Happy birthday Erik!

[breakinglight11]

I want to wish a fantastic birthday to flyingstalins, not only a remarkable and amazing human being, but the wonderful friend who hooked me up with Muppety goodness! Hope you have a wonderful day! :-)

I just finished writing one of the two replacement characters I have been assigned for Labor Wars, and I'm feeling pretty good about it. Replacement characters are a tricky proposition, in my opinion, but I'm quite proud of the way we're handling them here. There's a lot to recommend using them, of course. The Labor Wars is a weekend-long game with at least some possibility of character death, and nobody wants to be cut out of the game way way early because they got killed. So replacement characters are a way of getting those players back in the game so they don't miss out. But they can have problems. They are often much thinner than full characters, so I've encountered people getting back in the game and finding that they don't have much to do with their new role. Depending on when the second-run character gets into the game, the plots they're supposed to follow may have already resolved, or gone on in such a way as to make it impossible for them to get into those plots. And you can never predict when someone's going to die, so you can't predict when the new character's going to get into the game. Another issue is with information/knowledge management. You might get a second run character who doesn't know things that you already knew in your first character, so you're put under enormous difficulty to not metagame.

In Labor Wars, however, we've done a lot of planning to circumvent these issues as best we can. We are writing the replacements to be each tailored to a particular first-run character. So, if you're cast as X and you get killed, your replacement character will always be Y, whereas if you were cast as A, your replacement will always be B. The replacement is designated as your first character's lieutenant, to whom you've been reporting the goings-on of the game, who is ready to step in for you in the event that something happens to you. This helps make the transition smooth from one, by making character goals stem from the same stuff (if not necessarily consistent!) and by giving a reason for in-game knowledge to be consistent. Your replacement knows everything your original character knew because they are understood to have been informed of everything you learned. And usually you can pick up some aspect of your old plots, if not exactly in the same way to allow you to still have plot when you re-enter the game. It's an incredibly clever design on the parts of emp42ress, natbudin, and simplewordsmith. In the past I have tended to not like replacement characters because of the issues stated above, but their implementation of the concept in this game makes me feel really good about them.

One more to go. Here's off to do it justice.

Comments

[londo.livejournal.com]

Er... if someone is replaced with their Paranoia clone, doesn't that kind of blow the point of killing them?

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

They're not the same character-- just compatible.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

What _dragonwolf_ said. To expand a bit, replacement characters are not at all the same person. They might not even have the same agenda as the person they're replacing (then again, they might). Just like killing the leader of a faction in real life, when you assassinate a leadership figure, you don't know who's waiting behind the scenes.

As a faction leader, you will usually (but not always) know something about your replacement. Some characters have paid close attention to the line of succession and have groomed a lieutenant to step in. Some haven't, or don't have tight control over their faction and therefore can't. Some of the characters in this game are also nigh-immortal, due to various precautions they've taken.

So to sum up: saying it's "their Paranoia clone" is a gross mischaracterization.

[darkoni]

Yeah, replacement characters have not been very common for a long time, mostly because there aren't that many weekend games anymore and you don't usually need them for a four hour game.

I've never been overly fond of replacement characters, mostly because I like intricate plots, and that relies on a character being around. The few times I've tried to design replacement characters, I've mostly tried to design them from a strong personality style and less goal oriented, but with some skills that others might have use of, so they can be drawn into things. In School for Young Women, Miracle Max is a potential replacement.

[flyingstalins.livejournal.com]

If I'm killed I'd like to be replaced with a helplessly lovable kitten of some sort....people can't help but involve helplessly lovable kittens in whatever plot they've got going (and they've still got claws.)

so yes.....thank you for the wishes.....and replace them all with kittens.