[Mars 2100] Character generation session
Ron Edwards:
Hi Greg,
You? Really?
In case I haven't made this clear, your statement
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But as long as it makes believable characters who are interesting to play, interact and deal with the foibles of, then it is all good.
... is completely sensible to me. I really liked making the character and would love to see such a character in such a group in the Mars setting.
I realize now I made a key mistake in game terms in my post - my list of Loyalties is mistakenly called "Beliefs." Took me a minute to figure out what you were talking about until I realized that.
Remind me what Beliefs are exactly - the quantified labels of cultist, libertarian, communist, centrist? Or the two-word combination that one selects based on those scores, like Green Reformist? Either way, I think Loyalties are hugely important exactly for the reasons you describe. They weren't brought forward much in the document I used, but I think that was an early draft and don't have much to say about how you eventually explain them - your treatment in the post worked well for me.
Also, on reflection, Unexcitable and Sedate are not too bad descriptions for me after all, at this particular point in life. Sounds boring, but one can be passionate and even scary-active without being demonstrative about it, and I presume sedate allows for rapid action occasionally and perhaps, unexpectedly.
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As an aside, how badly off was your self analysis on terms of friendly and unfriendly beliefs? You already said you don't like centrists, but your check marks generally show:
Friendly (two of which are probably you): Libertarian, Centrist, Atheist, Green, Reformist
Centrists like me and vice versa insofar as I'm not an advocate for either standard version of right and left. Same goes for libertarians, with (some of) whom I share anti-war and various civil liberties views; I don't suppose it's unusual of me to say that self-described libertarians present something of a moving target on the issues. Atheists, Greens, and Reformists do well for me - after all, I am a politically active evolutionary biologist, so even though I may or may not be one of those in technical terms, there's a lot of compatibility there. So with half-a-hit each for the first two and three hits, that's four total.
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Unfriendly: Cultist, Reactionary, Communist
Heh. I hate cultist and reactionary guts. A lot of the 1's are dead on as well, amusingly including both progressive and conservative. Communist presents a bit of a conundrum - I have no particular love for the authoritarian states of the Cold War (and the few remaining), but as an anti-Cold Warrior, I don't demonize the ideology as a "side." And some of the committed commies I've known have been extraordinary admirable activists; the ones I dislike most are, effectively, cultists. So I'll say it's not a hit for a dead-on zero.
Overall, considering my zeros, that makes 6 hits out of 8. Well then!
Hey, one last thing that doesn't show up much - I get along really well with observant religious people, in terms of their religions, i.e., not as something I have to overlook. I don't know if that's some kind of personal glitch that isn't expected to show up, or whether your metric for likes/dislikes for that variable needs a second look.
Best, Ron
btrc:
Ron,
To clarify the game terminology:
Aspects: the five paired items (order/chaos, etc.)
Traits: The two items you get from pairing the top Aspects on the table
Beliefs: The two items that you get after all the check marks are tallied up (green reformer, etc.)
Loyalties: The "self" through "humanity" scale of tie-breakers
I'm thinking loyalties needs to be upgraded in importance, as being loyal to self or belief is going to generate widely different responses to a situation, as well as influence how strongly you are tied to your belief group. Right now it just tells which way you jump if you have to make a choice, but does not actually drive your actions in other situations. I'll have to think about that one for a while.
Greg
contracycle:
Have you noticed that there is difference in definitions here, for your playtest, "plausible would be a self-assessment that generated a character that everyone agreed was similar to the person doing it". which is in fact quite distinct from the goals of the self-assement, which was "not to generate people playing themselves, but to see if the generation process could or would generate PC's that felt "real" in terms of the personality and beliefs and motivations"
Feeling real <> same as the person doing it. Whether or not a a character felt real to you, when you did not know the player and could not check the self assement against what you thought of the player, is something entirelydifferent to whether such assesment is an accurate description of the person. It is entirely possible that someone could produce a set of values that "feel real" without that being perceived as an accurate perception of who they are. As such, the self reported survey has no bearing at all on whether or not self-assesement accurately reproduces the views of a specifiic person known to you or others. Furthermore, I suggest the whole survey element is essentially irrelevant to the game as such; if you can't crerate a character that is other than yourself, what would be the point?
