It’s that time of year again where I do playtesting for events that will be running at Gen Con. This is a very fun and exciting time, but it’s also very demanding. I need to absorb the adventure, predict as many possible player character actions that could occur during the adventure, and suggest patches for weak points. It’s definitely a labor of love!
As you might expect, it’s common in con events, especially introductory events, for players to use pregenerated player characters, or PreGens. PreGens are full character sheets and often have their own backgrounds printed right on the sheet. Occasionally, these backgrounds include personality traits and relationships to other PreGens. I’ve also created PreGens for short campaigns which have enabled me to generate hooks and subplots right from the start.
So what happens if a particular player accepts the sheet but rejects some of the personality and relationships? Is she doing it wrong?
Many moons ago I was part of a team creating a LARP. While based on the World of Darkness, this particular LARP took the tactic that most of the players (we had about 40 to start) were humans unaware of the supernatural. While the LARP was designed to be ongoing, my team decided to create PreGens for all of the players. Only a handful of PCs were “powered” and most of these were vampires, who were instructed to keep as low a profile as possible, lest they get found out by vampire hunters and destroyed.
We decided at the start that we’d have one vampire hunter in the game who also happened to be a vampire himself. It was by all accounts a plum role and I handed it to a friend that I felt was an excellent roleplayer (and I still do). His background was that he was an unassuming individual who went around the world doing charity work while he secretly hunted other vampires. He also got the same write-up as everyone else as to the nature and themes of this particular LARP.
You can guess what happened next.
The LARP wasn’t even an hour old before he’d basically announced to the entire room that he was a vampire hunter, regaling everyone he met with lurid tales of burning churches and villages, staking and decapitating people, and all manner of other colorful exploits. The human players gamely reacted as any person would and decided early on that he was insane and needed professional help. Some of the players took their concerns to the police chief, who decided to take the vampire hunter back to the station. Fearing death at dawn, our “good guy” vampire slaughtered the police chief and made his way back into the convention hall (where the bulk of the LARP took place) where he was promptly arrested for the murder and spent much of the rest of the game being interrogated.
After the first session was over I had a talk with my friend. I was shocked to discover how persecuted he felt, believing that we only “went tough” on him because he wasn’t playing the character as we, not he, thought he should. Furthermore, he told me that once a PreGen was handed to him that he could interpret it however he wanted to – just because we saw it a certain way didn’t mean that we should make him play it that way.
My argument was essentially a “social contract” one. He’d agreed to play in a LARP that had a particular style, which included realistic reactions. If he played contrary to that style then his character would likely be short-lived. Also, while his character’s background was detailed, his personality was, save “unassuming,” a blank slate. My GM team didn’t feel so much that he used a different interpretation as much as he’d ignored what he’d been given.
In the end, we both acknowledged the validity of each others’ points and worked together to create a new character for him to play for the remainder of the LARP. Still, I learned some valuable GMing lessons that day.
So fair or foul? Is it acceptable to impose some boundaries on PCs or is it “hands-off” once they’re in the players’ hands? Does it matter whether they are PreGens or simply “campaign guidelines?” Does the length of the campaign matter? Do you have any horror stories of a player you expected to go left and she went right? Did you have any pleasant surprises when a player took a PreGen in a radically different direction?
All the heroes in my Lying Darkness Campaign were pre-gens. I was appehensive at first when my least subtle player chose the Crane Clan Duelist. I feared that he had no feel for art and courtier stuff the Crane are renown for as the player never showed such qualities in previous games but, in fact he became a most excellent Crane, quoting the Tao, Sun Tzu and Confucious. He was also the first character to get romantically involved and was an excellent haiku composer. Without the pregen, I think I would have never seen this side of him.
Another player, who picked the Hida Bushi, was used to playing mages or scientists. I believe he has enjoyed himself a lot by playing outside of his comfort zone and bashing skulls with his Crab powerhouse.
However, it wasn’t all good. the player who played the Falcon Bushi did not have any affinity for him. He was the second son of the Daimyo and had a pet falcon. He was unable to grasp the leadership qualities of his hero and all but completely ignored his bird. he portrayed a dull, uninspired guy and soon dropped back into the background of things.
I guess, knowing the player, I should have banned him from taking the Falcon Bushi but then I probably would have banned the Crane for the other player.
