eddyfate

Nice!

Awesome! Thanks for posting that up, Amigo.

Not a problem. I'm hoping it will get the word out and start some good conversations within our org.

Hopefully they won't start with "Who does this bastard think he is anyway?" :P

I'm okay with that, too.

I know I would appreciate it if you would go over this with me on the Cruise next week. Heck, it might be cool if you talked to everyone about it.

I'll probably have it on my laptop.

The only thing I might find contentious is the "unfair death" thing, and that's because I find myself wandering way off the grid on that myself. What's your stance on it, elaborated?

Functionally, unfair death is a stable of the World of Darkness, and it's perfectly in-genre for someone to die for unfortunate reasons or in unfair ways. Unfair death outside the game, though (as in due to cheating or poor metagame reasons) should be avoided, however, because this is a game. The conflict comes in because what is considered "in game" and "out of game" reasoning is largely a matter of personal opinion, making the situation sticky, but by recognizing that and trying to draw more objective lines between in-game and out-of-game fairness, we can possibly more to resolve such situations more amiably.

I can see that.

My stance is starting to wander far afield: I think there's a connection between "my fictional character is capable of killing other fictional characters" and "I have the power to make another person stop using their creation" that could, and probably should, be weakened. In the media our games emulate -- continuing chronicle stories, like soap opera, comic books, and the narrative of pro wrestling -- actual elimination of characters is really rare. They get retired for a while, retooled, and brought back fresh. I wonder if there's not a way to get more of that into game.

I don't disagree, but that's a play-style choice. Some games go for the "we are the entire world, and death is common" style, while others go for the "we are all protagonists and somewhat immune to dying" style. However, regardless of the frequency of death, my key point was that the quality of a character dying being unfair is acceptable, and perhaps even encouraged in certain circumstances.

Excellent stuff.

Thanks!

> 6. PvP is the Goal

That in four words perfectly expresses my dissatisfaction with LARP. :)

--
Tim Harris
The Seeker
Time Lord

And that's okay. Being able to say "I don't like this game because of this reason" is far more helpful that "Well, I didn't have a good time, so let's try it under a different Storyteller, a different rules system, a different group of players, ad nauseum." It's a bit like saying, "I don't like Toyotas, but I might this Toyota if it was in a different color."

It's always been helpful for me to view the shorthand that is 'PvP' to stand for A Player Interacts/Engages with Another Player. It's basically whenever one players agency, for whatever reason, brushes up against another. Theoretically, there's very little rules difference between antagonistic and supportive actions between characters.

On the other hand, I've also seen too many people approach metagaming in the 'build' a character specifically to run a mechanical approach against intended targets because they're excited to see the results. It's an approach that's neither in-genre, and also ignores the implications of creating and playing a character that shares an environment with other people. The motivation 'my character is a bad person/my character is a psychopath' is over-used.

Good work, Eddie.

Correct. When two player characters are in conflict, even if that conflict results in a mutually-beneficial conclusion, it is different from a conflict between player character and environment. Building guilds in MMOs is just as "PvP" as kicking the crap out of them.

And the "psychopath" element I also addressed at ICC (albiet at closing ceremonies). If we accept that you can "win" at LARP and have character goals, and if we further accept that we should collaborate as players, then the goal of "I want to kill other PCs just 'cause" is, by definition, not collaborative. Other players and Storytellers should work together to reject such concepts if they don't suit the game the community wants to play. A great source for that is the game's VSS in the Camarilla.