thread: 2006-05-25 : System and character sole-ownership
On 2006-05-30, Charles S wrote:
Ben,
It seems to me that it is generally an easily fulfilled technical agenda item because people/game players generally do a very good job of allocating responsibility for character coherence in a manner that matches concern for character coherence (whereas Tony's argument would suggest that we generally do a less good job of allocating responsibility for character utility and enjoyability in alignment with concern for character utility and alignment).
While the fact that we are generally pretty solid at distributing character coherency maintenance authority to match interest in coherency in a particular character, it does not necessarily imply that the question of maintaining that balance remains trivial for all possible potentially interesting distributions of either concern or authority, particularly if we note that there are styles of distribution that are largely unexplored. It is worth considering whether 1) those authority/interest distribution styles are unexplored because they don't balance authority/interest in a manner that doesn't violate trivial simulationist goals 2) there are hidden balance issues that haven't been explored as well that will need to be resolved if those distributions are to meet a trivial simulationist standard.
It is worth noting that it has seemed to be much easier to come up with examples of games that radically restructured control over characters, such that character ownership becomes a non-issue, or traditional ownership styles (1 player per character has final say on all internal intent and back story questions), than it is to come up with games that retain something like traditional ownership, but add in an element of mixed ownership over certain aspects of the character (as Vincent has talked about finding interesting). That these imagined games largely don't exist raises the issue of why, and of how will they differ from either of the two dominant methods of handling character coherency authority.
It may also be worth noting that games that distribute responsibility for character coherency broadly amongst the play group seem to tend to be games of shorter duration. Maintaining coherency is certainly much easier in a short game than in a long game, particularly if there are differences among the players of degree of attention to and memory of details of a particular character from previous sessions.