It is in fact possible that the self-assesment is most useful when it produces results that are surprising. It is also possible that theb self-assesment is in some way broken. It is perfectly possible, and I would say factually true, that the self assessment is totally insignificant when it comes to actually playing the game. Thats is, the game only needs to produce characatyers that "feel real"; the goal or accurately reproducing player ideologies is at best a seperate, redundant issue.
Second, and let me try to not put this too harshly, as Americans you are all FUCKED UP. You've been through half a century plus of Cold War propaganda; systematically reproducing a certain specific set of ideological concepts.
Of course you don't see yourselves this way, because that was one of the tropes you were systematically encouraged to believe. None the less it is undeniable that the US specifically prosecuted Thought Crime in the McCarthyite witch-hunts, and that the political culture of today exhibits precisely such pruning of the range of permissable and discussable concepts. Indeed, the very association of "socialism" with "group oriented" betrays this ideological conditioning; the reality of Communist thought as the apogee of self-determination is an unthinkable thing, barely imaginable, much less discussable. And thus, because you are not allowed to discuss certain ideas, it is unsurprising that such self-assesment as you do results in certain appparent anomalies. You don't have a permissable language with which to discuss a certain range of concepts, and the range for which you do have acceptable languange is a miniscule subset of all thought on these topics. It is therefore not at all surprising that you tend to struggle with finding appropriate classifications for your positions, as you ceasely struggle to find an appropriate hole into which to hammer your impermissably square pegs.
Ron Edwards:
That's going to be difficult to reply to.
1. Gareth, your point about making the game rather than ID-profiling agrees with what both of us said. So at least that part could be framed in a "OK this works," "OK you're making sense Greg" way.
2. In the essentials, I agree with you regarding American perspectives, although I don't think it's as simple as Americans vs. enlightened-everyone-else. So I want to stress that I'm not moderating that content; it's valuable input as far as I'm concerned when political RPG design is involved. And there's more of them every year.
3. Taking it to the personal level of (effectively) accusation toward Greg and me isn't OK here. Especially since we're dealing with the notoriously intellectually-flattening effect of internet prose and none of us are too familiar with one another's personal/political histories. I also stress that nailing a particular idea or rule would be fine. I appreciate that the line is not always clear and will say as moderator, this was perhaps on it or in it, not over it.
4. Any help or comment regarding the game itself is appreciated.
5. Further political discussion as such should be taken off-site.
I think that's fair. Moderating genuine content is way harder than moderating discussions of how to roll-to-hit.
Best, Ron
AK_Aramis:
I would hope that, by answering the questions as myself, the resulting traits and belief should be me, or close to me. It's that simulation-oriented streak in me. That said, what my players chose to play, character-wise, wasn't them, but characters actually rather removed from themselves.
The checklist is effective (tho I don't adhere to the two that came up top by the instrument)...
With all 4 of my group, the questionnaire and traits (at least when tied traits were taken in the proper order), it did in fact hit dead on. The belief-component labels, however, didn't. And that's true for my wife and I for certain, and I think also for the guys we game with. Which means it's likely the broken part.
Noting that Ron also got a disconnect there, in that same step... implies the underlying data is bad for those labels.
And, having automated and then played around with altering the aspects by a point or two, it's surprisingly sensitive to single and 2 point changes on a single axis. Drop the risk from 4 to 2, and suddenly, it's got a fitting, but not dead on, belief descriptor pair resembling me.
--on to another issue--
Group and PC matching aspects at start: the group matching makes sense to uswhen one presumes the character to be high-power leader in the group (influence on the group being a large chunk of the group), and theoretically in power because of being a tight match to the group's collective average....
And also noting that they diverge from each other, due to end of crisis resolution and political and personal capital, that steady state of matching probably will not last.
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