Player Choice vs Anti-Optimization

[Mike Holmes]

That leaves me with thinking out some limitation which fits with the setting.

Good. That's what you should be doing.

Another, cooler but harder to implement idea would be to be something like geas. You get weaknesses. The more you use magic, the more weaknesses you get, kind of like you get psychological limitations, physical weaknesses and so on. With psychological limitations I'm thinking about being unable to do certain things. Can't cross running water or can't leave their castle or whatever. These could be physical too. But there has to be a reason why, and I don't have any good natural explanation which really fits with the setting.

Demonic taint makes it so? Sounds good enough to me to do wwhat you're saying.

But still, we're talking punishments here. "Don't use magic, or your character will be less powerful in other ways." Which, again, will only stop players who are interested in being powerful in other ways.

All these things punish the character in-game. Which does not necessarily punish the player. You keep missing that distinction. My example, of making the character less healthy, and thus threatening the character's life, is an exampole of how you can send a message to the player (again, I'm not suggesting this idea, just using it as an example). "If you keep doing this, you may lose your character!" Is an effective deterrent to a player.

And here's your conundrum. You don't want "corruption" whatever it does to "deprotagonize" the character. But you want it to be a deterrent, somehow. But the only thing that players want, is a character with protagonism. So you've eliminated the only practical deterrrent. Character death is the ultimate in "deprotagonization", and hence why I presented it as a practical deterent. There may be other forms of deterrrence that you can think of, but I think they're going to be rare, and hard to design. IOW, I think this is a conundrum with no solution.

Teh problem is trying to map the mechanics to the in-game reality. It's very much like if you had a game where players could play superheroes or normals, but the superheroes had big, nasty disadvantages to "balance". How many people would play the normals? Very few. The Normals just don't have the instant protagonism of superpowers. Nor the protagonism that comes from the conflicts that the "disadvantages" provide. They're just more interesting.

So, yet again, I can only urge you to rethink your basic ideas here. Instead of making a deterent to using these abilities. Which cannot work without deprotagonizing the character, instead of trying to find a way to punish a player for using such abilities, try to reward the player for refraining from using them.

Since this does not match the in-game definition of how these powers work, I'd suggest using a metagame mechanic, and directly rewarding the player. So, you have Fate points? Perfect. Given a situation wherin the player could use Demonic Magic to great effect, but does not, the GM should award Fate Points. If you want an In-Game link, say that such restraint gains the notice of the fates.

Then make the taint anything you want. The balance will come from the metagame reward.

If you do go with something like the above, however, you will have to find a balancing "something" that other character types have to make them attractive to play as well. In the Demonic Magician's case, he is either powerful and tainted (cool), or he has lot's of fate points (so he can do other cool things).

How about giving warriors Fate points for refraining from killing enemies? That would be cool. Then they are either cool for using their amazing killing abilities, or they are cool for finding other solutions and powering up to kill something much more badass later.

See what I'm getting at?

Mike

[Christoffer Lernö]

Yeah, you're kind of thinking of... well Otherkind comes to mind with it's "connection to life". One way would be to have like you suggest, a kind of "good karma" thing. The less you kill or do bad things, the more things will help you. A little like the youngest prince in those fairy tales who is the only one who helps the small animals in problem and listen to people and because of that they all help him in the end.

Fate is a little different, so I can't really use that, but if I found some other meta resource that could work with the game then that might be a possibility.

Another method could be to let the taint constantly happen. You don't need to use magic, you keep on getting tainted. Unless you really don't use it and try to cleanse yourself every day through meditation and stuff. In that case you can reverse it and start purify yourself and that's good because if you have little taint... well I don't know. But anyway, that wouldn't make "being tainted" an active thing even though using excessive amounts of energy probably would accelerate it. Instead we have the "active" thing of trying to remove taint which one has to do every day and if you do it then there is a reward for it.

Is that more in line with what you're thinking about?

[Mark D. Eddy]

OK: here's what I've gleaned from the two threads so far:

1) Demonic magic is one of a number of potential types of magic in Ygg.
2) Demonic Magic, by its very nature, twists and corrupts its practicioners.
2a) by physical changes
2b) untill the Demonic Mage is an unpowered 'true' demon.
3) Because this is a setting issue, you want a mechanic to reflect these two 'truths.'
4) You've been mostly looking at ways to 'punish' the characters for using 'forbidden' magic.

I've got what *I* think is an elegant solution: Each level of taint makes it harder to use the demonic magic. The concept behind this is that the demonic power's 'goal' is to become its own agent in the world, so, with each use, the taint changes it from potential demonic energy to physical demonic form, reducing the mage's ability.

Obviously, this kind of taint will have to be cleansable, but I think it may do what you want.

[Bob McNamee]

That could make an interesting character "class" to play.

the Mage class
Low level with lowish-average human physical abilities, and high demonic magical power access... but less experience in how to use it...minimal taint...

High levels with high powered Demonic physical form, and low to no magical access...but lots of experience in how to use it...High taint

cleansing taint might entail having to voluntarily give up levels...to regain former access to magic power

There might end up being an optimal "level" to stay at... but I could see from a Player's viewpoint both wanted to restrict my taint (and level) to maintain my initial char concept, and doing a character that plunges deep into taint and monsterhood....

I wouldn't worry too much about making up a taint gaining chart that would deprotagonize an initial character concept ... as long as the players know what could happen (even making their own chart etc....) That's part of the tradeoff for any character getting involved in Magic.  It's no less deprotagonizing than a knight getting terribly hurt because he likes to challenge all swordsmen who pass his way... its just one of the possible prices a character could have to pay for using the abilities they have.