[My Life With Master] Roszakabad

[LordSmerf]

So if players go for Intimacy you can force them to move on up to Sincerity by simply having the master grab Desperation.  You can push the players toward Desperation by having the master utilize Intimacy.  It is this rising emotion that fascinates me about MLwM.  The master's utilization of bonus dice, at least in my game, tended to push the players and their characters to new heights of humanity, highlighting the fact that as horrible as they are they are still human...

It's interesting the way you put that, because I had the opposite problem.  I felt that the human-ness of the PCs worked fine.  As I said, the overtures were great.  Similarly, when they finally did resist the Master in the end-game, they also shined.  What felt forced was when, after role-playing out how much they hated it, they failed their resist roll and had to follow the Master's orders.  Now, I know that in principle the players should respond to the die roll by figuring out some way to make it believable that the PC should follow the orders.  However, in this game, I feel it usually didn't come off well (particularly for Felix and Therese).  

I'm curious about your experience with this.  It sounds like in your games, the players were good at being loathsome monsters but needed the push of bonus dice to show humanity.  That might just come down to different sorts of players.

John,

I am not sure exactly what the difference would have been here.  One thing to note is that the characters in that game were... well... pathetic.  They were all horribly emotionally dependent...  You can see Actual Play reports here and then the second and final one here.

I do not feel that our characters needed help showing humanity, it is just  that we seemed to be able to express it more clearly through Intimacy, Desperation, and Sincerity.

Thomas