one-shots and attachment to character

[Sven Seeland]

Hello everybody.

Haven't posted in a long while but I've been lurking here pretty frequently.
Now finally after a long time of playing around with several different ideas there is somewhat of a game concept peeling itself out of that slush in my head and all of a sudden I'm stumbling over all kinds of problems. I am, however, posting this into RPG theory and not indie design because I believe this problem to be rather generic and not specific to my game.

Alright, off to the juicy bits!
I'm creating a narrativistic (spelling?) horror/thriller game and, without going further into my reasons for doing so, I'm planning on focusing this game on very short stories. Some of them will be wrapped up in one session maybe, some of them will last up to 4 sessions but everything beyond that should be the exception. I also want the characters to be story-specific, meaning you create a group of characters for one specific story. You never take them out of the context of the group or the story. This also means that you won't be playing any of your characters for longer than 4 sessions, on average.

What I'm a bit worried about is whether the players will actually manage to "get into character", for the lack of a better expression.  I've made the experience with other games (namely Shadowrun) that players tend to take a while until they can really identify with their characters, until that mesh of numbers and descriptors becomes a real person that they care about. Part of what contributes to that "bonding" with their character is play experience. They shape their characters by playing them. That's also when all kinds of stories arise ("Don't you go do THAT again!" or "Remember how you went up to this guy and said [...]? That was hillarious!").

Unfortunately, I need players to identify with their characters and to care about the characters but I don't have the time to provide them with the in-play experience they might need to bring their characters to life.

I'm pretty stumped on how this could work. Unfortunately I'm pretty inexperienced with most of the typical Forge games and can't really afford to go purchase a big pile of books (especially that shipping them to Germany will likely cost more than the actual book) and in addition to that I wouldn't have a gaming group to test them out.
Nevertheless I believe that some games have achieved this goal pretty well. One that comes to my mind would be My Life With Master, which I've neither read nor played.

So, what I'm looking for is your thoughts about this and your experiences with short or one-shot games where a strong bond between player and character is mandatory. As I said, I'm not looking for advice on how to make this work for my game specifically but more for a general discussion on the topic.
If this has been discussed before and I've just been too stupid to find the right threads, I'd be happy about links. I'd also appreciate some game recomendations to look into, but I'm afraid I'll have to limit myself to one or two games.

Thanks in advance!

[Edited for clarity]

[Jack Aidley]

Both some of my favourite characters, and my players favourite characters have been one-shotters. One-shotting frees you from the need to create a character that will work over long periods, or avoids becoming annoying.

My experience leads me to believe that the best one-shot characters have two qualities: they lie outside the bounds of what you'd usually play and they don't necessarily care about or like the other characters. PC-PC tension works much better in one-shotters where it can play out at a higher level without damaging the flow of the game.

[Trish2]

Sven -

The first thing I thought of when I read your post here was a game I played a long long time ago... it was a card game and it was all aout storytelling. Each person had a bunch of cards and they'd take turns playing the cards- each had a plot point and you had to incorporate specific things from the card into your storytelling.

It was set in a horror genre so all the cards had a dark twist to them. The idea was to play all the cards from your hand and tell an engaging story. You do that you win...

What about some kind of random chart or set of cards that gave the players a goal -- something to accomplish in the game. I know that may seem like its putting the players in competition with each other (the card game I mentioned did -- but we had fun doing it) -- but some goals might be cooperative and some might be competitive... but if you don't make them all mutually exclusive... you can still essentially come up with a win-win situation that makes playing fun.

Having a goal or a way to "succeed" might help your players bond with the characters.

Additionally... a set of pre-made stereotypes for a given genre might be fun to have as characters so that each player can put their own spin on it.   That coupled with the goal orientation might make for fun and simple sessions.

Still, I have to ask, is there a specific reason you are limiting a character to an adventure and don't want to make it a series or expandable into a campaign?

[Sven Seeland]

Good to hear that you had good experiences with this kind of gameplay, Jack. I actually never saw this side of things but they seem to be very much what I'm after.

Trish... Well, I don't want to make this too much about my game, which is why I posted here and not in the indie game design forum. Therefore I will try to keep my answers general while still explaining my reasoning, since it can contribute to the overall discussion after all.

The most important reason is setting and premise. In the bounds of the specific setting and premise that I chose for my game it just doesn't look or feel right to have a character experience a row of similar-yet-disjointed stories. Plus, it could start feeling like routine, which is definately not what I want for this game. Now, campaigns is a totally different matter and one that I'm not too sure about whether it fits into the overall flavor and style of the game.

