Madrigality

[mendoza]

I was going to post this as a comment in response to sithlorddarren's impassioned post, but as I'm not a Friend, I can't. Still, I think it's a valid question and I would love to hear what people think:

Comments

[ryxander]

Oh, and I might add that PLAYERS are in a much less clear-cut situation, but I'd suggest that they have these responsibilities:

* Consider player fun. Only the individual player, however, can decide whether their need to follow their character's motivations outweighs player fun in a given situation.

* Don't confuse IG and OOG. Very good things said on this by other people, but in short, it is DUMB and HURTFUL to get upset OOG about something someone did IG, so long as it wasn't something that involved cheating or other really egregrious violations of player fun (like if some twink is repeatedly spiking newbies for the adrenaline rush, OK, then you can be pissed OOG.) Disagreeing with a player choice OOG is OK so long as you're civil (like, for instance, I would personally never perm another PC, but I don't think people who DO are doing anything morally wrong).

* If you find yourself getting too upset OOG about player conflict, for heaven's sake, calm down and find a way to deal with it before you start interacting with others about it. Or making posts on the internet. Or bitching in your PEL. This is just common human courtesy. If you need to vent, go find someone you trust to keep it quiet and vent to them in private, and make it clear that it's private. This is not meant to point the shame finger at anyone who has in a moment of passion violated this guideline, mind you. Just sayin' it's common sense and common courtesy.

Again, I think it's better if the game designers try to head off this trouble in the first place, because once it gets into player hands, it's frankly too late for a clean solution.

[arianhwyvar]

It's funny -- one of the things that's coming to mind now is remembering back at the very beginning of Aralis, I think the second event, conspiratrix's character deliberately death struck Jim T's character on the field in the confusion of a battle. She chose to do it because, as near as I can recall, she hated him because he had unapologetically slaughtered her people in his backstory. Who had done the killing was a topic of IG roleplay and politics for another event or two, and it finally came out and there was much IG arguing over punishment, which worked out in the end to conspiratrix's character effectively being the last rescued in a module and taking a death because of it, which people IG were willing to accept as something roughly ressembling justice.

The thing that's impressive to me, remembering it, is that while there was huge turmoil IG about it, I don't recall there being a huge outcry or a lot of bad feeling OOG, even though one PC deliberately killing another secretly during a common fight you might think would be a big deal in a lot of larps. Unless I'm misremembering and there really was a big fuss OOG, I wonder what made that fairly extreme situation of anti-PC wrongdoing and punishment work out. The early point in the game when it occurred? The newness of many of the players to LARPing, thus not having expectations of 'you don't do that' so ingrained? The set up of enemy factions who are expected to hate each other, but nonetheless have to try to find ways of working together? Or were the specific people involved just really good about not taking it personally, or not fearing death so much as to get really upset?

[arianhwyvar]

And in Aralis we really did have plenty of problems around crime and punishment anyway. I remember there was a fair amount of frustration about 'how do you punish someone?' that was largely, I think, IG frustration because of the fact that we couldn't afford to incapacitate people who could help the group survive, even if we wanted to discourage certain behaviors. That contributed to making everyone more prone to giving people leeway for their actions, I think (with some exceptions), at least until a breaking point at which they could finally no longer be tolerated as part of the group -- and in most cases the people in question left and were not hunted down and destroyed, even when the remaining PCs had the opportunity to.

I wonder how that kind of situation plays on in the real world. In the old west, or other dangerous colony situations, was behavior tolerated that would not have been in more civilized areas partly because the skills of the criminals were needed to help the group survive?

[vastin]

Actually, I suspect rogue behavior in the old West was dealt with swiftly and brutally on most occasions. Only when the offender had a sufficient network of allies to protect or avenge them would they be safe from immediate retribution.

Of course, this means that anyone who wanted to be safe from getting killed generally had to be careful about keeping their noses out of other people's business, or they had to for a strong clique of allies who were willing to stand up for them.

