Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them
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I'm not talking PVP in the traditional I WILL KEEL YOU. I'm talking more about antagonistic in the political sense. Like you have goals, and there are PCs who are there to be annoying/a thorn/even be divisive.
Why is it that most places I've seen just want to be one big kumbaya fests? How would you try to break that culture where everyone wants to be the 'hero' to where some people can be the 'villain'. Stories don't happen without conflict and villains are far more proactive than heroes anyday.
Would love to hear people's thoughts on this.
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I've always wanted antagonist PCs on games I staff for. Have advocated for it even.
The problem comes in that you have to be almost tyrannical with the PCs in question. Remind them that violence between antagonist factions is actually the exception to the rule.
Otherwise it quickly escalates to Did you bite your thumb at me sir WELL PREPARE TO DIE MOTHERFU**ER! Because obviously that's the way that all adults handle conflict.
It gets even more trivial if you include magic or any kind of superpowers.
So you have to make sure to put a firm boot on that shit or you end up with snipers in towers pretending they can pick off anyone they want with impunity because magic bullets you see?
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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To continue on @Derp's theme: nobody likes to lose. Whether it be political position, death, loss of prestige, opinion... people hate losing. So instead of taking some political damage and trying to rebuild... they go all out and fight to the death.
This is not all people, obviously, but it's common enough that one just doesn't bother with it.
He/Him
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@tinuviel
It's particularly common in the type who apps overtly 'antagonistic' PCs, then writes a bunch of checks their ass can't or doesn't want to cash. I'm not sure there's any solving the issue of 'the person who most wants to play this is the last person you'd generally want playing it.'Building in coded systems where players can engage with goals that aren't necessarily compatible is appealing, though. Anything that takes the human element out of that stuff tends to cool off the OOC problems with it.
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I've played 'em, but I sat long and hard and thought about everything else a villain could do besides kill an opponent, stay mostly in those areas, and really just try to make my mindset that when I make a villain it's just like STing: the character is there for the enjoyment of others. I find that when people pick up on that attitude they're often pretty willing to work with me to make things happen.
Not a lot of people go into it with that mindset though, most get very caught up in winning 100%, to the point of being a problem. And get pissed off, for some reason, when suddenly half the playerbase isn't sympathetic with your psychopath and ready to say that everything they're doing is good and right and perfect and justifiable. It would be nice if we could sort of train people to do that without needing a tyrant to keep them from being out of control, buuuuuuuuut I'm not going to hold my breath. All anyone can do is maybe try to do that and be an example for others to see if others will also ride that train.
He/Him
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I generally try to avoid using the protagonist/antagonist model. Since these are player characters we're talking about, and they have more agency than we'd give a typical 'antagonistic' NPC. They're both protagonists of different stories, and where those stories overlap is when the antagonism can come into it.
So, ideally, give them stuff to do that isn't directly overlapping with other PCs all the time. They can do their 'play the villain' bit without negatively impacting their opposite sect.
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@devrex said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:
I've played 'em, but I sat long and hard and thought about everything else a villain could do besides kill an opponent, stay mostly in those areas, and really just try to make my mindset that when I make a villain it's just like STing: the character is there for the enjoyment of others.
It's never the villains that you have to worry about.
It's usually the heroes coming in and getting a whiff of anything opposed to their thing with an antagonist tag and swooping in like some kind of demented paladin determined to crush it into a fine red paste.
The villains usually play a longer game. The protagonist factions give no fucks. They just go in and decimate and then pat themselves on the back for staying the 'good guys' after their inevitable baseless murders.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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@derp Leading to weird story moments of "Okay, so you're opposed to those guys. Who were doing nothing, really. And you slaughtered them, killed innumerable innocent civilians, decimated the local infrastructure, and are costing us millions in repair bills... And you're saying they are the bad guys?
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The way that antagonism was handled on Echoes was excellent. I commend you for letting me take Maddy and going full Tzimisce with her.
Good antagonist PCs are hard to find. There’s one on Arx right now that we joke about killing, and the player is in on the conceit. But the truth is that RP revolves around the PC and this is a good thing. It serves to highlight how villainous the “good” PCs are, including my own.
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This is another issue I feel my roster idea helps address, since there is less personal investment in any one character. Losing a character is less a personal loss and more a communal loss.
One solution could be creating some sort of mechanic or mechanics to both incentivize antagonism (so as to avoid antagonists who are afraid to be bad so as not to cause problems with their social circle) and limit antagonism (in order to avoid the issue of a bad guy nuking someone because they sneezed too loudly).
Maybe have a baddie deck of cards that says what they're allowed to do and every week they draw a card or two. They have to play a card that matches a bad deed whenever they do they deed. They have a maximum hand size of say 5 or 7. If they would draw a card above their maximum hand size two weeks in a row, they either have turned over a new leaf and given up their evil ways or died from a brain aneurysm from all the pent up evil they wanted to do but we're frustrated in actually doing. Then it's up to staff to regulate the badness by setting the number of cards in the deck and what kind of cards in the deck. A deck of only attempt to murder someone cards is going to have a very murderous baddie.
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What @derp says.
I'd say one of the actual issues isn't antagonist PC players not wanting to lose, they knew that was in the cards when they signed up. It's getting tired of losing by an ex-machina fluke of luck or something every time they've out-maneuvered the good guys, which is every time 'cause good guys are always "never mind maneuvers, go straight at 'em."
I do mean antagonist PCs, though, where the player signed up for that role in the story. Not the same as an evil character played as a normal PC with the expectations of wins and heroism.
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@derp said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:
They just go in and decimate and then pat themselves on the back for staying the 'good guys' after their inevitable baseless murders.
GM: You just murdered a bunch of children.
Player: Noooo, I murdered kobold children.
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One answer would be consequences. All those aforementioned 'we murdered them because they were evil' is like yeah, sure, but your retainers didn't necessarily know they were evil, maybe you get ghosted and lose a dot.
Police are after you in a way you can't simply stop with a bribe, because the friends of the guy you just killed can write a bigger check.
Lose some resources as your band accounts are frozen.
Your safehouse isn't so safe any more now that they have a VESTED INTEREST in finding you. It might slow them down, but they are coming.
... or something.
ETA: Remember, the guy who revealed the Iran/Contra deal got suicided with two shots to the head in a hotel... but not until after his career was torpedoed, of course. Snowden can never come back to the US (he is now an NPC because he is permanently 'off-grid').
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@jennkryst As good an idea as that is, the kinds of people that suck at dealing with antagonists also suck at dealing with consequences.
Maybe we should just stop letting stupid selfish people play our games. Is there a test for that?
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How to handle them? Don't
Most games with some element of character-vs-character set up antagonists as a zero-sum game. Cops vs. robbers, Imperial vs. Rebel, superhero vs supervillain - one side's success comes at the direct expense of the other side. Most MU players can't handle that maturely.
Even if you find a rare RPer who can, the problem is that 90% of MU RP is social. It's hard to RP antagonists in social scenes. So there's this natural tendency to mute the antagonism to avoid cutting off your own RP avenues. (TV shows do this too when they reform a villain enough to join the good guys).
Certainly it _can_work - I've seen it done a handful of times. But most of the time it just leads to drama and headaches. Antagonism + strangers on the internet + players overly-invested in their characters' successes is just a recipe for disaster. This is why all my games are PVE.
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I have seen some antagonists done well, but most of the time they're just not great for the environment through no fault of their own.
I especially think it sets up real toxicity when there is absentee/hands off staff who aren't there to intervene when people cross boundaries (especially protagonist pcs).
So honestly I'm at the mush management point in my life where any game I set up/run will be pve. Will it lose me players yes but if they need pvp to engage or feel meaningful we aren't going to be right for each other anyway.
