thread: 2006-06-15 : The who and why of the owe list
On 2006-06-20, colin roald wrote:
brianm, I think what Vincent is saying is something like this: our far, far distant ancestors faced problems like this, looking upon a world with new minds and no conception of what they were capable of. And now we are bound pretty thoroughly by ten thousand years of their solutions, of the invention of ideas of law and honour and justice and fealty and obligation.
If you could start over again, would you do it the same?
I find that a pretty interesting idea, too. Though the part about "laws are brand new" is maybe a bit of a red herring, since the setting pieces from the oracle bespeak a pretty clear civilization. But this is a fantasy game, and characters with sufficient power are effectively unbound by law, so maybe it comes to the same thing—see Vincent's ghost story.
Though—the ghost story brings up something I'd been meaning to ask. The rules are explicitly limited so that it's impossible to kill a player character as the result of just one conflict. But, there are no such limits on mind control. In our last game, a mad priest character summoned the power of his god and a couple of good rolls in just one conflict, owned the entire room and forced the girl (a player character) to marry him. Mechanically, I wasn't happy with how easy it was to take over someone else's character and force them to do whatever I wanted. But from the sounds of it ("I possessed all the principals, ran roughshod over their interests, and would up right where I wanted to be") you're okay with it.
Ironically, had the priest been a PC, he would have got on the We Owe list for that trip as well, since he was up against two opponents who together had more dice. He just rolled better.