It works similarly in most LARPs in my experience, unless the staff creates a strong code of laws or conduct that is re-enforced (and in some cases EN-forced) in-game by NPC's.

[beled_el_djinn]

If the records are to be believed, then in the early days of The Massachusetts Bay Colony, whenever the citizens had a problem with rogue behavior, they pretty much resorted to banishing the dissident/separatist/quaker/whomever. They had this wonderful three strikes and you're out plan going. Your first, and the offense you were banished for, would warrant having one of your nostrils slit. Offense #2 would get you a matching set of slit nostrils. Your third offense would get you your tongue bored. If, for whatever reason, you returned for a fourth time, they'd finally get around to hanging you.

Would this work in a larp setting? Probably not, although for my own part, I'd get a kick out of skulking around the edges of town if I were banished (I'm weird that way). But it does sort of provide for an interesting framework of your character can mess up three times before the town is well within it's rights to perm you.

[arianhwyvar]

It would address some of the issue of mismatch of expectations/permanent and severe consequences to the player.

[egowumpus]

In the old west, or other dangerous colony situations, was behavior tolerated that would not have been in more civilized areas partly because the skills of the criminals were needed to help the group survive?

Do you think this is (was?) actually in play?

The way I see it, there are two possibilities regarding this aspect:
1) The characters in question have resources that are manifestly essential to survival of the whole. Therefore they are kept around despite antisocial behavior because it is clear to any 'rational' person that they are necessary for survival, and all characters are acting rationally.
2) It has been put forward, in an oog-backed way, that the characters in question are 'needed' and any solution(s) not involving them will not work. While this is not objectively true, and perhaps not even subjectively true, it allows a convienant excuse for any (player||character) to act in a manner contrary to the consistency of their (character||self), and is thus supported.

I find possibility (1) deeply unlikely in any realistic world and (2) something ideally avoided in any game situation, and so thinking that leads to those two possibilities arising as the ones matching observed behavior seems untenable to me.

For instance, you're in an old west town being attacked by natives. Slab the Killer, the best shot around offs someone. Now, is the disincentive to kill him because he is needed to fight indians? Even risking that he might off someone else? Or is it for some more realistic reason, like he won't go down without a fight, thus killing others, or people are simply afraid of him or unwilling to kill someone like themselves? Do you ever really need Slab the Killer *that* much? How many other people is he worth? And does that worth really override your immediate emotional reactions to someone else getting killed? Or your morals violated?

In a fantasy world, I don't buy the first reason; you descend on Slab the Killer and while you might die, you're not likely to perm. The second and third reasons, while good, aren't ones that are ever cited; they're overridden by out of game concerns, especially since any and all of this would be seen as a terrible derailing of the main narrative of valiantly defending the town from savages. And so I don't know that there is an appropriate analogy to be made there.

My main point, distracted as it was, being that I don't think it can be argued 'objectively' that a character is absolutely needed in any given situation. It may suck some other way, but you don't *need* them. Any such situation you contrive in which a character is 'needed' in that way is probably unlikely. Factions are a different story.

[arianhwyvar]

But your example is a pretty clear example of someone crossing the breaking point line. Yes, if the guy kills someone, you probably aren't willing to let it slide -- his problematicness is so great that it outweighs his usefulness. But if you only have 4 people who can fight to hold off the natives, are you going to hang one of them or insist he get out of town just because he spits tobacco juice in the street, or stole a tin of beans once from the general store when he thought no one was looking? That's not to say you don't want to try to change his behavior or right the wrong, but you're perhaps more likely to seek a solution that's not throwing him out of town then and there.

I wasn't arguing it's particularly likely that a single person's skills are so critical that you need to not prosecute them for minor crimes (though I guess if the town's only doctor is a womanizer...), but that if the numbers of people are so small that every pair of hands is critical, the group may suffer more by getting rid of one of those pairs of hands than by suffering the minor trouble that person causes -- as long as the trouble is not seen as a herald of worse to come.

