> By way of disclosure, I'm a player in Adrian's game,
> and so is at least one
> other person on this list.
(Puts hand up and waves). I'm staying quiet and listening to all the good ideas. I've known the player a long time, I was the one who persuaded him to try HQ because I think the style of play he prefers (politics, social interaction, manipulating NPCs, personality issues) is handled far better in HQ than in RQ. But my contribution to this problem so far has been "take it to the rules list".
The player is a power-gamer at heart. He plays role-playing games to "win". He always wants to be more powerful than the other PCs, and to dominate other PCs and other players - the latter can be a problem. Now, if that's what he enjoys, fair enough, as a fellow player for many years I have no problem with him doing things he enjoys. (And if I get pushed around, I push back). He's a very good writer, comes up with interesting character concepts. Do not tell Adrian what nasty things can be done with those symbiotic ancestral spirits, because the player is already doing them. He's coming up with great ideas for backstory that drop him into even more trouble. But the 100-word narrative is not backstory, as has been said before, so the fact that these things do not appear in the 100-word narrative isn't really cause for complaint.
It's just that we've got to the point where we could do with some numbers, and that appears, along with lists of augments for contests based on it. And Adrian, a novice HQ GM, looks at it and boggles: shows it to me, and I also boggle. So I suggested he bring it here.
> Further I know the player in question, and I think
> that people are assigning
> some motives to the player that I don't think he
> has. In play he's actually a very story-driven
player.
He did arrange for the retirement/assassination of his previous PC on the grounds that it was impossible to GM, after all.
> I think that his narrative is simply pushing the
> boundaries, and I'm guessing that he doesn't know
> about the particular rule
> in question from page 20.
I'm fairly sure the concept if not the detail has been mentioned to him (by me), but it could easily have been forgotten.
> Put another way, if presented with the same "rules"
> for creating a character
> (sans the text on p. 20), I'd probably do pretty
> much the same thing.
I've done things that headed that way in a slightly more subtle manner, too. Squeezing as much as possible out of 100 words is an art-form :)
> (though then you run into the
> problem of comparing between
> people who have used both methods, which they have
> in this case...).
Personally if I start with a list, then convert to narrative, I can get more out of the narrative.
> Anyhow, the worst thing to do, in my opinion, is to
> "punish" a player for their enthusiasm
Yes! We're trying to convince him that HQ is *not* limiting. He doesn't like the fact that in RQ you could just "do" all the relationships and so on, but here you can only have them by spending points. I'm seriously considering inviting him over to Swords, as I think as a Humakti fanatic he'd love it, and the chargen system that takes the brakes off is one he'd love. I'm just not sure I could cope as a GM.
He isn't a munchkin in the normal sense. In PBeM, you dominate a game by writing, and writing well: quality, imagination, quantity. This is a game with me and Mike as players, to give you some idea of the "competition" (not that either of us see it that way of course). This player dominates, by producing more *good* writing than either of us. This is something to be channeled, not squashed, IMO. Only the more I look at that 100 words, the less able I feel to explain what the 100-word narrative is actually for.
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