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How long should characters last?
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What worked for me in LARPs is just to establish a known convention that we’d happily craft Closing the Book plots for long-lived characters that the player wanted to retire. We had some other related stuff we did to incentivize retirement, but simply making it a known tradition in the game felt like the most impactful part.
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@MisterBoring said in How long should characters last?:
I feel that characters should last as long as they need to, but should have arcs that come to an end.
I also think there are a non-zero amount of people who see ending their character’s arc as some sort of tv series cancellation and a lot of people have the opinion that their series can’t be cancelled.
Something to consider though is that, unlike a TV series, you (as the player behind a character) don’t control the arc to nearly the same degree.
The simplest way the paradigm fails is if your PC’s arc is tied to another, and that character stops playing. But he killed your wife! Well too bad, unless you can turn them into an NPC.
But otherwise I agree - and in fact that’s the ‘secret’ of allowing a character to be played long-termly. You need to reinvent them, to shake things up a bit. Introducing new goals and getting them involved with a set of characters who didn’t even exist when you first rolled is essential.
In that way it actually does resemble a TV series. Perhaps one that’s been going on for a while; some of the original cast members are gone, but the show must go on.
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@Arkandel said in How long should characters last?:
But otherwise I agree - and in fact that’s the ‘secret’ of allowing a character to be played long-termly. You need to reinvent them, to shake things up a bit. Introducing new goals and getting them involved with a set of characters who didn’t even exist when you first rolled is essential.
Great point! Old, powerful characters can often contribute to stagnation simply by continuing to do what they have always done. Simplistic example: if your character has been Ventrue Primogen for five years, that’s five years of people unable to fulfill their own goals of becoming Ventrue Primogen.
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@shit-piss-love And that is a good point. The longer characters are ‘expected’ to last in a game, the more essential it becomes for the game to avoid glass ceilings from forming.
Now, I am not sure (as a game-runner) how you’re supposed to know that in advance, of course. It’s probably an argument against having important ranks achievable for PCs, though, at least without built-in IC rotations of some sort.
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@Arkandel said in How long should characters last?:
Now, I am not sure (as a game-runner) how you’re supposed to know that in advance, of course. It’s probably an argument against having important ranks achievable for PCs, though, at least without built-in IC rotations of some sort.
Handling the phases of the story of long-lived characters is one of my absolute favorite things about running long-form games. It was definitely at the core of my interest in running LARPs, where in some cases we were talking characters that people had been playing for many years.
My first staff role on a LARP was in 2002, on a game that had been running since the 80s. I’d played this LARP for about 6 years by this point, and knew many of the oldbies very well both IC and OOC. One of the first plots I worked on was a series of maneuvers from deep-lore NPCs that were aimed at taking down the PC with the third highest XP spend in the game. Villains that were BBEGs, which the PC had thwarted the plans of many times over. The player of this PC was great, and they always used their power and position in the game to jumpstart the stories of other players. This was their favorite thing in the game. The PC wasn’t all lovey dovey, she was a shrewd political animal, but she prided herself on turning her mentees into equally skilled operators.
So, I went out with an unassuming NPC that was in secret service to the BBEGs and felt out the new crop of young PCs that the target oldbie had taken under their wing. I learned and waited, and eventually identified three that had come into the game together as a dispossessed minor noble family that were now trying to claw their way back to power. The ringleader of this group, it was obvious to all, had become a sort of favored protegee. They were close. There was even a blooming expectation that the oldbie was going to formally adopt the protegee into her Household.
Without getting into too much context about the game; one of the oldbie PC’s greatest advantages was her ability to use a very rare type of magic that could supernaturally bind the word of others. Sort of like a geas; you made an Oath and there were now severe sorcerous consequences for breaking it. But there was a big catch to this. This power was so rare because the only way to pass it on was to use the power itself. It had once, in the ancient times, been the Art that all nobility was legitimized by. And it died with every person that fell before they could pass it on. This PC had picked the Art up from a long questline many years ago, from her own mentor NPC, and had used it to build her Household.
You can probably see where this is headed. There were lots of twists and turns but eventually the oldbie brought the protegee into her House, and situations conspired to put the Art in danger and she made the Oath that would pass the power down if she fell.
When the denouement finally came, I got to see it first hand. As the oldbie finally died, she looked at her former-protegee, now-betrayer, and asked “Why?”
The response was a simple, dead-ass flat, “I just wanted to be you.”
For years after, every time we were together at one of the many LARP community parties (LARPers go hard y’all) she would tell this story. It was her favorite story and she’d give me a huge hug (she gave great hugs). She had been secretly wanting to move on for years but just didn’t know how or how the ending could ever feel like justice for a character she’d played for almost 20 years.
So I guess the moral of the story here, if any, is that part of the art of being a game runner is knowing what vector is best for a character’s story and figuring out how to get there in a way that respects the story the player is telling.
edit: if any of you played in this game i realize i just doxxed myself. i’d ask that you keep my identity and that of the game to yourself. also hi.
