> The main new point to add is just that recurring antagonists can be discovered, not planned in advance. Don't make a guy and say, "This guy will be recurring throughout the campaign." This means you'll need to stop him from being killed, which is all about eroding your players' ability to affect the campaign world. Instead, make three - whichever one survives the longest is the recurring antagonist.
Personally I'd be wary of the "thinking of you" factor because if some guy is obviously, like, obsessed with me, I'm much more likely to want to get rid of him ASAP.
Vs. someone who crosses paths with you more naturally.
For a particularly long campaign, I planned to have a half-dozen major plots which could be wrapped up individually--but each of them would finish with the idea that there's someone who set up the plot in the first place, someone nobody in the plot itself knows about. There's just a mastermind-shaped hole in the stories, and as the party becomes more annoying to him... he'll arrange for his unsuspecting pawns to get in the party's way.
In another campaign, I had the party start out by being forced into their first adventure by the villain.
He wanted an artifact in a dungeon designed to only be accessible by a specific set of Good-aligned class abilities, and the party met the qualifications.
The rest of the campaign was dedicated to figuring out WHY he wanted the artifact and getting it back... and in the process discovering that he was collecting a lot of similar artifacts, intending to join them.
In yet another game, the villain was an ancient legend that nobody believed anymore--even the PCs couldn't sort it out from the rest of the worldbuilding I'd done.
So halfway through the campaign when they found out she was real, they went to vanquish her!
@BrianBallsun-Stanton "System intent" is what I mean by incentives and structure. "PC intent," hmm, I don't know if I would classify reflexive avoidance of weaknesses as quite the same as full-on choosing to be a murderhobo.
@AlexP "Villain" is actually a word I shouldn't have used; the D&D system design creates a world in which all non-player creatures are divided into "more useful alive than as XP," and "more useful as XP than alive."
@BESW "More useful as XP than alive" isn't a thing you can always act on, though. Like all those gods you can only kill after you've murderhobo'ed your way through a lot of orcs first.
In that context, villains are simply a subset of "more useful as XP" because they have a particular reason to be so un-useful alive.
@AlexP Aye, but a PC placed in front of a "more useful as XP" creature will have to be told very explicitly that this is a thing it cannot kill yet, or it will try.
And the PC will be constantly checking to see if the condition has changed yet, or trying to change circumstances so the condition will change.
"How do I use a narrative device in an environment where the players have no interest or ability to engage with the narrative on most levels?" is not a very interesting question, perhaps?
(I'm very open to the fact that many D&D games don't work like this --I've run them myself-- but that is not a virtue of the system; it is a subversion of the system by the players.)
@AlexP And yet, it is a question asked regularly here on the site.
So while uninteresting in essence, it is urgent and real in practice--and thus interesting to those who want answers to it.
@BESW I immediately think of the moment where I placed my players in front of an Earth elemental so giant he towers over the trees. He is hassling them into negotiations when he could kill them outright. One of my players gets impatient and decides he wants to turn this into combat. He curses the elemental. He stops once the elemental knocks him into the tent, and I make a damage roll that could wipe out well over half his health, thankfully rolling low. Negotiations then resume.
One of the best ways to subvert the system is to actually give them antagonists they care about on some level rather than doing the "expected" thing of the can't-kill-him-cuz-he-teleports villain or the unreachable evil overlord with 100 minions.
Basically there's a dwindling but still present body of advice that is essentially "You're the GM. You want to have a storyline. None of the other players care about it at all, or at least you're pretty sure that is the case and don't want to give them the opportunity to prove you right. So here's how you create a thing just for yourself while they do dungeons for XP."
Our D&D campaign has largely been a subversion of D&D: pretty much every npc that would be classified as xp fodder had a very relateable motivation for doing what they did, even dirty goblins. Namely, survival. Once PCs got confronted with that, repeatedly, they've been forced to re-evaluate the whole murderhobo thing. Notable exception to this rule being aberrations, who are inherently terrible and fair game.
I think I would appreciate murderhobo games if you got to use appropriate character names, like "Boxcar Ted" and "Ironbelly Norton."
@Magician I think 2/3 D&D campaigns I ran were subversions of D&D. Still had a lot of stuff forced upon us by D&D, of course. Some of which we didn't realize was, at the time.
