Mar 30, 2017, 9:16 PM
PC antagonism done right
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@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:
When you jerks come up with a better one-word term than 'antagonist' I'll be happy to use it from now on in the thread.
The objection is not with your use of the word, but with the presumptions regarding what that word should mean.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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Antagonist is the right word, if only we could ensure that players would separate the character from the player.
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@Ganymede said in PC antagonism done right:
@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:
When you jerks come up with a better one-word term than 'antagonist' I'll be happy to use it from now on in the thread.
The objection is not with your use of the word, but with the presumptions regarding what that word should mean.
It's like someone used the word "connotation" to describe some kind of disconnect between interpretations.
I blame the parents. (MST3K, now on Netflix.)
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@Ganymede said in PC antagonism done right:
The objection is not with your use of the word, but with the presumptions regarding what that word should mean.
Like this?
@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:
... I don't necessarily mean bad guys - although that's possible - but handling concepts which are thematically supposed to clash for ideological or practical reasons.
I tried! And failed.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said in PC antagonism done right:
I tried! And failed.
Don't blame me for your failures, you festering cunt. I'm just here to be a smart-ass.
(Now that's a spicy meatball!)
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@Ganymede is @Arkandel 's antagonist.
She contests for some goals, conflicts with him over others (such as his right to dignity).
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@Misadventure That's only because Gany uses OOC tactics to win on MSB. Fucking cheater.
Also, I could do much worse for an antagonist.
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@Thenomain I too would rather have the awesome player playing my character's opponent than their friend.
Sidenote, @Arkandel , how about "opponent" or "rival" rather than "antagonist?"
When you're playing with your character's friends, you need friction from an outside source to create action -- when you're playing with your character's opponent/rival, the friction is already there.
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Adversary is better than antagonist. Everyone is the protagonist of their story, most of the time. An adversary is not always going to act against you in all situations, which fits most MUing circumstances better.
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I have gained good OOC friends due to them being awesome IC Antagonists. Even though we don't even play together anymore, I still keep in touch via Skype and/or other means because they were generally good people...just turns out our characters hated the shit out of each other.
I am always looking for more players of this caliber, because without conflict MU*s (or at least the character) can just stagnate.
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I had the chance to play a villain on a game 100 years ago - so long I neither remember the name nor the theme of the game - but what I loved about it was that the PC heroes who were trying to stop me played WITH me in the whole thing. My PC was trying to terrorise this female character into realising he was right and she was wrong to even oppose him - standard villain stuff - and it was awesome. The player and I had OOC conversations about how to tell the story in the way that would make the greatest impact for everyone, but especially the other heroes in the tale. So, my PC was awful to her.
And then it came time for the heroes to finally dispatch my PC, she and I collaborated OOCly about how to tell the best story for everyone involved, and it was my truest pleasure for my PC to meet his end at her hands.
I have no problems with antagonists/villains/etc being mean and cruel ICly, and welcome the chance to work with them OOCly to make it the best story. And I think anyone who would play a villain should be able to say and do the same.
People who lie to me OOCly, though... they can go screw right off.
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Another issue I've found with playing an adversarial type character is that... people just don't generally know how to deal with them. In the aforementioned GM vs Player dynamic, the GM is a known quantity. The story, generally, will be tailored for your characters' abilities in such a way that it is possible for you to make worthwhile decisions when dealing with the adversary. Running, attacking, interrogating, wetting one's self, et cetera.
Another PC taking an adversarial position, however, is... wrong, in some people's minds. Most have been, or know someone who has been, in a situation where they lose their PC to another PC for reasons that weren't explained to them. That scares some people. So, they react to the idea of an adversarial character with force. Full force. All of the force.
After some thinking, I think that to have PC antagonists/adversaries in a game such a thing has to be baked into the game's foundations and culture from the start. The reasons that X group dislikes Y group have to be made clear. Not clear to us. Clear to stupid people. So clear that if it were solid you could see through it.
