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How long should characters last?
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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.
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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.
