovecraft's stories -- perhaps Through the Gates of the Silver Key -- he talks about how curiosity can drive a human soul to endure horrors.  Of course I don't own that book any more or I would quote it exactly.