Aralis might have counted as such a situation because the PC numbers were so small compared to the opposition, sometimes one or two more people -- regardless of who specifically they were -- made the difference between winning and bleeding to death. (At least at the beginning.) In most larps, the PC numbers are higher, as is the PC to staff ratio, and I think it would be much harder to make a case that every individual could tip the balance.

Of course, the other option is 'if you're doing one small thing wrong, that shows you're likely to cause much wronger things down the line, and we'd better get rid of you now.' Set up with clear expectations, that could maybe even work; but it might be overly restrictive and not much fun. How many people want to rp living in a totalitarian state and not being able to get away with anything?

[egowumpus]

Of course, the other option is 'if you're doing one small thing wrong, that shows you're likely to cause much wronger things down the line, and we'd better get rid of you now.'

Stop nerfing rogues!!! Such logic is meant only to persecute the shady!

Seriously, though, manpower is rarely a good reason. There were... lets say 25 PCs in Aralis. 10,000undead+assorted nasties/30 PCs is not that much different from 10,000undead+assorted nasties/29 PCs. Madrigal has, what, 60?
To put it another way, the amount of pain felt after, say, Melyr disappeared was not significantly higher than before. So it's not a manpower thing.

Knowledge or specific ability is a far more compelling reason. But even there, do you really expect that 29 PCs, all supposedly equal in the eyes of the game, won't be able to find a way through the consequences of losing one PC, also equal in the eyes of the game? In the real world this is a somewhat different matter, but I guarentee you'll here some complaints if only one character is offered the 'plot of saving the group' and the other PCs have compelling reason to kill him or her, thus meaning either they give in and get saved, or screw themselves. In that situation the problem is that the person in question seems far more narratively powerful than anyone else.

I also don't think we're talking about minor offenses here. They have to be significant to even trigger a reaction. Felonies, as it were. I'd note that the example in question is not necessarily a breaking-point issue. If there are forty thousand natives on the way, and he has a nuke that will kill 39,900, then a town of one hundred has a good reason to keep him around; sure he might kill one or two more people, but over the loss of a hundred, that is small beans. But those numbers are ridiculous.

I'd also note, of course, that it seemed like Bane was tolerated on similar grounds.

[darkwhimsy]

Taking the "rationalist" perspective, it's presumably a question of whether (the future value you expect from that person) exceeds (the future harm you expect from that person) - (the difficulty of removing that person). That doesn't necessarily require that the person be critical to your survival, just that he contributes something more than he takes away... or comes close enough that it's not worth removing him.

I don't think Bane is quite a comparable case to most PCs. Most people expected absolutely zero help from Bane. It was more "he might beat us up if we leave him alone, but he'll definitely beat us up if we don't", which is more comparable to a wild animal than a member of the community.

[darkwhimsy]

Well, that's sort of the OOG "rationalist" perspective, if you will. Now, personally I don't really play the IG rationalist myself - my characters will often follow the IG law even if it doesn't make "make sense" in the individual case.
As to whether it makes sense to do so in OOG cases, that really depends on your OOG morality. But we are also accustomed to a system with more social "rules" than expressly exist for most of our characters.

[egowumpus]

I suppose I'm not seeing the difference between a 'wild animal' and a 'member of the community'. What does a character have to have to classify them as a member of the community rather than a wild animal? Long-time existence? The fact they're not being played by a GM? The fact that they have only the whole community's best interest at heart? The fact that they will do nothing classified as 'evil' by anyone?

[darkwhimsy]

Well, in terms of that equation I would describe it by the first half: whether you expect non-zero "help" from that person. A few did expect help from Bane, but the majority never did, and for them the only question was whether "the pain of removing him" exceeded "the pain of letting him be".

[egowumpus]

It does not seem wholly unreasonable to say that a 'member of the community' is someone whom you can expect to receive arbitrary aid from, at least in a LARP context.