the preservation of antagonism
Mel White:
Spirit of the Century uses something like #3--antagonists can offer concessions through which, although defeated in a current plan, they get away to scheme again. The players have to agree to the concession though, otherwise the conflict can continue to the complete defeat of the villain.
Shock uses method #2--the protagonist cannot usually resolve their story goal until the antagonist credits are reduced below a certain point.
Mel
Ben Lehman:
Hey, Cristoph:
I imagine that they're intended to fit into #3 or #4, depending.
To hit on Polaris, it uses something which, if I squint a little, is kinda-sorta like what Paul categorizes as #3. Mainly, if I cut off the first clause halfway through "The game mechanics enlist the players in appreciation of the value of the antagonist." Full stop. None of this lit-theory stuff. Polaris doesn't particularly tell you anything about how the antagonist protagonizes the antagonist blah blah blah but because the kill-rate is so high for non-Heart characters in Polaris, characters (which, naturally, include antagonists) only survive if they are of interest to the players. So antagonists survive based on player understand of their own "coolness."
The best example of this I can come up with was a game I played with a giant demon named Altair, who was so tall that his head reached the stars. Now, just like any other character in Polaris, he was supremely mortal. Any player could have said "I cut off Altair's head and he dies" and that would have most likely been that. However, we were all so invested in his size and invulnerability that killing him required traveling in to the sky, making pacts with the moon, and so on.
Note that we're not doing this because we understand in any conscious way that Altair protagonizes our characters. We're doing it because Altair is damned cool, and we're all really into how cool he is, and we don't want him to casually die*.
yrs--
--Ben
* This is all about the preservation of antagonist in Polaris at an individual level. The preservation of antagonism without respect to the individual antagonists, is more of a matter of Paul's #4: the fiction of the game contains a source of infinite and unending antagonism. Bliss Stage works the same way.
P.S. Hey, Paul, this may be kinda an edge case, but what about games that simply don't contain antagonists as such and get protagonism from other means?
Valamir:
I was reading through Heavy Gear recently and that game seems like DP9 made a concious effort to cram every bog standard 90s design paradigm it could into a single game.
It deals with antagonists largely with #1 but there's no tacitly about it. They use this "Chessmen" system to identify important NPCs from less important NPCs so that GM's can avoid messing up the meta plot by killing off key characters (DP9 was apparently REALLY big into the idea of doleing out the meta plot one splat book dollup at a time)...they spend a ton of time talking about these Chessmen...clearly a device they were very proud of.
Then there's a section on how to roll dice where the advice (VERY explicitly) is to allow the players to roll their own dice but never tell them the difficulty ("Threshold" in HG terms) that way the GM can set it to whatever they want after they see the rolls to make sure the players don't ruin the story...this is not extrapolation...its direct instruction in the text (too bad I didn't have this text handy for any of the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast threads). And that includes saving NPCs who are "restricted".
This isn't concidered "fudging" its considered proper play. In fact, the advice for players who are "advanced" enough (direct from the text) is to forgo dice altogether and just let the GM adjudicate everything that happens. That way you make absolutely certain that those nasty players don't ruin the GM's ability to regurgitate DP9s meta plot.
Yowza!
But in terms of protecting Antagonists...it doesn't get any more solid than that.
Paul Czege:
Hey Christoph,
I can't say I appreciate one type more or less as an enduring and fundamental personal preference, but I can tell you why I'm currently interested in types #2 and #4.
In conversation with Thor Hansen on Saturday I made the observation that I'm not a very good roleplayer. And I supported the observation with references to great roleplaying I'd seen at Gen Con, by Eero Tuovinen in particular, and John Harper as well, and from Thor himself. He challenged the observation with a reference to my excellent roleplaying of a specific NPC when running Lacuna a few months ago.
And y'know, I'd enjoyed the hell out of that particular NPC. And it got me thinking about how so many of my favorite gaming experiences, where I had great fun and feel like I was roleplaying well, were with NPC antagonists. So now we're going to be playing Grey Ranks next, but after that I'm wanting to run something that'll support me in running NPC antagonists. I don't want a type #3 game, because I want unshared ongoing ownership of the NPCs. And I don't want type #1 because I've seen it fail to work too often.
So I'm interested in types #2 and #4. Know of any non-superhero games that fall into type #4?
Paul
Frank Tarcikowski:
Paul, I think #4 is not usually something that’s part of the game itself, in terms of general mechanics or setting. Rather, it’s part of scenario design. For some Forge games that’s largely congruent as scenario design is part of the game, but for others and certainly for traditional games it’s not.
Say you have a contemporary setting and the PCs are cops or some other sort of law enforcement guys. And your antagonist doesn’t give himself away easily. So, they could just put a bullet in his brain but they wouldn’t, because that would be illegal. There’s your #4 at work.
Or say your PCs are Hogwarts students and your antagonists are a teacher and an annoying Slytherin student. The social context within the fiction and also the genre conventions prevent the PCs from just hurling an Avada Kedavra at the antagonists from behind. That’s your #4, too.
In both cases, it doesn’t matter whether you play The Pool or HERO. So, I can’t point you to a specific game that does this, but my point is: You don’t (necessarily) need one. Thoughtful scenario creation will do that trick, too.
- Frank
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