Why I Don't MUD
Jul. 10th, 2005 12:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frustratedpilotHey.
The following is my side of a story that happened long enough ago (1999/2000) that I feel I can air it out now (from my archives):
The hardest part about writing this is where to start. Well, the simple thing to say is that a character of mine died and I'm still trying to get over it. I've had characters of mine get killed in role-playing games before, so that's not the subject of this article...it's the way this character met her end and the events that led up to it that still upset me a whole month afterwards.
I was attracted to a particular online RPG campaign because of a message that had appeared on a board I usually read...so I wrote back to the GM and told him about a story I had been working on for years that had similarities and even had a character handy for his runs. This character was one I initially created as a "flavor" character--basically a flunky of one of the major ones--but still the best "fit" character I had for his campaign. Anyway, the GM invites me in and we start the process of integrating my character into his story. I look back through the archived posts for his story's forum and see names of characters/users who had joined briefly and then left without a trace...looking back, I should taken that as a warning.
It took me a couple weeks to get up to speed. And then there was a nasty surprise. Somebody has a morbid fixation with the "Hoylandur" (no Khoppy Rites) "immortals" and the GM wastes little time arranging for my character to get killed in such a fashion that she could become one. Personally, I'm not a "Hoylandur" fan, so I saw precious little logic in this plan of action. Not only that, the way this was done seemed to me to be a test of how much emotional involvement I had in the persona...was the GM going to just reject me as a player, whither I wasn't really in love with my character? I was trying to improve my skills as a player...and this wasn't helping. (And one of my greater goals was to take my own stories into new directions through my experiences in this game. I had no interest at all in corpse counts...and that's what probably set me up to suffer.)
Over the course of the remaining phase of the campaign (about a month and a half), my character was only in combat ONCE. Which she won. (At about then, I witnessed a falling-out with another longtime player of this campaign--and found myself the last online player other than the GM.) We went through an intercampaign transition, and the GM brought in some of my characters for the campaign we were sequenting to...and in the first combat of the new campaign, my original character gets killed off. And not in the combat itself. I'm not going to elaborate on how it happened, but the way it happened defied all logic--and the GM ignored my attempts to continue playing my character while he bumped her off "offstage". (He then had the gall to tell me that my character's shade was in the pantheon of his Gawds, serving one of them--no matter that she was an alien and an infidel!)
The GM knew I had been upset the first time...so me being upset again should not have been a surprise to him. Evidently, it was, for he tried to reach me through messenger programs and even looked me up in the phone book and called me at home. "This game is fiction, fiction isn't real," he said.
"Fiction has a logic that must be followed," I said, speaking from the experience of being the son (and proofreader) of a published fiction author who has had to grapple with the logic of fiction for two decades plus. "And by ignoring my attempts to continue playing this character you are rejecting my participation in the game!"
"You're not the only person to lose a character in this game. I don't just GM this campaign online; I have a circle of players in real-life too. They've also lost characters," he says.
I said, "It isn't what happened that I'm upset with--it's the underhanded methods you used."
"You're a good writer and a good player. I didn't like killing off your character."
"You seemed to relish killing her off the first time to make her 'immortal'--and what use was that?"
He said, "You said your character was another character's 'flunky'--and your only purpose for her was to get your other characters together with mine."
"That was before I got to develop her further."
"She was the only character of yours I had to consider 'expendable'. For my purposes, the other characters of yours need to stay 'alive' until--"
And at that moment I knew that my other characters didn't have much of a future in his campaign. As revenge, my remaining characters called upon a Gawd they knew to rescue the dead, defiled heroine of mine (basically undoing what had been done to me) and abandoned his party, and I quit. The GM asked me back, but I told him I wasn't interested any more. Without an "experienced" character for my remaining characters to have for a "guide", I would have been back at Square One--or worse. Especially since the GM was hinting that a major war was brewing and my characters would be caught in the crossfire without any allies.
I'm not accusing him of being a "killer GM". What I can't stand is the way the reins were stripped from my hands arbitrarily, so the GM could run a character of mine into the ground himself. Once the GM had decided my character had to die, there was nothing I could do as a player--or I should say, in his mind I ceased to exist as a player. Ask yourself, good players, how do you like it when a persona of yours is a victim of "character rape"? (At least in the gaming groups presented in "Knights Of the Dinner Table", once PC personas are established, the GMs don't monkey with them. Whatever hazards the GMs hurl at the PCs, they never stoop so low as to unfairly make a persona do something the player would not have his/her persona do on their own. The situations can be twisted--but the attitudes and character properties of the personas are off-limits.)
One of the things the GM told me while we were in the campaign was that he intended to make the results of the run the subject of a novel he was writing. If you were reading a novel, and one of the central characters (one the audience is supposed to identify with, even) was just thrown away in the next chapter, would you continue reading? I want to write novels too--and I would NEVER do that to my readers! For a writer, it would be suicide. The relationship between a storyteller and his audience cannot be abused in this fashion and survive. Since both the GM and his PCs are storyteller AND audience--working for MUTUAL entertainment through the game-- how can a successful game come about when the GM makes totally arbitrary judgments on who lives and who dies, independant on the game's own structure? No way that I can see.
