thread: 2006-01-24 : Still More Character Ownership
On 2006-01-25, ScottM wrote:
The thread's been a long and good one (well, for me—Vincent's pain makes it clear that it's not unvarnished good).
A lot of the thread looks like it was about answering: Are we still obsessed with securing our personal
relevance?
That answer was a resounding yes. When the word character is reinserted, and tools are assumed that make the player's investment in something else is valued, then players are more willing to see random death.
Part of the problem was that Vincent's questions asked about our personal characters, twice. When he later asked (in comment 5), "Would any or all of you please go back to your comment and read it for assumptions about character ownership? I'd be grateful. What if we make those assumptions to no longer hold?"
I doubt that alone would be successful. Even if I'm sharing my character with others (like the previous Anna and Ben examples), I'd still be unhappy at losing my character in any one-player, one-primary character setup. The successful forms that emerged later in this thread (essentially fusing non-character based resources with enough surviving characters that could be assumed as roles) sound like they would work.
Is my perception right? Part of the Band of Brothers example's success is that the role you take over is "the same team", the same core story. You can expand a previously neglected character—and the team as a whole grows more complex. It seems similar to Inspectres play, where the company itself becomes a character, as players choose how to expend resources and use it.
If the alternative was taking over opposition characters, helping the GM play the monsters (in a more traditional game), or having to leave the room (as Tony's example in the thread Vincent linked to), it'd take a lot more to keep me happy.
(Cross posted with Lisa, who seems to be making a lot of the points I'm fumblingly trying to make.)
