[MLWM] My Life With The Viscount Part II.

[Mojo]

To drift the thread a little....

But where things really broke down was when I had the master order Marlaina to kill Beau's son.  Marlaina did so without question and with quite a bit of enjoyment.  After finding out his son was dead, Beau's player had Beau try to kill himself by setting fire to his home.  I explained that I didn't think that was appropriate because My Life With Master carries a kind of implicit agreement that everyone plays until the end game condition is met.
--snip--
Afterwards Beau's player admited that he was a little disturbed by Marlaina's player's behavior.  Apparently, it wasn't so much that his connection was killed but that Marlaina's player genuinely enjoyed doing it.  He pointed a couple of things out.  He noted that Marlaina's player was genuinely surprised to discover that Beau's player lost all the love points associated with that connection (despite me making this very clear several times).

I don't own MLwM so take these thoughts with a pinch of salt...
But surely it would make sense (thema-wise) to redirect the lost love to other stats in the game, ie.

To self-loathing - "Everything I touch is destroyed, something must be wrong with me"

To weariness - "Why bother loving at all when I will lose it anyway"

[GB Steve]

There's something I didn't mention and may represent another place that I made a mistake.  I was operatering under the assumption that Love Points were earned for Overtures to Connections that were genuinely humanizing.  The kind of thing that makes the whole group go, "Awww", instead of "That's sick!"

As I play it, any kind of concern for a villager establishes a connection and increasess love.

There are only 5 kinds of scene in the main game:
- Violence (against a villager or another PC)
- Villany (against a villager or another PC)
- Resisting the Master's orders
- Gaining Love
each of which ends in a dice roll and a change of stats, and
- The Horror Revealed
which doesn't change any stat but increases the tension in the story.

So teaching a villager to dismember badgers is making a connection. It's no so much about whether the relationship is twisted or not, but whether the character is breaking away from the Master's control by connecting with somebody else. They get Love whatever the outcome, because Love depends on the PC's actions and not any reciprocation of the NPC.

If your PC attempts to make a connection by rescuing a puppy for a little girl and the roll is failed. Then a point of Love is gained, but somehow, somthing has gone wrong, the puppy died, or the girl's parents saw the minion near the girl and were afraid, or the girl faints ...

[Paul Czege]

Hey Jesse,

I was operatering under the assumption that Love Points were earned for Overtures to Connections that were genuinely humanizing.

Yeah, Steve's right, the rules don't give the GM any decisionmaking power over a minion getting Love. Any attempt that a player calls an Overture to a Connection results in a one point Love increase. Only the acceptance/rejection of the Overture by the Connection is uncertain, and left to the dice.

What you've described from Marlaina sound like gorgeous Overtures to me.

Paul

[jburneko]

Hello Again,

I'll bare all this in mind for future games of My Life With Master but I guess I really don't see the point of Overtures and Love points if they aren't stark humanizing contrasts to the violence and villiany.  I mean if beating puppies and teaching little girls to kill and taking your best friend on an arsonist road trip count as "Overtures of Affection" then what makes getting Love points any different from doing the master's bidding?

Is it JUST the nature of getting out from under the thumb of the master?  "I'm a psychopathic killer, but damnit, I'm a psychopathic killer on my own terms!"

Now another issue is that most of the player's weren't directly making Overtures.  They'd start doing something with an NPC who was one of their connections and what they were doing seemed kind of nice and friendly and so I'd say, "Is this an Overture?" and they'd shrug and say, "I don't know.  You tell me."  So very early on I got in the habit of arbitrating whether a scene was violence, villainy or an overture simply because the players were just "playing their characters" and expecting me to arbitrate the appropriate resolution mechanic to apply.

Jesse

[TonyLB]

I think that part of the point is to break down the sense that there is a dichotomy between "bad people" and "people who need love".

If anything, Marlaina's desperate attempts to connect are (to me) made more poignant by the fact that violence and hatred are the only things she has to offer the object of her affections.

The game just isn't treating with anything as simple as Love being good, or Villainy being bad.  It's dealing with people who are so fundamentally broken that they're never going to be made right again... but they're still people, they still want love, and they will still risk the possibility (indeed, the near-certainty) of rejection and scorn in order to seek it.