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Opposition. Opposition forces. Competitors. These things strike me as being more what some are talking about -- people competing for resources or status or attempting to prevent someone else from having one or the other or both -- for whatever reason than what I think of when an antagonist is described as per the above. Characters in this group may behave in extreme ways against other characters, but it's as possible for them to all be acting from a 'good' motivation as it is for some desire to burn the whole world down or go full-on Mr. Burns. Some of the most amazing story conflicts can arise between two 'hero' types with different ideas about how to bring about world peace and happy ever after for everyone, for instance.
Generally speaking, I don't like the label antagonist for a number of the reasons described in the thread. It has nothing to do with worrying that someone is going to be mean to someone else IC, and more or less everything to do with the idea that there's a default set of traits that are acceptable for characters to have and one that 'others' them into a category of 'bad guy' that just doesn't work for me. It feels, on some level, as though the very messy, murky, muddy grey of reality in which people are made up of good and bad traits is not relevant on a MU, and that strikes me as pretty silly (for most settings; I can see some classic four color superhero settings going this route if that's the vibe they're going for).
The black and white breakdown of traits doesn't just impact your 'antagonists', either -- it limits your 'protagonists' as well by limiting the motivations, beliefs, practices, opinions, etc. that are open to them once it gets to a certain point.
There's a distinct difference between designated (or otherwise) antagonist characters and conflict RP. There's a difference, too, between conflict RP and actual risk, even.
I'm also with @Ghost re: reward for risk. I very firmly do not believe in tiered basic gains based on risk level for a variety of reasons. Most of all because risk involves activity, it's easy to reward that on an activity basis. Someone who is generally risk-averse may find that activity worthwhile; tiering it all presents an obstacle in that regard. Second, some generally risk-friendly players may consider some specific activity uninteresting; forcing their participation based on what's essentially an arbitrary ranking is, well, it's meh. It's just meh. Third... what's stopping someone from setting themselves to maximum risk and just sitting back on their butt and letting all the free extra XP roll right in? Absolutely nothing unless that reward for risk is tied to a requirement for activity.
This is one of those K.I.S.S. situations, and @Ghost nailed it.
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Ok, so coming from a polisci background, let's just go ahead and throw this out here. I think the term 'antagonist' often gets used as some kind of Black Hat v. White Hat sort of deal, and that's the way that it's done on MU in most cases -- but it's not really feasible in the long term. If we're playing PvP on a MU, then the simple fact is -- fantasy conflict won't work, and we need to look at real world conflict and work with that accordingly. Let's look at a few things here that hopefully help explain the reasons:
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Black Hat v. White Hat Only Works In Stories With Definitive Ends - Most MU's are not designed with a definite end in sight, unlike the tabletop games that most of them draw inspiration from. MU's are much more dynamic than you're going to see in most fantasy scenarios. The people change over time, the vision changes over time, and the ultimate future is often left rather nebulous. There is no way to win a MU in 99.99% of all MUdom. It's just getting that leg up for the time being. Which brings us to...
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Most Conflict Is Not A Zero-Sum Game - While it's easy, in a story with a clear beginning and end, to have two people/factions fight it out for supreme control of the galaxy, in the real world it's not so simple... and MU's are pretty good approximations of the real world whether they intend to be or not. You will almost never have two people duking it out for all the things, where one is the clear winner and one is the clear loser. They're both going to win some, and they're both going to lose some in nearly every situation that conflict arises in. Be prepared to deal with that in a mature way. You won't get the whole pie. And speaking of not getting the whole pie...
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Coalitions Are A Thing - In most conflict, this is what you're going to see -- a group of people get together and pool resources toward a specific goal if all of them in some way benefit from that goal. You will see opposing coalitions more often than opposed individuals. No individual is capable of doing All The Things by themselves, and games should be set up in a way that encourages these sorts of coalitions to form. These coalitions are also fluid -- just because a group of people work toward the same goal for one thing doesn't mean they're going to be working toward the same goal in others, and can often find themselves both allies AND rivals simultaneously. Political parties are perfect examples of this -- no one person can make all the changes that need to be made, so they have to work together, but their ideological stances even within the same party are often at odds on certain issues.
