So, with three sessions played, and for various reasons, I pulled the plug on the EPICS game:

• My plan to begin the game with each player selecting one of a number of scenes that their character would be cast into was a failure in a big way. Oh, there was a great deal of excitement and interest throughout my presentation of the scenes and the selection process itself, but play going forward was remarkably problematic.

Perhaps most significantly, characters were miscast. Balthazar's player chose Scene #6, which I had privately entitled, "Bringing Back the Brain." The NPC who'd opened the scene by inquiring about the discovery of a "creature" was Bui the Hare, a morally bankrupt and opportunistic "hero." I cast Balthazar as Bui's partner. The scene proceeded with Bui purchasing the floating brain creature from the farmboy, and swindling the boy out of his dog Steelhead as well. Her unrevealed plan was to cart the creature back to King's Port and present it to the King as a "crawling brain" that "steals children through windows." She would ask for funding for an expedition to hunt and kill the creature's mate, and then she'd hire a seedy alchemist to vat-grow a second one from a piece of tentacle that she could pass off as evidence of the mission accomplished. I envisioned Bui, a hero gone bad, functioning as a nice antagonist to a PC. But it never got to that. Not much past the middle of the first session, Balthazar's player defined a facet for Balthazar that the character had long been in the practice of using his summoning power to make creatures and force thereby a demand for his heroing services. Crap! That left Balthazar thematically undifferentiated from Bui. Balthazar was in exactly the wrong storyline. I could have handled an anti-hero Balthazar better in one of the other storylines, but not in this one. More than any of the others, it required a good guy.

Thomas the Liar, in the "warrior" role, was also miscast. The player chose Scene #2. And as I'm sure the player predicted, I cast Thomas as the one-armed boy's father. Then I proceeded with abducting the boy. And the problem became obvious. The player had wanted a warrior character, and somehow had been cast into the position of someone who needed to rely on the institution of heroism. Again, all of the antagonism I'd envisioned for the storyline was a bad fit for the character.

So even though the characters were hardly defined at all, somehow half of them were seriously miscast. It seems to me now that my critical mistake was thinking "define through play" was synonymous with "define yourself in response to delivered antagonism." Despite the uber-sketchiness of starting characters, players still have preferences embedded in them that they're not going to compromise.

• Anyway, in prepping for the second session I recovered nicely relative to Balthazar. I realized what meaningful antagonism for the character would be, and reinvented Bui to that effect under the hood. I imagined it would take me further from my goal of setting-premise Narrativism, but I was thinking I may have misapplied EPICS to that goal. And I still wanted to put the system through its paces.

Well, Bui only got one scene before Balthazar left her for dead by the campfire, and my efforts to cope with the miscasting issue by reimagining antagonism for Balthazar pretty much lay there dead with her. And this I place at the feet of EPICS: preserving antagonists is godawful hard. It was, honestly, a pain in the ass across all the characters' storylines. If you give an NPC a high Influence, a PC pretty much can't do anything to them...can't hit them in combat, can't tell a lie to them and have it be believed, can't threaten and get them to back down, nothing. So I had NPCs with moderate Influence scores...and they could do nothing to the player characters. In combat, the PCs would whittle down an NPC's moderate bank of Survival Points over a series of fairly boring attacks, and that would be it. It reminded me a lot of AD&D hit points: nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens, dead. Except it was significantly more one-sided in favor of the PCs.

So I got to thinking. There's a rule in the game that players can voluntarily take wounds in order to earn Survival Points. And even though I couldn't find it in the text, I had the distinct recollection of a rule empowering the GM to force wounds onto player characters by paying them with Survival Points. An email to J. Scott Pittman confirmed it. (But does the NPC have to hit the PC first? I never clarified that.)

So, what's the solution? Maybe it's a combination of things. Matt Gwinn suggested NPCs could be preserved better by having more Survival Points than just (Influence x 2) + Power. But part of the key might be some game text encouraging the GM to consistently use forced wounds. Get hit by an NPC, take a wound. Regardless of whether the character has enough Survival Points to soak it, pay them to take the wound. It's a social contract issue. If forced wounds are an occasional thing, and the GM has an never-ending supply of Survival Points he can hand out whenever he wishes to deliver forced wounds, then a decent GM can't really ever use them (because any time he does, it feels unfair). Either the GM needs to force a wound every single time he has the opportunity, or the amount of Survival Points at his disposal for forcing wounds has to be limited somehow.