I may not have expressed myself clearly in the first post. I limit characters to one group and one story. This story can have several "adventures" or "tasks" but it is still one story with one main goal.

Another reason is disposability. Players tend to treat their characters like raw eggs when they know that they'll have to play this character for a long while and when they poured much time and energy into it during character creation. This is something that doesn't lend itself well to the kind of gameplay I'm trying to achieve. I don't want PCs to cowardly sit at home waiting until everything is over, just so that they don't get hurt. It should be okay to take risks, it should be okay to have some tension in the group, it should be okay to play a character who is interesting but ineffective (in the classical sense of problem solving).
Jack talked about some of this in his post above.

The idea about the goals sounds fun! It's not matching my design goals at all so I'm not gonna use it but it seems a workable way to get players more attached to their one-shots. It breathes some life into them.
In my view it's all about making characters seem like real persons so that they can relate to them. Real persons have goals.

Stereotypes might actually work well, too. It's actually pretty commonplace to have premade characters for one-shots. This gives us the little problem of quality though. Having a stereotype is kinda like a fill-in-the-gaps text. If the text isn't good and exiting it won't inspire you to fill anything into the gaps or more likely you won't even care about the gaps. Granted, if you have a stereotype you find exiting that you can put your twist on it could work.
Has anyone actually tried this? I never played pregen characters too much nor do I know many people who do. It would seem to me that things get boring after a few characters once you're through with those stereotypes that appeal to you.

Another thing I that sounds very workable that I have no previous experience with is personality mechanics. This can even be kinda formalised during character creation to make it even easier. So, in a way there are rules for the creation of the personality, of the drives and priorities of the character. You could role on a few charts and tables or something. Or maybe stick a few premade packages together.
As far as I know sorcerer does this via bangs and kickers, only that the process is much more freeform.
One thing that comes to my mind is to have some mandatory drives and personality traits that need to be defined that have a definite impact on the game and a prominent place in the rules. It may be that Riddle of Steel does it this way, if I didn't get it wrong. I just downloaded the quickstart rules but haven't gotten to that point yet.
Does any of this make sense or am I just rambling again?

[M. J. Young]

The reason players spend so much time developing their characters during play in traditional games is that traditional game character generation is entirely about the practical matters of how the character will work in the tasks to be resolved in play, with the personality and motivations left to the player to fill in later.

Legends of Alyria is a game you should try to read as a response to this. Yes, there are some mechanical points determined at the beginning of play, but the majority of the character creation is about the characters beliefs, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. Also, the characters are all created at once cooperatively by all the players, and only after they have been created is any decision made as to which player will run which character. The result is that when play begins we already know who these characters are and what their relationship is to the situation (which we also created in tandem with creating the characters--we created the villains, too, you see). We already know them and care about them, and what remains is to see what they do about this situation around which we have crafted them.

To give a real thumbnail sketch of an example, let's say that we sit down and talk about what we want to play. (This is very unlike Alyria in terms of setting, but it should illustrate the process.) We decide that it would be interesting to create a story about a married couple that is struggling with staying together. That means, we recognize, that we need the husband and the wife, so we have those two characters. We'll invert the traditional roles--the wife is a corporate attorney, the husband stays home and cares for the children, and this inverted role is part of the tension in their relationship. It also means we need at least one child, maybe two children, so we create them and decide what they're going to be like, because they're going to be impacted by this and they're going to act in the midst of it to try to get things to turn out how they want them. But we need more people to enhance this interaction. Let's suggest that the husband has a best friend that he talks to, to whom he has expressed concerns. Let's also suggest that there is someone at the office who is hitting on the wife, and she finds him attractive. Let's create these people. We now have six characters. Let's decide which player should have which character, and what is happening as the curtain rises.

I think even in that brief description you've probably started to care about some of these characters. A Legends of Alyria game would take a few hours to develop this, giving little details to the characters that enrich them. Did the best friend have an affair with the wife, maybe before the husband met her, or maybe since? Is the person who is hitting on the wife one of her bosses, who could make her life easier or tougher at work? Does one of the kids think it would be good if the parents were too occupied with their own problems to meddle in his decisions? Is the other fearful about losing his family? You can see that by doing it this way you wind up with both a powerful starting point for a story about people and characters with whom you are already identifying.

I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young