Flat Characters

[Arturo G.]

Indeed, I think Alexandre is thinking in a kind of play really centered in the material created by the players, and giving the players some authority during play to bring their concerns to play.

It should work fine as far as the investment done by the players in their characters and backgrounds is not too much. And it should not be done by each one alone. I mean, creating too complex backgrounds for a character limits somehow the choices during play. Moreover, if everyone comes to the table with a very fixed idea of what she wants for her character, the GM may find impossible to make happy everyone at the same time.

I would suggest to work the characters together while you discuss the kind of play you expect. And leave enough undefined aspects in the characters to be free to explore them during actual play.

Arturo

[Vaxalon]

I'm writing up material for a campaign that I hope will become a long-term game.  It centers around a save-the-world prophesy.

Before we start making characters, I'm going to ask the players to name some elements to work into the prophesy.

[Bryan_T]

Hi Arturo and Vaxalon!

The reasons we are interested in Falkenstein instead of historical Europe or pure fantasy is that we would like to play grander than life and flamboyant characters. Characters that experience Love and Passion, that have Honor and all kinds of capitalized adjectives. Also, the free for all mix of fantasy, magic, mad science and steampunk tech was a plus to federate the players. Using an purely historical setting would have made our play more serious and restricted by all kinds of historical constraints that we don't care to take into account.

Just a quick thought--have you read the "Well of Souls" [narrativisist] adventure written for Heroquest?  I would think that if you were playing Falkenstein-quest, it would adapt well as a starting place.  After all, it hits the natural stories of aristocratic succession, and has justification for all sorts of characters and themes.  You might want to be more 'inspired by' than 'adapted from,' but I've heard enough good things from groups who have followed it, that it seems like it could be a good way to get things started.

--Bryan

[Alexandre Santos]

The in-character authority is a metaphor for the out-of-character authority held by the players.  When the players say that the actions of their Dogs are the will of the King of Life, then it IS.  It's all linked.

It's an interesting concept. The players become small GMs. I think that if the rules make it clear that this is the case, it's fine, everyone will expect it. My only reservation is that if the players can arbitrarily modify the reality of the game, it's internal logic will falter and the game world will stop being belieavable. Now if this only concerns specific aspects of the game reality (such as what does this NPC does or doesn't do), it's ok.

I have to read more game cession reports from DitV.

I would suggest to work the characters together while you discuss the kind of play you expect. And leave enough undefined aspects in the characters to be free to explore them during actual play.

This is exactly what we did this week end. It was crucial that the players work out their PCs together, otherwise it will be too hard for the GM to keep them together. Actually we basically created together the entire setting, before creating the characters. I also tried to have the rule that the PCs would be created in such a way that they care about what the other PCs care, to avoid lack of cooperation between players. We'll see if this works..

Your point about not defining too much the characters before game starts is noteworthy. I have the tendency to over-develop my characters before the game starts, and have difficulties later in really exploiting them. But hopefully in a game centered around the PC actions this will be less of a problem. And I think we will allow ourselves the freedom to modify the characters if they are not satisfactory

Just a quick thought--have you read the "Well of Souls" [narrativisist] adventure written for Heroquest?

Yes, and I sent it to our GM. It certainly gave me motivation in pushing to create a setting where character relationships play an important role. The family connection is simply the most obvious way to connect PCs, and I could not find another one as reliable. The main advantage of using the family connection is that it stably connects PCs without limiting what their interests and occupations are. If they were connected via their jobs or clubs, their interests range would be more limited.

[Mike Holmes]

To re-emphasize what Arturo said, if you decide too much about a character before the game starts, what's to discover in play? Even in a PC-centric game, if you've already exploited the internal conflicts in the character before play, then what's left for play? For example, it's better to have the character in the midst of a conflict between him and his brother over a girl, than to have killed his brother over the girl years ago. Or you can have him start just having killed his brother, if the conflict that's interesting to you is between the character and his father. But don't say that this is all history, unless you've got some other conflict that it highlights.

Put another way, if it's not about the character's current issues, then it's probably not going to help play to note it as background. And any such background may, in fact, make the character less interesting to play.


The family as central structure is, to my mind, a bit over-rated. Do you live with your family? How often do you see them? Do they depend upon you? Sure these things could all be true. But what if a character decides to move to another village to marry someone there? Plausible, surely, but now the character is out of contact with the rest. Players want to make "adventurous" characters, not homebodies.

That's not to say that you can't use the family as the center of some conflict, however. Let's say that the family has just lost the father, and the question now is who will take over farming the stead? Now we have a centralizing conflict.

Still, the problem there is that it may become, if I might use the term, too incestuous. That is, with the PCs being the entirity of the center of the conflict, it'll probably resolve too quickly. The situation doesn't have enough "depth" in terms of other NPCs with other motives to mix things up and keep the situation fresh for a while. So the family needs to have perhaps a relative who is a gold-digger looking to cash-in. And gossipy aunts with their own agendas and axes to grind. And a local baron who has his eye on the father-figure's prize boars. Etc, etc.

Family centralizing often devolves into "party play" where the conceit is that we'll all subjugate looking at our characters' interests by saying that we have to look out for the family first. Or players play it more realistically, and it all spins out of control with characters going off everywhere.

Relationships between PCs are not neccessarily a situation that will centralize play. In fact, I find that, if relied upon, they tend to have precisely the same problems that one finds in party play. In fact, in most party play, if you ask the player why his character is there, he'll say that it's because his character relies on the other, or leads the others, or is "Close Friends with Party." This doesn't allow the sort of flexibility that you want for players to have, the sort of flexibility you get by thrusting them instead into a situation where the players are free to demonstrate what the characters are about with respect to the evolving situation.

See how this all goes together? If you want to make sure that characters aren't flat, make sure that we don't know everything about them, and then give the character room to grow in terms of how the player addresses the situation with the character. The more you pre-plan the character, the more you try to set up situations that force players to "play along" the less character development you'll encounter in play.

Mike