Post by Tony One on Oct 19, 2010 5:34:32 GMT -8
We all (should) get attached to our characters. They are ours. They exist as a part of us in some way in the ether that is story.
The most important part of a world though, is not the characters, it's the story they are a part of.
I'll give some anecdotal evidence of the difference between coaxing drama and just posting self important diatribes.
Back in the day I played a table-top game called rifts. I would pour through the books reading the flavor of the world and finding interesting characters to role play. Some of my friends figured out the perfect combination of race/class/profession/skills/etc. to make the perfect characters. The GM was forced to create elaborate encounters with massive combat scenarios in order to "level" the characters abilities. This left my "little" character being pretty pointless since I didn't have the "stats" to compete.
The game would always quickly resolve into dozens and dozens of dice roles and hours spent on a calculator running numbers.
For most of them, this was fun. This however, arguably, was not roleplaying. It was stat-playing.
The point is: Superman is only just "barely" acceptable as a protagonist. He can only be harmed via Kryptonite and hurting the people he cares about. So we have to constantly imagine scenarios where Superman deals with these two issues, otherwise the drama is minimal.
We don't wanna get caught up in a story that caters to the idea of desperately trying to find some way to challenge the characters abilities.
The best stories are ones that have drama that unfolds.
One of my favorite stories is Cujo. It's rife with tension and drama as a dog with rabies terrorizes a woman and her child. Meanwhile the child has asthma so the woman is not only battling this beast of a dog but she's battling against time as her child may not live long enough to get eaten anyway.
If you put Superman or Harry Potter or Jet Li in this story.. it would just be a bad ass character taking a few seconds to deal with some mangy dog. The End.
Without drama, there isn't much story.
The most important part of a world though, is not the characters, it's the story they are a part of.
I'll give some anecdotal evidence of the difference between coaxing drama and just posting self important diatribes.
Back in the day I played a table-top game called rifts. I would pour through the books reading the flavor of the world and finding interesting characters to role play. Some of my friends figured out the perfect combination of race/class/profession/skills/etc. to make the perfect characters. The GM was forced to create elaborate encounters with massive combat scenarios in order to "level" the characters abilities. This left my "little" character being pretty pointless since I didn't have the "stats" to compete.
The game would always quickly resolve into dozens and dozens of dice roles and hours spent on a calculator running numbers.
For most of them, this was fun. This however, arguably, was not roleplaying. It was stat-playing.
The point is: Superman is only just "barely" acceptable as a protagonist. He can only be harmed via Kryptonite and hurting the people he cares about. So we have to constantly imagine scenarios where Superman deals with these two issues, otherwise the drama is minimal.
We don't wanna get caught up in a story that caters to the idea of desperately trying to find some way to challenge the characters abilities.
The best stories are ones that have drama that unfolds.
One of my favorite stories is Cujo. It's rife with tension and drama as a dog with rabies terrorizes a woman and her child. Meanwhile the child has asthma so the woman is not only battling this beast of a dog but she's battling against time as her child may not live long enough to get eaten anyway.
If you put Superman or Harry Potter or Jet Li in this story.. it would just be a bad ass character taking a few seconds to deal with some mangy dog. The End.
Without drama, there isn't much story.