Damn the continuing story

[clehrich]

Four willows weeping wrote:

The "you cannot be sure it is useless" attitude, IMO, can lead to dysfunctional "campaign" play; players cling to their characters in an attempt to squeeze protagonism out of every game element that they paid for, because so much of it was taken "in case". Every case of "in case" I've seen was secretly a situation where the player wanted to use that ability, not one where the player thought that the ability would have future utility.

I think it really depends on which end of the timeline you're looking at things from.  What John is saying, I think, is that in a traditional skill system you build a character that has some skills, working together in a package.  You don't know what will happen in advance, and you want to have a rounded character.  This structure is very different from fiction or drama writing, because the author doesn't bother telling us about things that are completely irrelevant (which is not to say marginal or colorful or whatever, but actually irrelevant).  For example, Tolkien has enormous amounts of detail all over the place.  But he didn't happen to mention that Aragorn was his high school tennis champ --- it's totally irrelevant.

My point is this: the difference here is temporal.  If I'm looking at it from before the story is written, how do I know that Aragorn isn't going to end up using that terrific passing shot in a swordfight?  If I'm looking at it from the endpoint, with hindsight, I know that the tennis was irrelevant.

As a game player, I design a character with a range of skills, abilities, background hooks, and so forth.  If after the whole campaign is over I find that I never got to use some of it, then to that extent I have been somewhat deprotagonized.  But the point at stake isn't whether I should have designed these things into my character: it's whether I have created and been allowed to create an opportunity to use them.

[contracycle]

As a game player, I design a character with a range of skills, abilities, background hooks, and so forth.  

Sure, but why.  This is the way we do things by default, and at the moment.  We could, I hope, design character ans story at the same time or near enough.

If after the whole campaign is over I find that I never got to use some of it, then to that extent I have been somewhat deprotagonized.  But the point at stake isn't whether I should have designed these things into my character: it's whether I have created and been allowed to create an opportunity to use them.

I don't think thats really the point at all; the point is, why did you waste your game-effect currency on something that had no game effect?  Questions about what you are "allowed" to do are moot; I am not suggesting a prescriptive mode but a cooperative one.  Surely it is not totally impossible that we could build characters appropriate to a particular story?  As I pointed out initially, if there are abilities which need to be intorduced later, they CAN be by redesigning the character appropriate for the story in which tghat element is an important issue.

[clehrich]

Contracycle,

clehrich wrote:

As a game player, I design a character with a range of skills, abilities, background hooks, and so forth.  

Sure, but why. This is the way we do things by default, and at the moment. We could, I hope, design character ans story at the same time or near enough.

I agree it certainly can be done the way you suggest, and I'm also interested in the idea of doing both in one game.  I was only trying to suggest where and why conflict arises.  I think conflict could also arise with in-session invented material, in a similar fashion, with the same sort of GM.  I mean, if as we're going along we generate some nifty stuff about our characters that is interesting and relevant right now, and then the GM essentially railroads us away from exploring or focusing on any of that neat stuff, then we'll be annoyed.