How tightly can we frame a game, as play event rather product?

Assuming a fair amount of GM/player distinction, if I as a GM said something to the effect of "I have room for two fighters and a ranger", how would you everyone about that as players? The offered tradeoff here would be that lots of attention would be paid to the specifics of the character, and that they would develop a personal rather than proficiency niche.

What if I said "In episode 1, we need two fighters and a ranger, and in episode 2 we'll need an elven archer, a wizard and a thief". How would people feel about changing characters like this in order to complete an arc, and about knowing this up front? How would people feel about such a radical change of character types?

The issues I'm driving at are: how committed are people to freeform as opposed focussed characer design? How committed are people to "development play" of characters? Do we have distinctions into groups of similar opinions? I'm wondering how persistent characters need to be for people to get their jollies?

Me personally? I like changing characters, a lot, a whole lot. My solution until recently has been to GM.
In railroad illusion sim games (which I played a lot of until recently) I had a tendency to make deals with GMs in order to kill off characters of mine left and right and change them. This makes many GMs uncomfortable BTW.
I guess my answer is, me personally...I'd play a game like that for a bit.

Gareth,

Can you focus the context of the question a bit? I'm reasonably sure the current version will get replies from all over the map, but from such a diversity of play-contexts that they won't add up to anything.

I'm not sure what direction to suggest, but here are some candidates: a group which plays sequential few-session games, a group that assumes it will play a given game indefinitely, a game which does not permit continuous play "through" a given character's death (or a game which does), a game with very rapid character improvement (or a game with little or none), etc, etc. If you could narrow down some of these things, I think the forthcoming answers will look a lot less like free-associated preference-blather.

Best,
Ron

Let me see . . in paragraph 2 (of Gareth's original message) I see this question - "I have a game that requires you to really restrict yourself to certain character types (in terms of "proficiency"), but I promise the game will really be about the personality you develop for the character, not that "proficiency". Are you interested?"

Paragraph 3, we've got "would you be interested in a game where you play a different character in each session, building an arc in the process?"

And in paragraph 4, we move to some general questions: "how much freedom do you like in creating your character?", and "is having your guy develop over time an important part of your enjoyment of RPGs?"

For me personally the answer to 'em all is basically "it depends - give me the details," so that's not very helpful. I will say that "multi-character in order to complete an arc" sounds interesting, but I want to know a lot more about what this "completing an arc" thing is. And that the conventional wisdom, mass market RPG answers to the general questions seem to be "LOTS of freedom" and "development over time is VERY important."

Hope that helps show the range of possible discussions here, if nothing else,

Gordon

Well, I thought after posting that my character-class type examples were pretty wuss and didn't really capture what I was after.

The idea is that the GM is being very proactive in casting character roles appropriate to their story, this being quite far down the GM-auteur lane.

So my initital idea was, with the "fighter/fighter/ranger" example, that by specifying these proficiency niches, and being able to proactively plan around that knowledge, the GM con construct quite a detailed preplanned "plot". However, the tradeoff is that the GM works hard to protagonise the character as a person, as an individual in the world. Although you have 2 fighters and a ranger, in D&D terms a pretty specialised group, one might be a defrocked paladain, another a low ranking gaurdsman and the ranger is really a bandit. Precisely becuase the "effectiveness" niches overlap to such a degree, its not practical to model rewards and growth on having the next spiffy magic sword in the set; the characters are distinct becuase of their individual histories and personalities, they have to be so. OTOH, the GM gets to preplan knowing, frex, that the group will never have a fireball available to it.

However, then I thought, why model the effectiveness niche at all? What if instead we specified the "character sketch"? In this scenario the GM would mandate "A disinherited and bitter minor noble, an unambitious jobsworth and a dishevelled scofflaw". By strictly specifying these details in advance, the GM ha information about the characters goals and relationships to broader society before they are even designed.

To an extent, these character specifications would, in our current procedural model, arise from the first session character creation. at this time the GM and the players create and familiarise themselves with the characters; the GM leartns the effectiveness niche of each and groups distributiuon across the available niches, and in a more abstract way the drives and motives of the characters as informed by their player-created histories. The GM then creates/adapts a "plot" to handle these specific choices.

