[OCHH] Unsafe stories, unsafe characters
Chris Chinn (Bankuei) has restarted his blog Deep in the Game as Deeper in the Game. In one of his posts he talks about dangerous characters and this got me thinking about One Can Have Her. Granted, I relate almost everything on roleplaying game I read nowadays to One Can Have Her.
So are characters in One Can Have Her safe or unsafe? Safe for whom? For the audience and the creators, and no, they’re not safe. I’ll explain.
The audience of the story in roleplaying games is the game master and the players. At the same time they create the fiction of the story. Players are usually, not always, mostly interested in their own player character. They invest a lot into that one character and channel their hopes and wishes through it. What’s possibly unsafe about characters is that they can betray the player’s trust, they can let them down, or turn out in ways the player didn’t expect and maybe didn’t want.
In One Can Have Her the player of a character makes all decisions for that character. You can’t be forced to have your character kill another character or fall in love with someone unless you decide to. The character can be suspected for the murder even though he didn’t do it, and he can be chased by a jealous husband even though he has no interest in the husband’s wife. But the heart of the character belongs to the player. The ultimate fate of the character is always up to the player in the form of an epilogue. The characters don’t always turn out the way the player want to. Sometimes the player want the character to reach his life goal, but someone rats on him to the police and he dies. But the player still decides how he dies.
The shared story, on the other hand, is clearly out of the individual player’s control. That’s obvious, since the story is created collaboratively with the other players. The other players can have their characters do things that put your character in a totally different light. If he rats on them and their players portray them as stoic heroes that takes the punishment, that doesn’t make the squealer look very good. He’ll get his life goal and maybe the femme fatale, but at what cost?
When I played at OmniCon and my aggressive doctor actually reached his life goal I was both happy and disgusted. He was a rotten man, and he used his new-won fame to crush the only person connected with his old life, the young femme fatale.
If the story is unsafe and the story is made up of the player characters and their actions, they become unsafe too. When you start playing One Can Have Her you know your character has committed a crime, but you don’t know if he’ll somehow make up for it. Will he pay for it with his life or the rest of his life behind bars, or will he get away clean but undeserving? You don’t know until you’ve finished the story.