thread: 2005-11-14 : Dangerousness
On 2005-11-22, Vincent wrote:
Now that I've (finally) read through, let me say: this sounds so familiar to me from our group's Ars Magica play that I can't even blink.
Here's Barry: How do I create a genuinely kick-ass antagonist without stepping on other player's toes?
How indeed!
What you need - by which I mean, what I need - is very clear permissions and expectations about when (not if) I will step on another player's toes. I'm convinced that effective antagonism pretty much means toe-stepping and no way around it.
Choosing "character ownership" as the underlying structure of your play - by which I mean, my play - creates terrible anxiety around antagonism. In order to create an antagonist, I have to build her out of my own character ownership, right? I have to make it so that my character is on a trajectory guaranteed to bring her into conflict with yours - she wants something your character doesn't want to give her.
But then what I've done is, I've cast my vision for my character against your vision for yours. When all we've got to work with is our character ownership, my character wanting something that your character doesn't want to give her is a social-level crisis. It automatically steps on toes, and we don't have any way to deal with that productively. It becomes "I want it! I take it!" vs. "you can't have it! I keep it!" - the only possible compromise is a compromise of vision.
Here's Charles: Would stats and dice have gotten us somewhere better? Possibly, but magic stats for Perdyx wouldn't have helped much. I have Sonata's magic fully stat'ed out in AM terms, but I don't think it gives me much more guidance. For your stats to matter, you'd need for the Monkey to be stat'd out as well, and to have a mechanic for comparisons. We don't have that.
Consider my Otherkind dice again. They aren't a mechanic for comparing stats, but rather for creating tradeoffs.
Kip: I banish you, monkey!
Barry: The three things are banishing the monkey, harming yourself, and keeping your apprentice safe.
Kip: Harming myself isn't okay, how about squandering my resources?
Barry: How about, squandering the covenant's resources?
Kip: Ouch, but yes, I can deal with that.
Barry: Throw down!
I find negotiating about the bounds of what can happen easier and far less disruptive than negotiating about what finally happens. Again, that's probably just because we aren't negotiating a conflict directly between our visions, we're negotiating a common ground.
This makes WMW go "Shoutout for inspiration"
Not really even topical, just that this comment suddenly made a thorny problem go *poof* for me. Wow.
