Okay, this thread is split off of Players Without Goals. The original thread concerned establishing "Goals" for a character, as a way of orienting the character's activity and helping the GM know what to prep. The only problem is that players (some, not all) don't want to articulate "goals", especially at an early stage of a campaign.

Quote from: SpikeI LIKE to set a goal for my character. But I LIKE to do it after I've spent a few games puttering around and seeing what the world is like, what the character is like and what the GM is like.

My "theory" of how to deal with this is, instead, to try to get at what the player wants to do, or is willing to do, while they putter around. Do they like to fight? Solve problems? Explore the unknown? Squabble comically? None of these really have to lead anywhere in particular, but they can all give the players something fun to do while they orient themselves. The question is, how do you pick the "bootstrap" activit(ies) which will get the game off the ground? Spike has graciously agreed to act as a test case. He describes one game:

Quote from: Spikethe first few game sessions my 'guy' was some big, ugly over the top (Hawiian shirts, white boy dreads that had been tie-dyed) ex-commando who had been picked up as part of this mercenary team. He was a loud obnoxious and over the top guy. By three games in, I had worked out a bit more of his past, got him side intrests (trade, black market arms dealing and the like), a potential love intrest he was woo-ing... which meant ditching the hawiian shirts, at least some of the time, for suits and ties. In other words, he was evolving as a character. Just in time for the game (which only lasted four sessions as I recall...) to end unexpectedly.

I have a number of questions about this. In no particular order:

1. Were you having fun during those first few game sessions? What was fun?
2. What did your character do during those sessions, as part of the group?
3. What did the group do? (Were they given a mission to solve, for example?)
4. Did the rest of the group seem to enjoy those sessions? Why did they decide to reboot the campaign?

Quote from: Elliot Wilen1. Were you having fun during those first few game sessions? What was fun?
2. What did your character do during those sessions, as part of the group?
3. What did the group do? (Were they given a mission to solve, for example?)
4. Did the rest of the group seem to enjoy those sessions? Why did they decide to reboot the campaign?

Answer one is easy enough. Certainly it was fun. I don't go back to games that are not, it is that simple.  I liked the premise (the mercenary team angle, high tech commandos and all that jazz), and the first few sessions were, with only a couple of minor glitches that can be chalked up to an inexpirenced GM causing irritation.  Bits of railroad, say, breaking up the elysian feilds...

Answer Two is pretty simple for me. Violence. Heh. I stepped into the game, followed the flow of the action. What my character could do I did. He was a big, sneaky gun toting, kung fu maniac. So when you needed someone to sneak somewhere and commit mayhem, that was the character you turned to. Other than pointing out my area of expertise in the 'planning' phase of our character's 'mission' du jour, I mostly bootstrapped it.

Answer Three was the GM had NPC's who were the contact points/admin staff of our little band of maniacs. A session started with a 'job' coming down the pipe. Possibly we couldn't really refuse it, I couldn't say for certain. We'd take the information we got, plan out a job and go, with the rest of the session involving whatever roleplaying got done... such as wooing the sexy captain

Answer four is harder.  People seemed to be having fun. We took a week off for the holidays, and when they rebooted it was to move the entire focus off the man on the ground to 'battletech'.   When I caught back up a few months later, the same group were starting a brand new battletech campaign with mechwarrior elements to it. I think all along they really just wanted something other than what I did. They wanted Battletech, complete with maps and figures.  I wanted a character and roleplaying... only with fights.  


In the end, I guess it was just as well they restarted. Looking back on it I can guess that the GM was not very good at planning for characters so much as laying out a senario for us.  We were going to go in and defuse nuclear missiles, the NPC scientist WAS going to commit suicide no matter what we did to stop him.... the roleplaying side of things was going over his head and out of his comfort zone.  That meant my sideline business with the blackmarket was never going to amount to more than a footnote, the romance thing probably squicked him, and hurt feelings all around were bound to occur.  

Its kinda a shame, though, I liked that character.

Thanks. I was using you as a test of my intuition, and I think I was right. From your character description and other cues, it seems to me the best way for a GM to go would be to give you a mission with some good opportunities for violence. Pre-plotted/railroaded events should be avoided. (The NPC scientist might be suicidal or desperate, but the scenario shouldn't be constructed with the assumption that he would definitely kill himself.) But my guess is that the railroading per se wasn't too much of a problem, at least at first, as long as you had something to shoot at.

Moving beyond that, though, as your PC picked up "hooks", I'd want to bring them into play. Part of the problem here might be communicating them. For this, maybe bluebooking would be a helpful tool. In any case, I should watch out for those side interests and find ways to build some kind of interactivity around them, up to and including full spotlight scenarios.

