[Ronin Storm]

Raison D'Etre

Player Characters are not isolated. They exist in a web of relationships that link them to other Player Characters. A character in a box with no other characters to interact with in any way is boring and uninteresting - that character's story can be the most detailed and inventive in the world but without someone to tell that story to then all that detail may as well never have been created.

It is through our characters' relationships that we find fun in a roleplaying game: their strife with an ancient adversary, their love for their kin, and their trust (or lack of it) in their fellow Player Characters. Through these relationships our characters' stories are told.

However, the nature of the relationship colours what pieces of the story are told and how they are perceived. Creating, defining and understanding the nature of those relationships is what this theory is about.

We generally accept that relationships are critical. How do we make them? And how do we make the most of them?

References

I make occasional comparisons or use concepts described elsewhere in the following. The primary bases for my thinking are listed below:

Character Is Not Important - an essay by Steve Cooper (an old friend of mine who showed up once or twice at SWG-RP)

Player Empowerment Theory - an article posted here previously by me

Meta Preamble

The thoughts below are relatively unstructured and still being refined. I've thrown a summary of structured thoughts at the bottom of this post to bring the thoughts together some but I'm still working on this (in a longer term sense). However, as I've not written anything against this for around four months or so I figure I'll put this up as is.

The concepts here I feel could be applied across the roleplaying medium, but the discussion is focused at online gaming. I once read Everquest described as being like the city of London - there are millions of people but no one talks to anyone and, if anything, you feel all the more isolated rather than feeling part of a community or play group. I think that's true for many un-Guilded people in Everquest.

I want to draw players together. One avenue for this to occur is through their characters. Hence the following...

Musing / Discussion

Steve argues in his essay "Character Is Not Important" that there are two kinds of relationships - stable and unstable. He argues that for roleplaying the "unstable" kind are what makes a character interesting and dramatic and therefore those are the kinds of relationships a character should seek.

That does not feel intuitive to me, and does not feel like the whole story.

Considering the roleplay group for a moment, both as a group of players and a collection of characters (considering that the character may not be "grouped" persay) the concept that unstable relationships are more interesting feels flawed. Character tensions (i.e. unstable relationships) can lead to a collection of prima donnas that either resolve or explode - i.e. change into a more manageable unstable relationship, form into a stable relationship or dissolve entirely after some event.

It's that "event" that worries me. The breakdown or explosion of a relationship, practically, can fall-over to the players as well as affecting the characters. My character kills your character before your character achieved something you were hoping for, as a player (and a character, perhaps) - this "denial" I have inflicted on your character through my character can lead to player emnity.

Now I can hear the voices that say "but not if you're a good, mature roleplayer" and I smile wryly. I am both and yet I still dislike people kicking my sandcastles down. For me, I can try to workaround. For others I know this can lead to the dissolution of the game as players no longer feel happy about the flow of the game. It's the basic disruption of the community around the game.

That "event", without boundaries, can be a dangerous thing. Unstable relationships, when poorly conceived and built for the purpose of pleasing oneself, can be a dangerous thing.

Implicit in many of Steve's writings is that "players are not being arseholes". Online, you can't be sure of that, nor can you be sure of that at tabletop conventions or new roleplay groups. I find it safer to assume that players can be self-centred about their characters and that can lead them to act for themselves and not for the play group and, ultimately, roleplaying is a group activity.

So, let my basic premise begin that we're playing in an environment where we needn't trust each other implicitly, people can have their bad days and that we're playing in a group of players (even if not as a group of characters).

The play group is a cooperative item - it agrees what it communally wants to play and how it wants to play it. For the most part, remaining part of that play group directly implies that you wish to be part of that cooperation and that you don't substantially disagree with its choices of "what" and "how". As such, it's relationships are cooperative.

Tabletop can have you build relationships before the game begins. For a "group-oriented" game - i.e. one where the characters are intending to operate in the same locales, often towards the same goals - these relationships are often about binding the group together, not finding reasons for the group to contain internal tensions. Intra-group tensions need to be balanced off against intra-group "attractions" (the reasons to stay together).

It's like a bunch of magnets - if the pressure between each magnet is stronger than the forces holding them together then either the pressures need to decrease or the magnets will be forced away from each other. Bearing in mind that it's no fun to be the player sat in the corner while the rest of the group plays together we must bear in mind the play of tensions versus attractions and seek to balance them in some fashion.

Consider your day-to-day relationships. There's a small bunch of people you really like and seek to be around. There's a small bunch of people you strongly dislike and seek to avoid. There's a mass of people that you interact with because they're there, but you don't really think much of either way.

That seems to imply that there are actually three modes of relationship, not Steve's simple two.

• Positive relationships - those that "attract" you to others and others to you.
  
• Negative relationships - those that repel you from others and others from you.
  
• Neutral relationships - those that you seek occasionally or necessarily seek (because of work or circumstances) but that you don't spend much time thinking on.
  

Now, how you react to those relationships is a different consideration. Just because a relationship is "positive" it does not automatically mean that it will work out or even that you will seek to make it work.

Just because a relationship is "negative", it does not mean you will avoid contact and, in fact, you may seek exactly the opposite through conflict.

It is quite possible that on each side of a relationship (clearly a relationship requires two people, and, for these purposes, we're only considering the one-on-one relationship) has a different "polarity" (i.e. positive/negative/neutral) for that relationship or a different way of describing it.

Consider this scenario: