thread: 2006-01-24 : Still More Character Ownership
On 2006-01-25, Vincent wrote:
Tris, have you watched Band of Brothers? Of course you feel sick about it; a character you liked a lot just died for no reason.
But what happens is, this random, pointless death here, in episode 3, contributes - contributes irreplacably - to what the show's about, here at the end of episode 10. Without it, without a whole backdrop of people we like dying for no reason, the show wouldn't get to say what it has to say.
If we demand that every PC's death be about something right now, a statement, and the player's choice on top, then we lose ... well, we lose every kind of fiction but action-adventure fiction, I think.
This makes DY go "But what do we gain?"
I'm having trouble seeing how we gain anything _except_ specifically being able to say something like the brutality of war. It seems like that's the narrow field of fiction, not the broad one.
This makes VB go "well, I for one want to say something about the brutality of war."
Is there any good reason to limit ourselves to action-adventure? No. Is there any good reason not to expand the range of the form, when we see the opportunity to do so? Fuck no.
This makes BR go "We could also gain a way out of "this character is broken""
In a lot of genres where you're pressing the edge you'll end up with broken characters. In fiction these characters are allowed to leave, die, or withdraw. We know, however that you can't do that with a traditional protagonist RPGing character -- they have to stay and fight it out. Which removes that whole cycle that does such wonderful things in fiction. So we could gain that, in addition to the narrower war stuff.