Pregens are a good tool to force your players out of their comfort zone but should also be handled with care…
I’ve had this happen a few times over the years with ‘themed’ games and it can be a difficult situation to deal with. I think it mostly happens when you have a player who really wants to play in your game, but perhaps doesn’t fully understand the ‘theme’ or just doesn’t like the idea of being constrained by it.
If its a simple matter of the player not fully grasping the ‘theme’ then that can often be remedied fairly quickly and easily. However, if its a case of the player not really wanting to play that particular ‘theme’ or ‘style’ then IME they are likely to continue playing things the way they want until the game conforms to them, their character dies, or they completely derail the game ruining it for everyone else who is staying in-theme.
I think you were spot on in your ‘social contract’ argument and based on your description it sounds to me like the player really wanted to play in A game, just not that particular ‘style’ of game. That is just IMO.
*scratches head* Why? An adventure should be prepared in such manner that you can improvise consequences based on the characters’ actions. The more you prepare for possible outcomes, the less you are able to adopt to other people’s action. It just turns to be a rail. Possible even a bad one.
This is soo easy to say afterwards, but shouldn’t the LARP be halted here and talked through?
Also, the player acted and created responses. Isn’t that great? Sure, it wasn’t what the organizers of the LARP had in mind, but that’s what I’m saying. You shouldn’t, because that will lock your ability to go with the flow. It seems like a railed LARP that turned ugly.
Sure, the player could’ve handled it better, but so could the organizers and I totally understand his reaction to how it was handled. I think this is more about a player not following a railed path.
Rickard – what I’m doing is trouble-shooting. GM improvisation is much easier with a well-designed adventure than a poorly designed one.
As for the LARP, I left out some other issues because I wanted to focus on the question. By your reaction you’re obviously in the “hands off” camp, and that’s very cool!
I think it is fair to hold a player to a pregen he/she chooses. Acting in accordance with the pregen is basically the same as acting within the rules of the game system you’ve all chosen to play. If a player is “concerned” with some of the attributes of a pregen, then a conversation about how the character can be tweaked is in order.
What is not fair is the railroad argument. I am so tired of “railroad” tirades. They’ve now gone so far as to suggest that when a GM is prepared for possible outcomes, they are predestined to force the players into certain actions. Not true. Many GMs are perfectly capable of anticipating outcomes (often done in the interest of saving time at the table) while going with the flow. Would it be a railroading if a player in a fantasy setting is not allowed by a GM to go down to the local market and buy a plasma rifle? Good grief! The game is supposed to be fun for everyone, including the GM. Riding roughshod over the game, agreed on by the players and developed for everyone’s enjoyment (by the one guy/girl who usually steps up to the plate because no one else wants to do it), and then crying railroad if things don’t go your way is awfully childish. When you choose the rule system and the theme of the game, you’ve said “I get it, and I’ll play nice.”
Don’t get me wrong–Railroading does exist, and it can sap the fun out of a game. I just don’t see it in Walt’s scenario and to see it brought up as such really grinds my gears as a GM who works very hard to balance the metaplot (agreed on by all) with the actions of players and their characters. If it was so easy, there would be one player at the table surrounded by six GMs. (Yeah I know this occurs when everyone plays and also GMs other games…It’s hyperbole.)
Not predestined, but the tendency is stronger. We can look at other media where both Viola Spolin and Keith Johnstone are saying the same thing about acting. The stiffest actors are the ones who already have decided how to respond to a situation (while doing improv). Thi correlates exactly to my experience when I’ve been in the role of a game master and had tried to predict possible outcomes.
Railroading isn’t bad per se. I use it myself for certain scenarios and it has some advantages. The disadvantages only occur if the players aren’t with me.
I can’t say anything about the LARP itself, because I know nothing about it, but to create an open scenario, just throw in a couple character with goals and then stir things up by changing the conditions. Then, sit back and enjoy what happens. You don’t have to plan things ahead or tell them how to play. Just create circumstances and starting conditions that will create consequences.
– What if one vampire wanted to off another one and wanted to use the vampire hunter for that purpose? (goal)
– What if one vampire had a leverage over the vampire hunter?
– What if the vampire hunter wasn’t a stranger but had someone to care about that could be hurt if he outed himself?
