Hello,

At the end of the "My firstest relationship map" thread, I shamefully left poor Vincent hanging:

He wrote,
"... here's a question. Do you ever play troupe-style, or are your games always one-player-one-PC? (That's another first-step's-a-doozy.)"

And I never answered. It struck me just now that I should have, and that the last two sessions of Hero Wars offer a fine example. My usual answer is, "Not often at all," although my players use a lot of Director stance with NPCs - so it's a BIT like playing them.

Then a few weeks ago, one of my Hero Wars players asked if she would ever get a chance to play one of the NPCs, who is the niece of the player-character in question. I assented instantly, as that would aid the developing scenario, in which the niece was definitely going to be present and the PC in question might or might not be.

So for the last two sessions, the PC has been camping with some other characters above-ground, dealing with manticores and similar, while her niece has been with the other two PCs down in the trolls' subterranean home. I've cut back and forth between the two locales a lot, especially in the latest session, so that player has had a real workout of playing a character in pretty nearly every scene.

I'm not too comfortable (personal thing) with having the player run both characters in the same scene, though. I guess in the past I would assume that the PC was hers and the NPC was mine, although granted, in this case, the player has always exerted massive Director power over that NPC anyway. From now on, though, it's possible that the player may simply have two PCs. Interesting to see where it goes.

I should add that in Hero Wars, a PC may have "followers" and "relationships," which create characters who are practically aspects of the PC anyway, and that the NPC in this case is one of these.

EDITING THIS IN: Who else uses multiple PCs per player? In what circumstances and games? Any comments about it?

Best,
Ron

[ This Message was edited by: Ron Edwards on 2001-12-06 16:43 ]

On 2001-12-06 16:15, Ron Edwards wrote:
I'm not too comfortable (personal thing) with having the player run both characters in the same scene, though. I guess in the past I would assume that the PC was hers and the NPC was mine, although granted, in this case, the player has always exerted massive Director power over that NPC anyway. From now on, though, it's possible that the player may simply have two PCs. Interesting to see where it goes.

My younger brother and I used to regularly play 2 or 3 characters, but it was mostly strategic dungeon crawling & bashing...

But Dead Meat works with this concept quite a bit. Each player has three 'Personas' (in DM, 'Character' refers to 'strength of character', i.e. Stats, rather than # of PC's played). The new rules state that no more than two of a players Persona's can be in the same Scene. And if they are, the extra persona tags are passed to other Players or the Director until the scene is over (or the Persona is killed)...

Imagine, if you will, when I run tests by myself, trying to GM and act out 9 characters' parts. Ever hear the song 'Personality Crisis'? :smile: I forget which old punk band does that...

Sean

Ron, no worry. I figured you'd get to it or you wouldn't.

I'm fascinated by your story, especially by the character in question's transition from NPC to PC. Hidden in there is some pretty technical gamestuff I'd love to dig up and root around in and smear all over myself.

What's different about the niece character now, that makes her a PC instead of an NPC? There are lots of things it could be, like (simply) now she's played by a player instead of the gm, now the player is using actor and author on her instead of director, now she gets more screen time, now when she does things the rest of the group or the gm have to approve/narrate/interpret/adjudicate, now you expect a full writeup of her, and that's all I can think of off the top of my head but no doubt there's more. What does it mean, she went from being an NPC to a PC? I'd love to hear your experience of it.

We gave up trying to tell the difference between PCs and NPCs in our game. You might notice me saying NPC(ish) sometimes. There's a difference there, and it's probably a useful one, but we have so many characters who slide back and forth over the line that I can't figure out where it is.

Oh, and one of my favorite house rules (you'll see it in Matchmaker too) is that you're never obligated to play out a conversation with yourself. You can always just summarize if you prefer.

Mike, standing and sitting, absolutely. We pitch our voices, change our posture, play with props, adopt irritating personal habits. My guy Acanthus drums on things and makes weird noises with his mouth. It's the source of much in-game amusement at his expense, and it's wicked useful for my fellow players.

Note to self: Check out Dead Meat again.

-lumpley Vincent

On my back burner is a Narrativist Aliens game. A player starts off with a whole squad of characters, each of which has only one descriptive trait. As the game goes on and characters die, the number of traits stays constant - when one character dies, other pcs get more traits...

Er. I'm tangenting.

I've used multiple PCs on occasion, but never as an ongoing thing - i.e., I've never had one player with two characters in the same party. I like bringing PCs from previous campaigns in, and I generally let the player play their old character in the cameo.

The key, of course, is to ensure that the multiple characters don't get abused. Making sure that the two characters controlled by a player never interact directly helps...

On my back burner is a Narrativist Aliens game. A player starts off with a whole squad of characters, each of which has only one descriptive trait. As the game goes on and characters die, the number of traits stays constant - when one character dies, other pcs get more traits...

Very cool idea Gareth.

Paul

In one of our published one-shot adventures the players all play two sets of characters (it's free and online if anyone is interested). It's a high school horror adventure and there are two PC groups: the obnoxious popular kids and the more loveable outcasts.

Each player has one popular kid and one misfit. In the first act the players take turns being mean to each other (no person plays both his own aggressor and victim) and then in the second act the popular kids venture up to the old abandoned house and get killed.

I did this from thinking about how to run a horror game where a dead PC didn't mean a player going home early. Was it successful? In playtest people liked it: getting to play villains is something one rarely gets to do, it seems. Also, haiving characters the players 'loved to hate' get slaughtered seemed to be spooky enough without having the problem of someone losing a cherrished character.

In normal gaming I've never done this--although Mike's giant-version thing sounds very cool!
-Marco

Marco,

Excellent! Definitely perfect for the subject. I'd like to play it.

Best,
Ron

Ars Magica. Players not playing a magus would commonly take multiple grogs or minor NPCs encountered in the course of a quest or other adventure. Troupe style play as my then-group defined it made for a really unique experience. Add to that the fact that the grogs (bodyguards) weren't "owned" by specific players from session to session -- so a different player might play that grog from week to week -- and you have a superb dynamic for character development. Interestingly, the grogs are always the most beloved characters in an Ars Magica saga, at least from those of my experience. They die like flies compared to Magi or Companions, but they are mourned.

Best,

Blake

On 2001-12-07 07:23, lumpley wrote:

I'm fascinated by your story, especially by the character in question's transition from NPC to PC. Hidden in there is some pretty technical gamestuff I'd love to dig up and root around in and smear all over myself.

What's different about the niece character now, that makes her a PC instead of an NPC?

Welcome, Julie!

As long as we are rooting and smearing, another key piece of this set of play events concerns the larger picture about the entire story.

Hero Wars is emotionally demanding and extremely dramatic - you can find yourself carrying out scenes of amazing power with very little mechanical difficulty or organization. The system is definitely "present," but it works so well that things happen ... or to state this differently, things happen that in other games would have required grossly complex mechanical maneuvering OR utterly blatant/override intrusion of Drama methods.

We've played well past 30 sessions, although probably not yet 35. I'd venture to say that a single session of Hero Wars, most of the time, gets about as much accomplished as three or four of my old Champions or GURPS or Cyberpunk sessions. We're into the third Humongous Story Arc, and these Arcs have been about (let's see) incest, infidelity, and within-marriage rape, respectively.

I found myself hitting aesthetic limits of how much can continue and still be good. In other words, say we move into a fourth Arc about, hmmmm, well, something equally meaty (my mind fails me considering the Three So Far). Isn't it a bit odd, a bit soapy or superhero-y, to think that this group of people would deal with such things over the course of only a couple of years, in-game time?

That sort of thing bugs me with a system and setting as solid as Hero Wars. We really have generated what amounts to a hell of a set of novels. After three solid, short novels, if our play moves into "yet another," then I shift from "this is a great novel" mode into "this is a great series" mode. These are different modes of both authorship and entertainment, and in many ways, I don't want to make that shift in our Hero Wars play.

Consider the multiple novels of Ross MacDonald in which Lew Archer is very much the same guy throughout, as opposed to the way that Easy Rawlings ages considerably through the events of the five novels by Walter Moseley. I find that the Hero Wars setting "sits well" as the latter rather than the former.

So I was groping for a solution and considered, once this third story is resolved, doing the ten-years-later method. For those of you who don't know, Hero Wars is set in the canonical setting of Glorantha, a fictional mythic-fantasy world whose history is available; the Hero Wars are within this history and therefore we all know "how they turn out."

(It's a fine example of the canonical or underbelly style of play I describe in a concurrent RPG Theory thread, as opposed to metaplot-as-railroading.)

