the preservation of antagonism
Ron Edwards:
Hi Paul,
H'm - without investing into the details of the Ben/you post, I think relevant adversity is the source of protagonism, and antagonism is the most reliable route to adversity. And antagonism is most obviously delivered through avatars or representatives, i.e. antagonists. But I do think you're talking about the latter.
So OK, that means we just focus on the latter and not get into the perhaps-metaphysical higher categories.
One thing about The Pool, PTA, Trollbabe, and a number of other games is that antagonistic NPCs have no special value. There are some practical nuances. As Pool GM, I can withhold all Gift dice when a particular NPC is involved, forcing the player to rely only on one Trait and whatever he or she chooses to gamble. I've found that Trollbabe play produces antagonists mainly by seeing which conflicts end up hurting or incapacitating the protagonist, and thus "casting" that particular NPC into the role of "tough." And in PTA, a Nemesis character has to be available for play/use throughout a season, by definition.
But all that said, yes, I see your point. The GM rides with what's happened, period. Dust Devils can go the same way; it did for me, when a fairly tough NPC did in fact get a really nasty draw against him, and went down for good in an early fight scene.
Here's the thing: this is a feature in given systems which may not meet your needs (in this regard) as systems. I know why it's such a common feature - people have been writing games in which protagonism is reliably consequential, and in which GMing is more about working with what's been shaped in play. Too many of us have spent too much time chipping away hit points, or STUN, or watching our characters' actions get re-shaped into whatever the GM wants to happen no matter what we say.
I'm not sure protagonism must suffer in these circumstances. I modestly suggest that Trollbabe play delivers nicely in those terms, and it is very, very close to The Pool in this design feature. (Of course, taking down a foe often risks grave harm in Trollbabe; maybe that's involved.)
But again, to stick with my agreement with your point rather than the quibbles, I want to investigate what systems do really allow meaty antagonist play. (And I imagine, without simply giving them uber-high never-chip-it-away scores of some kind, right?) What's out there?
Unfortunately, I'm not coming up with much. In some cases, the antagonist is untouchable, even a little intangible, as My Life with Master and The Mountain Witch (although secondary characters can be quite tough in the latter). In others, they're effectively player-characters and therefore subject to sudden reversals on occasion (The Shadow of Yesterday, Sorcerer, Dust Devils, Legends of Alyria, The Riddle of Steel, Nine Worlds).
A good question. I actually struck toward it a little bit with my older notes for Doctor Chaos.
Best, Ron
jburneko:
May I suggest taking a look at Darkpages. Darkpages involves creating a specific Antagonist NPC. For all intents and purposes they're the same as PCs but go down a little faster because they process Pain directly where PCs have a few channels to dump Pain into.
That might sound like exactly the OPPOSITE of what you want except that antagonists work off the same Re-incarnation rules as PCs (at least I think they do). Which means that they can come back... just slightly changed.
Jesse
contracycle:
7th Sea might be worth a mention here. Most of the approach is fairly conventional, with three mechanically distinct tiers of antagonists who are progressively more capable. But more interesting is the Wiles that villains can have, and which correspond to various special powers held by PC's. These Wiles are often specifically aimed at preserving the antagonist, and are framed in terms of the antagonists dramatic role; one of them is simply "Recurring". Other Wiles allow villains to, for example, re-roll dice, ignore Surprise, cause a PC to fail a roll, have stronger minions, etc. This is a lot more flexible than simply having a lot of hitpoints or even being physically tough at all, and are rather more like mechanical interpretations of the kinds of fudges GM's use to keep their villains alive.
Thomas Lawrence:
An interesting example of either type #1 or type #4 or a kind of mixture, drawn from my own actual play, is provided by Steve Jackson's "In Nomine". In the game's setting, PC's (and frequently opposing NPCs) are either angels or demons, who (on the corporeal plane) walk around in physical forms known as Vessels. If your Vessel is killed (or perhaps the more accurate term is destroyed), the angel/demon does not die, but instead returns to Heaven/Hell, passes through a sort of coma-like state called Trauma, and eventually (with sufficient rolling of dice and passage of in-game time) awakes from Trauma and could purchase a new Vessel and return to the corporeal plane.