In the end: it’s not the players fault if that person does something that the GM haven’t foreseen, which is basically the case here. The organizers have tried to force how to play the game, and if one player isn’t with them then of course things will go bad. But don’t blame the player. Blame the organisation of the game.
“it’s not the players fault if that person does something that the GM haven’t foreseen”
Sure. Whatever. But did you read this article? The problem wasn’t that the player “did something the GM didn’t forsee”; The problem was that the player did something the GMs more or less specifically said “don’t do this” and then complained about the consequences.
While I personally think that diverging from a pregen character is fine, I also think that the Vampire Hunter player in the LARP example sounds like a complete moron. A serious case of not getting on board with the concept. It’s not railroading if the GM tells you “Hey. Expect realistic reactions” and then you go and do something where the realistic reactions are unpleasant.
I’m siding with mercutior here – you should entirely too eager to grab your pitchfork and scream “Railroad!”
I can’t really comment on LARPs in general (because I have no experience there) but in this example, I think you should have let the player go with it. He did some stuff, and all the other players reacted accordingly–that’s a success, no?
Now, I do think it is “foul” to tell a player in a tabletop game to knock it off if they’re drifting away from the character design of a pregen; characters evolve, and that will take shape differently for different players. That being said, I think it’s a bad player who doesn’t at least make an effort! Ideally, a player talks to the GM about alternatives, or takes a broad (but still reasonable) interpretation of the given design.
I am going with fair on this. You had a social contract. You informed the player (that you trusted because of his role playing ability) that he would be playing a special character, which would put a target on his back if he revealed his identity. He did so, other players behaved accordingly.
What is specifically NON railroad about the situation, is that it was the other players that inevitably took control of the problem situation. Unless details were left out, it wasn’t the GMs that controlled the situation. The discussion was in the after game. Therefore, it would t constitute a railroaded situation.
Furthermore, it is important to note that for a one-off con game, sometimes you have limited time, so you need juicy hooks and prebuilt drama to jump start things and prevent a slow start. Every minute counts. So I don’t consider it railroading to make pregens either. It is a necessary evil. Players joining these events should read the fine print and decide whether they are willing to play with restrictions. If not, don’t play the game. Once again, this was a con game, not a home campaign where someone not playing means that one of your close friends will miss dozens of game nights.
I do not believe it is anyone’s place to tell a person how to play his or her character, pre-generated or not.
I played in a one-shot back in college where someone tried to pull this on me. The game was already off to a bad start, because the DM had decided, rather than letting us build our characters OR using pre-generated characters, he would roll our race and class at random. But that’s moot.
The important part is at the end, when the DM forced us to fight the final boss (we’d tried several times to circumvent the fight, but he wouldn’t let us). The boss gets initiative, casts a fireball, and kills half of the party (three of the six of us) outright in the first action of the first turn. I, playing my character assuming he was actually SANE, decided to run away. A fellow player turned to me and asked “What’s your character’s alignment?”, as if my answer would allow him to tell me what I could or couldn’t do.
As a player, my character is the one and only thing in the game I control. Any time someone else tells me how to play him, that person takes away control from me. If I’m not even in control of my character, then why am I playing the game at all?
HOWEVER, that’s not what happened in your above story. You GMs weren’t telling the player how he could or couldn’t act; you were introducing consequences for his choices. Which is perfectly valid, completely within a GM’s rights.
One of the things I really enjoy about running one-shots is seeing what different people do with the same character. It’s always cool to see the different spins people will put on the framework I’ve given them. For my Doctor Who games, I have characters that have backgrounds and some personality, but they’re given enough flexibility to interpret those things into their own choices.
It’s cool to see both the similarities and the differences. With one character, four out of the five players have put the character in a Hawaiian shirt, even though nothing on the sheet mentions anything about that wardrobe choice. It just fits the character. Another character is invariably played as British, even though nothing on the sheet says the character is British. Conversely, some of the other characters wouldn’t even be recognizable when compared to someone else playing the same character.
In the case mentioned above, though, I think it is absolutely fair to impose some boundaries on the characters and that I also would have been upset at the player who nearly killed the LARP. I believe there is a social contract with players when they’re given the guidelines for a character, whether it’s a pregenerated character or even the guidelines that may have been set up at the beginning of a campaign. If the GM says “All characters need to have this particular thing in their background” and a player ignores that, the GM is completely within their rights to tell them to remake the character and include that in there.