If we skip ten years ahead, we all know that the Dragon did rise during the inauguration of the Reaching Moon, that Kallyr is killed during her final bid for unifying Sartar, that the City of Wonders fades from mortal sight, and etc, etc. In other words, it's like skipping from a 1935 game to a 1945 game, perhaps.

Anyway, so if we skip like that, I decided to make it clear to the players that (a) they did not have to stay with their current characters, but could "write them an ending" as they saw fit; (b) they could stay with their current characters if they wanted, and would have a free hand in upgrading or changing them, because the intevening ten years would be up to the players; and (c) the new game, essentially, would be set anywhere we felt like, not necessarily on the same soil we were using in this one.

So I was turning these things over in my mind and just getting around to seeing what the players think, when Julie tells me two things. Mind you, this is BEFORE I have articulated ANYTHING about the above paragraph to the players.

1) She likes her current character, but could easily see that later in the character's life, the character would be less desirable to play (complex reasons why).
2) She likes the niece NPC immensely and would like to try playing her some time, and has given some thought to what the niece will be like and be doing as she grows up.

Well. As I said a couple of times in the Art-Deco Melodrama thread, "I never argue with the word of God."

Best,
Ron

THE QUESTING BEAST rules deal with players who are writing their own stories and in doing so they get to control as many "npc" characters as they create. Also, they get limited use of other peoples' creations. This is very difficult to articulate and while writing it I found that I was having to reinvent how I view gaming.

I've often ran games in which players have multiple characters, but rarely has it ever panned out the way I hoped. Not that the concept is flawed, it was simply a matter of approach. You play one style of rp for years and then change something as simple as number of characters per player and suddenly you're dealing with a whole new set of problems.

Later

James V. West

Goosebumps. I've got goosebumps.

Julie,
"My view of her originally was soley in relationship to her aunt (my original PC). I am now much more interested in this particular character and want to have a more active role in how she may influence events during play."

Cool. It sounds like taking her on as a PC formalized this (growing?) change in your relationship with her. Is that fair to say? You increasingly protagonized her in play, and eventually it just made sense to call her a PC? Or did you hold back from protagonizing her, though you wanted to, until you took her as a PC? (I hope I'm using 'protagonize' in a technically correct way.)

(I think I might be trying to talk about ownership. At the moment before she became a PC, did you own her or did Ron?)

It happens to us all the time, both ways. Characters grow and go along and suddenly we realize that we really care.

"During the gaming session, Olga's PC status meant that a solo scene took place that would not have otherwise been played out."

Ah, yeah. PCs get the screen time, don't they.

Actually I think of it as curtailed freedom. NPCs can run around and do anything they want off-screen. Nobody has to know or approve but me, until I reveal it in play as a done deal. PCs, everybody wants a say in.

Ron,
How much ownership of Olga did you feel before she switched? It sounds like in a lot of ways she was mostly a PC already, yes?

Julie, Ron,
Sounds like a great game. Thanks for telling me.

Oh but wait, Olga's dramatic role. Now she's a main character, where before she was supporting cast?

Do you have any NPCs in your game who are main characters? A lot of times a GM will say something like "I have all my NPCs, but I also play this character as a PC in the group..."

James (and Marco),
"THE QUESTING BEAST rules deal with players who are writing their own stories and in doing so they get to control as many "npc" characters as they create. Also, they get limited use of other peoples' creations."

When we started our Ars Magica game however many years ago, that's exactly what we did. It didn't go the way we hoped either. Now we play each others' friends and relations instead of our own, if you see what I mean. (Kind of like Marco's genius idea of playing each others' bullies.)

Now we pretty much openly negotiate: "Meguey, I'll play your older brother, okay? Anything I should know about him?" and she might say, "no, he's all yours, except he's really well educated." Or whatever.

Ownership issues again. I own the big brother, except Meguey owns his education. Must think.

Blake,
We've never managed to kill off that many grogs. Maybe we love them too much.

-lumpley Vincent

[ This Message was edited by: lumpley on 2001-12-09 09:44 ]

lumpley,

We loved the grogs too, but somehow the lack of ownership (and perhaps the corresponding ego-identification) meant we played them with an abandon that exposed them unabashedly to severe hazards. Hence their mortality level was high. Plus in those long-running sagas, we lost a few to old age. THAT'S an interesting way to lose a character, let me tell you.

Best,

Blake

Blake,
That must be it. We just divvied the grogs up same as everybody, and got attached to them.