How's that sound? Is there anything else you think a GM could do to help you enjoy playing your character? Additional missions like the first few sessions would still be okay, wouldn't they?

For me it's not a problem with the format. I signed on to play a mercenary doing mercenary stuff...

How I got involved, however abortively, with the black market arms dealing came up because the GM suggested it would be hard to get some types of gear I wanted. Rather than waste a lot of energy constantly running around trying to find stuff, I figured my character would become his own supplier...and it snowballed from there.

In one of Tim's YotZ threads I pointed out that the first thing that comes to my mind about zombie games is looking for a 'long term senario' after the first few sessions.  To steal a 'nature' from WW games, I'm an architect, I build stuff around me as I game. But I tend to do it with the materials presented to me.

I'd be more worried of my side thing taking over everyone else's game, not reoccurrance of the dreaded 'mission'.  

My problem with the suicidal bit wasn't that the GM wanted the NPC to kill himself, the problem was that the situation and the characters involved meant that my character, who wanted a prisoner, was perfectly placed, and trained to stop him... and couldn't.  That is the lack of impact on the situation that keeps getting talked about in all these threads.

Okay, the railroading is slightly peripheral but now I'm wondering...why didn't the GM let you stop him from killing himself? If it wasn't necessary for the scenario, I'd either apply the rules or (given what you've said about your character) let you stop him. Or at least give you a high percentage chance on an impromptu roll.

But back to balancing your character needs vs. missions. Okay, you're cool with missions, but you don't want the character stuff to take over. Then bluebooking seems like a good tool, a way to elicit individual out-of-scenario development, if the player wants to provide any, without getting in the way of group activity. Otherwise you basically accrete "stuff" as you go along, a sort of katamari-character rolling through missions.

Sounds like a decent campaign framework. I do wonder how long that would last, especially with disjointed missions. If the missions started to be connected, would it bug you that the "campaign" against SMERSH or whatever was essentially being directed by your contacts, with the party not really having much strategic initiative? What if you got one of those spy-story twists, where you realize that somebody in the organization is a traitor...or the organization itself sends you on an "evil" mission...or you realize you're all being set up in part of some larger plan? How would or would not those things be cool? Would the amount/type of character development up to that point be a factor?

Another thing: within a mission, are you looking for a challenge with a real "loss" condition? Do you want a real chance of PC death? Straight by the dice, no fudging? Or a nudge here and there, with death as a possibility only in "key scenes"? If there's a "loss condition" aside from PC death, how would you like it to affect the campaign--can the party "lose the campaign"? How?

As for why the suicide, I can only suppose. Perhaps he had no plans in place for prisoners, no desire to run a possible interrogation sequence. Maybe he just thought it would be an awesome way to demonstrate the fanatical mindset of the enemy. What I do know is that no rolls were made on either side of the screen, and no 'I do this to stop him' was permitted.  Essentially it was a 'cutscene' I have him at my mercy, captured... he kills himself. X leads to Z, no stopping at Why.

As to the campaign structure...

Who is to say? Really.  Certainly a framework of reasons behind the missions would give me more to work with as a character. Growth of a character is, to my point of view, far more than XP on a sheet and gold in the bag.  Eventually, your character progresses in the campaign world, he succeeds enough, or at the right times, that his services have real value, he can pick an agenda to support... or just find reasons to do stuff.  Ideally, after a long running game, a character that has lasted should be able to make an impact on the setting.  Say my character, maybe he keeps making merc contract work, but the gun running takes on a more global (in this case galactic) impact as the network grows. My challenges would become keeping the network thriving and stave off attempts from rivals and governments to shut it down or subvert it. But I could then look to goals like supplying guns to forces whose political agenda I supported. The Team, theoretically, would stop putting out brushfires and move on to more aggressive proactive work.

Ideally, that is.  It holds true for any long running game in my mind. If your beginning chump is a thug that works for others, why should he simply become a more powerful thug?  All that skill and power is going to propel even the least ambitious character/player somewhere!  

In this game Loss would have been completely necessary, at least the real threat of it.  The entire focus of the group and the game was on tactics, stratagy and running a 'military style' commado operation from game one. Our niche's in the game ran from Sniper, to CQB specialist (my guy) to silent assassin (close but slightly different), to the Commo guy and the bomb dude. Without the threat of loss the game would have lost its meaning. The suicide guy was watching over bombs, and as players, we understood that if we failed it was entirely possible that the entire team would die in a nuclear explosion. As I recall the GM had some sort of countdown going on.

In a different game I might prefer a bit of fudging here and there, certainly deaths that would be more dramatic anyway. A brutal, even pointless death is fitting for an episode of 24, but much harder to swallow on Desperate Housewives, or even (among the cast) CSI.