thread: 2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome
On 2011-05-13, ndp wrote:
I have a (long) story - I don't know if it'll be useful, but it's the first thing I thought of with having unwelcome things happen in games. Actually, two stories, contrasting what it seems to me that David is talking about, and what Vincent is talking about.
I was playing Vampire: the Requiem with my buddies back in Boston. J was the GM, and I was one of three starting-level (neonate?) characters, a musician who had been embraced mere months before the game started and still had strong ties to the mortal world. In my first scene of the first session, I blew a don't-freak-out-when-you're-hungry roll (Composure+something) and the rules-based result was that I ended up killing the guy I was trying to feed on. This wasn't at all how I saw the character, but the game rules inexorably led to this scene - I made a guy with low composure, he had really low blood points so he needed to feed, I gambled on doing it "humanely", I lost and killed a guy, right out of the gate. Oh man. Harsh.
Later in the game, there was this mortal woman who my guy had recorded some songs with before he was embraced. J started threatening her, both as a fictional way to get my character to agree to some bad shit he didn't want to do, and because he knew that I was invested in this woman not getting hurt. He used his GM authority to target her, and I used all my available resources to fight to keep her safe, even though it was a fairly tangential issue to the main stuff going on. I, as a player, was invested in keeping her safe. Like, sitting-on-my-hands-squirming invested. In the game, she witnessed some freaky shit (I think a Nosferatu vampire feeding on someone), and she freaked out, and I had to decide how to deal with it, and the ONLY viable option (other than her going mad, essentially) was to use my vampire mind powers to make her forget about the whole thing, which meant forgetting her relationship to my character.
Oh, how I agonized about that decision! It violated every conception of my character, which had ALREADY been violated by that early murder! I was all "well, sure, it's not really in his CONTROL to freak out in a blood rage, but he would NEVER destroy an innocent persons mind". And then he did! It was so unwelcome, but so the only satisfying way to solve the situation!
So, um, that second story is what I think Vincent is talking about. I hope that helps in some way! (or, if I'm wrong, I'm listening...)