But god, we had one covenant never make it out of spring. We were just a bunch of kids, no sense or real power. Our healer got terribly sick (that was his deal) and while half of us were taking him to the healing springs we'd heard of in Bath or wherever, our estranged captain of the guard came back with plague. Looking for healing, of course. We lost three wizards, our one apprentice, covenfolk we loved. You ever go to an old cemetary and look at the stones: John Martin b.1884 d.1919, Mary Martin b.1887 d.1919, Timothy Martin b.1911 d.1919, Charity Martin b.1916 d.1919, John Martin Jr. b.1918 d.1919. That was us.

-lumpley Vincent

Vincent,

You asked,
"Do you have any NPCs in your game who are main characters? A lot of times a GM will say something like 'I have all my NPCs, but I also play this character as a PC in the group...'"

I used to do this all the time in my Champions game, and it had its advantages and disadvantages. If the character never did anything significant, then he or she was useless; if the character did too much significant, then he or she tended to overshadow the PCs. But most of the time, especially in my last game ('89-'92), it worked all right.

Since getting back into role-playing ('96-present), I have avoided this tactic pretty thoroughly, in that I decided that the NPC-protagonist (GMPC?) was offering too much of a safety-net for players not to have their PCs be protagonists.

With one exception - a character in the Hero Wars game, Aething by name, who is now the clan chief and authority-figure for the NPCs. And let me tell you, it is one stone bitch to keep her from being "the main character." In several instances, I've even "faded" her from the scene in ways that threw the decisions into the player-characters' laps, instead of hers. (It was easier in Orkworld, in which the dowmga character, or matriarch-mom NPC, had a more defined role in the overall system and setting.)

It all comes down to whether the players feel as if the PCs are being marginalized by (a) being obligated to the NPC's concerns, up to and including taking orders from her; or (b) having game events being influenced or even resolved by the NPC's actions.

Best,
Ron

Ron,
So now but that's interesting. Even with relationship maps and open-ended games and following the word of god? It seems like it'd be easy to play a GMPC at the same level of hooked-in and authority as the other PCs.

Know what? I think it's because that's what I would want to do. That's why we're co-GMing, really. None of us wanted to do without playing a PC or two.

Hm.

-lumpley Vincent

Hi Vincent,

You wrote, in reference to some of the game techniques I've been describing,
"It seems like it'd be easy to play a GMPC at the same level of hooked-in and authority as the other PCs."

Easi-ER, I would say. I haven't found it to be outright, you know, easy.

I think we should distinguish among these situations:

1) The GM who runs an NPC-PC as a control device, both for immediate scene outcomes and overall story outcomes, and perhaps even as an auto-feedback loop, being a one-person GM and player "within" but separated from the group.

This phenomenon tends to generate resentment from the players, and it was the constant danger during my old Champions days. A fellow I used to play with a lot back then was notorious for it in his fantasy games, as his NPCs were vastly more interesting and relevant to him than the PCs could be, and - and given his philosophy of play - than the PCs could POSSIBLY be.

2) The GM who runs an NPC-PC as a means of providing "good setting," ie that which helps in reinforcing/enjoying Premise for the players to act upon. That's what I'm hoping to accomplish a lot these days. My goal is for the players to be the primary authors, and I as GM am literally "lesser" in terms of story power (or, rather, my role is as facilitative as possible). This NPC is a very important part of the landscape, so to speak.

The problem is of course that the story itself sometimes "makes more sense" (is "better," has "more integrity," etc) when that NPC really is in center stage and making the key decision of the scene.

I referred to the issue as a stone bitch before, and I meant it, but it's a "problem" in the sense of a cool and challenging artistic issue, rather than in the sense of a continuing, disruptive, dysfunctional snag.

It's only a problem in the negative sense if the players (a) are marginalized and (b) don't care about the NPC. That hasn't cropped up in the Hero Wars game.

3) The GM who is a player at the same time, and the other players are also GMs, at the same time. I'm not sure I said that right ... OK, a bunch of players, each with a PC or two. Now GM-role tasks kind of shift around the group, either by scene or by session or whatever. If I'm not mistaken, this is the method of play that you're carrying out.

By definition, you've solved any potential "problem" faced by the other options. I can imagine one or two limitations of this method in terms of various goals of play, but the GM-PC problem of #1 would appear to have simply disappeared.

How's that breakdown? Make sense? I am concerned that your emphasis on shared GMing might lead someone to confound #1 and #2.

