thread: 2009-07-26 : Very Briefly about Authority
On 2009-08-03, Josh W wrote:
CC@43, Well it's sort of a paradox; he's stuck either way. He probably would pull the character out and replace him with a new one, one he is less invested in, but that would also defy the character! I vastly prefer fallout to endure duress, because fallout still allows the player to take ownership of what happens to his character, as well as giving them grounds to see it as a good thing. I think that difference is closer to what you suggest about authority; the fallout system works partially because it requires the input of the player controlling the character, and partially because it encourages a player to engage with what is being done. Poison'd seems to do focus on the latter more than the first, although it's mechanism for doing that mostly misses me; I'm just not a "black freighter" kind of guy.
Another way to put it might be this; people will except a social contract principle like the one you suggest more readily if they agree with the parameters within which that influence will fall, and that can be tuned carefully to make interactions pretty positive. So far so agreeing I'm sure. Secondly they will be even more likely to agree to it if they consider that input to be of value to them, because a person "gets" their character or because it acts as useful inspiration. People accept character creation restrictions for much the same reason. We probably agree here as well, hopefully.
I've rewritten traits for friends even though that's so not my job, just because people liked the succinct way I phrased them. And in freeform imaginative chatting, I've over-ruled something someone else has said by coming up with something they like better. We approached both situations the same, but in the first situation an explicit authority thing was lurking underneath, in case someone tried to take over the imaginative conversation in a way that people actually didn't like better. A good authority system for cooperative play passes the buck over to valuing each others contributions and gets out of everyone's way, wouldn't it be awesome if we could make that step happen faster!
