Majoru Oakheart said:
I think it's because I don't see playing an RPG as a large excersize in creating a grand story. I see it as playing a character in a make believe world. I might play a meaningless peasant who doesn't do anything useful or a hero who goes out in a blaze of glory 5 minutes. To me, it's about the challenge of playing that character and letting fate unravel for him.
We don't disagree. I wanted to try playing a character consumed by hate, as it's an emotion/motivation that i really don't understand in real life. I've never been able to hate, really. [Another long-standing goal is to play a character driven by greed--something else that is largely foreign to me.] And i wanted to just let fate unravel and see what happened. Sure, i set him into the story at a particular point, where really only a few goals were likely (success or frustration), but other things could've happened, and i still didn't know how i'd get there. It wasn't about the story, it was about playing the character. In this case , acharacter backed into a corner with not a lot of options, and a single-mindedness.
Have you seen Babylon 5? One of the things we know from, i think, episode #1, is that two of the major characters are going to die with their hands locked around each others' throats. Yet, how we get to that point (which is more scripted than anything i had in mind) was still fascinating, compelling drama. And, by the time we see it in context, it has a totally different meaning than was first implied.
When I read your character description, it sounds like I would have interpretted it as "I am creating a character for the express purpose of killing the BBEG" and I would have allowed you to kill him if I gave you the chance.
And, in fairness, i'm sure that's what the GM did. I'm not trying to blame him. My point is that a game that had explicit mechanisms for talking about narrative goals would've prevented the problem. And, honestly, it wasn't the letting my character succeed that was half as anticlimactic (though that certainly was a hollow victory) as putting him in a situation where the Big Bad had essentially already been defeated by forces completely outside of the PCs' realms of influence and without our knowledge, so that i was essentially just doing mop-up.
See, my big problem with understanding the situation is that I don't understand creating a character whose goals you didn't want to be accomplished. To me, the game is about a bunch of heroes fighting against evil. They try their best, sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. Sometimes it is a lot easier than expected. Still, there are other evils to fight and other adventures to go on. So, the PCs go on them because they are heroes and are dedicated to defeating evil in whatever shape it make take.
I may have been unclear. I didn't create a character whose goals i didn't want to accomplish. I created a character where the journey to the goal was the interesting part, not the goal itself. Think of it like this: you want to prove to yourself that you can win a marathon. You train, you buy equipment, you diet, you train some more, you're all prepared. The day of the marathon comes, and due to some fluke nobody else shows up, so they give you the gold medal, without even having you run the race. Would you be satisfied? Similarly, i *did* want my character no succeed--though i didn't expect him to, it was certainly a goal--but if he succeeded, it should've been through hard work, and lots of interesting gameplay. As is, i succeeded in killing an "archenemesis" that i didn't actually have
any in-game interactions with, making the whole "he's my archnemesis" thing feel really contrived.
I could see possibility in your character even beyond what happened. Was someone else in control of this BBEG? Was he just a servant? Is there someone who could take over his legacy? Would someone try to bring him back that needed to be stopped? The Revanant would not rest until ALL his work was done. Maybe he just would not rest while there were others out there who would do the same things as the BBEG. It's a matter of working the game into your character as much as you work your character into the game. The game has to flow both ways.
Yeah, and the GM could've exercised any of those options. He didn't. There was no one behind the Big Bad--just unrelated other threats. We'd already bent the rules a bit to make the character; he was disinclined to bend them further to keep him around after accomplishing his goal. Also, putting other people onto his list would've required completely rewriting his background.
Still, in the case of this character, I think he is better suited as an NPC or a character in a novel than a PC. PCs have to be generic enough to be able to accept multiple plot hooks and reasons for adventure as I discovered in a similar situation:
You may be right--it may have simply been a poor choice of PC. Mind you, he *was* inclined to accept multiple plot hooks and reasons for adventure--he just prioritized one of them. So long as the Big Bad wasn't in evidence (which had been a reasonable amount of the time), he'd've been perfectly willing to do other stuff. He was doing other, completely unrelated, stuff when the Big Bad showed up. I very carefully crafted his personality and background so as to avoid that one-trick-pony pitfall. Up to that point in the campaign (~1.5yrs), we had *always* been either facing that Big Bad (or his minions/machinations), or dealing with something else because he was nowhere to be found. At no point, prior to the introduction of my new PC, had the group ever chosen to go after a different threat/goal while dealing with that Big Bad was an option. So it simply hadn't occurred to me that they ever would.
. HERO isn't incomplete, either. For Gurps you might need a whole library for a specific idea 
. The point was not to talk disparagingly about Fudge, but to stress that the time necessary to define your version of Fudge game should not be counted when you estimate how fast it plays.
