The Blog of Roon

A comment to Ginger’s latest Role Call response said, “The one thing I can’t stand is inter-party fighting or backstabbing, but that can happen in any genre.”

Yes, it can happen anywhere, but I must confess I don’t understand why internal party conflict is at all times and in all circumstances a bad thing. (Which is, just so we all understand each other, probably going a bit beyond what the commenter meant.)

The court minister in Passions of the Tide just dropped a bomb that is likely to separate Nacreon from the rest of his family. (Still some unknowns there, so don’t hold me to that—but it does seem likely.) I’m not afraid of that, and I’m dead sure Nacreon’s player isn’t either. Given the initial character designs, it was frankly inevitable. The resulting fights should provide lots of scope for verbal acrobatics and behind-the-scenes scheming. I’m actually looking forward to it.

Come to think of it, there have been some fairly amusingly dysfunctional moments already. Nacreon tried to have Tamasi write a flagrantly insulting message to the court minister; she flatly disobeyed his orders (and made him out a feeble old mer hunting for death’s door in the letter to boot) to maintain decorum. Tamasi made curt and unkind demands of a rather intoxicated Nikolao, who has since taken delight in testing her patience. And Nacreon neglected to tell Tamasi that she was wanted at the court minister’s audience; if both he and the court minister are quick, they might have noticed her momentary discomfiture, and there is nothing Tamasi hates worse than public embarrassment.

(Well, okay, a few things. But nothing relating to her personally.)

And it’s fine. It’s all fine. Even in a PBeM, where the lack of face-to-face interaction can flare tempers, everybody knows that it’s all character conflict, and isn’t to be taken personally.

Nor is Nacreon’s family going to fall apart at the seams, another fear of some gamers who believe that any party not completely united will eventually divide. Nacreon’s unthinking patriarchy, Tamasi’s sense of duty and decorum, what may (I’m not sure yet) turn out to be a surprising amount of decency and kindness in Nikolao—all of these counterweight the chaos. When the battle-lines are drawn, at least some of these merfolk will start pulling together.

Do I know exactly what Tamasi is going to do? Well, no; I don’t even know the full extent of the situation yet, nor am I wholly certain of the balance between Tamasi’s principles and her iron sense of duty. But I’m certainly not going to circumscribe her reaction just because she and Nacreon couldn’t see eye-to-eye even if placed face-to-face an inch away from each other.

This isn’t to say there aren’t limits. Launch a killing attack on another character, expect nasty in-game and out-of-game repercussions. That’s genuinely off-limits. (Which isn’t to say a non-killing attack might not happen—but even then, I’d give the other player’s character plenty of notice—and veto power, frankly.) Rape a character or NPC in any game I’m in without negotiating with the other player and GM first, and expect me to leave. Quickly. Even if I’m not running any of the characters involved.

The only times I’ve seen internal party conflict get out of hand were when the conflict was a proxy for unresolved conflict among players. It’s really that simple, at least in my experience. The really nasty thing about this is that it can’t be resolved in-game, even though at least one of the parties to the conflict usually thinks it can, if the group would only Do Things His/Her Way.

I’m interested in alternate views on this. (Hm. I think it’s a previous Game WISH. I’ll have to look up the answers it got.) My sense, though, is that forbidding characters to get mad at each other, much less fight, reduces the scope of a game practically to unplayability.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2003 at 11:37 am and is filed under Passions of the Tide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.