@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.