This was a train wreck waiting for a place to happen from where I sit.
The need for the players to stay “on message” with their assigned characters should have been the first thing on the player advice hand-out, should have been in 18 point type, bold and in red. It should have been explained that the story could unfold in many ways, but the most entertaining for all would be by cleaving to the vision.
This is one of the best things about the Dresden Files RPG character sheet. Up front and center is a statement about what the character is like in terms of drives and challenges.
I feel for you Walt. I long ago came to the decision that pregenerated characters save time but should never be used to provide structure for the plot of a game.
What I do is provide characters with a few core skills padded to the minimum requirements of the plot (in a recent Solly Kane I gave everyone Healing D4 so they wouldn’t get caught in the old “the doctor has been badly stabbed” trap) and allow the players to assign the rest up to certain clear limits.
If I need to define relationships, I do so in the most nebulous terms possible without introducing confusion. “He’s your brother. You don’t get on”. “He’s a former friend. He owes you money you’ll never collect”.
The clever part (I rarely have such good ideas) is that I let players do the assigning of some skills/defining areas of interest during the adventure.
It is particularly entertaining for all concerned with the Realms of Cthulhu “defining interest”, which gives a player character an area of knowledge better than general but not expert. Here I say at any point one player may claim a defining interest that is relevant to the action. Once it’s been picked, it is permanent, consumes one of your Defining Interest slots and can’t be traded back. First to ask for it, gets it, and only one person in the group may claim a specific area of interest.
Players have great fun with this. “A sailboat, you say? Well, I never told you guys this but I go to Lake Crimson every summer to fish, and I’ve become quite versed in the use of these things. Stand aside and I’ll check it’s river-worthiness!”.
It moves the game forward and moreover makes the players feel they participated in building the character, which is more important than anything else, I’ve found.
The few times I’ve made pregens, I’ve purposely tried to bake in a bit of wiggle room so that the players can make the characters their own. I’ll even leave some aspects blank. (Examples: Pick your two Faults one major, one minor. Your character always carries two valued possessions; what are they?)
I certainly believe in player agency, I barely even try fathom how the actual game will play out. Instead I come up with obstacles, events that will happen, and events that might happen then just play it by ear. I don’t bother to plan out all the solutions to an obstacle. So long as I can see one way to get through it, I consider the obstacle fair; besides, they players will come up with five more I could never imagine. Players do what they want, I, the GM, adjudicate according to the system & the in-setting reality.
That said if there are some overarching truths to a campaign setting, ignoring them is a total dick move. When it is spelled out that the supernatural is unknown, dropping the “I’m a Vampire” bomb publically is gonna have consequences. Bitching about them is silly. Players _can_ have their characters do whatever they want, this doesn’t mean they should just do what the hell ever.
You’re spot on with the implied social contract line of reasoning, Walt. Pregens are subject to the players’ interpretations, but the interpretation ought to have some resonance with established facts. Ignoring those facts, may be interesting, maybe even be fun, but ultimately it’s just going to be disruptive. There’s got to be some level of collaboration if there’s to be any long-term enjoyment.
I think it’s good that you agreed that you both had valid points. I think Roxysteve is right: if staying true to the character as conceived was important for the whole scenario, that’s important to list upfront.
In a LARP where you have 40 people that you’re juggling, keeping your “prime movers” on a tighter leash is more necessary than around a table.
Around a table: While it can be frustrating to have a player go off the rails and drag the whole group off track, at 1 GM to 5 players, this can be addressed reasonably. For a LARP, with only a few GMs scattered through the room, not even witnessing many actions, most characters–particularly those given special roles–have to act within expectations even when the GM’s not watching. Otherwise, the coordinated prep–which is much harder when you have 5 GMs who have to agree for the event to feel coherent–will be wasted, and you’ll have five different spots of improv GMing in a sea of “why isn’t anything interesting going on”?
Honestly, joining a LARP is like joining a module. The flexibility of “anything can happen” or “change your character as you see fit” is constrained, by the nature of the game you’ve signed onto. If you decide not to go into the Tomb of Horrors, that might be realistic roleplaying… but it also means you won’t get to enjoy taking on the Tomb, the thing everyone agreed to.
“So what happens if a particular player accepts the sheet but rejects some of the personality and relationships? Is she doing it wrong?”