One had all the characters end up "Evil" because objective cosmic morality wasn't as important as their actual, like, goals.
That one and another one both involved being handed quests that ultimately proved to be not at all necessary or what they seemed.
@AlexP Yeah, fighting the system to play the game you want is a waste of effort, and I wish I'd realised this sooner. There's a blog post I'm contemplating, about the virtues of playing each game the way it's meant to be played, not inflicting preconceptions and poorly formulated desires upon it.
I think there's a lot to sell... erm, I'm gonna call them "fantasy adventure games," because they're not really dungeon-crawls anymore in the classic sense... on their own merits.
Main thing I remember from that movie is two scenes from the end.
1. There's a sniper in some steam tunnels or something. Vin Diesel step out, over the body of a guy who just got sniped in the face, whips out his heat-seeking rocket launcher, and fires the rocket, which homes in on the sniper because he is smoking a cigarette.
2. The bad guy decides to kill all the scientists by releasing the gas they were working on in the lab. They all run around and die, even though they are wearing shiny silver bodysuits with air filter masks, presumably designed for the express purpose of protecting them from the occasional accidental gas discharge. none of them put up their hoods.
The name thing reminds me... my wife knew a guy in high school who named his D&D character, like, Swordhero Tallgood. Which, whatever, people pick names for characters that they like, who cares? Except he had, like, this whole system. For naming things using some kind of fancy objective criteria he devised, to express their true nature. I think he tried to use it in real life (quietly).
@Magician All the characters are like that, though. Drawmij, for instance.
Drawmij sounds kinda cool,though.
@BESW Chronicles of Riddick was the most disappointing movie I ever saw in theaters, I think. Here's the thing: I didn't walk in expecting a lot. But then it was okay for the first few minutes. And then the screen died and they gave us free tickets to come back and watch it later.
So now I came back a second time thoroughly expecting a reasonable movie.
She fails at being a person --much less a likable person-- because she is instead a Strong Sexy Woman With A Tragic Past Which Leads Her To Do Unpleasant Things But We Forgive Her Because Of Her Tragic Past.
Which can be a decent character, but regularly (as in all three of these examples) fails to ever actually become much of a character at all.
@BESW I think it's a bit of a catch-22 because if you make her less of a trope, she becomes someone people hate. The whole "antihero" thing, Sopranos-style, never quite works out the same for female characters in our culture.
She's never the main character --because she's coming into an existing show-- but whenever she shows up on screen, the story (whatever it was) suddenly twists and becomes all about her.
River Song, well... we had multi-season arcs about how awesome she was, with absolutely no long-term payoff.
Vala got to be the Virgin Mary, for crying out loud!
And yet, this character can't be seen to have real, ordinary problems or failings: her challenges are either external or somehow the result of her Tragic Past.
They hurried up the major arcs because they thought that they were going to lose that last season, so they wrapped up all the big stuff the season before.
And they were left with the secondary plots when the new season was greenlit.
Compare SG-1, who thought S8 was their last season, and wrapped up everything. When S9 was greenlit, they had to invent an entirely new multiseason arc.
And their choice for the new arc was awful.
It totally demolished everything they'd spent 8 seasons building, in terms of theme and message.
They spent 8 seasons saying "Don't let people fool you into thinking they are greater than you just because they can use power they don't let you use."
And then they turned around and dropped in a villain that was everything they'd spent 8 seasons demonstrating the goa'uld were not. It was a cute gimmick, but an awful gut-punch to the show's underlying ethos.
Also I find it easier to view SG-1 9-10 as, like, a self-contained thing, because there's this core big shtick that's clearly separate -- including thematically -- from the preceding stuff.
Whereas B5 last season is kinda this stunted epilogue.
Although that does make it much more forgettable, and thus much more easily forgotten. >.>
Throw in the fact that they'd lost the lynchpin of their core cast dynamic, the replacement casts were a transparent bid to pick up the Farscape audience, and the whole setup was predicated on "Watch our heroes get their butts kicked except when deus ex machina kicks in," and you get a show I had no interest in watching.
Anyway, name system guy! Tina agreed to play D&D with 'em once, so they spent like three hours on character creation, most of which was some photocopied alignment quiz. And then the group told her the alignment the quiz gave her was wrong, and she should be some other alignment instead, because otherwise there were penalties (AD&D 2nd Edition, must be!).
