The Blog of Roon

Li offers an example of a character-based challenge in response to a Game WISH I haven’t yet answered: “a strictly non-violent character finds out that she or he may have been targeted for assassination.”

Er, I resemble that remark. Or Shirley does, anyway. I did the Batman schtick with him, up to a point; his parents died by violence, therefore he is himself firmly pacifist.

The smart money currently is on his not having been a specific target—if you read the Grand Ellipse timelines carefully, you discover that chief assassin suspect Herbert Addison never bothered to wait for Shirley to show up to be assassinated.

Even so, Li is quite correct that this was something of a preoccupation for Shirley as long as he didn’t know where the heck Addison was (you will note it’s pure GM fluke that Addison got caught). All right, all right—Shirley was terrified. Scared half out of his mind.

But if the supposed challenge was whether Shirley would stick to his principles in the face of considerable damage they might cause him—well, look, no challenge at all there. No question about it, Shirley is one principled little dude. Not perfect, just principled.

I suppose I might have handled things differently. I could have hauled in the game mechanics by the ears and bought off the Pacifist deficiency I gave Shirley at character-creation time. Easy enough to rationalize in-game; lots of people misplace their principles in the face of death. And I have character points coming out my ears at the moment, so the buyoff is no trouble. (I am in fact considering buying off his other deficiency. Depends on how a few things shake out.)

Or I might have had him crumble. He’s been close to it a time or two; he has a bad time with uncertainty and half-knowledge. In fact, I think the real challenge Li posed Shirley was not crumbling.

Goes to show that GM machinations don’t always have the effect the GM thinks they do. And it goes to show that some players are so bloody stupid they hand the GM the keys to their character’s weak points on a silver platter.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2003 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Grand Ellipse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.