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@Arkandel said in How long should characters last?:
@Mourne said in How long should characters last?:
Except Staff.
And I’ve found that on those games that /don’t/ limit Blood Potency etc to reasonable levels, they don’t give a frick to begin with.
This deeefinitely goes outside of the thread’s scope but you stumbled upon one of my pet peeves. Trigger activated!
My issue usually isn’t about that one player/character, to be honest. In fact, if nothing else, they tend to be more careful about throwing their weight around since their precious character is so irreplaceable; if my 2-month old character dies I’ll be sad. If their BP 6 3-year old character dies it’s a Very Big Deal. In my experience these folks are very, very conservative about how hot the waters they’re willing to test can be.
No, my actual issue is the fact the doors are often closed behind them. In the first six months of a game BP, Renown or whatever toys are easy to get; if you have the XPs and you file a job, you get the toy. Then staff or a policy changes and now there are hoops to jump through; you must be worthy of this shiny! And suddenly the oldbies’ ‘value’ skyrockets due to this brand new artificial scarcity.
In those games and situations you better believe ‘how long should characters last’ is often answered with ‘as long as they can fucking can, now that I’m a Golden God among peons’.
This is why I have ALWAYS said that policy changes during an “alpha/beta” need to be accompanied by progress wipes. Especially since you cannot actually test the balance repercussions of a change if half the people still gain benefits from the previous mechanics, and half the people don’t.
At that point, all you’re doing is calcifying the divide between people who got in early and people who didn’t.
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@Pyrephox Mind you, the same principle can be applied even with something as simple as a staff regime change (which is a pretty common event in MU*), and in regards to long-running characters it can affect them both ways.
For example. @shit-piss-love quits being sphere staff. @Pyrephox is their replacement. Long live @Pyrephox !
However @Pyrephox thinks Renown was too damn easy to get before. Therefore from now on to get you have to be a goddamn hero to get Glory! Ooor… @Pyrephox thinks it was too damn hard to get before, and now you can get it as long as you’re able to type +request “Hey so I’m awesome”.
Either way, either my existing Werewolf’s accomplishments were suddenly elevated overnight because no one else is getting there any time soon, or these PrPs he barely survived turned out to have been unnecessary since everyone can get it.
It’s probably not a solvable problem in the long term unless a MU* is very, very serious about remaining consistent about the toys it rewards over time.
But here’s a question - should any of that matter to me? Should the toys characters can (or cannot) obtain affect how long they can be played for? In other words we’ve discussed longevity in terms of goals, arcs and social groups. Are skills and powers part of what makes PCs worthwhile to keep going a while longer?
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@Arkandel This is true.
To address the question you bring up, I think it’s worthwhile to distinguish “should” from “does”. SHOULD it affect a character’s length of viable play? Probably not.
DOES it? For a lot of people, I would say it does. But then we get back to different players being motivated (or dismotivated) by different things. For some people, a sense of mechanical progression and consistency is very important. Some people find it moderately important, and others don’t care at all.
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@Arkandel said in How long should characters last?:
Are skills and powers part of what makes PCs worthwhile to keep going a while longer?
@Pyrephox said in How long should characters last?:
@Arkandel This is true.
To address the question you bring up, I think it’s worthwhile to distinguish “should” from “does”. SHOULD it affect a character’s length of viable play? Probably not.
DOES it? For a lot of people, I would say it does. But then we get back to different players being motivated (or dismotivated) by different things. For some people, a sense of mechanical progression and consistency is very important. Some people find it moderately important, and others don’t care at all.
There’s also the issue of where you fall as a game-runner. Some are of the opinion that they need to stay totally hands-off someone else’s story and so they don’t even want to make judgments about how a character is affecting the game overall.
I uh, don’t think that, so personally I look at characters more critically the more power they are able to exert. If you play in my games long enough you learn that I’m the grim reaper and I’m coming for you. I assume that you welcome the conflict I’m going to bring your way, because Conflict is Story. My experience has been that doing this sort of naturally resolves the problems because even if the conflict I’m bringing your way doesn’t kill you, it’s probably tying up a lot of your resources anyway which either mitigates the problem of your power or actively turns it to uses that can benefit the game overall.
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There’s always that group of people for whom being able to be mechanically dominant is more important than story. For those people, ending a character’s story equates to voluntarily turning in your orbital ion cannon and starting again with a steak knife.
Those people are on my list of MU peeves.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring said in How long should characters last?:
There’s always that group of people for whom being able to be mechanically dominant is more important than story. For those people, ending a character’s story equates to voluntarily turning in your orbital ion cannon and starting again with a steak knife.
Those people are on my list of MU peeves.
From a different lens, that group might interlap significantly with people who want to… stand out. To be better than others, or who are tethering their IC success to their own as players.
For example being the deadliest mofo in the room isn’t necessarily all that different from being the higher ranked person there. Or the most knowledgeable.
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@Arkandel said in How long should characters last?:
It’s probably not a solvable problem in the long term unless a MU* is very, very serious about remaining consistent about the toys it rewards over time.