FP
PS:
The following is my side of a story that happened long enough ago (1999/2000) that I feel I can air it out now (from my archives):
The hardest part about writing this is where to start. Well, the simple thing to say is that a character of mine died and I'm still trying to get over it. I've had characters of mine get killed in role-playing games before, so that's not the subject of this article...it's the way this character met her end and the events that led up to it that still upset me a whole month afterwards.
I was attracted to a particular online RPG campaign because of a message that had appeared on a board I usually read...so I wrote back to the GM and told him about a story I had been working on for years that had similarities and even had a character handy for his runs. This character was one I initially created as a "flavor" character--basically a flunky of one of the major ones--but still the best "fit" character I had for his campaign. Anyway, the GM invites me in and we start the process of integrating my character into his story. I look back through the archived posts for his story's forum and see names of characters/users who had joined briefly and then left without a trace...looking back, I should taken that as a warning.
It took me a couple weeks to get up to speed. And then there was a nasty surprise. Somebody has a morbid fixation with the "Hoylandur" (no Khoppy Rites) "immortals" and the GM wastes little time arranging for my character to get killed in such a fashion that she could become one. Personally, I'm not a "Hoylandur" fan, so I saw precious little logic in this plan of action. Not only that, the way this was done seemed to me to be a test of how much emotional involvement I had in the persona...was the GM going to just reject me as a player, whither I wasn't really in love with my character? I was trying to improve my skills as a player...and this wasn't helping. (And one of my greater goals was to take my own stories into new directions through my experiences in this game. I had no interest at all in corpse counts...and that's what probably set me up to suffer.)
Over the course of the remaining phase of the campaign (about a month and a half), my character was only in combat ONCE. Which she won. (At about then, I witnessed a falling-out with another longtime player of this campaign--and found myself the last online player other than the GM.) We went through an intercampaign transition, and the GM brought in some of my characters for the campaign we were sequenting to...and in the first combat of the new campaign, my original character gets killed off. And not in the combat itself. I'm not going to elaborate on how it happened, but the way it happened defied all logic--and the GM ignored my attempts to continue playing my character while he bumped her off "offstage". (He then had the gall to tell me that my character's shade was in the pantheon of his Gawds, serving one of them--no matter that she was an alien and an infidel!)
The GM knew I had been upset the first time...so me being upset again should not have been a surprise to him. Evidently, it was, for he tried to reach me through messenger programs and even looked me up in the phone book and called me at home. "This game is fiction, fiction isn't real," he said.
"Fiction has a logic that must be followed," I said, speaking from the experience of being the son (and proofreader) of a published fiction author who has had to grapple with the logic of fiction for two decades plus. "And by ignoring my attempts to continue playing this character you are rejecting my participation in the game!"
"You're not the only person to lose a character in this game. I don't just GM this campaign online; I have a circle of players in real-life too. They've also lost characters," he says.
I said, "It isn't what happened that I'm upset with--it's the underhanded methods you used."
"You're a good writer and a good player. I didn't like killing off your character."
"You seemed to relish killing her off the first time to make her 'immortal'--and what use was that?"
He said, "You said your character was another character's 'flunky'--and your only purpose for her was to get your other characters together with mine."
"That was before I got to develop her further."
"She was the only character of yours I had to consider 'expendable'. For my purposes, the other characters of yours need to stay 'alive' until--"
And at that moment I knew that my other characters didn't have much of a future in his campaign. As revenge, my remaining characters called upon a Gawd they knew to rescue the dead, defiled heroine of mine (basically undoing what had been done to me) and abandoned his party, and I quit. The GM asked me back, but I told him I wasn't interested any more. Without an "experienced" character for my remaining characters to have for a "guide", I would have been back at Square One--or worse. Especially since the GM was hinting that a major war was brewing and my characters would be caught in the crossfire without any allies.
I'm not accusing him of being a "killer GM". What I can't stand is the way the reins were stripped from my hands arbitrarily, so the GM could run a character of mine into the ground himself. Once the GM had decided my character had to die, there was nothing I could do as a player--or I should say, in his mind I ceased to exist as a player. Ask yourself, good players, how do you like it when a persona of yours is a victim of "character rape"? (At least in the gaming groups presented in "Knights Of the Dinner Table", once PC personas are established, the GMs don't monkey with them. Whatever hazards the GMs hurl at the PCs, they never stoop so low as to unfairly make a persona do something the player would not have his/her persona do on their own. The situations can be twisted--but the attitudes and character properties of the personas are off-limits.)
One of the things the GM told me while we were in the campaign was that he intended to make the results of the run the subject of a novel he was writing. If you were reading a novel, and one of the central characters (one the audience is supposed to identify with, even) was just thrown away in the next chapter, would you continue reading? I want to write novels too--and I would NEVER do that to my readers! For a writer, it would be suicide. The relationship between a storyteller and his audience cannot be abused in this fashion and survive. Since both the GM and his PCs are storyteller AND audience--working for MUTUAL entertainment through the game-- how can a successful game come about when the GM makes totally arbitrary judgments on who lives and who dies, independant on the game's own structure? No way that I can see.
FP
PS:
