NeoTrad/OC Play, & the treatment of friendly NPCs (++)

[S'mon]

Probably the best approach is just to say you want your character to feel more challenged.


'My character gets everything he wants a bit too easily. I'd like it if things were harder on him. In a lot of stories the characters really have to go through the ringer, I'd like a bit more of that.'


If you want actual challenge based play where real permanent failure is on the line, then you need the group and the GM to all be on board with it.


So is your dissatisfaction more:

A) In fiction the main characters tend to suffer horribly. 'Turns out the father you thought was dead is actually a commander in the enemy force, and he's just cut your hand off, and he wants you to join him.' 'You've been given a ring that corrodes your soul and you need to destroy it before the world is consumed by darkness. and you've just been stabbed by a ghost.' A majority of stories have far more failure than success or lots of set backs before success.

B) There is no strategic challenge. You as a player don't have to work to get what you want , you don't have to figure things out and strategize. Or to the extent you do it's easy.


If it's B (which it seems to be from what you've said) then I think you're probably out of luck if Kimberly doesn't understand that mode of play. The issue is that even if you manage to explain it, there is no guarantee she'll be interested or even capable. Where as A is probably a cake walk for an OC GM.

I tend to be pessimistic about mixed agendas though, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.

I was thinking/talking about (edit) B, but actually edit (A) is probably more relevant to the discussion. I think a lot of OC play tends strongly towards "Cosy Roleplay", I used Kim's game as an example. I think this is actually a pretty strong play mode compared to GMs who are nominally running a Trad game but are afraid to mess with the PCs. But I think probably most players, and certainly me, like a bit more Drama & even Sadness. It was something I like about another friend Jelly's GMing. She's definitely an OC style GM too, but she's very happy to do horrible things to my PC like taking away the testicles of my Tanuki PC (testicles are super important to Tanuki...) via a sex-swap, just when I was about to try to court a female Tanuki.

 

[S'mon]

As a player I do definitely prefer OC/NeoTrad GMs to Trad GMs, who I tend to associate with a rigid, linear approach that can result in railroading. I really hated it when a GM said my drunken INT 8 4e berserker dwarf barbarian had to participate in an arcane puzzle skill challenge in the prescribed manner - by solving the puzzle, not by hitting things with my maul until the problem went away. OC/NeoTrad GMs are normally far far more flexible around that sort of thing, maybe a bit over-generous. OSR/Old School GMs are usually flexible too, but more likely to rule the PC's attempts fail.

I do remember one bad experience I had with a player who as a player was fun and imaginative with an OC orientation, but then as a GM she was a hardcore Trad railroader who scolded me for "doing it wrong" and "trying to break her game" because I tried to speak with the Redbrand Ruffians in Phandalin. She as a player in Red Hand of Doom had been happy to seduce an evil Druid-Lich and recruit him to the cause of the good guys, a bit like a sexier Aragorn with the Men of the Mountain.

I guess my ideal is something like an Old School/Neo-Trad mix. I definitely enjoy in-character RP and examining the inner lives of characters far more than is common in hardcore Old School gaming. My friend Matt GMs like this although his NPCs all tend to be jokes riffing off The Fast Show and other aspects of Gen X pop culture, it's a lighter more comedic style than I'd go for.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

A big theme with previous OC threads has been establishing the distinction between "OC as a low difficulty setting" and "OC as variously servicing differing fantasies" one touchstone is the new dragon age-- it features paralell difficulty settings, one can make the game harder by tightening reaction windows for greater mechanical demand, or let that be more lenient and use other settings to make char op the primary skill.

In a similar vein, a game with viciously difficult encounters, but where death is off the table so the players are frequently waking up after being knocked and proceeding on their adventures is a valid construction of OC play.

 

[S'mon]

I was thinking/talking about (edit) B, but actually edit (A) is probably more relevant to the discussion. I think a lot of OC play tends strongly towards "Cosy Roleplay", I used Kim's game as an example. I think this is actually a pretty strong play mode compared to GMs who are nominally running a Trad game but are afraid to mess with the PCs. But I think probably most players, and certainly me, like a bit more Drama & even Sadness. It was something I like about another friend Jelly's GMing. She's definitely an OC style GM too, but she's very happy to do horrible things to my PC like taking away the testicles of my Tanuki PC (testicles are super important to Tanuki...) via a sex-swap, just when I was about to try to court a female Tanuki.

I got A and B mixed up when I posted, oops. I had been posting about lack of Gamist challenge in OC, but lack of big Narrative stakes is probably a bigger issue. The OC GMs are often very cautious about messing with the PCs, when the players would often very much like the PC to be messed with. I remember in Wilderlands I had it turn out that one PC (Hakeem)'s father was actually the evil warlord villain Yusan. This worked brilliantly, eg it meant that Hakeem was also half brother to the Amazon Princess (& future Queen) Laurana and they worked together to defeat Yusan and the Brigand Host. But I was certainly a bit nervous going against what the player had sketched in his background.

