AvatarVecna
2016-07-07, 10:13 AM
A while back, I joined a game for the purpose of playing an interesting character concept in an interesting system; for the sake of discussing it here, I'll be using the game of Life (https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic288405_md.jpg). This game system is a player-vs-player game where, in-universe, you must navigate your character through the maze of options available in life (and Life) towards a specific goal that all players are competing for (let's say, to collect the most money). This version of the game of Life, however, involves a lot more roleplaying, and has mechanics in place that tie into the various personalities that can manifest in your characters as the game goes on (due to events in your life and choices you make, although most of that happens in the character background).
Now, I rarely feel truly inspired by characterization; far more often, the mechanics of a game inspire me to optimize for a particular thing, and some level of basic characterization is slapped on afterwards half-heartedly, but I was inspired for this game. Backstory for my character is as follows: at an earlier point in his life, while he was unfortunately not in his right state of mind, Jack (not real name) went on a bit of a spree, putting several people in the hospital and one in the morgue. He was caught fairly easily, and ended up serving hard time for his crimes...although his questionable mental state at the time, as well as other mitigating factors, resulted in him being released much earlier than is generally the case for such crimes.
Unfortunately, these events (both the incident and the subsequent imprisonment) took place in the later parts of Jack's developmental years, and has resulted in an unfortunate mentality: Jack has a consequence-based morality, where he believes the only reason you should act a certain way is because behaving otherwise results in society punishing you, rather than an internal conscience telling you a thing is wrong and society helping bolster that conscience. Now, this mentality would normally result in Jack being a model citizen in action (although only because the punishment isn't worth committing the crime), but Jack is under the not-necessarily-inaccurate impression that he's screwed his life over by having this murder on his record, and with no life worth living, he intends to eventually end it...but not before having a good bit of fun. Now, Jack believes that, if you commit a crime, you need to accept the consequences of your actions, and he is perfectly willing to turn himself in for whatever he does (although actions related to his love interest tend to not qualify as crimes in his mind); indeed, so far in the game, he's invaded the personal privacy of a minor (by threatening members of the school the student goes to), abused the privilege of being allowed on school grounds by making a nuisance of himself and disrupting the school day (he brought an inflatable pool to the school, filled it with Jello, and wrestled with students while taking bets on who would win), and he even arranged for another player to get flashed by other PCs at a public sports game (PCs who proceeded to verbally/sexually harrass the first PC). In that last one, Jack basically handed her a phone with a cop's number pre-dialed and dared her to make the call. Each time, Jack has been fully accepting of the consequences due to him (since consequences don't mean anything to a dead man walking).
However, I'm running into a problem. You can probably see how Jack is escalating things from minor crimes to pretty major crimes, right? That's because he's kinda losing it, due to running into the invisible Fourth Wall. The problem is that the game system is set up where players can't really be eliminated from the PvP competition prior to the end of the game when points are tallied and a winner is declared; the general consensus on this is that it's unfair to the players to take them out of the competition for any non-mechanical reason...which results in conflicts with the story. For all Jack has done in the story so far, he's hardly the worst of the lot: on just his first in-game day as part of this group of PCs, Jack bore witness to attempted breaking-and-entering, theft, multiple counts of invasion of a minor's privacy, and verbal harassment. That secretary that Jack threatened into giving him access to student files? He wasn't the only one doing it, and one of the other people threatening actually flat-out assaulted the woman in front of multiple witnesses. The assaulter, by the way, is a naturally violent character who takes out their aggression on other members of their self-defense group...a group in which they are the best in the class, and the others are far outmatched. The parts of this that took place that first day saw this person challenge the whole group to a fight one at a time until none of them wanted to fight anymore, and she only stopped challenging them to fight her some more after the teacher called her out on it. The verbal harassment? That was the player who had committed theft and invasion of privacy, who was returning the bag to its rightful owner...only to chew him out about leaving his stuff lying around where anybody could steal it, and accusing him of being a stalker since she found things in his backpack that clearly weren't his. I must admit, it was a very smooth way to cover up her own crimes by wildly accusing another to make sure nobody pointed any fingers back at her, but it's still very weird by normal standards.
