Best Plan Ever?

Sometimes in a Game you throw a no-win situation at the players. I don't mean you kill them all with an undefeatable monster (though actually... I've done that too), but you give them a dilemma in which every solution has unpalatable consequences, so you're forcing them to make a moral choice to decide which is the lesser of two evils. Depending on what they choose, you follow through with the consequences and the Game changes as a result.

Sometimes, you wait for them to realise that they have two unpalatable options, and out of the blue they come up with a third way you've never even considered, one which you hadn't planned for and probably shouldn't allow, but which is so awesomely argued (within the established framework of the Game universe, and all in character, no "cheating" with knowledge the characters shouldn't have) that you just have to allow it, even if it means completely chucking out future plot lines that you've spent weeks working out in anticipation of the "defeat".

This is one such plan proposed by a player's character in the Game. In his own words:

Perhaps either the Event Field is 'indestructible' and interference is pointless, or the consequences to the Universe itself will be far worse than mere interstellar conflict if it's artificially extinguished. So I'd like to propose a compromise, a third alternative. Why don't you utilise the Dream Weaver Device to divert rather than eliminate the effect? I propose a three stage process, which will necessarily require use of the Device and the absolute trust and co-operation of everybody involved. Firstly, over the area of space-time encompassing the Event horizon itself, amend a basic Physical Law. Instead of being Mass multiplied by Velocity, briefly define Momentum as being equal to Mass multiplied by Speed. Secondly, curve that area of space time, nudging the direction of travel of the Event in space by ninety degrees i.e. perpendicular to its previous direction of travel. Thus we would have a rotating rather than an expanding phenomenon around the Earth. With our adjusted definition of Momentum, the direction component of velocity is not an issue thus Conservation of Momentum / Energy is conserved. Thirdly, restore the previous definition of Momentum to the area of space time previously affected. The Event phenomenon has not been destroyed, merely 'steered' and contained into a constantly rotating and non expanding configuration! The Event itself isn't to be targeted, merely the area of space-time it occupies.

Best. Players. Ever.

Astra

I wrote this some years ago, but wasn't sure I wanted to include it here. But a conversation yesterday reminded me of it, and I think that if it was important enough for me to write then it's worth sharing. So here it is.

Writing is hard 

Today's game was emotionally hard for me to run. When I plotted the current story line some months ago, I knew I had to play out one scene that, well, every time I rehearsed the dialogue to myself I just broke down.

I'm not sure if people who don't play RPGs realise how attached you can get to a character.

One of the very first characters I created for the original Strikeforce game was Astra. Originally a villain, then as I developed her background I realised she worked better as a hero, and eventually she joined Strikeforce and grew into a better person than I ever could have planned for. Grew from a timid and unsure teenage girl coerced into crime, into a strong, confident, and capable woman.

Maybe it sounds stupid to talk like this about a fictional character—particularly one that I had created myself—but I was so proud of her. And I guess I loved her, as much as you can love a fictional character.

And the players reinforced that. They took the character to their hearts, and literally enabled, even pushed through, the story arc that saw her transition to a hero. Their characters completely embraced Astra as a friend and comrade. As usual, it's the players who are responsible for making the game work, not me. When I ran a scenario that was literally Astra's 18th birthday party, everyone put effort into picking the perfect gifts. When her boyfriend cheated on her, one of the players sat in the kitchen with me and in-character we ate ice cream together. (And I'm going to completely gloss over how weird it is for a grown man to act the part of a teenage girl having a birthday party; that's just how games work.)

When I moved the game "Twenty Years Later", Astra returned as an adult, and everyone knew that was the right thing to happen.

Then, when I started filling in the historical eras of the story, a big part of that was filling in Astra's genealogy. (See if you can spot her ancestor in the Atlantis story. Your clue is that "Setara" means "Star" in Persian, and as we all know, Persian is one of the languages rooted in ancient Atlantean.)

Ok, if you're still here, I'm getting to the point now.

The current phase of the game is set in 1975, and is a prequel story set 12 years before the original Strikeforce story.

So the current crop of player-run heroes are gathered at Wang's shop in San Francisco's Chinatown, in 1975, to discuss their plan to take down the local crime boss (which is the main plot of the current game). The characters don't know Wang, even though the players do. Wang is a minor character in the Strikeforce story, and I hope the players think that I've introduced the younger version of him here to tell his background story as an "easter egg" for them, irrelevant to the actual plot. But I'm not telling Wang's story. I'm telling Astra's.

Wang sells cheap souvenirs to tourists. There are three of them in the shop right now: a young couple and their four-year-old daughter. While the player-characters watch (but don't intervene, because it's nothing to do with their plot, it's just a side scene I'm playing out for their benefit), the girl asks her father to buy her a colourful paper lantern for $5. Her father tells her it's over-priced rubbish and refuses. The girl is upset.

And then Wang, who I've spent the last couple of weeks establishing as a short-tempered, self-absorbed, money-grabbing con-man, inexplicably kneels down and hands the girl a lantern. And says—and this is the dialogue that kills me, and you won't understand it unless you know the history of Strikeforce, and Wang, and especially Astra, and I think I hold it together so my friends don't notice, I think I say it without my voice cracking—

"For you, little girl, it will never cost five dollars."

And Astra leaves the shop with her parents, and minutes later there's huge smashing noise outside, and the heroes rush out to find both parents dead in a car crash.

I've just orphaned my favourite character.

Because that's already part of her history, it was established when I first introduced her all those years ago. But knowing it has happened is different from describing it happening.

It's so different.

It's so hard.