A bodiless, persona less character?

[Sindyr]

Sindyr, you seem to assume that any game you play with, say, me or Tony, will involve goals like:

Goal: My character rapes your chracter
Goal: Your character becomes a serial killer and loves it, drinking the blood of innocents
Event: Puppies are murdered
Event: All goodness is sapped from the world by the forces of darkness

or whatever.  You seem to consistently assume the worst of a bunch of people you have never met.  If you are in a game and someone plays a conflict like those above with absolutely no warning, no hint it is coming, and no prior discussion, then I'll tell you what I would do.  I would slowly back out of the room and run for it.  For your information, these goals appeal to me not at all...except maybe the last one...the last one could be kind of cool in the right circumstances.

Let me clarify, I am not making ANY assumptions.  I am simply keeping my options open.

Here, for you information, are the kind of manipulative goals that I might play;

Goal: Doc Ock frames Spiderman for a crime
Goal: The Vulture scares Aunt May into a heart attack
Event: Mary Jane breaks up with Peter
Event: An editorial by Jameson incites the city against Spiderman
Goal: Peter Parker makes it to the hospital to before Aunt May goes into surgery

If you are playing Spiderman, I'll point out that three out of the five above are even vetoable by you.

Cool.  But I do want to point out one ULTRA important fact:  I can play Kismet and STILL take spiderman's side and be just as involved in shaping his story.  My character in the game may be Kismet, but the story I am helping to tell is Spiderman's.  So why not do just that?  The smart and efficient choice seems to be to play a universal force and entwine myself with any character that appeals to me in the moment.

Thats what I mean by meddling, manipulating, challenging you.   If you cannot bear the thought of any of those things hitting the table unless you think of them yourself, then, yes, you and I should never, ever play in a game together, and if you think I am a jerk and asshat for wanting to play them, then fair enough.  I can live with that. 

Nope, again, I did not and do not have ANY opinion of how you play, as I have not payed with you.  Plus, *everyone* on this thread need to keep in mind that I was not the one who brought the wors asshat and jerk into this thread.

I sense you are neither.

[De Reel]

First, I can see no relation between playing a non entity and being frightened. On the contrary. It is so abstract and dry and vulnerable it can only be brave to try and play it.

The, Sindyr, you have a very beautiful mind, but creations of the mind are fragile. We realized in Son of Love thread that the less "contact surface" your character has, the stronger he will get glued in the end by all kind of players with a peculiar idea of fun. A character such as the "non entity" described above has only one point to target, and it will be targetted. It is not the character's psychology, drives, body, whatever. It is the character's name.
example of goal : Kismet is turned into a blooming lotus flower by Sun Wu Kong.

[Sindyr]

That does not terribly concern me, for 2 reasons:

-I believe that Kismet is eternal and eternally ineffable.  The blooming lotus flower may have come from Kismet (or not) but here the rub:  No matter what happens to that flower, nothing can affect or curtail how me, the player can use the abilities on Kismet's character sheet to affect the storyline.  That, combined with the nature of the character as envisioned leads me to experience the flower as nothing more than the child of Kismet at most - a child that Kismet may or may not interact with.

-It is completely unnessecary for players to be able to play goals on my character in order to earn my resources.  If they entice me and draw me in on ANY conflict, they will get my resources.  Kismet is in some ways like the Hand of God.  God is *not* the central character of the story though.  In a story about Doc Ock versus Sandman and Spiderman, Doc Ock may be played by player A, and Sandman by player B, and Spiderman by me, even though none of us have character sheets for those characters.  For example, I may be playing the Kismet character sheet, player A may be playing a character sheet called "Villainous Forces", and player B may be playing a character sheet called "Poetic Justice" - but the story, and what we narrate, is the adventures of Sandman and Spiderman against Doc Ock.

I think we need to make a fundamental shift in thinking when it comes to Capes, to realize it's full potential.  We are GM's first and foremost, not PC's.  Our character sheet is mainly to give us a way to affect, channel, and compete for narrative control.  That the character sheet be representative or linked to any incarnate entity in the narration is entirely not only unecessary but superflous.  With the Kismet character sheet, I can still play Spiderman in almost every important way.

I imagine the natural evolution of people who play this game is to more and more embrace the separation of the meta game from the narration.  I myself think and I am going to throw myself fully into this.  Not just as a method of self-protection, but because it now seems true that this is the true spirit of Capes, as designed.  This is what the absolute separation of the metagame and the narrative leads inexorably to, and its very interesting.

Wow.

