thread: 2006-05-25 : System and character sole-ownership
On 2006-05-26, Sarah wrote:
Hey, Vince. Nice post! I'm not entirely sure why any of this should strike people as "scary," but then, maybe I'm just weird that way.
From my perspective, this is really the most important bit, right here:
"From the point of view of design, it's especially important to zoom in on character ownership until it no longer looks monolithic, until you can see the whole family of concerns it represents."
Yes. Excellent. Breaking up the component parts of character ownership seems to me to be a really worthwhile goal, not least of which because it can help to get a feel for what people really mean when they say things like: "I want to be able to make decisions for my own character."
In freeform circles, that's a terribly common thing to hear people say - but it's often not entirely clear what they mean by it. And since in some prose-based freeform games, all of the aspects of character ownership you cited are not necessarily taken as read (some rules allow for people writing each other's characters, for example), the specifics of character ownership can be a particularly bad point for the group to be fuzzy or unclear on.
This makes XP go "There are also"
frequently restrictions on characters in a given group/community that infringe on the supposedly complete character ownership. Sure, it's all your character, but it's NOT okay for hir to be a God; it's NOT okay for hir to never get hurt; etc. That means others are making decisions about what your character can and cannot be and become.
And you're completely right, that area is the most important to have clear communication on in those communities, yet many don't do a very good job of doing that.
This makes SK go "Exactly"
Just checking - this is Xenopulse/Christian, right? Yeah, there was a situation in one game I observed when one player gave another player permission to "Godmod" her character for a given scene, but then got terribly upset when the player wrote from the character's *internal* point-of-view. There, the distinction between "I control what my character says/does" and "I control what my character feels/thinks" was very important to the player - and the lack of clear communication on that distinction caused some very hurt feelings.
This makes XP go "That's me :)"