To slightly tangent on this, I’d worry that if players and staff were serious about trying to keep things consistant, it could end up leaving poor systems in place when potentially better things could be tried. Just because it wouldn’t be fair to the people who had to deal with those systems?
You might remember when my character on Haunted Memories was PK’d, it did trigger a lot of changes to pvp policies behind the scenes, justification for outright PK was changed, and I think XP rollover got updated as well. I didn’t benefit from any of the improvements, which kinda sucked in the moment, but it was overall an improvement.
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@Livia I suppose in a way long-lasting characters act as the best canaries-in-the-mine. If there are fundamental issues with the way the game is set up, its policies, the XP distribution curve, how powers are doled out… those are the ones who’re the most likely to be impacted by them.
On the other hand of course… if there are no long-lasting characters and none of these issues stand out, is it possible the actual ‘problem’ was having dinos in the first place?
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My answer to the original question is 12 months. I make exceptions for characters who are shelved to return a long time later, post-character-development. That’s always great.
Unfortunately in some games, progression is far too slow and it demotivates people from keeping things fresh. After all, who wants to kill their character off knowing that their replacement will be effectively castrated for 12-18 months before they can achieve basic things? It’s mind-numbing how hard you have to fight against the system in some games to avoid turning into a dino.
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Mine use to be 1 year when I started Mu*ING. But back then I could EASILY get 7+ scenes a week. (No, they weren’t all quality okay.) So a ton of development could happen.
The older I get, the longer I keep an alt. I would love if they would all have organic endings, but honestly, right now is that moment when I go, “Wait, am I adding value? Is my enjoyment more than my stress? Do I feel like a burden?”
If the answer is no, no, yes: it is time to let go.
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It used to be very important to me to have a planned/anticipated end for my PCs. It helped focus my RP, honestly, because I am very weird and am the person who LOVES spoilering myself (not others) and reads the end of the book first or now looks up the wiki/plotline/review, ect. It actually helps me really enjoy the rest of the story.
So usually my characters are driven. They always used to have a within the scope of the game but extremely difficult goal to achieve after which they would go out in a blaze of glory or slip off to happily ever after. My favorite plan for this was actually on a battlestar game where i even got clearance from the people that approved me that my PC would not survive more than a year (it was actually quite realistic for that to be the case given the position she held). It was awesome. I knew, they knew, nobody else did. It actually gave me a lot of OOC patience with some people that were kind of dicks which desescalated quite a few things. Unfortunately that game kind of crashed and burned for everyone I played with before that could be brought to bear, but I dunno, shit happens. Even my Fading Suns characters both had arcs where frankly, they were going to meet their end in really interesting ways.
I can’t put my finger on when that shifted exactly–maybe the first time I saw someone absolutely go apeshit somewhere bc someone else had decided to take out their own character and that person now blamed them for ruining everything and how they owed it to them to continue. Or game runners OWED it to people to give their games to other people because players had a right to keep their PC going with all their stuff for perpetuity. I don’t think this is a common thing exactly but it was so surprising and jarring the strength and just…seething hatred towards people who got in the way of that on the part of a few people, that it kind of shocked me. And then I noticed people really getting annoyed at other people killing off their PCs. Or calling folks who wanted that to happen in a storyline attention whores. So I didn’t feel quite as certain that I should have an expiration date in mind for my PCs because honestly, I really hate when people are mad at me.
I get that people don’t want to play grief (which to me is totally fine, I’ve skimmed over that too). And really for the most part, any individual pc is frankly so unimportant to the game as a whole that even an awesome death that leads to a lot of RP for a little while or memories or whatever really honestly in the longer term like a really really low speedbump for everyone else. So I wish there was less resentment towards people who want their PCs to go out in glory, if that’s what they want. I think maybe it’s tough to ask that as an ST (though elsewhere I’ve run a lot of blaze of glory scenes for people it’s one of my absolutely high impact favorite scenes to run!) if someone doesn’t like that. But if that’s not the case, I wish people were more okay with less control about how other PCs fit in to their play/timelines to allow for voluntary or planned character loss to be okay.
I can’t put a time on it–so for me it’s very much a gut feeling thing.
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Until you get bored of playing them.
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@shit-piss-love said in How long should characters last?:
I love this topic so much, because I have learned over the years that I seem to be on one extreme of the spectrum for how one enjoys PC play.
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I strongly suspect that I love this pattern because I’ve been the Forever GM since the 90s. Playing a character, for me, is less about the story I am experiencing and more about being the hand behind experiences that others enjoy. I also really like being a Conflict-driver because there is truly no one a character is closer to than the people they are at odds with. It’s a kind of intimacy that, done in a positive and collaborative fashion, is unique to the medium.
Forgive the follow-on to thread necromancy, but I love this response. I’m at least a decade removed from a MU* career, but share similar instincts and hadn’t fully internalized the “Forever-GM” aspect as a possible root cause.
This is one of the reasons I prefer games that have generous character roll-over policies that are tied to players vs. characters.
-r