Best,
Ron

Nice post, Ron. I'm there.

I have a little more time just now, so I'll explain myself better. I hope. So in the first half of my post I was suggesting a third non-coGMed situation. Let's take your Art Deco Melodrama game (which thank you for such an amazing resource). What if during the character creation process, you had created a character too? As openly as the other players did, going to them about kickers and backstory and demons and so on, just like they did, just another character? (Oh, um, and Sorcerer were the kind of game where the PCs got together in a group so you wouldn't always be having conversations with yourself.) Your character wouldn't have the answers since there aren't any 'the answers,' she wouldn't drive events because everybody drives their own events (including her, but not exclusively is the point), plus you'd get to have the fun of having a PC out there in the story.

The second half of my post was me saying -- hold on, that may be fine, but that's what I want out of a game. You may want something completely different. It might be just fine with you that you're not playing a PC, it might even be a relief or a delight. I was assuming that you weren't seeing the opportunity, but actually maybe you weren't and maybe you were, and either way maybe you wouldn't take it anyway. So no biggie.

(Incidentally, we shift GM duties basically around whose PC is doing things. When Emily Care's and Meguey's PCs are doing something together, I'm the GM. When my guy's the guy, Emily Care and Meguey co-GM, discussing what they think should happen. And every other combination, many times and back in a session.)

More generally, I'm kind of thinking in terms of NPC privilege vs. PC privilege. NPCs are privileged to do things offscreen. They're privileged to change their natures more fluidly, and to more overtly serve their players' whims.

Oh and seriously, I haven't mentioned it before but thanks for the Art Deco Melodrama threads, and to you Tor, and you Jesse, and you Paul. Just awesome.

-lumpley Vincent

[ This Message was edited by: lumpley on 2001-12-12 19:39 ]

What is the difference between a GM PC and an NPC? Aren't all the characters other than the players the GM's PCs? From a Narrativist view, the only thing that I can get is that a PC is a Focus of the story. But the Narrativist rule is that the GM should not make the game about NPCs. Well, calling an NPC a PC seems to be just an end-around of this rule, making an exception for one character.

The idea behind having a GM is to have somebody impartial and unencumbered by a PC to orchestrate everything else. Why mess with that balance? If you really want everybody to have characters, I suggest splitting up the GMing amongst all players as well. And then you have Universalis (obligatory apollogy for blatant plug).

Mike

Mike,

You're flailing a little here. Vincent is part of the group that includes Emily Care and Meguey, and among the three of them, their posts on the Forge BEGAN with the description of "GM-full" role-playing, as opposed to "GM-less." So Vincent's perfectly aware of your option - it's what he's doing already.

And yes, Universalis offers another excellent example.

Best,
Ron

Yes, I see what you're saying. What I'm getting at, though, is that there is a paricular advantage to having a dedicated GM. If you do decide to "go over" then I'd think that spreading the power across all equally is the next best option (or possibly best overall). But I do see the advantages to their system as well. In the end I think that any well considered distribution is probably just fine, and preference will dictate.

Mike

Mike,
IF, ready, IF NPCs are just the GM's PCs, then why:
-Are there different rules for creating them?
-Are GMs expected to use Author Stance so much more extensively than players?
-Aren't players usually allowed to play as many as they want?
-Do they get to change their natures so completely so late in the game?
-Do they get to do trememdously important things off-screen, without rolling for it?

I think that NPC vs. PC is a. an accident of history and b. a dodge. I think the real issue is Main Character vs. Supporting Cast. Look at Ron's example #1 from his post at the top of the page. The problem isn't that an NPC is driving the story, the problem is that the GM is using her power to make all of the other players' characters into Supporting Cast.

Right?

My position is that sharing narrative power works both ways. If the players have more narrative power, then we can let go of the (in my opinion) improbable dumb old 'impartial GM' thing. When players get to do more GM things, like say where the story goes and what the story means and what the story should focus on and who's important and hell, whether the crate of bat guano falls on ugly pig Bob -- then the GM should be more free to do player things too. Because: why not? The old reason -- the GM has too much power and will dominate the story and it'll suck for everybody else -- doesn't apply.

Anyway, whatever else, why mess with the balance is the worst possible reason to design games, if you ask me. I'm about messing with the balance.

How do supporting cast and everybody else in the world work in Universalis?

-lumpley Vincent