thread: 2006-01-24 : Still More Character Ownership
On 2006-01-24, Gordon wrote:
The fact that we already do this - that is, it is not really true that your character is entirely a personal privledged protagonist, ever - encourgaes me to rephrase the issue to "where does the buck stop?"
If we have the protagonism-buck stop with a particular player for a particular character, we should have a reason for doing so. There is no reason why we couldn't choose to have the protagonism-buck for a character stop with the dice (cards/straws/whatever), if there's a good use/reason for that. Often "the dice determine protagonism" has been seen as a bad, upsetting, maybe even damaging (not that I know just what Ron means by that) thing, but there is absolutely no reason why it would have to be so, even within premise-oriented play.
I would like to re-point at an issue that Matt mentioned early on - that not knowing who the protagonist(s) are is problematic to the quality of the story until we decide on/discover them. I think this is an issue, but not an absolute barrier. Sometimes it is best to know, but sometimes it isn't. From an author standpoint, it is (it seems to me) an even bigger issue than it is from a reader/observer standpoint, but since play of the sort we're discussing here is (inexactly) both of those things at once - still not a total block.
