anyway.

That would be very cool. Next time I run Dogs, I will definitely use that rule.

And if you don't like the rule, as a player, you can just make sure that there are never any unassigned relationship dice on your sheet.  They never land there except at character creation.

That sounds like a bit of a flaw in the system, though.

What happens when you've been playing for three sessions, and you're out of unassigned relationship dice?

That being said, I like the mechanic.

In the game that I played in LA, I suggested taking relationships in order to get the last few dice they needed in order to win their final conflict.  What happens if they didn't have a choice in the matter?

You can also throw in a "Luke, I Am Your Father" rule, and say that when an NPC shows up on the table, any player can declare that that NPC is related to another player's PC by blood, thus granting the automatic Blood 1d6 relationship.

Fred: And if you don't like the rule, as a player, you can just make sure that there are never any unassigned relationship dice on your sheet. They never land there except at character creation.

It's against the rules to assign more than one or two relationships during character creation anyway. But now I'm a nitpicky pedant, go me.

Maybe with this alternate co-ownership rule, your fellow players get to assign your relationships at character creation too!

And yes, throw in the I Am Your Father rule too. Good!

I love the I Am Your Father rule.

With hearts and flowers and skulls and bullets.

So, is this kind of co-ownership more or less painful than the "surprise! You used to have a lover in Jamaica, and my guy was boinking her too!" kind?

Vincent,

I think it would depend a lot on what's happening in play.

However, in general I think this type might be. Too me it seems like it could often be a "add intensity or a shift in focus" whereas the other can result in "change a fundemental part of the character."

If I'm trying to gut the guy, and now he's my best friend from seminary it is BIG. But at that point I can still use the system to back out of it, to mess around with it, and so on. It has given context and meaning to a conflict I started.

The previous example is a conflict I asked for in general, but the context and details are out of my hands. At the point at which I've suddenly got a gay lover, I'm having to change a lot more in my head, and with (possibly) less control.

I'm not sure that's accurate to whats actually going on in the system, but that is what it feels like, on first blush.

My first reaction would be to say less:

"Used to have a lover in Jamaica" implies something that may contradict how the player has conceived of the character in a way that can't be resolved.  (Or it may give the player a chance to reenvision them in a useful way.)

When someone assigns relationship dice (without the "you are my Father" rule) how that means is entirely up to the player.  If you feel strongly about them, one way or another, any amount of dice (3d4, 2d10, 1d6) works fine; the worst thing that could happen is the other player not assigning any dice, and then if you need it you can just ask.  (Saying no—"I'm saving those for later" *smirk*—just puts that player in something like the GM chair for a moment.)

The alternative is when the dice get assigned to someone who you just aren't interested in.  But because they don't say why that person is important, all it does is highlight them, move them towards you, like the camera lingering on another character whom the protagonist is ignoring.  It makes tension; it pulls you towards them, whether by encouraging you to interact (good dice), or encouraging you to avoid (d4s).  Trying to avoid is also a sort of interaction.

It's also important how far someone goes with assigning that die.

"You have a relationship with him.  Take that 2d4 from your unassigned relationship dice."

"You know the guy from the Dogs Temple. ..."

"You and were rivals for the affection of that cute milkmaid at the Dogs temple. ..."

"You and he had a big fight over that cute Sister Mercy at Dogs Temple last year. ..."

"You shot him in an illicit duel over that cute Sister Mercy at Dogs Temple last year. ..."

The further you go along that track, the more likely you are to get a negative reaction from the player.

The further you go along that track, the more likely you are to get a negative reaction from the player.

Why?

Does everybody agree with this?

I see more information as a bigger gift, personally - more meat.

For my own use, calling in that stake would be a swift road to getting challenged by my players in just the same ways I challenge them.

...I should explain that, before Vincent boots me.

When my players win a conflict, I often lean back in my chair, look them straight in the eye, and say "All right, you've won.  Now, tell me what you've won.  What's the scene?" and they get a deer-in-the-headlights look for a second, and then they create.  It's awesome.

I guarantee they'd do exactly the same to me.  And they'd expect me to respect the consensus and the characters and everything just the same as we expect them to when they 'tell me what they've won.'

So.  On those grounds, I like it.  A lot.

It's a fundamental shift to see other peoples ideas about your resources as opening new possibilities for you, rather than closing them off.

Here's another comparison question:

Of the two, which gives Ben more power over Ann's character's future, in play?

In marginalia, Vincent asked if the "lover in Jamaica" or the "have a relationship" kind of input was more difficult. I dunno. I guess I see different axes that different people will approach in different ways.

The "lover in Jamaica" aspect is an interaction with the same kind of character ownership that DIP/DAS talk is usually about - whether the player comes to the table with a character already defined in their head, and play is a process of revealing that character, or whether play is a process of discovering that character.

The "here, have a Relationship" aspect is more neutral with respect to that - the new Relationship can be taken as just a tool for revealing the character, or as a way of defining a new aspect of the character.

I don't see either as terribly much harder than the other, but I'm also not picky about DIP/DAS issues or other sorts of ownership stuff. I think that "have a relationship" is probably more fruitful in terms of being a seed for creativity than "have some facts" is, but that's an inarticulate hunch at this point.

That depends on how cues are coordinated with the fiction in the game.  (Of course.)

But, as it stands in the first example the player gains dice when he/she wants them, by ceding control over the backstory.  In the second, the player (potentially) keeps control over the fictive backstory, but cedes control over when he/she gets extra dice to use now.

(Controversy warning:)  One way to see this is, in both cases, is as trading off the acquisition of push resources for a chance by other characters to pull you in a particular direction.  In the first case, you choose when you want resources to push with, in return for giving the other player the ability to make backstory which may pull you in some direction. (You can choose to ignore it, to some degree, if you want.)  In the second, by allocating dice to particular characters, the other player pulls you in a certain direction.  If you respond, you get push resources for that situation.

Vincent, in your example, is Ben establishing the relationship automatically before the conflict starts, or is he suggesting it as part of the stakes? Both are interesting to me.

Seems like he's giving her the dice then and there for the upcoming "do you gut him like a fish" conflict.  But consider:

Ann: What's at stake is "can I exorcise this demon?"
Ben: If you can't, I say your 2d4 unassigned becomes a relationship with this demon!
Ann: And if I can?
Ben: keep your 2d4 for now.

I intended Ben to be assigning the relationship dice then and there, done and done.

For a (rather thrilling) example of making mechanical changes part of the stakes of conflicts, see Polaris:

"I break the spine of the world."
"But only if you move Rigel from your New Moon to your Mistaken."
"Done."

Piers, let's narrow down your "it depends." Let's go with my expansion of the pirate-flashback example, from here:

If you have a flashback with a rival:
-Add 2 dice to your pool.
If the scene includes a conflict roll:
-If you win the roll, get +1 Steel.
-If you lose the roll, get +1 Fire.
If it includes more than one conflict roll:
-You choose which single one is the significant one.

Using those rules, in the pirate-flashback example, Ann's guaranteed 2 dice to her pool and she'll probably be able to angle the +1 to her Steel or to her Fire, but she probably won't get to choose which; this is more-or-less independent of Ben's framing of the scene. If he says "okay, we're two barristers in court in London, a year ago..." she still gets the two dice and probably the +1 stat.

In the Dogs example, Ben assigns Ann the 2d4 relationship with the to-be-gutted guy.

In that case, the Dogs rule clearly gives Ben more power over Ann's character's short-term future, over this conflict and its fallout. But what about the long term, any opinions?

When my LA players accepted new relationships on their character sheets in order to get the dice necessary to defeat the sorceror, they paused.

"Wow, that... that really says something about the character, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," I said.  "It means your character is carrying around that little ball of emotion (in this case hatred) around with him all the time.  You still want to do it?  Or do you want to give?"

"Nah, I'll do it... I was just commenting on what it means."

Here's how it *feels*, to me.

In the Dogs example, I feel like Ben is requiring Ann to *focus*, in the long-term.  But not telling her how to focus.  That's easy for me to accept, comparatively; players look for focus on specific things from each other all the time with their characters, and this simmply feels like a way of enabling that to a greater degree.

In the pirate example, however, I feel like Ben might be *revising* Ann's character.  Ann may have this whole matrix of stuff in her head that can lead all over the map, to an infinite number of characters - but none of them can necessarily easily include this specific thing.  Ann can generate as many oranges as you like, all of them different - Ben's telling her that she's an apple, and Ann might be unable to go with that; it just doesn't anchor to anything in that mess of stuff in her head.

But that's all just feeling.

Does it make a difference that Ann (and Ben too) is specifically not allowed to create a backstory for her character, even in her head?

It is not only important, but necessary—particularly the 'in the head' bit.

In the head backstory is like something on the character sheet you never use, with the added complication that it's where no-one else can see it, such that one of the main times it gets invoked is when someone contradicts it.  All backstory has to be linked to a cue which is available to others, otherwise you are just heading for dysfunction.

I suppose the real question is, 'what's the effect of not being allowed to make backstory, aside from as part of a way of organizing how it is made such that the backstory is functional?'  To which, I guess I'd say, it makes you immerse differently: you have to play in a way which jettisons the idea that you make choices because of the way the character is.  Rather, you make choices you want as a player.

Well, I mean, the character has a backstory, you just don't know what it is. Instead of building character integrity pre-play, you build character integrity during play.

Is there any real reason to fear that Ben would introduce backstory elements incompatible with the character he's seen in play?

"Does it make a difference that Ann (and Ben too) is specifically not allowed to create a backstory for her character, even in her head?"

Not to my gut feeling.

Because what she has in her head isn't a backstory.

It's a collection of elements, all of them interconnected in different ways.  And when Ben hits her with elements that are connected up in ways that don't fit the rest of the 'stuff' she's got, she *might* be able to integrate that stuff and make a cohesive character.

Or she might not.  And then she's simply unable to get the character to sit coherently in her head thereafter.

Again, all gut feeling, based on my own and other people's play.  I can't prove any of this.

In many of the comments about limits and wiggle room, I think we may be looking at some semi-concious focus on the idea that the main source of creativity and pride in a game is the PC and you ability to create and portray them.

In many games, from TT to LARP, in which the emphasis has been on "role play" it is your ability to "Step up" with your avatar, with their story and with a convincing acting job around them is what has traditionally been defined as success. Good RPers are those who make coherent, compelling characters who have solid backstories and still manage to fit themselves into the things going on around the table.

So as you start to give others the ability to do the thing you are supposed to be doing, you are obviously refocusing the import of what play is "supposed" to be about. It no longer can be about this coherent, crafted character that you reveal to the table—as others have too much say to allow for that. Instead it has to, in some degree, become about the process of creation and collaberation.

In other words, it ceases to be about individuals crafting and then revealing/discovering individuals, and about groups crafting/exploring stories at a very fundemental level. Your character may still be your portal to the world, but they are no longer your focus nor your only tool.

So is the difference we're seeing between me (for instance) and Fred (for instance) that I see this thing you're saying, Brand, as desirable, and Fred doesn't?

The difference, I suppose, or a difference.

Fred?

I'd love the rule if you could get all those relationship dice back at the end of each town (or the player could choose to keep them around).

It's just that, as a resource in Dogs, Relationships are hard to bring up into future conflicts in future town.  If someone took my 3d6 and stuck it into "Abagail", and we're no where near Abagail for the next four towns, then I might as well burn a hole in the character sheet there.

-Andy

Considering your ideas for playerless and playerful play, Vincent, I think you at least consider the idea something cool to play with in your head.

Others of us, however, are still trying to get from "where I used to be" to "where I want to be" and aren't always sure where either was. I'm not talking Fred here, either, so much as I'm talking me.

I, traditionally, have a very iffy relationship to RPing as a player in games where the whole "acting and revealing" thing is important as I'm not an immersivist nor a good actor, and so my level of dicomfort with that makes me look eagerly to new modes.

OTOH, players who like that mode, or are good at it, may be uneasy at some level with talk about the new thing because it challanges their notions about why they play. Hell, it could happen even if they don't like that mode (really) because they still think that is what RP is about.

So on we come to the Lord Nar Yanger's blog and he's talking all this crazy shit, and we're trying to catch up, and I get all jazzed and others get all squeed, and then we all try to figure out why.

In marginalia:

VAX goes "It's not that, precisely"
These things aren't binary switches. If I find that my ownership of the character is more valuable to me than the coherency and meaning of the story, that doesn't mean that I don't value the story. Let me say it again... When you take away (or ask for) some of my control over my character, what am I getting in return? It's not a rhetorical question! I'm really asking... what do I get in return? Is it the same thing back, except degraded because it's coming from your character, which I value less than my own*? If so, it's going to be a hard sell. If I'm getting something else... tell me. If I value it more than what you're asking me to give up, I'll gladly give it up. The only difference between you and I, Vincent, is that we have different price lists.

VAX goes "Asterix"
* I value my character more than yours, because it's my character. The same thing goes for my car, my house, my kids. If I own it, then I care more what happens to it than things I don't own. I hope this isn't a difficult thing to grasp.

Difficult to grasp. I'm boggled.

We all share all the characters. I thought I showed that already.

But that aside, what you get in return is someone else's creative input, which is why you're roleplaying in the first place. You get a more full fulfillment of your creative agenda.

I'm new to all this, i know, but i think it might be important to consider just what this "roleplaying" thing is, at least as it pertains to this issue, here and now.

Something along the lines of:

You have gamers that focus on this idea of "roleplaying", playing roles, immersing, discovering and sharing characters, and all that jazz for sure.

But you probably also have gamers who play these sort of games in a fundamentally different way, or want to. Maybe something you could think of as strategy with characters and drama?

So i'm echoing what Brand posted above (sorry), but i am trying to call attention to the "hey we might just have two different things going on here" aspect of the whole discussion. If you can see what i mean?

Vincent,

You argued that we all share the characters... but I don't accept the argument.

As long as character creation happens in a more-or-less traditional manner, that is, I have this sheet, and I fill it out, and I write on it, and that's where the character has its anchor in the real world, and I'm the one that is responsible for portraying that character... I'm going to think of it as mine, and I'm going to value it higher than characters in which I have not made the investment of time (in terms of character sheet handling time) and emotion (in terms of portrayal).

Now if you're talking about doing character creation and portrayal in a different way... such as by handing the character sheets around in a circle, so that everyone gets some input, and moving the portrayal from person to person, then I'm behind you one hundred percent... once none of the characters are "mine" because I didn't build it myself and I don't portray it myself, then we're on the same page.

I had an idea while reading a thread on the HQ forum on The Forge.  I had the idea that what if Hero Points were only to be spent by players on other players, and that you would both bump the conflict and apply that point towards advancement as the spending player saw fit.  The players would get a set amount of HP at the start, say 2, and it would be a closed economy.  Hero Points would go into the recieving player's pool of points for next session.  So spending Hero Points rewards players for doing things they enjoy; even if the spending player decides to bump against the receiving player they still get a point of advancement from it.

I think it also allows for an interesting meter for the GM.  If the GM keeps track of who gets what, how, and how many, then the GM has a cheat sheet right there telling him what the players are interested in, and who might need some more attention (if the player is getting cut out of the economy, then all he needs to do is just start framing conflicts with that character like crazy until he catches up).

I suppose I'm posting this as a comparison to Vincent's DitV tweak.  This would the same sort of push/pull co-ownership stuff, right?  I think that the interesting thing about push/pull is the possibility for players to create their own reward economy independant of the GM (if the game even has one).

Fred - I'm not trying to pick on you. Let me say that up front. Half of me agrees completely with you, the other half is like Brand - still catching up but totally excited about the idea.

Your comment about handing the character sheets around in a circle made me think about this thread about character creation. So, you'd be totally okay with the kind of co-ownership that Vincent is talking about if you made the characters like you do in Shooting the Moon?

Because, it seems like, its a small jump from that to the "agreed-upon" co-ownership of Vincent's pirate game in the other thread here, and maybe an even smaller jump to the kind of DitV we're talking about here, as long as you're told about it early enough. I mean, if, during character generation in DitV, the GM just tells all the players that one of their traits or relationships is going to be defined by the person on their left (so now, during generation, its no longer your solely-owned character) does that make the kind of in-game co-ownership being talked about here more palatable?

#1.) Tweak of Vincent's idea at top:

I prefer if Ben's suggested change—"You, Ann, have a 2d4 relationship with" some dude—is made part of the stakes:

"Does Ann's character have a 2d4 relationship with the dude?"

That way, Ann may or may not "gut the dude like a fish" (up to her), but if she loses the bidding; she's stuck with a relationship with the Dude who she did-or-didn't gut.

This way, Ben gets to take a shot at asserting changes to Ann's character.  And, Ann has a fighting-chance to reject such changes.  But the system & some random chance arbitrates What Happens, fairly.

#2.) What if

In See/Raise/Escalate bidding, we let any DitV player 'use' any dice on ANY character's sheet, not just their own PC's?

Then DitV becomes like Universalis in lack of character OWNERSHIP during play.

Yet if each player still were to create just one character for the game/ and only that player were allowed to choose fallout effects, relationships, etc./ then that player would still retain unique AUTHORSHIP power over 'their' 'what's important' about that character, even as narrative OWNERSHIP is de-monopolized.

Now switch that around:

In my tweak above, Authorship is distributed (as Vincent has been proposing), but a sense of role-play Ownership is maintained. (Because Ann can fight to avoid the new trait Ben wants to impose on her.)

#3.) So—have I made Vincent's big idea more palatable to player's sense of fairness & control?,

or have I entirely missed the boat on breaking up the 'my character' monopoly?

This idea of sharing characters is really not that alien to people who've done collaborative writing before, where you pass the "pen" around and people can have input in characters that others have already established. Now, the danger is, as people have already pointed out, that someone introduces something that makes a character somewhat incoherent with the ideas of the person who first wrote them into the story. But that's really just a matter of shifting perspectives to the changed character. After all, nothing is set in stone until it's written down (or introduced in play), and if you're going to do this activity with others, you have to be prepared for such changes to happen.

Interestingly, we're almost always assuming we know how the character would act even though our actual knowledge tends to be limited—that should baffle anyone who studies human psychology. Even if you have 30 pages of back story, there might be some event, some experience, some mental wiring, that you haven't thought up yet that could easily explain why the character, in any particular situation, acts differently than you would expect with the limited prior knowledge.

For some people, it matters that actions of characters are based on things established prior to that action. But it's just as reasonable to have an action and then seek out the explanation for it post facto. After all, you're making it up either way. This whole "playing the character truthfully" thing is such a strange concept that roleplayers made up somewhere along the way, because it's based on somehow figuring out the "most likely way" the character would act and then assuming that they always act in the most likely way. No real person I know does that.

- Christian

What Christian says resonates with me. Here's a thing I'll say from his shoulders. I'll use "other-contribution" to mean an act of co-ownership (inserting a relationship into another player's character), just as a stand-in term.

If other-contribution contradicts the established facts 'out there' in the story, clearly problems may emerge (which is not to say that an interesting game design couldn't make hay out of such situations).
Other-contribution could also be a problem if it jars with the feel/genre of the game people wish to be playing. If I'm trying to play a gritty game about real people with tough decisions, while all the while circus performer, MI5 spy and ninja are being inserted into my characters background, there may be a point where I'd want to call a halt and address this.

But really, this complaint isn't about messing with the character - it's messing with the story. It should apply just as much when another player contributes something to her character that breaks the tacit genre/feel. If we're trying to play "real people, tough decisions" then your circus-ninja-spy contributions should be as problematic no matter whose character they're being applied to. Otherwise, it suggests each player enjoys a set of fiction that centres round their character and only marginally overlaps with other characters.
So
1) you make me a circus-ninja-spy
2) you make you a circus-ninja-spy
Here's my claim:
the degree to which 1) is more problematic than 2)  =  the degree to which a shared story ISN'T happening.

Alex:

1) you make me a circus-ninja-spy
2) you make you a circus-ninja-spy
Here's my claim:
the degree to which 1) is more problematic than 2) = the degree to which a shared story ISN'T happening.

Takes my breath away.

Takes my breath AWAY.

Everybody with it?

I can dig it.

This goes way beyond character, btw.  I had this mini-epiphany in the car today.  Remind me to talk to you about it moon-day.

yrs—
—Ben

Not just shared story, but shared gaming.

Okay, so: "owns"="the buck stops here." Whoever "owns" something in an RPG is the person or persons with final authority over that thing.

In RPGs in general:

1) Who "owns" an individual character?
2) Who "owns" the setting?
3) Who "owns" the system?

It seems to me the tradition is this: players (that is, non-GMs) own the player-characters, the GM owns the setting and system. The GM has final word on when and how to apply resolution mechanics and obvious reward systems. The GM decides what the setting will be and has final say on what's true and not about the setting. Each player has final authority over what is and isn't true about his or her character (except where questions of system or setting come in, in which case the GM can override.)

It also seems to me that this is bosh. The entire group of players "own" the entire game. I mean, this is obvious, right? Believing and acting otherwise is, I think, dysfunctional game play.

Functional game play: The banker in Monopoly is caught taking money out of the bank and putting into her own stash. The other players call her on it. If the banker fesses up and relents, play can continue. If the banker refuses to stop, play ends.

Dysfunctional game play: The GM is caught fudging dice rolls in order to get "the story he wants to happen." The other players call him on it. The GM overrules them because "I'm the GM and I have final say over the system." The players submit, except one—he leaves the group because he doesn't like what the GM does. The rest of the group label this person "an asshole" for not submitting to the GM.

Now, I do think that a lot of people become GMs in RPGs precisely because they want that kind of power. They want to own the system, the setting and the way the game plays out. And I think a lot of people are players because they want to own a particular character, and want to cede ownership of the system, the setting and the way the game plays out. And as long as everyone is happy, it works okay.

But if you think the GM owns the setting or the system or the way the game plays out or whatever, and if you think each player owns his or her character, then shared gameplay isn't happening.

Or maybe I'm just babbling and off course. But this seems right to me.

Vincent first described his Big Dangerous Idea For 2006 as 'playerless play'.
And he provided plenty of context as to what he meant by that.

Context aside, the phrase really grabbed my imagination.

As intriguing as his fleshing-out of the concept has been;
I kinda wish he'd just walked-around all year declaring 2006 The Year Of Playerless Play, without further explanation.

Some REALLY wacky games might have been inspired by leaving folks speculating what Playerless Play meant, with no hints.

Ha! Maybe I'll try that next time.

"I'm tellin' ya, next GenCon will be all about Fortune-sideways, not Fortune-forward!"