Part of this arose from the recent discussions here, about effectiveness niches and so on. Why can't you have a game in which all the characters are Conan-esque barbarians? If they were sufficiently distinct PEOPLE, their effectiveness niche is not really important; it becomes mere methodology. But that would need a system that somehow concentrated on and systemitised personality rather than effectiveness, and playing directly to those personalitites rather than to the effectiveness niche. The conventional model focusses on combat (basically) and abstracts everything else; I'm proposing that we focus on the personality and abstract the combat. This in itself is not that radical an idea; but I was thinking recently the HW frex does not push the boundary far enough, still falls back to effectiveness classification even though it has a mechanical principle that can handle social interactions.

Gordon, I agree that the current conventional thinking is about character developent and stuff. But sometimes I wonder if this is not a misinterpretation of a single idea: the transition to adulthood, but carried out again and again and again. We have made growth itself the perennial end, rather than a means to an end.

But in most media, characters walk on, perform their story role, and depart. They are not persistent, or if they are persistent, they are so as the lynchpin around which the entire "metaplot" revolves.

So, I want to explore two things: "disposable" characters that have specific roles in a broader story; and pre-specified characters so that GM's can usefully construct the "lynchpin" model and carry out the extensive supporting work that would be needed in advance.

The system you describe sounds like TROS, frankly. Sorcerers aside (which seem to be a sort of an add-on, anyhow; in the two games I've playes, and in all that I've read there has never been a sorcerer PC), all players are classless, and given the system, might all be considered fighters of a sort. What separates one character from the next, besides his particular ability with combat, and other skills, is their personality as described by the Spiritual Attributes. Interestingly, these make a character more effective in combat. Which means that a character is defined from a game role standpoint by what issues make him combat effective.

So you don't have to separate combat out, if you don't want to, to have a group that is delineated by their personalities. If you wanted to specify roles ahead of time in TROS, you'd just select SAs ahead of time. Or, conversely, you could assign basic effectiveness in terms of fighting ability ahead of time, but allow the player to decide the SAs thus creating a niche for the character. It all depends on what you are really after, a group with certain core competencies, or a group that must address certain concerns.

I think that this might all work. Certainly it works for one-shots where the GM provides complete characters. The notion with longer games is that the player will want a larger role in creating the sort of protagonist that they want to portray. However, it's not impossible that with discussion you couldn't get the players to accept certain roles long term. Especially if they can at least choose between them who will play which role, which gives at least a small amount of choice to the player.

Again, this has been proposed in the form of the thoretical Scooby-Doo game, where you would play the characters straight out of the TV series. No choices other than which character each player plays. I'm certain that with such as a game assumption that it could be done. For example, I could see a Knights of the Round Table game, where your choice was just which of the pregenerated knights to play. I'm certain that ,written properly, it would work just fine. The question with your proposition is, are you doing this with a system that usually allows the players to create their own characters? If so they may miss the freedom that is usually allowed.

Mike

Hi Gareth,

I think TROS is still quite far down the "players design characters" avenue, comparatively.

A lot of my games are designed with the principles you're suggesting in mind, especially in terms of limits. Sorcerer fits the bill to some extent, especially if you take into account the GM's authority over the available list of score descriptors. Elfs does more so, as elf characters really aren't very different from one another except for things like anal vs. genital vs. oral stage. Trollbabe (in final layout!) is extremely aggressive in this regard.

Zero might be an interesting read from this perspective - characters belong to distinct castes in a cyborg Hive, but play begins on the day they are mysteriously severed from the Hive. My play of the game suggests that the castes exist mainly to be abandoned, and the characters become ... people, as such.

What I don't see much of, in published game texts, is the actual GM-authority over characters' "types" (by whatever name) when a diversity of characters is expected. That diversity seems to be the province of players, historically.

However, in demo or con play, one tactic is to define the characters fairly completely (much as in your example) and let the players (a) choose and (b) possibly round out or complete the characters for that session. This is what the Driftwood guys do with TROS cons, what I did for Sorcerer back in its early days at cons, and what I've seen any number of people do with con games. This might be a good model for you to investigate.

Best,
Ron

HeartQuest buiilds its character desuign system around the campaign in question.

