House of Cards GM Log

IMC: The Ones That Got Away

posted by Ginger at 11:18 AM, May 27, 2004 | Filed under : IMC , Player Characters | Comments and Followups

Following up on Paul and Arref:

One of the decisions we made when we started House of Cards was to deliberately cast a few more PCs than we expected, because we were recruiting from some non-gaming groups (gamer-friendly and containing gamers, but not dedicated PBeM folks) and were pretty sure some of them would fade. Also, we had a lot of good applications, and wanted to have as many characters as we could handle. We’re greedy! We did lose a couple early—Greg and Jim, both of whom didn’t really have time and weren’t into the game—and recast their characters. Some of the folks we really expected to go have stayed on, though.

We’ve had a couple of players leave because of stylistic incompatibility (not always GNS, either) over the years. In one case we did a recast, which we hadn’t intended to, but the perfect player came along and has gone gonzo with the role. I’ve heard a lot of kind things about the new-look Lucas, and I’m certainly enjoying GMing him. Had we not recast, the character would have come to a nasty end.

The other character whose player departed the game was a Chaosian. We didn’t initially intend to allow Chaosian PCs at all, and in retrospect probably should have stuck to our guns, but we were willing to take a chance. With the player’s departure, we came up with a nasty and somewhat gruesome end for the poor character.

We also have two players on hiatus/retired. We had one leave and return, as well. We’ve thought about how to write those PCs out more permanently than “in Shadow” should we need to.

The House of Cards universe is a big and dangerous place. We don’t tend to let characters who we think aren’t ever coming back sit around—every PC whose player has left the game has prompted a GM discussion about how to write that PC’s demise. We’ve only actually had to implement the results of the discussion once, but at this point, we’d probably do that rather than recast any PC who left. It’s easy to recast characters who haven’t had a lot of impact on the plot, but pretty much everyone we’ve got left has made a splash somewhere.

Follow up: the trackback URL for this entry is: http://www.whiterose.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/3575

0 Comments

Monthly Archives (Last 5)

February 2007
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006

Powered by Movable Type 3.33 and the HiveMind of the House of Cards GM team