[Andrew Cooper]

Sindyr,

Now that is something I think could be really cool.  Go play that game and tell us how it turns out.  I'd love to hear it as I think the Capes rules would rise to the challenge quite well.  I could see a three player game where there were characters representing The Forces of Good, The Forces of Evil and The Hand of Fate.  Where "Forces" didn't neccessarily refer to specific people rather a metaphysical state of the universe.  I just wonder how you would deal with changing characters between scenes.  I think it would become boring to constantly play those incorporeal, big-picture characters constantly.  Sometimes I'd want to dip down into the smaller scale of single characters.

[Vaxalon]

No matter what happens to that flower, nothing can affect or curtail how me, the player can use the abilities on Kismet's character sheet to affect the storyline. 

Of course, that's true of EVERY Capes character.

Please let us know how this play turns out.

[Sindyr]

Sindyr,
Now that is something I think could be really cool.  Go play that game and tell us how it turns out.  I'd love to hear it as I think the Capes rules would rise to the challenge quite well.  I could see a three player game where there were characters representing The Forces of Good, The Forces of Evil and The Hand of Fate.  Where "Forces" didn't neccessarily refer to specific people rather a metaphysical state of the universe.  I just wonder how you would deal with changing characters between scenes.  I think it would become boring to constantly play those incorporeal, big-picture characters constantly.  Sometimes I'd want to dip down into the smaller scale of single characters.

Perhaps it would become boring - although my tolerances and what gives me joy may be different from others.  Only time will tell.  On the other hand, if playing Kismet I really wanted to be focusing on the story of Spiderman, I can simply bring him in, and pay no token since he doesn't have a character sheet.  None the less, I can "play" him in almost the same way if I *did* have a character sheet for him. I can narrate his using his powers, I just don't get to roll dice unless I add in some kismet, which is cool. "Spiderman shoots out his webs to grab the top of the wall that Doc Ock is standing under, and topples it onto Ock. I am using my Kismet ability Poetic Justice(3) to roll up my die on the Spiderman defeats Doc Ock Conflict"

Of course, every other player can narrate fr Spiderman too, but as I have been told repeatedly, they could even if I had a character sheet for him, as that sheet gives me almost zero authority.  With that in mind, why both to bring Spidey in sheeted, when I can play a "larger" game and keep my options wide open?

What kind of blows my mind, in a very good way, is that by playing Kismet I am essentially playing *myself*, my godlike ability as a player to reach into the world of the narration and affect it, helping that which I want to support, combating that which I want to curtail.  Heck, all you really have to do is come up with 12 abilities that represent the kind of effect you want to have on the story, "Poetic Justice", "Fate take a hand", "the Good prevail", etc and there you go, you have made a character which is you, the player's, proxy within the narrative world.

Ultimately, by playing the purely narrative force instead of sheeting up a character as a focus, you are declaring that your primary interest is not in any one character overall - although you may be interested is Spidey's story today - but in the story itself.  You are taking a GM stance as opposed to a PC stance.  And I think this is a good thing, because at the end of the day, playing Capes is not like playing a PC, as Capes does not support player ownership/authority over slected PC's, no instead it *is* like being a GM.  And by playing this narrative force, you are strongly embracing that role.

Mind-blowing.

[Sindyr]

No matter what happens to that flower, nothing can affect or curtail how me, the player can use the abilities on Kismet's character sheet to affect the storyline. 

Of course, that's true of EVERY Capes character.

That's true.  But sometimes the mental gymanstics required to figure out how Spiderman's Danger Sense comes into play 7 games after he has been killed can seem a little forced and artificial.  Playing Kismet, I think it flows more naturally, since Kismet *is* my ability to affect the story - they are one and the same.  It's taking something that was one step removed, and removing that step.

Please let us know how this play turns out.

Will do.  I am arranging to use a room at an art center in the local town weekly for this, and they seem to be given approval, though we still have to rangle over how age appropriate this game must be to be held there.  Anyways, with luck I should be playing on a weekly basis soon.

[Hans]

Will do.  I am arranging to use a room at an art center in the local town weekly for this, and they seem to be given approval, though we still have to rangle over how age appropriate this game must be to be held there.  Anyways, with luck I should be playing on a weekly basis soon.

That's good news!  Enjoy yourselves, and let us know how it goes. 

I would like to suggest that this concept is sort of "graduate-level" Capes?  Based on my own experience teaching new groups how to play, this could be too far to go in a first session.  Give it three or four sessions of straightforward four-colour stuff, and once everyone can think about the game play, instead of the actual rules of game play, wow your fellow gamers with this.  I know I was harsh on it before, but really, it will blow their minds, and possibly take the group to a new level of play.  Your only danger is someone else at the table will think of something similar, and scoop you on the surprise!

[Sindyr]

Yeah, Hans, I think you are right - they have enough to learn with basic Capes, so I will be doing baby steps with 'em.

