Personal Relevance and Multi-PC Play

[lumpley]

Up in Character and Our Weird Gamer Friends, Clinton wrote

Doing this myself, I have specific characters that are:
- Sad-About-Divorce Clinton
- Really-Pissed-Off-Now-About-Divorce Clinton
- Attracted-to-Friend's-Wife Clinton
- Wishing-to-Enact-Justice-on-Loony-Parents Clinton

Looking at a character you've played over and over again with a different name and different face is another good exercise in this territory.

As lots of you know, Meguey and Emily Care and I play a longterm Ars Magica game, co-GMed, with overt negotiation for System and Otherkind dice for conflict mechanics.  It's groovy but what I want to say is, echoing Clinton, for me it's all about:
- Insecure-About-Fatherhood Vincent

The goodness of having many PCs is that I can tackle the problem from lots of angles at once.  A quick overview of my characters gives us:
- Child of a distracted and disinterested father Vincent
- Abusive and manipulative bastard father Vincent
- Good, conscientious and thoughtful father Vincent with a son who's not living up to my expectations
- Religious fanatic father Vincent with a son who's not living up to my expectations
- Son who failed to live up to his religious fanatic father's expectations Vincent

All of which are relevant to my life.

I admit to the wacky psychology!  I'd rather be playing games with this stuff than inflicting it on my kids.

-Vincent

[Jason Lee]

Though I'm on record as not approaching my play from the personal issues stance, I would agree that multiple pc's really help in hitting a theme hard.  I've got a whole family full of characters and it really lets me explore the family dynamics (albeit weird, incestuous royal family dynamics - I blame Hamlet).

I bet the co-GMing helps quite a bit too.  The more control you have over the environment and npcs the more you can steer the world towards the theme - by controlling npc reactions, creating events that challenge the theme, and so on.  We actually run on a GM rotation (6 players, currently 20 active pcs) instead of co-GMing, and that's my experience anyway.

I also think the campaign play helps.  It gives you more time to both build up to things and address the details.