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How long should characters last?
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I played Harkan for around 15 years on A Moment in Tyme (with a relatively-short hiatus of playing him on Dragon’s Fang), through three timeline resets. That was probably too long, especially for someone who started as “my dead character’s brother,” but the timeline resets gave me opportunities to tweak him so that he still had goals/purposes.
I agree with the idea that you should play a character as long as they’re fun for you, and with the idea that I tend to play a character (if the health of the game allows it) until they’ve completed their goals or reached a plateau. I recently retired Zack after nearly 2 years because he was just too comfortable not the Network’s Dome setting, and while seasons were fun with him, hiatuses between seasons weren’t. He had what he wanted, he was there for 20ish years, and he had just come to accept the strange luxury of The Dome even if it feared on his socialist nerves.
I think it’s really important to know when you’ve come to the end of a character’s story (or stories), because if you can’t find new goals, you’re going to have a hard time connecting with anything that’s going on. Want and Do Not Want drive so much of stories, if your character has what they want and doesn’t have what they don’t want, it’s going to be hard to keep them involved, changing, and interesting.
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@TNP said in How long should characters last?:
Until you no longer enjoy playing it. Only thing that matters.
This. I stop playing a character when I can’t come up with anything else fun to do with them.
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@Arkandel I have no idea how to answer this. I’ve never had a chance to actually retire a character. Either a playgroup/game fell apart, or I didn’t want to be there anymore.
Closest I’ve come was Arx, but the dice retired him for me.
I think I’m content to keep a character forever, unless he gets written into a corner.
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The last time I thought I was done with a character’s story staff asked if I would mind starting a new chapter where he’s the pope. So I clearly have no idea.
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My favorite experience is having an actual ending for a character. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve played a character, IC retirement is one of the most satisfying ways for me to finish playing.
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Most satisfying end to a character goes down as the selfless mentor who murdered and sucked the life force out of @Tat.
Def agree that IC closure is ideal, but sometimes it’s just not in the cards. Last year I picked up a character I created that I had to put down for 4-5ish years, and it’s been with the intention of playing them until the end of their story – which I have some ideas for.
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@helvetica said in How long should characters last?:
Most satisfying end to a character goes down as the selfless mentor who murdered and sucked the life force out of @Tat.
God that was good. So fucking good.
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@helvetica said in How long should characters last?:
Def agree that IC closure is ideal, but sometimes it’s just not in the cards. Last year I picked up a character I created that I had to put down for 4-5ish years, and it’s been with the intention of playing them until the end of their story – which I have some ideas for.
If this is who I think it, we should talk sometime.
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I’d echo other statements and simply say that keep playing until they are no longer enjoyable.
I’d add to that and define ‘no longer enjoyable’ to mean a couple of things, such as ending their arc or completing what I as a player had set out to do for them.
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Until its story is told – and until it no longer is useful in helping others tell their stories.
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My initial response is “until you stop having fun with it”, but the older, wiser me includes, “or until you start hindering other people’s stories”. Because despite what some people may want/feel, the MU* isn’t all about you.
Basically once your xp bloat begins making other people’s involvement in things useless it is time for you to do something. That doesn’t mean you have to give up the character just because you have a lot of xp, but you can take a step back from active roles and delegate activities/responsibilities/missions to others. This way also prevents you from hindering other people’s stories without giving up the character.
Also, XP bloat isn’t the only way to hinder other people stories. You could have very low xp and just be rude or inconsiderate, or taking all the spots on events or cliquing up with others to keep certain characters out of the loop just because you don’t like them. But the rule still applies. If that’s what you’ve done with your character, then you’re hindering other people’s stories and your character’s run should be over.
But usually its the XP bloat thing.
Disclaimer: This is all completely arbitrary based on what I’ve noticed most MU* s tend to be. But whether the game world’s players are expected to be cohesive or a bunch of individuals who aren’t beholden to each other, that should be something made clear by the game runner.
