Musing on the Nature of Character in RPGs

[Ovinomancer]

From this, I have to think playing a character in The Between would feel to me at least a little bit as though I was playing someone else's character, in the same way that in a band, playing a cover is (most of the time) playing someone else's song. (it is possible to take a cover and make it yours but that has always felt to me like an exception, not the default)

I can see that. To be honest, it does feel like I was given a character thumbnail and asked to fill it in and play it and the writers will make changes to the script to accommodate. That's cool and interesting to me, though, so it doesn't bother me. I don't really feel like it is a cover because I will have lots of creative options as play progresses, so it won't end up being the same song. More like the opening bars and the key is locked in, but you get to go from there? I dunno, analogies can be fraught. This one may be getting stretched too far by me.

BTW, Johnny Cash did the best version of Hurt. NIN might as well be the cover. Fight me if you dare.

 

[prabe]

BTW, Johnny Cash did the best version of Hurt. NIN might as well be the cover. Fight me if you dare.

I'm enough into electric and electronic music, and enough of a fan of noise as a part of the musical palette, that I disagree. For me, they're roughly equal, with different strengths, though I might favor one or the other at different points. I don't exactly see it as a fight worth fighting, though.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I'm enough into electric and electronic music, and enough of a fan of noise as a part of the musical palette, that I disagree. For me, they're roughly equal, with different strengths, though I might favor one or the other at different points. I don't exactly see it as a fight worth fighting, though.

Nope, it's on. 3 o'clock high. Parking lot. Bring a knife.

 

[Manbearcat]

The deputy? In game I was approaching him because it makes sense to me that Rattlesnake was comfortable with the law in the West and predicated his assumption that it would be about the same here. I was actually ready for that to not work out, but the move to invite for a drink is just plain universal. I could easily see the deputy becoming a friend of Rattlesnake, or at least a drinking buddy. There's very much a sense here of a personal relationship based on shared interests.

ETA: yes, I know it's constable. You aren't changing Rattlesnake, though. Every policeman's gonna be deputy or a sheriff or a Marshal.

So, this has somewhat evolved. At no point did Mister look at Doyle as a friend. He was an target to be manipulated for advantage, then an asset to be used. At first, Mister wouldn't have stepped in to help Doyle unless it offered clear advantage towards something Mister wanted. Then, Mister viewed him as an extension of the crew, if a distant one, and so the idea of protection extended as well. Now? Asset. Nothing more. Mister will spend him for advantage in a heartbeat, but keeps a long eye on things so as not to waste him.

That shift was when Mister picked up Cold as a trauma. You should ask about Martha. Cause I don't know the answer to that one.

I'm not sure there's been a moment of play that's useful to clarify Rattlesnake's relationship -- too new, nothing really called on yet. For Doyle, we did go out of our way to make sure he was clear of the Durmont business (we framed Doyle's superior officer, but it turned out he was possessed by a demon, so we also dealt with that). That was a very important point for that score. I know that the other two in the Crew have a different take on relationships in Blades, and foresee some of my recent trauma acquisitions as being a point of contention. We haven't really talked about the dog incident yet.

I'm actually finding that a fascinating bit about the Blades game. Our crew has been remarkably consistent and on the same page, but the recent spate of bad luck and traumas mounting up on members is starting to drive wedges into the crew. I've never gotten that deep into Blades to observe how traumas can create intra-crew problems and new spaces for play. Very cool stuff. To me, at least.

Now, can you look at those two NPCs only as game pieces?

* How are you (the player) oriented to them as game pieces?

* What role does play premise, structure, action resolution, and incentive structures play into this?

* In what was is it different between the two games (using the above question as anchors fit your answer)?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Now, can you look at those two NPCs only as game pieces?

No. They're real, I tell you! REAL! Yeah, sure, I can strip it down.

* How are you (the player) oriented to them as game pieces?

* What role does play premise, structure, action resolution, and incentive structures play into this?

* In what was is it different between the two games (using the above question as anchors fit your answer)?

Doyle is more of a tangible thing. I know in Blades that Doyle can become a strong tool for moving the fiction around, and that I have a lot of control over whether or not that's a thing that happens. I know I can take actions to improve relationships with Doyle, and that these will factor into and be part of the focus of play if I do so. Doyle is a legit playing piece who's power to affect things in the game is up to me.