I dont mind playing on pvp games, but I don't initiate that stuff anymore. I like themes of loss/betrayal/ect but find it more interesting when its with a pc that isn't purposefully made to be an antagonist.
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It's important to note that there is a difference between PCs who are antagonistic, and groups that are designed to be antagonistic.
My Ventrue and your Toreador are PCs who have antagonism between them. My Camarilla and your Sabbat are in groups that are designed to be antagonistic. The latter is harder to deal with and would probably require policy, the former is... basically expected in many kinds of games. So OOC communication is an absolute must, and that's basically it.
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On the game I staff on we've outright banned antagonist characters -- but that doesn't mean everyone needs to sit and hold hands around the campfire. Our theme technically makes it possible to bring in very antagonistic groups such as the Spanish Inquisition or WWII Nazis (the literal examples used) and we don't want those.
Why? Because we are telling the story of a group of people in a situation, and how they manage to survive in that situation. If they end up murdering each other in back alleys instead of taking on the game's antagonists, it's going to be a short and miserable story.
That, however, does not mean that people aren't allowed to antagonise each other. Want to play someone with miserable social skills or for that matter, a manipulative asshole? Fine by us as long as you realise that any consequences of your IC behaviour are also for you to deal with. People aren't always nice. People aren't always capable of getting along. People are sometimes dicks.
The key issue -- to my eyes as a game designer -- is what kind of antagonism the game 'officially' sanctions. If you have factions like the example above, of Camarilla and Sabbat, then members of those are going to be in opposition to one another. If you don't have factions or everyone is a part of the same faction, then some people are still going to be in opposition to each other simply because they don't share views or just plain don't get along. This is fine.
The trick is to avoid indirectly sanctioning OOC dickish behaviour. You don't want the kind of 4chan edgelord who comes onto a game with the single purpose of antagonising everyone else in the name of freedom of speech and lol get a sense of humour.
This is why we run PVE, not PVP. Too old, too tired, too jaded to deal with more of those. Which, again, does not mean that we prohibit people from being dicks IC -- we just don't give them a shield to hide behind when their dickery has consequences from other players.
http://keys.aresmush.com -- Come to Chincoteague, we have ponies.
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Maybe have players submit ideas for what sort o things they would like to deal with from an antagonist, and that could be used either as some suggestions for the player or staff running the antagonist PC.
Likewise players could suggest ideas for other organizations (PC or not) but more as a brainstorming process. Care would have to be taken to not weaponize this.
It's like the idea of players acting as an IC councilor to an NPC leader, all vying to meet their own agendas while meshing with the leaders agenda and personality, except reversed.
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@derp said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:
It's never the villains that you have to worry about.
It's usually the heroes coming in and getting a whiff of anything opposed to their thing with an antagonist tag and swooping in like some kind of demented paladin determined to crush it into a fine red paste.
For the one or two antagonistic characters I've played - it was very much this. I played an Imperial who eventually defected from the Empire to the Rebellion. It wasn't a real OOC secret that the character was a 'bad guy,' but I didn't go around being all full-on crush all rebels either. I think I had good OOC relationships with most players, which helped a lot. Having a story/side-story that wasn't dependent on Stopping The Good Guys (or, for others, Stopping The Bad Guys) also helped - avenues of story to focus on that weren't just Empire vs Rebellion. Areas to rp whether neither faction could fight also helped. It allowed for intense rp restricted from going too far, for lack of better words.
What's always stuck in my mind about the character, though, was how often a handful of the 'good guy' PCs would want to meet to "talk" after the character joined the Rebellion. They'd then spend the scene trying to bait and push the character into Doing Something - so they could react all Good Guy, I guess? I don't know. At that point the character was barely antagonistic I suppose, but it was definitely a thing.
Both of the characters I mentioned were on roster games, and ones I did not write myself to play. I don't know if that hurts or helps. The 'I'm just playing the part!' verses the 'I wrote myself a badass' could go either way.