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This is an area where I have to be careful not to graft what I want onto other players. I can’t really do a character for more than a couple years for various reasons that just come down to the kind of story arc I enjoy. Endings are also pretty important to me, they reorient how I view even characters I’ve semi-lost interest in and make them feel more satisfying, kind of helping to highlight the good parts and make the meh ones feel more distant. The first character I put to bed properly was one where I’d left the game for a while but come back for the finale on @Faraday’s Battlestar Pacifica out of nostalgia, and being able to put a pin in her was somewhat revelatory for me in terms of ‘oh, this sure is a thing I found really satisfying in a way I didn’t know MUs could be’, since idling out or the game losing steam is more the norm. All that said, I know that a lot of players don’t need that kind of button and find ongoing play for years a really satisfying part of this hobby. I’ve also found myself unable to play games I otherwise enjoy because retiring a bit meant the loss of IC relationships and continuity I really loved, so it’s kind of a picking priorities thing.
I think how to deal with dinosaurs is a different question and you can do it in a lot of ways beyond forced retirement (XP caps, staff being firm about rotating out certain IC positions, etc). Those things aren’t easy but I think they’re doable. I’m also excited to see more games build in clear ends to story arcs (even anthology-style like The Network) and I’d like to see places play around with time-jumps, but you need to be really upfront with your playerbase if that’s something you want to experiment with and it’s also more a narrative choice than one made for anti-dino purposes imo.
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Since the title is ‘How long should characters last?’ not ‘How long should my characters last?’ (emphasis mine) I’m going to answer to say I’ve quit playing games/PCs because dinos that weren’t me affected the ‘gravity’ of a game, so to speak.
It’s one of the interesting facets of the hobby to me that you can study a wiki and work through all the thematic and character generation points only to get into the game and find out it’s not really ‘World of Darkness’ but ‘World of Adam, the First and Oldest PC Still On Grid’ and in doing so, find out that your carefully crafted and on-theme concept doesn’t work due to the culture shift the game has taken to revolve around an entrenched person or group.
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@eye8urcake I used to play on Haunted Memories. Its system (pre- GMC World of Darkness) was very, very favorable to dinos; not only did XP accumulate on older characters but also powers themselves had simply been easier to approve back-in-the-day. Meaning there were two hurdles before your character could improve; one was to gather the XPs in the first place and the second was to be allowed to buy some of the cool toys - Blood Potency for Vampires, Renown for Werewolves, etc.
Given all this you’d think only the dinos could amount to something, right?
No. Laibah, when she created, joined the Carthians which at the time was the least populated, shittiest faction in the game. Her player, while amazing in every other way, never cared a bit about her sheet; she usually sat on XPs anyway since she forgot to buy anything.
It just didn’t matter - she was so good at it that the Covenant soon swelled in numbers simply because people rolled to hang out there. Her influence on the sphere defied the numbers of the sheet - not that she played it wrong, either. It’s just… again, people flocked there, and their characters listened.
Sure, now and then mechanically powerful characters get to dictate some things but their influence is exaggerated. Talented players, people you want to play with, whose characters are flawed but intriguing, whose posts are enticing and whose arcs you want to be involved in, shape games.
I’ll always believe this. But I’m more than willing to debate the point with anyone who disagrees.
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@Arkandel The problem with dino’s and the heavy sheets, and we see this so often with Werewolves who get to primal urge 8 or Vampires with Blood Potency stupid whatever, is that they have a resoundingly negative impact on the game //when the player// decides they want to throw their sheet around and there is literally nothing anyone can do about it.
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.
It can and will have a negative impact, but, good people are good people. We (as humans) tend to remember the negative, and for every Laibah there is at least 3-4 of the:
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@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’.
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@Arkandel said in How long should characters last?:
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’.
My next vampire character is now Dennis Reynolds. Thank you!
edit: You also made a good point. Pulling the ladder up behind the beta players happens and it sucks.
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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. That the story should just go on and on and on. I think, after a certain point, that can lead to irresponsible behavior on a MU, since getting to the point where a character’s arc has wrapped up but you’re trying to force the story to go on can cause a person to do things both narratively and otherwise that disrupt the game for other people.
Yes it’s great that your character has finally defeated their rival and found closure with their long lost brother after 5 years of really great play, but suddenly deciding to declare war on Lord Bob because you footnoted in a line about how Lord Bob’s lands are really your ancestral homelands is cheap and often doesn’t serve the greater story.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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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.
