thread: 2006-01-05 : I suspect but can't prove...
On 2006-01-06, Michael S. Miller wrote:
Emily said:
Tie the player effectiveness on another hook, for one. Invest people in the adversity coming their way. Make them want it. Killing character ownership helps do this. If instead of looking at somebody coming at "my" character with a knife as a threat to my gamely livelihood, but as an opportunity to author about something I care about and am interested in, I'll dive right in. I'll take the blow, damn, I'll give myself the blow—if it means I can say something about loyalty, or cowardice or what have you.
I designed With Great Power... to do this without killing character ownership. Each player has a superhero that they have final inking rights over (with 2 exceptions). "Inking" in WGP terms = "the buck stops here" in Ron terms. The first exception is when a character loses a conflict scene. The victor increases the dramatic tension on an aspect of the character (called increasing the Suffering of the Aspect) and describes how that manifests in the SIS.
The 2nd exception is an optional rule in the back. With this option, when you've defined your character as a "partner" of another PC, that character's player can choose to increase the Suffering of your Aspects and get the cards for it.
This illustrates your point about "tying player effectiveness to something else." I looked to nonRPG games and gave each player in WGP the same hand of cards. They can each do the same kinds of things to get more cards (that is, voluntarily increase the Suffering of their aspects).
Vincent, to use an analogy, are you saying that, in these "playerful" games, a player will continue to be the actor of a given character, while someone else is the playwright? If so, do NPC relationships in Trollbabe fit what you're talking about?
Since Discernment has been mentioned, I should say that stories in that game are very, very short. Often only one scene. Characters are conjured into existance and defined by the Lead Scholar, then quickly, furiously played by everyone else, then conflict is resolved and it's time for a new Lead Scholar. That certainly undermines a sense of character ownership.
