thread: 2009-06-22 : Secrets: the Smelly Chamberlain
On 2009-06-22, Brand Robins wrote:
Vincent, this is funny cause I was thinking about a situation in which something like this happened in a game I ran a long time ago, which got brought up at a party not long ago. I'm going to replace the actual character with "chamberlain" and the actual problem with "stinks" because it amuses me to run with it.
Player 1 one day decides that the Chamberlain stinks. He acts out making a face, and then says his character goes and opens the window. Most of the group doesn't notice, but player 2 does.
Player 2 then asks Player 1, at the table but while everyone else is involved in a fight scene and not paying attention, if he was saying that the Chamberlain stinks. Player 1 says, yes, he stinks. Player 2 laughs and the next time he meets the Chamberlain he makes the stink face to, and asks player 1 to open a window. No one really catches on.
Later in the game Player 3 wants to kill the Chamberlain but knows he can't do it alone. At first Player 1 and Player 2 have no real reason to do it. However, they decided together that they'll go along with it because he stinks, and they're tired of it. They never tell Player 3 or 4 about this—but its part of an explicit scene that they bluebook together.
So the Chamberlain is killed by the three together, and the game goes on. Player 4 (the GM) and Player 3 never know that Player 1 and 2 killed the Chamberlain because he stank, just that they did go along with the kill plot. The games goes on and eventually ends.
A year later, the group is back together and talking about the game. Player 3 says something about when they killed the Chamberlain and Player 1 laughs and says, "Player 2 and I only did that because he stank." Player 3 asks what, and Player 2 goes and digs out the bluebook in which they recorded the scene of their characters getting together and deciding to kill the Chamberlain because he stank. Player 4 says, "But he didn't stink, did he?" And Player 2 says, "Well if he didn't we wouldn't have killed him." Player 4 makes a face.
Player 4 then says:
1) "He didn't stink, you must have killed him for some other reason"
2) "I didn't know that he stank, but I guess he must have"
3) "I guess we had different visions of the character"
4) "I need more Vodka."
So if half of the group took action that changed the game based on information that was only real to them, when does it become "real" in any sense at all to everyone else? Especially if the reasoning only becomes obvious (if ever) long after the game is done and the fiction is now just memories and occasional bluebooks?
(In real life Player 4 said he needed more Vodka, because no one needed to make the different stories into one story. They could both be "true" or not, it didn't really matter as play was over. Of course, at that moment, rather like Schr??dinger's Cat, the Chamberlain both stank and didn't.)