 

[TwoSix]

... but she's very happy to do horrible things to my PC like taking away the testicles of my Tanuki PC (testicles are super important to Tanuki...) ...

I'm going to go out on a limb and stress their importance to many of us who are not Tanuki.

 

[thefutilist]

I got A and B mixed up when I posted, oops. I had been posting about lack of Gamist challenge in OC, but lack of big Narrative stakes is probably a bigger issue. The OC GMs are often very cautious about messing with the PCs, when the players would often very much like the PC to be messed with. I remember in Wilderlands I had it turn out that one PC (Hakeem)'s father was actually the evil warlord villain Yusan. This worked brilliantly, eg it meant that Hakeem was also half brother to the Amazon Princess (& future Queen) Laurana and they worked together to defeat Yusan and the Brigand Host. But I was certainly a bit nervous going against what the player had sketched in his background.

To expand a bit on my earlier comments. I said it wasn't about control and I really don't think it is. You can mess with the players backstory, their character, whatever you want, as long as you do it in a way that 'gets it.'

With most OC players they want you to rain down a world of ruin, conflict and suffering. You just have to do it in the right way. I think the trick is that you just have to do what you think is cool and hope that you both have the same idea of what cool is.

Don't walk on eggshells because you might mess up their backstory or whatever. Just 'be a fan of the character' as PBTA games put it. And that might mean throwing them off buildings, betrayal, starvation, being abandoned by friends and lovers, all of that.

 

[pemerton]

I'm going to go out on a limb and stress their importance to many of us who are not Tanuki.

For that very reason, be cautious as you go out on that limb . . .

 

[S'mon]

To expand a bit on my earlier comments. I said it wasn't about control and I really don't think it is. You can mess with the players backstory, their character, whatever you want, as long as you do it in a way that 'gets it.'

With most OC players they want you to rain down a world of ruin, conflict and suffering. You just have to do it in the right way. I think the trick is that you just have to do what you think is cool and hope that you both have the same idea of what cool is.

Don't walk on eggshells because you might mess up their backstory or whatever. Just 'be a fan of the character' as PBTA games put it. And that might mean throwing them off buildings, betrayal, starvation, being abandoned by friends and lovers, all of that.

Thanks, yeah. An important point was that being Warlord Yusan's son, and the implications of that, made Hakeem more awesome, not less. I was definitely a fan of the character.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This has got me thinking about superhero games again.

Superhero games are very prone to letting players define an awful lot of character-penumbra setting elements. They also assume you resist the urge to disturb those elements more than necessary without a sign-off from players.

But then there's other elements. When an NPC villain ends up flirting with a PC, how that plays out in the long run is not necessarily in a way that will suit the player. In addition a lot of things are intrinsically conflicting in what different players might want out of a situation, because there are a lot of moving parts, and some of them can end up interacting in ways that are going to potentially not be dead-on for a given player to make sense collectively.

(I note here the comment that Thefutilist mentioned earlier about the world not mattering to OC oriented people, but I'm not sure that's entirely true with anyone in a superhero setting; often what they want is their character to serve a particular type of position in those worlds, and that requires the world reaching a steady-state at some point that isn't entirely flexing to them).

It got me thinking about my days back playing in an X-Men themed MUX. This was what was known as a "consent based" MUX. By this they mean that you are not allowed to narrate (since the game had some defined character traits in character write-up, but no real mechanics) something that directly effects another character (there were some exceptions to this but they required direct intervention by an administrator, and usually required a situation where a player has actively incited another player to actions that should be possible within that other player's character definition and that the first player's definitions would be very unlikely to allow them to avoid (I realize that's probably a little hard to follow, but as an example, someone is playing what was called an NFC (Non-Feature Character, i.e. an original character created by the player and probably of modest to moderate power) and, well, picks a fight with, say, Apocalypse (an FC (Feature Character, aka a character who actually comes from the original source). Apocalypse is unlikely to let something like that pass, and even being charitable, will almost certainly beat the NFCs behind, whether that player wants it to happen or not).

In the MUX, the vast majority of characters you'll actually interact with on-screen will be PCs. There will be some exceptions to this, but its overwhelmingly common. So to what extent do the borders imposed by rubbing up against other PCs make this situation impossible to play in OC fashion?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Frankly I'm with you, @S'mon -- I think on the whole OC play tends to be too . . . easy? Convenient, perhaps? for my sensibilities.

My problem with it is that there’s no real risk to the characters. The player has the ultimate say of what should or should not happen to the character, and to their “supporting cast” of NPCs.

It removes a huge chunk of what makes RPGs fun and dynamic… that something unwanted can happen. Without that possibility, it’s hard to really challenge players.