Posts made by Juniper

@arkandel said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

The reason I dislike it is because it taints future interactions. How is Bob supposed to build up to the next small tidbit of apocrypha he pries out of Joe and feel legitimate excitement about it when Jane has read the fucking handbook IC and knows everything there is to know complete with its canonical terminology?

Now imagine that instead of doing that, Jane continues to treat it like a secret and admits to keeping things from Bob. Or pretends to be surprised so she doesn't have to admit she was keeping things from Bob. There are a million interesting ways you could have taken this, Jane, God damn it.

@horrorhound said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:

@Juniper

I, personally, loathe the Super Friend routine and often distance myself from it when I see it as I recognize my first instinct is to piss all over it and then set it on fire. Hooooweverrrr, using that example and your own, you inevitably come back to Staff being the arbiters between players and at each crossroads because, you know, drama.

Swinging back around this game a couple of years later, the main form of plot development seems to be constant charity drives and I just want to burn the whole thing to the ground.

Having only vaguely skimmed this thread (sorry) here's my worthless 2 cents.

Good antagonism both requires a high-quality roleplayer and a high level of personal commitment to making it work. The more I play MUDs the more convinced I am that players are like water, they usually take the path of least resistance. If you want them to act in specific ways you need the mechanically incentivise that behavior and dam up shortcuts that you don't want them to use. If you can't design a system that incentivise cooperative antagonistic play, high-quality antagonists will go somewhere else.

I recall a game where players holding high positions of authority were thematically obligated to crush antags into a fine red paste ASAP. Anyone who went easy on an antag to promote story faced backlash and potential removal. So people stopped being bad. GMs now wonder why everyone sits around hugging each other and nobody wants to start conflict. But, I mean, what did you expect?

I'm not saying it's easy or simple, but facilitating antagonism is definitely the responsibility of the game implementor (unless the game has like 3 people in which case none of this applies).