Gah, remind me to not have eggs and plan stuff for RPGs (eggs give me suicidal depression). Now, to be fair, I didn't MEAN to eat the eggs, they were snuck into some chocolate-covered mints (as binder, natch) that I had the cravings for, and, whaddaya know, I wound up depressed! So I went and planned out the end of my Burning Wheel game Revenge of the Countess of Fire, which is a big no-no, of course. This is what I came up with.
So, my players have been unavoidably teamed up an unknown entity known as The One in the Deep thanks to the ownership of The Black Stone, which lets them communicate with the One in the Deep, but which they can't voluntarily get rid of. As of last session, the One in the Deep asked that the Stone be given to his avowed enemy, The Countess of Fire, who wishes to destroy the One in the Deep with the Stone. How she thinks she'll do this is not important, and plus there's spoilers to consider, but at any rate, here's what the original conception for the One in the Deep.
In this world everyone is connected in a vast unconsciousness. Everyone has a special way of communicating with each other on a level that none of them can know about. Well, the One in the Deep is the evil personification of this collective unconsciousness, and, well, he wants to become conscious (since the unknown in each of us wishes to be known). I began to plan around this idea, and while the plan was quite good and imaginative and I'll probably actually use this plan someday, there's one problem with it, that makes it antithetical to Burning Wheel.
IT WAS A PLAN.
Don't get me wrong, I'm supposed to know what the bad guys are up to. But I actually tried to predict how things would go which, as any narrative gamer will tell you, is a terrible idea. I mean, of all the boneheadded things to do...
Oh, and Maria hated the idea on top of it all. She brought up that it was a truly depressing villain over which there could be no victory. It was one thing to have a villain that could only be imprisoned, but someone that was actually you? Not much of a conclusion. So there's always the fact that the rest of my players probably wouldn't like the idea either. No idea, and only one way to find out!
Anyway, yeah, that's how I got my stupid rear end saved from making a plan. But some of the methods I'd thought of I'll probably save for a 4th edition game, whenever I get back to playing that one...
"Oh, and Maria hated the idea on top of it all. She brought up that it was a truly depressing villain over which there could be no victory. It was one thing to have a villain that could only be imprisoned, but someone that was actually you?"
ReplyDeleteIt can be done wrong. It can be done corny or cheesy or just plain hokey and kooky. But it's way more thought-provoking to fight your own evil than to fight some protodemon that can only be repelled and never vanquished. Also, initial girlfriend disapproval can indicate that the idea is actually good but you need to rethink how to present it, what to do with it, or something else about it to make the crux of the idea work as well as it ought. (In this case, it sounds like the thing needed is to come up with a way that the players/characters could actually have a meaningful choice in how they deal with this villain, which should be perfectly possible if you think less in terms of a specific result and more in terms of what the possibilities are given the underlying idea of what the thing is.)
Not necessarily. Maria knows the people involved in the game relatively well, hence my willingness to listen to her. A couple of the people from this group have commented that they really would have hated something like this. And the whole protodemon thing can be done interestingly enough as well, and I've got a an interesting angle to throw at them.
ReplyDelete