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Coalitions Are A Thing, Part Deux - Nobody in a coalition, even the one that "wins", gets the whole prize. Coalitions fall apart when people get less than they expect from them. You have to be willing to compromise both with the opposing coalition and the people in the one you're working with, whether this be shared access to The Thing or divvying up The Things between all involved. (See above re: Most Conflict is Not Zero Sum).
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This Is How People Really Work - It might be called Game Theory, but I promise you that you can model Games for real world situations. People have been doing it for a very long time now, and the results are often staggeringly accurate. When any group of people are put together in the long term with limited resources, Games are the natural byproduct. And while we might be playing fantasy games or whatnot, the way we play them on a MU is not the way they are played in a tabletop. Like, full stop. You can want to tell a story all you want to, but stories really do have endings, and MU's... end, but not usually according to any plan, or shape. So the typical narrative elements don't apply, and we need to look at other things.
I think that if we keep those things in mind when designing conflict in MU's, we'll get a whole lot better result, just because we've set some very unrealistic expectations of what conflict should look like as it resolves. We like to try and do it as a story, and in a thing with no real end, the storybook method just doesn't work. It falls apart. We've seen it countless times.
So, I guess the TL;DR is -- set realistic expectations, and understand how conflict really works between people outside of set, patterned stories. Adjust accordingly.
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I'd also advocate for more stories with an end. A story that gives every group (not necessarily every individual) a goal, with plot to drive that goal home.
He/Him
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@Tinuviel said in PC antagonism done right:
I'd also advocate for more stories with an end. A story that gives every group (not necessarily every individual) a goal, with plot to drive that goal home.
While I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, I don't think it's really workable in most MU scenarios. Video games, sure. But in MU's, every player is playing a different character, sometimes multiple characters, that they've invested in. They have a story to tell. If the story ends, it's almost never at a universally agreed upon time for the entire playerbase. It's by the arbitrary decision of whoever is running the story, whether or not any one individual's character has finished their story or not, and I don't think that many players are ultimately going to buy into that. The Reach tried that, and I don't think that it succeeded very well (YMMV). The end date got pushed back multiple times to accommodate for a variety of things, many players still had stories they wanted to tell after the game officially closed, etc. It seems like a good thing on paper, but the practice rarely works out.
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@Derp Sure. But if people are given a timeline (this game will last six months) then they know they have a limited time to get the stories they want told done with. I had an idea for a Star Trek game (because of course I did) that had timejumps.
Every six months (I was feeling optimistic) the game would 'restart' and the timeline would jump forward a set amount of time. Two years, five. Whatever made sense at that point in the story. Former PCs would age, be promoted, reassigned, whatever, and a new bunch of junior crew (the new player characters) would join the station. The problem arises when games are expected to last forever. No game does, ever. So why not conclude a story, rather than just... let it fade away?
To bring this "idea" back to the topic at hand, having defined goals for all groups, staff and players of all stripes alike, brings restriction. And restriction, I've found, is of great import when it comes to creativity. When you can do, be, tell anything... you end up doing nothing, or nothing important.
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This is one of the reasons I like the 'seasonal arcs' approach to metaplot. You can have guaranteed endings to a major story, but it is not the only story, and another will follow in its wake (or potentially overlap, or be spawned by the events of the previous arc, etc.).
You can have time jumps in this, but it's not at all necessary.
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@Seraphim73 said in PC antagonism done right:
We all know by now (whether it's true on a particular game or not) that NPC opposition is just there to be a speedbump,
Off topic but if that has truly been the case for most of the games you have been on, you have run into some shitty GMs, or conversely I have been blessed with running into a lot of good ones.
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I think the person who talked about people not being able, or willing, to 'lose' when faced with an opposition or antagonist is one of the core problems. Especially when it's not a factionalized game. People want to have only the good things, not the bad things.