Re: Previewing next Myths of Gaming version

Russell Wallace posts, in part:

  In my experience, if the players have any emotional attachment 
  to their characters - i.e. unless the "characters" are really 
  just tokens in a war game - serious PC vs PC conflicts 
  _always_ end up with the players getting pissed off with each 
  other.

Well, you know the rgfa rule of thumb about how dangerous it is to judge based
on any single person's experience, even (maybe especially) one's own.

My experience is not as different from yours as some of the others here, but it
is different.  My most recent experience with this didn't involve a player
character death, but it did involve his being forced out of an adventuring
group.  Actually he was forced out of two adventuring groups, ending up not
being able to be played.

The player was quite unhappy about it, as he really enjoyed playing the
character, but he didn't end up getting upset at the other character's player. 
In the first case, one of the leaders of the people who forced the character
out was one of that player's other characters; the player did not, so far as I
know, get upset at himself for this.  In the second case, the player got upset
at the other character and didn't like playing with her for a while, but he
didn't get upset at the other character's player.

In earlier cases, some of which involved character deaths, players sometimes
got upset at other players, but there were enough players, and they were
diverse enough, that not all the players were going to be happy with all the
others all the time anyway.  And there were some cases where all involved
agreed 'it was an accident' - though in most of those cases it was an accident
on a character level as well as a player level.

  A much better solution is to make sure PCs who are likely to 
  become mortal enemies don't end up in the same campaign in 
  the first place.

That's perhaps easy for a short term campaign, but over the course of two
decades of player time and five decades of character time, characters can
change:  good friends can become deadly enemies in ways that were not
predictable at the start.  The choices then are to be false to the characters,
to end the campaign, or to allow the character conflict to happen, and the
latter can be the best of the three.

  But that part of the goal becomes pretty irrelevant if
  pursuing it causes the gaming group to tear apart - the 
  usual result of letting PC vs PC hostility get to lethal 
  levels.

In the extreme case, if two of the players can't play with one another any
more, it may be possible for the group to keep playing the same campaign after
one of the two players leaves.

Warren J. Dew
Powderhouse Software