• And finally, but perhaps most significant to me deciding to end the game, we had an issue with character protagonism that after three sessions, seemed unresolveable. I like the "define through play" aspect of the game, but it produces such sketchy starting characters that they fail to capture the interest of the audience of other players. As a group, we've had a lot of success with the way group character creation and Kicker mechanics prime everyone to be interested in the stories of the various characters. EPICS, however, gave us starting characters that lacked a meaningful suggestion of theme-addressing protagonism. And further definition of them through play, over the course of three sessions, hardly made a dent in the yowling void of how boring the characters were.

When I discussed the issue with Ron, he suggested I might just throw a torrent of adversity at the characters...thereby forcing them to become interesting through the players' defining. And when I thought about the various examples of play in the game text, that made a great deal of sense. The examples are all like that.

Well...I didn't have much of a chance to roll out that planned torrent of adversity, due to the weak survivability and effectiveness of antagonists issue I described above. But as I think on it now, I'm not sure how effective it would have been. Self-definition as a reaction, or hell, even proactive self-definition, isn't nearly as powerfully interesting as determined pursuit of self-interest.

Or you think maybe it would have worked?

Paul

So even though the characters were hardly defined at all, somehow half of them were seriously miscast. It seems to me now that my critical mistake was thinking "define through play" was synonymous with "define yourself in response to delivered antagonism." Despite the uber-sketchiness of starting characters, players still have preferences embedded in them that they're not going to compromise.

And this I place at the feet of EPICS: preserving antagonists is godawful hard. It was, honestly, a pain in the ass across all the characters' storylines. If you give an NPC a high Influence, a PC pretty much can't do anything to them...can't hit them in combat, can't tell a lie to them and have it be believed, can't threaten and get them to back down, nothing.

So, what's the solution? Maybe it's a combination of things. Matt Gwinn suggested NPCs could be preserved better by having more Survival Points than just (Influence x 2) + Power.

Regardless of whether the character has enough Survival Points to soak it, pay them to take the wound.

I like the "define through play" aspect of the game, but it produces such sketchy starting characters that they fail to capture the interest of the audience of other players. As a group, we've had a lot of success with the way group character creation and Kicker mechanics prime everyone to be interested in the stories of the various characters. EPICS, however, gave us starting characters that lacked a meaningful suggestion of theme-addressing protagonism. And further definition of them through play, over the course of three sessions, hardly made a dent in the yowling void of how boring the characters were.

When I discussed the issue with Ron, he suggested I might just throw a torrent of adversity at the characters...

Scott, that was a well reasoned response, I'm glad you've posted it.

The post is also incredibly ironic for reasons of which I doubt that you're aware (unless you're some sort of evil genius). I can't wait for Paul's response. :-)

Mike

Hey Scott,

Sure, most characters can be highly entertaining on paper, but I have seen the best detailed charcters fall flat during actual play.

Yes. My experiences with detailed characters are very much in accord with your own: a story oriented player writes up a detailed background for his character, rich with conflict, and then works during play to demonstrate the powerful vision they have for the character. And for various reasons, the character doesn't materialize in the game as envisioned. You couldn't possibly have designed EPICS if you hadn't had this same experience.

But let me ask you this...

Did you design EPICS because you believe detailed character backgrounds prevent characters from being entertaining in play? Did you get annoyed with the "my guy" thing, where a player justifies character behavior by pointing to their detailed background notes and character sheet and saying something like, "My guy is irritible, so he won't bend his knee to the duke"?

Or did you design EPICS because you saw how frustrated players were to have their characters not emerge in play as they'd envisioned them. Did you come to believe that defining a character through play would be more fun and more rewarding as a player?

Paul

Did you design EPICS because you believe detailed character backgrounds prevent characters from being entertaining in play? Did you get annoyed with the "my guy" thing, where a player justifies character behavior by pointing to their detailed background notes and character sheet and saying something like, "My guy is irritible, so he won't bend his knee to the duke"?

Or did you design EPICS because you saw how frustrated players were to have their characters not emerge in play as they'd envisioned them. Did you come to believe that defining a character through play would be more fun and more rewarding as a player?