And then she never actually played because they failed to schedule a time that she could attend.
Which is good because it means now, in 2013, my wife doesn't have past D&D experiences clouding her judgement.
IIRC she said they kept saying you couldn't be Lawful if you weren't sufficiently respectful of authority rather than just personal ethics, or something.
But really just the fact that they were obsessed with this quiz but then also didn't trust its output.
@BESW Yeah, that made me sad. Because it was nothing like Farscape. Farscape had, like... well, it was hella quirkier than SG-1 with Vala, for starters.
Like, one episode is resolved when Rigel (the muppet) discovers that a particular planet's flora has made his urine combustible in air.
@AlexP The goa'uld were compelling because they were an insanely powerful threat but still demonstrably-beatable mortals. It was about the Earth's most competent and upright heroes fighting overwhelming odds.
The ori were... demigods. Unbeatable, overpowering, nigh-omnipotent demigods who were only not taking over because the NPC wizards were stopping them, and even their avatars were effectively untouchable--not that beating them meant anything. Our heroes couldn't ever move forward, they at best managed to hold their ground.
It was an interesting story, but it had no reason for being SG-1.
@BESW I think its reason was specifically to upend the older themes. There'd be no punch to it otherwise. The punch wasn't done well and you didn't like it, also. But I can see the idea behind it.
And it is intellectually interesting as a subversion. But it resulted in a totally different show--one that turned its back on everything I liked about SG-1.
@AlexP It's like they... forgot how, or something. I mean, Vala's psychic projection adventure could have been a revisiting of episodes like The Time Teal'c Thought He Was A Fireman.
@AlexP in general, effectively my entire Ars group are pacifists. Of course, that's because 1 person hasn't bothered mastering the rules in... 5 years of playing, 1 person just is doing the "charge up" for... N years, and @magician is too busy pranking people.
Also I laugh at "pacifist" characters who are following a bunch of killers around patching them up between fights. That's... not much of a pacifist, in the largest scheme of things.
They spent a lot of time convincing one of the NPC heroes (a set of four typical D&D min/maxed characters with poor self control and a tendency to metagame) to accept them as unsuspicious NPC cohorts.
(Although when trying in-game to get an NPC's fictional player to reach the appropriate meta-game conclusion about your character, I'm not sure "deep immersion" is the right phrase.)
Mainly because I tended , well, with all of my characters, to when @Magician offered a philosophical talky hook, to sit there and actually talk about it for as long as he would let me
@BrianBallsun-Stanton So did you end up trying to avoid fighting and then talking about the ramifications of it a bunch? Or did you straight-up actually avoid avoid fighting?
One of the greatest "skills" a player can learn if they want to manipulate the game to their own ends is the ability to smell when a GM can be derailed.
Not the plot--the GM.
And GMs do well to recognize their weak points.
My biggest weak point is when a PC asks my NPC a question about himself. For some reason my NPCs can't help but talk about themselves.
Oh god. "Yes, Mr. Eldritch-Horror-That-Lives-Outside-Sane-Reality, by all means, let us discuss your position on language as inferior method of communication, I believe I can offer you some suggestions..."
I generally don't, in the sense that when confronted with it characters I play usually don't try to preserve the status quo or optimize a "have it all" solution.
Yes, the fundamental problem with the first Brian's character (and the second) was that they didn't want to fight, ever. First was a coward and the second was a hardcore pacifist. It's a problem in 4e because fighting is how you interact with the world. Even when you're subverting the genre and showing how killing things for xp is bad, you still fight things. You just pick your fights and their consequences much more carefully.
The third one, the one that eventually became Death, was not opposed to fighting-as-interaction. Engaging insane NPCs in philosophical debates, while only fun to him and me and not the rest of the group, wasn't contrary to the way the game plays.
Also, pushing "novel" philosophical models you come up with for strange creatures is hard with an actual philosopher around, who can and does quote the original thinker who came up with them.
@AlexP Harvey Pekar's American Splendor comics/novels are about ordinary people doing ordinary things in an ordinary setting. They're largely autobiographical, and very "small" in their scope, when compared to the more common adventure and horror that comics are associated with.
