PC Santa

I had some thoughts on blog post ideas, but they were either redundant or rather limited.

For instance, I keep thinking of my elemental surge campaign idea for L5R, a lot of the reason why is to disallow PC shugenja.

But, something more general and far more different came to mind just recently due to a situation in one of my campaigns.

NPCs have whatever they need to provide PCs with cool and/or useful stuff.

For instance, there’s a festival with a contest and the top prize is [fill in blank here].  Maybe it makes sense thematically/narratively, maybe it’s just arbitrary, but they have something to give out.

RPG PCs get stuff.  But, the assumption is that they will keep that stuff or consume it or have to fight not to lose it.

What do PCs have that they want to give away?

Ironically, perhaps, one of the things I most enjoyed in RuneQuest play was giving some possession away.  Even though we were playing a dungeon crawl style campaign where it was all about powering up, I never cared about the stuff I gained.  It always felt random, mostly because it was random, and unearned, mostly because it was unearned as I was just some sidekick in a party with far more powerful PCs.  Actually, that what was an interesting world in a theoretical mythological sense was played as videogame role-playing is probably why giving away stuff felt so good – my form of protest against the halflingification of mythological role-playing.

But, usually, PCs don’t have stuff.  In HoR mods, there may be situations where the PCs describe gifts they will present, but the gifts are typically provided by their daimyo.

What if the PCs are the daimyo?

We aren’t just Emerald Magistrates with yoriki.  We are de facto daimyo of a territory.  How do we reward our flunkies?  How do we reward people who help us?  How do we provide prizes to tournaments we run because we are the engorged cheeses who do things like run tournaments?

Makes me interested in the concept of … no, not money – accountating = bad … having a menu of things you just own as a PC.

Now, you can have the players come up with their lists with whatever level of GM input that makes their stuff sane.

To some extent, it’s reminiscent of two things I did in the Gaki Mura campaign.

One thing I did was have the players provide input into one of the NPCs.  A second thing I did was have the PCs build out the town in the way they wanted.

I’ve mentioned it before because I can’t seem to have original thoughts anymore that I want to return to these ideas someday.  More player input into aspects of the world, including the NPCs.

Well, then there’s also stuff.  Not stuff the PC can mechanically use except to trade or give away to others, even PC others.  Yeah, that’s weird that a PC gets to have this cool thing that that PC can’t use to be more awesome but can give to another PC and the other PC can use it to be more awesome.

This reminds me of something else I’ve done, because geniuses are geniusy.  I had a special item in a game with really no other special items that the PC was tasked with finding a rightful owner to.  I thought it was a cool subplot.  The player hated it.  Who was the rightful owner?  Pretty much whoever the PC thought was the rightful owner, just had to make a decent argument to me as to who that was.  But, no, when you have a videogame role-playing mentality, you think you have to go do some antifetch quest thing rather than lean into a narratively flexible idea.

Anyway, easy for me to get off on tangents as some of these ideas are ideas I want to revisit … only work better.

When stuff is a thematic thing, well, now that you are a primogen or daimyo or shah or star colonel or whatever, you can now be Story Santa rather than it always being “the Emperor calls you forward to give you this Kaiu Blade for defeating your new sworn enemy in the finals of Iaijutsuday”.