In practice for the GM providing the antagonism, this provides an inbuilt reason why a "killed" antagonist can return whenever the GM would like them to do so, although eventually the idea that the angel/demon involved can keep acquiring new Vessels without much apparent personal cost will strain credulity (especially for demons). I myself have done this in my ongoing game, although I have been at pains to portray the demons involved as having suffered for losing their old Vessel, and have yet to have a demon who has been twice Vessel-killed recur a third time.
Should it be wished that a particular angel or demon be more permanently erased, it is possible to "soul-kill" them, although this takes a lot of damage to achieve completely (and retreat to heaven/hell is comparatively straightforward). It's also extremely difficult to engage in the type of combat in which soul-killing is an option without all combatants opening themselves up to it.
Given the inefficacy of Vessel-destruction as a means of permanently disposing of antagonists, and the inherent difficulties of soul-killing, it often seems more practical from a player's perspective to commit "character assassination", or death by political manoeuvre - trying to get a given demon to screw up so badly that their patron Demon Prince would not let them return to Earth, or at least would reassign/depower them.
JoyWriter:
I haven't seen this said yet, but why can't antagonists preserve themselves?
Why does the gloating villain gloat? Because he is relishing a temporary moment of invincibility, which he has set up. I think sometimes the problem with many game villains is that they are all front; they don't have the backup work to be as invincible or dangerous as they say they are. Now this requires engineering; the villain must have some region of advantage, some comfort zone in which they are hard to take out, based on the rules of the game (explicit crunch-sim or otherwise). This gives them comfort to be a villain in the first place, because they feel untouchable. It's like anonymity on the internet!
Going back to old school, why do we have stakes at all? Or why do something like bringing down the pain? Because people in the game need to have warning that something they are invested in may get lost, or irreparably damaged. People in the game includes the GM!
So just like edge in Shadowrun has a use for player characters, it has a use for NPCs too. Because these mechanics are never really about PCs being favoured by the cosmos, but because their players don't want to loose them. This is different to bringing down the pain because it cannot fail! One of the problems with the "Are you sure?" method is that sometimes people will say yes, they will risk the character you thought they were totally stuck to and take out your apparently more beloved NPC. This is one of the many reasons I think Universalis is brilliant, because it tries to make explicit how invested people are in stuff, but the other opportunity to taking a wise gamble is not to gamble at all.
Also, putting story elements in front of a player is asking him to change at least one of them, so you are always risking something. One alternative to this is internalising a character's conflict, so they carry their antagonism around with them. I'm talking more heavily psychological systems here, so people can have issues, and be forced to deal with them and adapt by situations, perhaps even gaining new ones. This flips the problem, as the player is now having to accept the world encroaching on their pristine character concept. Another alternative, like the mechanically constructed safety zone above, is to have explicit moods for a scene, that people can shift by their actions, which provide the context for acceptable actions. This forces you to think about what situation elements would give the that mood sufficient force, and so design a situation that signals to the players what to expect.
Another tack is that when people solve your originally immensely tricky scenario, resolve your antagonism in a non-sociopathic way, they may have actually taught you something for life! In other words, if your antagonism has been weakened by a flaw in your model in the world, does this apply to situations you have found insolvable? If not, and you can find a parallel, how about ramping it up by including those elements that make it harder for you. Now this hardly solves the emotional investment problem, but it could mean something pretty wonderful for the broader effect of your role-playing.
Another view that is rarely used in games is that sometimes finding the source of the problem is the problem itself. Working out what you are supposed to be opposing. Now this is what is often called a "soft system" problem, the semi-existential one about "What are we supposed to be doing here?". This is generally considered a fundimental deficiency of a role-playing method rather than an in game issue to fight, perhaps because people sometimes play games to escape from such unstructured problems, and dislike it as horrible blankness. That is I think why solving it during games design is a big thing, but that's not the only way to go.
It's essentially a constructive approach, encouraging players to build rather than defeat, with mismatches between built structure and the setting environment appearing every now and again, so that players cause their own conflict via over-corrections, or are simply satisfied with what they have created, and we move on! But I suppose this last form is a bit off topic.
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