[Buffy] A Little Role Reversal

[John Kim]

The Friday before last, we played another episode of our Buffy the Vampire Slayer campaign, "Silicon Valley Slayage".  It was notable for the technique of role reversal which we used. 

At the start of the game, the current GM Bill asked for all of our character sheets, took them and shuffled them around, and then handed them back out -- with everyone ending up with a different character sheet.  He then described to us waking up on Sunday morning in other bodies.  A big part of the game was role-reversals of our usual selves.  I put up a summary of the game in our session logs at:

http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/buffy/siliconvalley/season3.html#s3_e09

The interesting bits of role-reversal included me doing a Liz-as-Chip impression of wacky banter; and Cynthia switching from the older, somewhat passive leader Roberta to the butt-kicking bodies.  Anyhow, it wasn't the deepest or best of the season, but I thought it was interesting for the device used, and wondered at what other role-reversal people have done.  I think the forceful start-of-session approach worked well.  It's more interesting to do role-reversal into roles that people don't normally take. 

[Matt-M-McElroy]

The closest thing I can think of doing in an RPG was the various Shadowplay that we did in my old Wraith: the Oblivion games. It wasn't really taking on the body or persona of another character, but the pplayers did get to be the "dark side" of someone else's character from time-to-time.

It is an interesting idea though. How did you handle the Drama Points? Did the character retain their "original" points or did they have the points from the "new" characters? How did this affect the play of the session?

Regards,

Matt M McElroy
"What Are You Afraid Of?"
http://www.flamesrising.com

[TonyLB]

I'm very interested to hear why the GM switched around character sheets as if they were the same as bodies.

Character sheets strike me (these days) as a bunch of resources that the player can bring to bear on the story.  It seems odd, to say the least, to hear about them being tied to the physical bodies.

So, that's the fundamental strangeness I'm wondering about.  I'd expect it to manifest in (among other things) a certain clumsiness about which skills the player is allowed to access from their borrowed sheet.  The geeky guy in the slayer body ... maybe it's right and proper for him to use her kung fu skill (though even that's dicey).  But the player of the ignorant cheerleader who now has the Watcher's character sheet ... does she have full access to his Lores and Linguistics?

[whump]

Hi, I'm Bill, John's co-gm in this campaign.

I'm very interested to hear why the GM switched around character sheets as if they were the same as bodies.

No deep reasons, it was the straightforward way to implement the body-swapping mechanic. I also wanted to get everyone in the situation quickly (we were playing on a Sunday evening so we didn't want to run late.)

Our group had played Polaris back in December, so doing something like having multiple players handling characters in an overlapping manner wouldn't have been a stretch, but I must admit that it didn't come to mind here. Something to try in another campaign.

It also gave the players a chance to do something different.

So, that's the fundamental strangeness I'm wondering about.  I'd expect it to manifest in (among other things) a certain clumsiness about which skills the player is allowed to access from their borrowed sheet.  The geeky guy in the slayer body ... maybe it's right and proper for him to use her kung fu skill (though even that's dicey).  But the player of the ignorant cheerleader who now has the Watcher's character sheet ... does she have full access to his Lores and Linguistics?

That's how we played it. We could had introduced the "not in one's own skin" factor as another mechanic, but that didn't come up in play.

[John Kim]

Character sheets strike me (these days) as a bunch of resources that the player can bring to bear on the story.  It seems odd, to say the least, to hear about them being tied to the physical bodies.

So, that's the fundamental strangeness I'm wondering about.  I'd expect it to manifest in (among other things) a certain clumsiness about which skills the player is allowed to access from their borrowed sheet.  The geeky guy in the slayer body ... maybe it's right and proper for him to use her kung fu skill (though even that's dicey).  But the player of the ignorant cheerleader who now has the Watcher's character sheet ... does she have full access to his Lores and Linguistics?

To answer questions:   Everyone spent their own Drama Points.  Drama Points aren't tied to character, which had already been made explicit since some players now have secondary characters but still always spend from their original Drama Points.  

As for the strangeness of it -- hey, it's Buffy!  :-)  That is to say, yes, when Chip's soul went into Max's body, he now was an expert in programming and magic.  And when Roberta went into Dot's body, she became a martial arts master.  I suppose we can say that what was transfered was an essential bit of soul and identity which doesn't include knowledge or skills.  The point was that Liz/Chip became the powerful one with all the answers, and Cynthia/Roberta became the ass-kicking one, and so forth.  If skills didn't transfer then it wouldn't work so well as role-reversal.  

With the exception of Drama Points, character sheets in Buffy are like, say, Dogs in the Vineyard -- the writings on the sheet are all qualities of the character rather than purely player-level resources.  That still seems pretty common to me, even among modern games.  

[ScottM]

Sounds like a fun game.  The closest common example is from rotating GM games-- where you share NPCs that have already been established, or previous PCs of the other GMs.  You'd have to play for a while to get something from this-- there wouldn't be much contrast if it came up in the first session or three.  You have to know both halves of the role-reversal pretty well for it to work, right?