The Constable is nowhere near as tangible a thing. There's only the fictional positioning of this particular Threat that made the constable useful. I do not have know if the constable would be a useful tool to acquire moving forward, or even if they'll continue to be useful in this particular Threat. I'm also not clear on how I might go about the acquisition and positioning of the constable. I can see usefulness, but play doesn't look like it will revolve around my relationship with the Constable much unless I invoke him in a situation where it makes sense to do so, and I have little control over how often those situations may occur. The Constable is much more vague and fuzzy as a game piece.

 

[Manbearcat]

What about the street kid Edward in The Beyond vs Dirty Dan and Chomper (before they became Crew members) in Blades?

As pieces of fiction.

Then as game pieces.

 

[Fenris-77]

That's a fascinating comparison, especially with the rather novel (to me, at least) approach the Between takes. Do you think other games could benefit from eliding backstory and focusing on outward characterization, or is it something specific to the Between? From my quick reading, it seems that the backstory for the characters is something that's "discovered" for each playbook during the course of play.

Funny you should mention this. I've been thinking a lot in the last could of days about porting some of the mechanics from the Between to a 5E game.

 

[Ovinomancer]

What about the street kid Edward in The Beyond vs Dirty Dan and Chomper (before they became Crew members) in Blades?

As pieces of fiction.

Then as game pieces.

Okay, so this is feeling like an inside discussion and I'd like to open it up so I'm going to put in more detail here.

IN the Blades game, we have two members of our crew named Dirty Dan and Chomper as part of our gang of rooks -- folks that collect info and sneak around and stuff. Dan is an older homeless guy and Chomper is his dog. We picked these guys up as Assets in an early score, meaning we spent downtime to recruit some people for a fight and these were two of them. We kept picking them up this way, and when we up-tiered the crew and grew our available gangs, Dan and Chomper came onboard and were now part of the crew proper. They've featured in a number of scores, and Chomper has been particularly effective mostly due to die rolls but the legends has grown.

In The Between, one of the players overheard a street urchin planning to go into a haunted house as a dare, followed him, and actually saved him from the haunting. We took him to Hargrave House, fed him and cleaned him up, and then gently interrogated him for what he saw in the basement of the haunted house. This went very well, and Rattlesnake gave him a bullet as a souvenir for his remarkable bravery. The GM determined that this level of effort and success meant that the urchin was now available as a side character resource for the House, which we can leverage.

That's the fiction.

As game pieces, Dirty Dan and Chomper are really just interchangable names on the rooks gang. The real piece is the rooks gang, and what they can do for the crew. We move the gang, but speak in the fiction about Dan and Chomper and Darla and Olga and Greg and Louganis (the latter two have a hilarious story, hence the names). If they were killed, then the fiction would be one thing, but gamewise we'd just spend the downtime activity to get new plug-ins.

The urchin was just a point of fiction we were leveraging to make Information moves and get clues on the Threat. (In The Between, the goal is to hunt supernatural Threats terrorizing London. It's a Carved in Brindlewood game, so it uses the clue and question system from Brindlewood (another RPG). This doesn't look look like CoC, in fact, clues are largely vague and are put together by the players into a theory that gets tested with the Question move -- a success means the player theory is right, a failure means the GM inflicts some measure of pain and the theory is not correct.) The bit where the urchin was turned into a Side Character was cool, and followed from the fiction, but we didn't really have any way to make that move to get it to happen. So, yes, the urchin is a more valuable game piece now, but how that happened wasn't something I feel the players could do reliably. I think maybe they shouldn't be able to, because that sets up some feedback loops I think might cause problems.

 

[Campbell]

From this, I have to think playing a character in The Between would feel to me at least a little bit as though I was playing someone else's character, in the same way that in a band, playing a cover is (most of the time) playing someone else's song. (it is possible to take a cover and make it yours but that has always felt to me like an exception, not the default)

I think this is interesting. Maybe this is my theater background speaking, but I have never really felt that I had ownership of the characters I have played. For me there's a big difference in feel between characters I have designed and ones derived from the thematically strong playbooks in a Powered by the Apocalypse game worth its salt. Still I tend to feel the pool in the other direction. I feel like I owe it to the role/character to do it justice, to advocate on its behalf. That I owe it to the people I play with to play the role/character well.

Not sure that makes any sense. This is all very stream of consciousness for me.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Funny you should mention this. I've been thinking a lot in the last could of days about porting some of the mechanics from the Between to a 5E game.

If you mean the clue and question system, that could work, but you'd have some issues as the Brindlewood system really kinda doesn't work as well without the rest of the PbtA framework driving clue acquisition and that driving play through the complication snowball. Pay attention to this during integration. I think it could work just as a bolt on, but it won't be driving play as much as it does in games built around it.