THus, if you're doing a magic girls campaign most PCs will have supernormal powers to some degree. They don't have to be equally powerful, but they all have to be potent enough that they can take part in the adventure.

In a teen romance game, chyaracters will be built around their relationships to each other -- old friendships, rivalries, secret attractions, etc.

In all cases, the choice of Faults (the FUDGE term for disadvantages or defects) is very important and provides a ton of roleplaying hooks. There are even characters in the HQ rulebook who have faults they might not strictly need to balance out their characters.

From what I have seen of TROS so far, I think there are similarities, and certainly some of my thoughts on this topic were crystalised by those discussions. Yeah, the magic girls thing too is in the right ballpark.

I've been chewing over the relationship maps thing as discussed by Ron, and on a number of occassions its come up in discussions of things like episode/mission based play. The problem I see here is this - if prominent NPC's are a necessary part of the motivational process, repetition becomes tricky. Similarly for life-changing events and revelations... and yet both of these things are employed for the vast majority of stories. I feel this is becuase the characters are not intended to be persistent; where characters are persistent, like say the A-team, they in fact never achieve their goals, their motivating factor, because to do so would end the story (or more accurately, would tell a story which is currently on hold).

Hence, the opposed requirements of persistent characters and emotionally committed characters. Long running series which try to work around these difficulties, including the A-team, tend toward a couple of predicatble conventions:
- the long lost friend/colleague
- friendly stranger-in-need-of-help du jour
- old enemies
And these can be pulled off because the characters backstory is largely opaque... any new fact can be readily introduced retroactively. The downside is that the longer this goes on, the harder it gets until you are eventually dealing with the Jessica Fletcher problem: everywhere she goes someone dies.

This does not work in RPG's - first, the internal causality is much tighter, second the GM does not as a rule hold editorial power over the characters.

So I've been looking at other ways to construct games around the characters. I think a lot of open-ended campaign games do the A-team trick of the suspended story. The characters usually have backstories to explain how they got where they are, why they hang out with the other characters, how they got their kewl powers. And are then fed a hook by the GM to kickstart the game proper. Seems to me this is essentially suspending the characters individual stories; disengaging them from the very things the players brought to the table as components of the characters history and motivation.

Therefore it seems to me that it might be possible to design a game/plotting design technique that explicitly takes characters as inputs, and responds directly and exclusively to those inputs. Characters come with an array of NPC's in the form of friends, relatives, enemies and aquaintances. The "plot" then "clamps" to these elements in some sustematic fashion; uses them as an original from which to make a mould (to mix metaphors). So this would have to be a system which did not start from the thesis that the function of mechanics is to describe the world or interactions; it would have to be designed to coordinate the progress of the resolutions of each characters individual story.

The inputs to the system, then, would be those dilemmas, NPC's etc rather than Strength, Dex, that sort of trivia. Progress toward resolving "my relationship with my sister" is scored and tracked; it is these changes which constitute character growth, not doing pressups in the gym (the equivalent of XP expenditure to "improve" characters"). Characters are finite, in that their issues can be resolved, permanently... sooner or later, they have no story left to tell.

Anyway, this is a bit chaotic, but I hope it outlines the idea a little further.

Hi Gareth,

Lots of parallel tracking goin' on, I think. The last six months have seen a flurry of game design that addresses these issues specifically, and for all the reasons that you're describing.

Trollbabe
Violence Future
Charnel Gods
Nicotine Girls
Panels

and others are all based primarily on relationships as a central mechanic. It's a definite and deliberate evolutionary shift from games like Hero Wars, TROS, and Orkworld, in which the relationships are overwhelmingly powerful modifying mechanics. I modestly claim Sorcerer as an early representative, in reference to its Binding mechanics.

It's also significant - and consistent with your point - that the five designs I list above permit very, very little diversity among the characters in terms of non-relationship mechanics.

Unfortunately, none of these games is currently available in finished form. Charnel Gods and Trollbabe are very, very close; Panels looks to be on hiatus (unfortunately, I really want to see that one); Violence Future and Nicotine Girls are in revision. But when we get there, hoo boy!!

Best,
Ron

P.S. (editing this in later) I should also mention Secrets & Lies, which is being developed by Mario Bonassin, and Vincent's astounding vampire game. Both are discussed in various places in the Indie Design forum.