[Sydney Freedberg]

What kind of blows my mind, in a very good way, is that by playing Kismet I am essentially playing *myself*, my godlike ability as a player to reach into the world of the narration and affect it, helping that which I want to support, combating that which I want to curtail....you have made a character which is you, the player's, proxy within the narrative world.

Excellent insight. May I go one further? To echo Fred (Vaxalon), "that's true of every Capes character." In fact, that's true of every character ever played in any roleplaying game, just as fictional characters in a story are projections of their author. Your "kismet" approach just makes it more obvious. But even if you set out to create a character in the image of someone else's idea -- "this is Spiderman!" -- or in the image of some real person -- "this character is my real-life cousin Barbara, y'know, the one you met last week?" -- you still end up portraying, not the established canonical character or real-life person, but the idea of that person in your own mind. By how you turn your model into Abilities and Drives (or whatever statistics the system gives you); by what you choose to emphasize or deemphasize about your model ("I love the Spidey-MJ romance, but the whole Green Goblin nemesis thing blows"; "Yeah, I know Barbara's a good cook, but I'm not wasting an ability slot on that, what really matters to me is her loyalty to her friends"); by the very choice of one model over another in the first place -- by all these things, you are being selective about your sources, making a statement about what you want to include or avoid in the imaginary world, and therefore making a statement about yourself.

And by how the other players react to your character and what he/she/it does -- even if you're playing a game where (unlike Capes) their reaction has no game-mechanical effect, but is purely social, whether it's whoops of approval or weary eye-rolling -- they are making a statement about your character, and about you.

So, guess what. There is no "safe" way to play. There are no "inviolate" characters. There are no "characters" at all, in any observable sense. There's only you and your friends around the table.

[Vaxalon]

The character is not a character.  The points are not points.  The game is not a game.

When you understand these things, Grasshopper, then you will understand Capes.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Uh, I'm pretty sure the game is a game, actually.

[Sindyr]

Excellent insight. May I go one further? To echo Fred (Vaxalon), "that's true of every Capes character." In fact, that's true of every character ever played in any roleplaying game, just as fictional characters in a story are projections of their author. Your "kismet" approach just makes it more obvious. But even if you set out to create a character in the image of someone else's idea -- "this is Spiderman!" -- or in the image of some real person -- "this character is my real-life cousin Barbara, y'know, the one you met last week?" -- you still end up portraying, not the established canonical character or real-life person, but the idea of that person in your own mind. By how you turn your model into Abilities and Drives (or whatever statistics the system gives you); by what you choose to emphasize or deemphasize about your model ("I love the Spidey-MJ romance, but the whole Green Goblin nemesis thing blows"; "Yeah, I know Barbara's a good cook, but I'm not wasting an ability slot on that, what really matters to me is her loyalty to her friends"); by the very choice of one model over another in the first place -- by all these things, you are being selective about your sources, making a statement about what you want to include or avoid in the imaginary world, and therefore making a statement about yourself.

And by how the other players react to your character and what he/she/it does -- even if you're playing a game where (unlike Capes) their reaction has no game-mechanical effect, but is purely social, whether it's whoops of approval or weary eye-rolling -- they are making a statement about your character, and about you.

So, guess what. There is no "safe" way to play. There are no "inviolate" characters. There are no "characters" at all, in any observable sense. There's only you and your friends around the table.

I understand and I think I pretty much agree with what your are saying (unless I am missing something, which is quite possible.)

However, I am not sure how this applies to the rest of this thread (again, I could be missing something.)

The two main points I am focusing on this thread seem to be unrelated (in my mind) to the truths you are pointing out:

1) That playing a cosmic force not tied to an in-story persona is quite different from playing a persona based character.  Whether that difference is quantitative (and demonstrable) or qualitative (perceived and in the eye of the beholder), it seems to be there.
2) That playing a cosmic force gives one more options and latitude - again either objectively by its nature, or subjectively by it's paradigm.

There reason I am writing this is to make sure that I am not missing some understanding of your point(s) that may supposed to be applying to either #1 or #2 above, because when I read what you write, it appeared to be worthwhile and true, but I did not find a direct correlation to what I have been talking about here.

Perhaps I missed something?

[Sindyr]

Uh, I'm pretty sure the game is a game, actually.

Ah but is the game you see the game you play, or is the game you see a mere chessboard, the players pawns, and the actions moves, of the real, higher metagame?

(grin)

[Sindyr]

Uh, I'm pretty sure the game is a game, actually.

Ah but is the game you see the game you play, or is the game you see a mere chessboard, the players pawns, and the actions moves, of the real, higher metagame?

(grin)