On 2005-11-29, Mo wrote:
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I've had a couple of big character farewells this last year, both in very long running campaigns. Both were intentional - one by me and one by the group as a whole and both were experiments in endings. Brand posed your question to me some time ago - why do we let games, or characters, go on past their primes? Why do we let them lose their impact by letting them peter - why with a whimper not a bang? The first was a four-year long campaign of Exalted in a game that is comprised of a perfect circle. I had a character that was in some ways new, and some ways archetypal for me. She was the Rock against which all things must break, she was a priest torn between her love of God and her love of the man God took from her (I could go on and on, but I'll spare you). Suffice to say that I found her very engaging, very powerful, very immersable, and as she came into her strength, very difficult to play in the sort of game we were playing. The game had a gradual progression in power, much like your Ars Magica game from the sounds of it. As we grew in power, I found more and more that I had to author her out of the dramatic choice to save the dynamic of the group, both in and out of character. This was due to some broken social contract issues, some problems with safety, and some serious style clashes among the players. The Rock against which all things must break was eroding - and not because I was choosing that it happen. So one particularly difficult game I came home to talk to Brand about it (it has been in play since well before he came to Canada). I was really very frustrated, and he posed the question to me: If it's not as much fun as it used to be, why do you go on doing it? If the not fun of now is starting to take away the fun of then, isn't it best for you and for the group to make a change that will work? I thought about it good and long, and I didn't really have an answer for it. I've historically had a difficult time ending my characters, either independently or at the end of game, but on close examination of those times it was largely because I had little control or say over the ending of the character. I'd been trained to fear it, because this creation that I was emotionally plugged into was going to be destroyed at the hands of someone else. I feared the end wouldn't do the character, or the story, justice after so much work, thought, and emotional investment had been made. So I decided to author my death. It was 6 months in the planning between me and the GM. I wanted a big face off with God, I wanted to bring it to this massive choice between being a faithful servant of God, or to be a woman, and love and hate as I chose. I wanted to die having come to terms with the answer to that question. I wanted to show that the character was as capable of being a hero as a woman as she was as the Rock, I wanted to make the ultimate self-sacrifice not for God, but for Love. It was extremely empowering. It was, at times, a mite scripted ??? It was my first time on an endeavor, the GM has a different style of play that needed a bit of negotiation to pull off, and the group tried hard to follow the road that leads to Rome, trying to find a way out for me ??? because naturally I wouldn't want to die, right? All in all, the story ended powerfully, I felt at peace with it, and in later games, it gave a bit of revitalization to one or two others in the game who needed a boost or a change. So my answer in short? Maybe we're timid about endings because we have a skewed impression about what they do and how we'll feel afterwards. Maybe it's a little because they represent an emotional connection (for many) and the death of that connection can be difficult to mourn through, especially if the character or story came to a bad (read: unsatisfactory) end. Maybe it???s difficult to orchestrate an ending that will do justice to those games that we've worked so hard to make fleshy: they either take too much planning and can despoil the organic quality of play, or they are too unprepared and the end feels shallow after all that work. I do realize that I promised two stories and only gave one, but I went on and blathered up your blog??? and didn't want to overbear your comments-space. Sorry about that. ;P |
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