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Dec 24, 2013 - 07:05 PM |
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Pt. 7: Classy folks with good manners |
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Oh hey yeah, been a while, hasn't it. End of the semester's always pretty busy. Was really hoping to have the game in some kind of playable shape by the end of the year but that's clearly not going to happen. Still, work continues.
One of the best changes I've made, so far as the things I've already talked about goes: dispensing with dice. Entirely. One of my goals is to make the "needed materials list", if you will, as pedestrian and universally accessible as possible; that's why I tried my damnedest to make the d6 work when it doesn't have enough flexibility. But I realized that there's a random-number generator with much more flexibility than a d20, while possibly being more commonplace in your average home than a fistful of d6s.
A die just gives you a number. A deck of cards gives you numbers, yes, but also suits, colors, and arbitrary combinations of these three traits. And a tremendous amount of cultural baggage on which to hang design gewgaws. And while we're getting rid of needless turbonerd props: fuck your "battlemap", kid. Get your chessboard. (Yes, chess is also for dorks but plenty of people have a chess set even if it just collects dust until the next power outage.)
But we're here to talk about PCs (or, if you will, the PCs' PCs, adhering to the metagame conceit we've established). In the majority of RPGs, your characters are ostensibly heroic guys who just rescue all the prisoners and slay all the dragons and hip-hip-hooray! And that's fine, on paper. In practice, most players do not direct their characters in this way. Why? Because they want the characters to live and prosper. Dragon-fighting and prisoner-freeing are not usually compatible with the broader live/prosper objective. So when dragons are fought, they are dragons which have been determined, mathematically, to represent a minimal risk. When prisoners are rescued, they are the prisoners who are least thoroughly guarded and most able to offer lavish rewards. And that's fine. We don't want to die, and, by extension we don't want our character — who is usually little more than "me, wearing some rubber ears and perhaps a little facepaint", let's be honest — to die either. The problem is the dissonance. You can't be a self-serving, cowardly greedhead and a noble hero whom every peasant loves and respects. Word would get around pretty fast.
So the solution is straightforward: acknowledge out of the gate that your characters are terrible people. In fact, they're such terrible people that their peers have appointed them to do the most dangerous and thankless work available. Of course, they still want these terrible people to succeed: after all, long-term survival probably depends on it. But if a few of these vermin don't make it back alive, fetch an eyedropper to save the village's single tear. So who are these awful jackasses?
The Hack is your standard meathead, good at killin' and breaking things and not a whole lot else. Not necessarily stupid, mind you, or even necessarily belligerent in nature. He's just got a pretty limited skill set and a profound disinterest in diversifying. There are precious few problems which do not, from a certain angle, resemble a nail. Still, they say it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in a field. The Hack was a master before he was out of diapers. Mind you, depending on the Hack in question, that's not necessarily an impressive fact.
The Hack advances (that is, he gains epithets or dismisses scars) when he destroys something important.
The Creep is usually a bit younger or a bit older than the rest of the folks she's been sent out to probably-die with, because Creeps don't stand out as a problem unless they're young and sloppy or jaded and careless. What an individual Creep has or hasn't done is very much down to the Creep's individual proclivities, but the list of terrible things a person could do upon discovering how easy it is to go unnoticed — well. It's a long list, and unpleasant to read. Maybe your Creep just stole some food. For her starving grandmother. Sure.
The Creep advances when she does something audacious and leaves no evidence or witnesses. (Her fellow scavengers are not considered witnesses.)
The Cheat is a liar. That would be enough to get anybody put on scavenger duty. If you can't trust your neighbor, how do you expect to survive the winter, let alone the decade? But he's not just that. Everyone lies here and there. A little bit. But a Cheat is a spider at the center of an ever-growing web of lies, too complicated for a practical man to maintain. But the Cheat has the luxury of being impractical; people will do anything for you when you say the right things to them. And they'll congratulate themselves on the cherry deal they made.
The Cheat advances when he manipulates someone into hurting themselves for his benefit, provided he's far away before they see the trick.
The Jinx has the closest thing a living human being can get to "being in touch with the spirit world": a jumble of half-understood whispers, battering at her mind the moment she drops the concentration needed to keep them out. Which would be sad, in its way, if she hadn't worked out how to whisper back. How to make silent deals with long-dead somethings, how to hide a smile when — oh my goodness, he just stepped in his own snare? In broad daylight? How terrible. He must have hung there for days before the dehydration killed him.
The Jinx advances when she closes a pact, concluding her business with a given spirit after achieving both the (usually awful) thing she wants and the (almost always awful) thing the spirit wants in return.
Any class-based RPG has the "I'm good at X but not Y or Z" conceit, but it always boils down to which approach would be easier: should we fight these guards? No, it would be a hard fight, so we'll use diplomacy. Fuck that. Make the characters want to handle things their way instead of the easy way, because it gives them a sick little thrill that the rest of you can't possibly understand! Of course, these motivations need not always be at cross purposes. You can always wipe out most of an enemy force before persuading the survivors to deliver your "unconditional surrender" to their superiors. They don't need to know about the fungus spreading through their travel rations, and it's quite invisible even if it occurred to them to look for it. I love these horrible people. I can't wait to see them prosper in defiance of all propriety.
| Currently Playing: Warren Zevon - Mr. Bad Example |
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