But that's not Jack's problem: Jack's problem is that, for all the crimes he's borne witness to, only one has ever seen consequences, and that was the person who assaulted the secretary (the violent person with a track record of such violence). Everything else was glossed over, with consequences handwaved away assuming they even got caught doing what they did. Jack threatening the secretary into handing over student files? He was there when the other player was getting dragged away for assault, but received no punishment himself. The jello pool disrupting the school day? He's still allowed on campus, not even temporarily banned. Hell, that last thing? Let's be totally clear: he instigated some PCs into flashing another PC at a major public even that had uncountable minors in attendence; immediately following this, he and the others proceeded to verbally and sexually harass the other player, before Jack basically dared them to call the cops. When the cop arrived, it turned out that apparently public nudity is legal in the state this game takes in (we were all surprised), but that doesn't excuse the harassment, especially considering their were multiple witnesses to the event...not to mention a freaking confession from Jack! Guess what? Nothing happened. No consequences.
And this is perfectly fine for this game; it's what works for this game and its players, what keeps things fair. Nevertheless, the player response to the system saying "you can't be penalized in the game part for purely roleplaying decisions you make, because that's not fair" was not "we'll pretend that breaking the law has punishments, even though we know OOC that we can't be penalized", it was to say "we can't be penalized, so we can break the law as much as we want", which is the exact mentality Jack has: since there's no consequences as long as it's not a mechanical part of the game, who cares what I do? I could blackmail the entire faculty, kidnap NPC students and brainwash them into helping me rig the competition, murder anybody that gets in my way, steal all my opponent's things, destroy whatever they have that I can't steal, whatever I want! There's no consequences! And Jack can't handle that. To be perfectly clear, Jack is insane, and is a terrible person, but he desperately wants to be a good one. The only thing that keeps him being a good person is that actions have consequences; that he's in a state of mind where most consequences are meaningless to him means he's acting like a prick most of the time, but he's not going full-on criminal because the consequences are too severe. But without those consequences, he's going to start doing bad things, and he'll end up hurting the only person he really cares about.
I don't think it's a good idea to change the system so that actions have severe consequences, but at the same time the only way to both keep the game fair and keep the story realistic is to have a gentlemen's agreement from the start that the players won't abuse their immunity to real consequences, and will behave as if they expect to be punished if they break the law...but this game has been running for long enough that such an agreement just isn't an option at this point. I'm not sure what to do here: I like this character, and I like this system, but the way the system is set up, this character cannot operate in this system for very long without going crazy from the lack of consequences, and I'm not seeing a way to keep him in the game for much longer without either completely breaking character (and ignoring the lack of consequences) or completely breaking realism (by having him embrace the lack of consequences and begin planning his world domination strategy). If anybody has an idea of how to remain faithful to the character without ruining the game's story by becoming a murderhobo, I'd love to hear it.
Now, I rarely feel truly inspired by characterization; far more often, the mechanics of a game inspire me to optimize for a particular thing, and some level of basic characterization is slapped on afterwards half-heartedly, but I was inspired for this game. Backstory for my character is as follows: at an earlier point in his life, while he was unfortunately not in his right state of mind, Jack (not real name) went on a bit of a spree, putting several people in the hospital and one in the morgue. He was caught fairly easily, and ended up serving hard time for his crimes...although his questionable mental state at the time, as well as other mitigating factors, resulted in him being released much earlier than is generally the case for such crimes.
Unfortunately, these events (both the incident and the subsequent imprisonment) took place in the later parts of Jack's developmental years, and has resulted in an unfortunate mentality: Jack has a consequence-based morality, where he believes the only reason you should act a certain way is because behaving otherwise results in society punishing you, rather than an internal conscience telling you a thing is wrong and society helping bolster that conscience. Now, this mentality would normally result in Jack being a model citizen in action (although only because the punishment isn't worth committing the crime), but Jack is under the not-necessarily-inaccurate impression that he's screwed his life over by having this murder on his record, and with no life worth living, he intends to eventually end it...but not before having a good bit of fun. Now, Jack believes that, if you commit a crime, you need to accept the consequences of your actions, and he is perfectly willing to turn himself in for whatever he does (although actions related to his love interest tend to not qualify as crimes in his mind); indeed, so far in the game, he's invaded the personal privacy of a minor (by threatening members of the school the student goes to), abused the privilege of being allowed on school grounds by making a nuisance of himself and disrupting the school day (he brought an inflatable pool to the school, filled it with Jello, and wrestled with students while taking bets on who would win), and he even arranged for another player to get flashed by other PCs at a public sports game (PCs who proceeded to verbally/sexually harrass the first PC). In that last one, Jack basically handed her a phone with a cop's number pre-dialed and dared her to make the call. Each time, Jack has been fully accepting of the consequences due to him (since consequences don't mean anything to a dead man walking).
