The LARPers and our changeling game...
Mar. 22nd, 2007 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alpharaposaSomebody wanted to commission a cold iron axe of gigantic proportions. If you know anything about cold iron (as opposed to, say, steel or cast iron), you know it's heavy, awkward, and brittle. It's not very good for anything large scale.
So, as the storytellers, we're doing the whole, "ZOMG! You want a cold iron what??" thing for a moment, which gets us flak from the player we're talking to, because he just wants to know what the mechanics are, really. So we go back and forth on what's actually possible and what's likely. Player in question is very impatient with the whole thing. So, we get down to questions of how this is being accomplished, then spend some time talking to each other over the phone to figure out what the results of this are.
Neither![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anher nor I are very happy about the idea in the first place. I mean, a double-bladed axe with cold iron? This tone is obviously going to get communicated, which is when the player points out that one of our NPCs has a cold iron chain and it shouldn't be a problem for players to have cold iron things, too.
Kind of misses the point. For one thing, the chain does one level of damage. (Live action has eight health levels, so even one can hurt.) The axe being requested does three levels. When we asked about further details, we got told that what was wanted was a cold iron axe that does three levels of damage and that the rest of the stuff was unimportant, really.
We did get the details hammered out. Neither of us are really happy about this, but really, we don't have a reason to say no other than that it's a really, really stupid thing to try to make. A cold iron double-bladed axe? Even with the idea the player had- to make the center of the head steel and hammer weld cold iron edges on- doesn't help much. Cold iron really isn't something heroes should pick up and decide to use on people.
After this,anher is unhappy enough to log off the conversation for a bit (the whole thing was over IM). And the player decides, as a player, that we needed to know that there are lots of people who just don't take this game as seriously as we do, and that making such a big deal out of these details and things like that is making people think about quitting the game. It seems that they didn't want to have to worry about the hows unless it was something that gave some game advantage or something.
*sigh*
We left the werewolf game over a point of contention between ourselves and the ST there- he didn't let us play a couple of characters we wrote up and he was using as NPCs. In the end, he was rude enough about it that we pointed out that the characters were intellectual property, thank you very much, and we'd just take them back.
That was awkward and upsetting and such, but that wasn't what my biggest problem with the werewolf game was. It was just the thing that made me upset enough at the ST to leave.
The problem we were having is that the players and the ST would all do things exactly according to the rules, but with no mercy guiding them. If a character made a mistake, the other characters would dogpile on that character, and nobody would step in and say, hey, he's just a beginner like the rest of us, don't we all get a chance to be stupid now and then?
When I tried to talk about this with most of the people involved, they all just shrugged and saw no problem with it. It's just a game. Hey, they're wolves- somebody's gotta be the omega. That sort of thing.
I'm into keeping IC and OOC seperate, but why would anybody play in a game where their character is either miserable or making other people miserable all the time?
So, this has got me wondering about running the changeling LARP.anher seems to have cheered up since then, but since I started out gloomy, I'm not doing that great with it now.
It seems like the folks around here are hung up on mechanics. They'll do things to get a big advantage in game mechanics, then shrug off the RP consequences because they don't care if their character dies or gets shunned or whatever. That's the price of having the big nifty game thingy they've bargained for. But if something gives no mechanical benefit, they can't understand why an ST would object to just doing it, even if it's something that, according to the setting, would be hard to do.
To an extent, this is all true, but the attitude of it is just... weird. They don't care if their character screws over another character, because it's just a game and everybody knows that, right? They don't care of their character dies, because it's just a game. Even if that character might be central to a whole group of characters, with a really cool plotline that'll be derailed if somebody goes out and does something stupid.
This takes the whole "it's just a game" vibe to a level where I have to wonder why you even bother to play anymore. Might as well play cards instead.
So, as the storytellers, we're doing the whole, "ZOMG! You want a cold iron what??" thing for a moment, which gets us flak from the player we're talking to, because he just wants to know what the mechanics are, really. So we go back and forth on what's actually possible and what's likely. Player in question is very impatient with the whole thing. So, we get down to questions of how this is being accomplished, then spend some time talking to each other over the phone to figure out what the results of this are.
Neither
anher nor I are very happy about the idea in the first place. I mean, a double-bladed axe with cold iron? This tone is obviously going to get communicated, which is when the player points out that one of our NPCs has a cold iron chain and it shouldn't be a problem for players to have cold iron things, too.Kind of misses the point. For one thing, the chain does one level of damage. (Live action has eight health levels, so even one can hurt.) The axe being requested does three levels. When we asked about further details, we got told that what was wanted was a cold iron axe that does three levels of damage and that the rest of the stuff was unimportant, really.
We did get the details hammered out. Neither of us are really happy about this, but really, we don't have a reason to say no other than that it's a really, really stupid thing to try to make. A cold iron double-bladed axe? Even with the idea the player had- to make the center of the head steel and hammer weld cold iron edges on- doesn't help much. Cold iron really isn't something heroes should pick up and decide to use on people.
After this,
anher is unhappy enough to log off the conversation for a bit (the whole thing was over IM). And the player decides, as a player, that we needed to know that there are lots of people who just don't take this game as seriously as we do, and that making such a big deal out of these details and things like that is making people think about quitting the game. It seems that they didn't want to have to worry about the hows unless it was something that gave some game advantage or something.*sigh*
We left the werewolf game over a point of contention between ourselves and the ST there- he didn't let us play a couple of characters we wrote up and he was using as NPCs. In the end, he was rude enough about it that we pointed out that the characters were intellectual property, thank you very much, and we'd just take them back.
That was awkward and upsetting and such, but that wasn't what my biggest problem with the werewolf game was. It was just the thing that made me upset enough at the ST to leave.
The problem we were having is that the players and the ST would all do things exactly according to the rules, but with no mercy guiding them. If a character made a mistake, the other characters would dogpile on that character, and nobody would step in and say, hey, he's just a beginner like the rest of us, don't we all get a chance to be stupid now and then?
When I tried to talk about this with most of the people involved, they all just shrugged and saw no problem with it. It's just a game. Hey, they're wolves- somebody's gotta be the omega. That sort of thing.
I'm into keeping IC and OOC seperate, but why would anybody play in a game where their character is either miserable or making other people miserable all the time?
So, this has got me wondering about running the changeling LARP.
anher seems to have cheered up since then, but since I started out gloomy, I'm not doing that great with it now.It seems like the folks around here are hung up on mechanics. They'll do things to get a big advantage in game mechanics, then shrug off the RP consequences because they don't care if their character dies or gets shunned or whatever. That's the price of having the big nifty game thingy they've bargained for. But if something gives no mechanical benefit, they can't understand why an ST would object to just doing it, even if it's something that, according to the setting, would be hard to do.
To an extent, this is all true, but the attitude of it is just... weird. They don't care if their character screws over another character, because it's just a game and everybody knows that, right? They don't care of their character dies, because it's just a game. Even if that character might be central to a whole group of characters, with a really cool plotline that'll be derailed if somebody goes out and does something stupid.
This takes the whole "it's just a game" vibe to a level where I have to wonder why you even bother to play anymore. Might as well play cards instead.
