Topic: Personal Relevance and Multi-PC Play
Started by: lumpley
Started on: 9/15/2003
Board: Actual Play
On 9/15/2003 at 5:30pm, lumpley wrote:
Personal Relevance and Multi-PC Play
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
Forge Reference Links:
Topic 7916
On 9/16/2003 at 10:20pm, cruciel wrote:
RE: Personal Relevance and Multi-PC Play
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.