A tool, yes, but at least to my thinking not an ideal tool. His previous post on that topic (the one with the Inglorious Basterds example) kind of hit the nail on the head of what bothers me about some players who go for the “Iconic Role”. They can’t compromise, they can’t be changed by the events of the game, and in part that means they can’t negotiate with the GM or more often with the other players.
I could have sworn I read a point in your book that went something like this “Since a game is cooperative, players who make up extreme characters will end up softened, the loner who ends up in a group and so on. That’s a fact of the nature of a group-based rpg.”– but of course now that I’m flipping through it I can’t find that point.
I think it is great to have a role model for your character, but at the same time sticking to that path– or deciding ahead of time that your character can only change in X way, can limit the game, stomp on other people’s fun and make it harder for the GM to write to you.
I was pretty sure I knew which Thing you were talking about as soon as I read that. On finding it, I can see why it was hard to find, because it totally addresses that point (to my mind, anyway), but comes at it from the side.
It’s 043:
When creating RPG characters, lots of people make up the same one over and over, in different trappings.
I know a guy who creates an inscrutable loner who lives by his own outsider’s code of conduct, for which he’ll gladly both kill and die, in every game he plays. Might be a ninja in one setting or a bounty hunter in another, but it’s the same character from game to game to game.
Your point is an excellent one: The non-negotiable ethos of a single PC can destroy a game.
The really valuable thing about Robin’s point—what I think does make it an ideal tool, when used in this sense—is that it allows GM and players to elide the part of a told story (a novel, a film) where we have to learn, “Why this protagonist, in this story?” In poor games, I think that part gets elided anyway, but without any thought of decisions having been put into the question. So you wind up sitting there, two-thirds of the way through a gaming session, wondering why the heck your character is even here, other than that the GM obviously intends for this to be the adventure.
Perhaps a group-based iconic ethos, with PCs created to match it, solves the problem both ways.
A tool, yes, but at least to my thinking not an ideal tool. His previous post on that topic (the one with the Inglorious Basterds example) kind of hit the nail on the head of what bothers me about some players who go for the “Iconic Role”. They can’t compromise, they can’t be changed by the events of the game, and in part that means they can’t negotiate with the GM or more often with the other players.
I could have sworn I read a point in your book that went something like this “Since a game is cooperative, players who make up extreme characters will end up softened, the loner who ends up in a group and so on. That’s a fact of the nature of a group-based rpg.”– but of course now that I’m flipping through it I can’t find that point.
I think it is great to have a role model for your character, but at the same time sticking to that path– or deciding ahead of time that your character can only change in X way, can limit the game, stomp on other people’s fun and make it harder for the GM to write to you.
I was pretty sure I knew which Thing you were talking about as soon as I read that. On finding it, I can see why it was hard to find, because it totally addresses that point (to my mind, anyway), but comes at it from the side.
It’s 043:
Your point is an excellent one: The non-negotiable ethos of a single PC can destroy a game.
The really valuable thing about Robin’s point—what I think does make it an ideal tool, when used in this sense—is that it allows GM and players to elide the part of a told story (a novel, a film) where we have to learn, “Why this protagonist, in this story?” In poor games, I think that part gets elided anyway, but without any thought of decisions having been put into the question. So you wind up sitting there, two-thirds of the way through a gaming session, wondering why the heck your character is even here, other than that the GM obviously intends for this to be the adventure.
Perhaps a group-based iconic ethos, with PCs created to match it, solves the problem both ways.