Evil Influences on player characters
dindenver:
Simon,
I designed a vampire game (it is at the Editors now) and I struggled with the same conundrum. How to mechanically represent the temptation to become more of a monster and less of a human. It is easy (and ineffective) for the GM to say, you feel temptation. But it is hard to give the players that feeling of "If I just take this one step towards the dark side, I could get what I want" feel.
In the end, I found a pretty good solution. That is I made the vampire powers outshine any other mechanic in the game. In essence, you roll one die and add for each aspect of what you are trying to accomplish. But if a vampire power is helping you obtain that goal, you roll two dice and keep both and still add.
I would suggest a similar idea for your game. Make using the ring a trumping power. And then instruct the GM to invoke consequences every time the players succumb to the ring's temptation. So, maybe the ring lets you play a Spade after the original card and the GM's card is revealed. That would be tempting to use. But every time a spade is used, the GM gets to invoke a consequence (maybe based on the value of the card, like 2 of spades means you act odd and a 10 of spades means you betray your friends). The difference I am trying to highlight here is that if you use the ring, you will win. But that win comes at a cost. As opposed to the system you have suggested where if you use the ring, it may or may not help, depending on the random value of the opposing card. There is no reward for using the ring and the only benefit to having the ring is a larger hand size.
I am not saying your way is wrong, this is just a solution I came up with for my game. Typically, we end up with 1-3 vampires per group and they either dip their toes in the water and realize they made a mistake or they go full bore and get tons of vampire powers (and weaknesses). I learned this trick from CP2020. In that game, you can power up your character by sacrificing some money and humanity. It proved to be very tempting to most players and I think I did a decent job of capturing that feel (temptation) in my own game.
Your game sounds cool, I'll check it out this weekend.
Gwynplaine:
Heya
One thing I note; you’ve said that in your experience players tend to dislike the narrator having influence on their character actions/ personality. Unless I misunderstood the mechanics idea, the ‘spades’ influence is not player controlled – it arises through the narrator or a random chance. Perhaps you could change it a little so that it is ‘player’ controlled to some degree, but not ‘character’ controlled (necessarily)? As mentioned above, the idea of Risk v. Reward of awesome powers but the downside of negative things happening to the character (important to make the distinction that it’s the character bad things happen too – and this can be helped if the player has a little choice as to how/ when they occur).
Also, perhaps the ‘negative’ influence may not necessarily be on the character’s actions/ personality itself. They could cause misfortune in the areas around them while ‘high on spades’ (or some other more sensible term), or even be a focal point of baleful forces. So rather than influencing character behaviour directly, you do so via the responses/ interactions of the world around them (of course you could combine the two methods, so that players that embrace the challenge of a descent into madness can have that, whilst other more defensively minded players have the world acting out against them – or if they’re defensive regarding character control –and- combat orientated it could be a literal ‘world against them’ type of thing).
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