NO
Long answer: Hell no, what kind of beyond-railroading GM are you??? (unless the player is going out of his/her way to ruin the game for other players, which is a completely different issue than just changing the character’s personality to make it fun to play)
But in the vampire hunter case, it sounds like he should have been treated more as an important NPC than as a PC. GMs should always have some control over how NPCs act. In a LARP the NPCs should have as much leeway as possible, but should not be allowed to hurt the plot.
Once you hand a character to a player, it’s no longer yours, it’s theirs. How a player interprets a character is part of the magic that keeps a LARP fresh and unpredictable, even if run repeatedly. And the phrase “you’re playing the character wrong” is unlikely to ever be productive.
But I feel no guilt about nudging players in directions more likely to be fun for everyone. When you’re juggling a mob of players, a little metagaming can be a useful grease on the wheels of fun. And always check that there isn’t a misunderstanding about the character or the world; a lot of seemingly crazy decisions are the result of the player and the GM having very different ideas of the situation.
But based on the limited information I have, it sounds like the player screwed up. Play the character you’re handed, not the character you wish you had. You no more get to rewrite the personality, background, and goals than you get to rewrite the statistics, powers, and inventory.
In many LARPs with pregens, the characters are carefully woven together with the goal of creating a good game for everyone. The writers don’t write a single plot, but try to create conflict, challenges to be overcome, opportunities for dramatic scenes, and some chances to brood meaningfully. Rewriting your own character without GM involvement is nothing less than cutting random threads in that weaving, adding a few more, and hoping that it still fits in. Maybe it will be fine, especially for smaller edits, but your changes can impact the fun of others in unpredictable ways.
So a player publicly announces that they’re a vampire hunter. What about the vampire whose sheet says, “You have it on good authority that a vampire hunter is in the city. You’ll need to lie low. Even better would be to identify and neutralize them.” Whelp, the identification plotline is basically done. And once the hunter is tossed in the asylum, the neutralization is done too. How about the would-be hunter seeking a mentor? Welcome to the start of the game, here’s a handy solution right in front of them! Or the spy wary of being found out; the tension of the red herring of the vampire being nosy as they look for the hunter just disappeared. Or what about the journalist looking to expose evidence of the supernatural; what does the GM say when they ask, “I want to verify this guy’s story, so I check our archives for the churches and villages he says he burned?”
This isn’t to say a character can’t evolve; evolving is awesome! Some of the coolest parts of LARPs I’ve played have been when someone decided their character made a fairly radical change over the course of the game: the villain who apologies and turns themselves in, the father who blesses their child’s marriage to someone of culturally inappropriate station, the sheriff who denounces the town he spent his life protecting and walks away. But these are slow movements, major character development, not a start-of-game rewrite.
If you simply can’t play the character as written, talk to a GM before rewriting. It’s possible that the writer failed to convey something on the character sheet, and that a brief talk may reveal that the character will work fine for you. Small changes in focus may be enough to get you on a path to fun (“Hey, how about downplaying these aspects you don’t like and focus on these? Will that work?”). If a rewrite is necessary, because the GM knows how everything is woven together they can ensure the new character meshes well, maximizing fun for you and everyone else. If necessary, they can patch other characters (“Oh, on your character sheet it says this, but that’s a mistake, it should actually say this other thing.”).
I’m not entirely sure, to be honest, wherein the railroading lies in this particular example.
If this had been a tabletop game, where the vampiric vampire hunter was arrested by npc’s, then maybe I could see the point in calling it railed. But that isn’t what happened.
As I read the descrition, there were players playing characters who were mortals unaware of the existance of vampires. These players decided their characters would be freaked out by this one guy exclaiming, quite earnestly, that he was a vampire and telling detailed stories of how he’d killed other vampires. If that same thing happened to me in real life, I’d be pretty freaked out too. If the clearly insane individual making these claims did not leave me alone, I’d eventualy call the police as well.
Was the player playing his character “wrong”? No, I wouldn’t call it that. But the consequences of how he played his character were not imposed on him by the GM, they were brought on by other people playing their characters in a perfectly realistic, plausible way. This entire chain of events was brought about through player agency.
Be that as it may, I get that it sucked for that guy to have his chosen play-style put him in an unmanageable situation (I once had a LARP character executed for heretical practices, actually, man do I get that it sucked) and I think it’s great that you worked something out.