House of Cards GM Log

IMC: Player vs. Player Violence

posted by Ginger at 04:09 PM, October 20, 2004 | Filed under : IMC | Comments and Followups

Arref talks about player vs. player scenarios and the normal sort of precautions PCs (and NPCs) can be assumed to take in a game.

I’m personally not a big fan of player vs. player scenarios in Amber. I’ve concluded that one of the reasons for this is that I find the style of play often veers from acting to turtling when players worry that other players are going to knock their PCs off. That seems out-of-genre for the Corwin chronicles to me, and it’s not conducive to player-driven stories, which I prefer.

As Arref notes, there are a number of situations where various elders almost kill each other in the Corwin books. What Arref learns from these examples is that to be true to the Corwin chronicles, lethal PC-on-PC violence should rarely succeed. What I get out of it is that PC-on-PC violence isn’t generally meticulously-planned deathtraps. It’s sudden homicidal intent. Similarly, in a Corwin-style game, Benedict doesn’t go around swatting invisible ninjas, and not just because there aren’t any. It’s not in-genre.

To the extent that we want a more Corwinesque game, we have to model that to the players. For instance, family NPCs don’t run around with a van of bodyguards. The only NPC who has visibly had a bodyguard is Vialle, who is visibly incapable of defending herself. Even Merlin, who has been attacked and is something of a scaredy-cat, doesn’t want one. By modeling that this is how the PCs should behave, we hope to produce a crop of PCs whose opinion is that Amberites don’t run around with bodyguards.

We also encourage the “no lethal violence among PCs” with canon tropes such as “no fratricide shall sit the throne of Amber” and the idea that Brand’s attack on Martin was considered unforgivable by the rest of the family. While it’s not certain that PCs will honor the implicit law against family homicide, we intend it to weigh heavily on the mind of any player who considers trying to kill another PC. (Hence the response of various elders and cousin NPCs to Brennan’s proposal to kill Dara.)

Could a PC take advantage of the fact that people aren’t guarded all the time to arrange the perfect hit on an NPC or another PC? Sure. But even if you arrange the perfect hit on, for instance, Random, he’s lucky and wily and may be able to manage to survive the first blow. And if you don’t nail him immediately, odds are the guard will come to his rescue.

To successfully take out an elder should require the coordinated efforts of a number of PCs. To successfully take out a PC should require almost the same effort and planning—and while the GMs won’t guarantee a PC will survive, we’re generally rooting for the PCs to come back another day and would probably rule that ties go to the defender.

As Arref suggested, when you consider how hard it is to nail your cousins, you may want to look for another way of dealing with problems with them.

Follow up: the trackback URL for this entry is: http://www.whiterose.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/4504

1 Comments

Arref
Oct 20, 2004 5:21 PM

"...while the GMs won’t guarantee a PC will survive, we’re generally rooting for the PCs to come back another day and would probably rule that ties go to the defender."

I should have added the above thought to my post as well for clarity. I, too, find it very genre shattering for folks to do coldly calculated fratricide. As a GM, I'll advise against such for reasons both in and out of game.

While passions can push a PC over the edge, I don't find heroic drama in successful deathtraps --I do find it in amazing escapes.

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