thread: 2005-04-06 : The Whole Point
On 2005-04-10, Tony Pace wrote:
Here's an example of how system and setting and actual play can interact to produce an unfortunate moment.
We were playing WFRP, which is one of the purest examples of random character generation. At any rate one of our players rolled a Bawd, which is a career which more or less amounts to assistant pimp. The player is a woman and she chose to play a female character.
Then the GM gets some clever ideas reading lists like this one and decides to try some of the Narravtive stuff people are talking about, like bangs. So, to avoid the details, there was a situation where the character was threatened with rape at the end of a series of escalations, and some of the other players didn't want to save her. Squick.
Now looking back, maybe I should have stayed far away from that series of escalations, but two aspects of WFRP weren't helping me.
The dark, realistic setting introduces a lot of discomfort inducing elements into play, like being a torturer or an assistant pimp.
Second, the use of truly random character generation means that you don't get to define your own character premise at the beginning of play - you may get handed a set of character issues that frankly just kick the sleeping dogs where they lie. A player choice to explore dark issues like this is cool. As an imposition, it's ugly.
So now our game is in deep trouble! The last session was vry intense, and lot of good stuff got done, but the inter-player tensions pulled out by that incident willl undoubtably have some long-lasting effects on the game.
