This last weekend was another game of Vampire The Requiem, where Owen Asteria (played by me) held Court for the Vampires of New York. Wine was served, jokes were made, deals were done and monsters were monsters. Owen's despondency (it's a character played by me, so it's kind of a given) has grown increasingly as more and more people are clearly being manipulated/working with his Avus (vampiric Mentor) and overall Archnemesis in the Liam Neeson Ra's Al Ghul way, Erik Destler (and NPC). Owen has been tortured, mentally and physically by this man in the hopes to train him. Every time Erik's name has been mentioned, Owen goes from sociable to...well...
It's not pretty. The problem was that Destler kept coming in to play, which removed him as a shadowy threat that Owen's been playing counter to the entire time. Owen is Prince to fight Destler's Macciavelli-was-a-Simp machinations. The more his name gets dropped, the more it removes the distant threat. So this month I was convinced that Owen as either going to have to deal with yet one more instance of his Avus. It never happened, or if it did, Owen was never made aware of it. Instead, a rash of art thievery came to a head when one of the thieves was captured. Owen, who himself used to be of the illegal acquistion profession before he was made a Vampire, showed leniency to the thief, which lead to another piece of his past bite him in the ass.
The point of this anecdote is two-fold: Brandon my Storyteller, friend, and writing partner, is a bastard. The second point is that these elements of my story keep coming up because this was stuff I had written into his back story or worked on previously with Brandon. My character keeps getting tortured and prodded mentally and physically because I set the stage for him to be so.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Brandon and I both come from a similar school of writing and characterization: give the characters as much rope as they need to hang themselves with, and then sit back and watch them try to get out. I think we get this from reading Jim Butcher a lot, whose protagonists (hello Harry Dresden) tend to get themselves into trouble through past associations or because of some stupid concept of heroism or assholishness and then have to spend just as much time digging himself out of the hole he was digging to bury the original problem. We both believe that a protagonist that coasts by brings very little tension or drama in to a situation. What's the point of engaging with the character when there is really nothing to make you want to read more?
And that works for me, because I'm someone who needs to be engaged. I'm not the kind of larper who likes to use it as a means of being social. Some people do, and if it works by them, power to em. I tried it and I felt like a tourist. As a native New Yorker, I don't do tourism that well.
Lately, since I've been spamming Star Trek: The Next Generation, I've been thinking about larp in terms of the Holdoeck, especially when people started doing those long simulations like The Big Goodbye, or the Wild West, or some pulpy space opera, or talking to DaVinci in his workshop. Those were larps. And there were a few kinds of way people experienced the way they were in the holodeck. Some people were content with just riding out the ride, like Riker in a juke-joint, just sitting back and enjoying himself. Picard could play Dixon Hill all he wanted and get a kick out of it because he loved following the clues of a mystery and see where it lead, then you have Date who has read all of Arthur Conan Doyle's material and can end a round of Sherlock in seconds the moment the correct prompt is presented...much to the chagrin of everyone else.
I'm a Picard-kind of player. I follow a thread and see where it goes and hope it leads me to a satisfactory ending and not a permanent ending. This thought is why I think I enjoy playing a Fate Mage so much in Awakening. We don't get all of the answers, and while we can affect a lot of things, we still have to deal with the consequences. We take a thread and we follow it and see where it leads and sometimes we have to be clever to follow it and some times to get out of it and figure out where it ends and how it ends.
This was something I had mentioned when I signed up for Rise of Tiburon. I mentioned to Josh Jaffe that I'm the kinda player who needs to be engaged in something or else my brain wanders off and I lose the character. Give my PC something to do and a reason to do something and I can keep character until I collapse. He did this, and I worked my ass off to build a robot with a bunch of other equally engaged lunatics.
My conversation with Brandon on this style of play lead to this discussion: We're playing in a fictional world, and we get to be heroes, monsters, and citizens. Give yourself something to do, give yourself ties and an excuse to go off on your own adventures and drag others with you. Give yourself an excuse to get yourself in trouble and have to deal with the consequences of it. It's not for everyone, some players may not be up for it. Some storytellers may not be up for it either, instead focusing more on just straight up challenges or focus on just the 'tourism' becoming something more. Conversations and encounters by those there to be social will get with one another. Play to your strengths, find storytellers that allow for your strengths.
Meanwhile, I'm sizing up the noose I have for Owen and going "now, how the hell do I get out of this one?"
Later,
C
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