However, I'm running into a problem. You can probably see how Jack is escalating things from minor crimes to pretty major crimes, right? That's because he's kinda losing it, due to running into the invisible Fourth Wall. The problem is that the game system is set up where players can't really be eliminated from the PvP competition prior to the end of the game when points are tallied and a winner is declared; the general consensus on this is that it's unfair to the players to take them out of the competition for any non-mechanical reason...which results in conflicts with the story. For all Jack has done in the story so far, he's hardly the worst of the lot: on just his first in-game day as part of this group of PCs, Jack bore witness to attempted breaking-and-entering, theft, multiple counts of invasion of a minor's privacy, and verbal harassment. That secretary that Jack threatened into giving him access to student files? He wasn't the only one doing it, and one of the other people threatening actually flat-out assaulted the woman in front of multiple witnesses. The assaulter, by the way, is a naturally violent character who takes out their aggression on other members of their self-defense group...a group in which they are the best in the class, and the others are far outmatched. The parts of this that took place that first day saw this person challenge the whole group to a fight one at a time until none of them wanted to fight anymore, and she only stopped challenging them to fight her some more after the teacher called her out on it. The verbal harassment? That was the player who had committed theft and invasion of privacy, who was returning the bag to its rightful owner...only to chew him out about leaving his stuff lying around where anybody could steal it, and accusing him of being a stalker since she found things in his backpack that clearly weren't his. I must admit, it was a very smooth way to cover up her own crimes by wildly accusing another to make sure nobody pointed any fingers back at her, but it's still very weird by normal standards.
But that's not Jack's problem: Jack's problem is that, for all the crimes he's borne witness to, only one has ever seen consequences, and that was the person who assaulted the secretary (the violent person with a track record of such violence). Everything else was glossed over, with consequences handwaved away assuming they even got caught doing what they did. Jack threatening the secretary into handing over student files? He was there when the other player was getting dragged away for assault, but received no punishment himself. The jello pool disrupting the school day? He's still allowed on campus, not even temporarily banned. Hell, that last thing? Let's be totally clear: he instigated some PCs into flashing another PC at a major public even that had uncountable minors in attendence; immediately following this, he and the others proceeded to verbally and sexually harass the other player, before Jack basically dared them to call the cops. When the cop arrived, it turned out that apparently public nudity is legal in the state this game takes in (we were all surprised), but that doesn't excuse the harassment, especially considering their were multiple witnesses to the event...not to mention a freaking confession from Jack! Guess what? Nothing happened. No consequences.
And this is perfectly fine for this game; it's what works for this game and its players, what keeps things fair. Nevertheless, the player response to the system saying "you can't be penalized in the game part for purely roleplaying decisions you make, because that's not fair" was not "we'll pretend that breaking the law has punishments, even though we know OOC that we can't be penalized", it was to say "we can't be penalized, so we can break the law as much as we want", which is the exact mentality Jack has: since there's no consequences as long as it's not a mechanical part of the game, who cares what I do? I could blackmail the entire faculty, kidnap NPC students and brainwash them into helping me rig the competition, murder anybody that gets in my way, steal all my opponent's things, destroy whatever they have that I can't steal, whatever I want! There's no consequences! And Jack can't handle that. To be perfectly clear, Jack is insane, and is a terrible person, but he desperately wants to be a good one. The only thing that keeps him being a good person is that actions have consequences; that he's in a state of mind where most consequences are meaningless to him means he's acting like a prick most of the time, but he's not going full-on criminal because the consequences are too severe. But without those consequences, he's going to start doing bad things, and he'll end up hurting the only person he really cares about.
I don't think it's a good idea to change the system so that actions have severe consequences, but at the same time the only way to both keep the game fair and keep the story realistic is to have a gentlemen's agreement from the start that the players won't abuse their immunity to real consequences, and will behave as if they expect to be punished if they break the law...but this game has been running for long enough that such an agreement just isn't an option at this point. I'm not sure what to do here: I like this character, and I like this system, but the way the system is set up, this character cannot operate in this system for very long without going crazy from the lack of consequences, and I'm not seeing a way to keep him in the game for much longer without either completely breaking character (and ignoring the lack of consequences) or completely breaking realism (by having him embrace the lack of consequences and begin planning his world domination strategy). If anybody has an idea of how to remain faithful to the character without ruining the game's story by becoming a murderhobo, I'd love to hear it.