01.15
A few years ago I was running a play-by-web-forum game set in the Crimean War. (I don’t normally like these as much as tabletop RPGs because it’s difficult to get people to abide by the results of die rolls — RPGs should be challenging!! — but anyway. -_- )
Anyway, there were eight players in the game when it started. However, as is the way of RPGs ._. two of them dropped out almost immediately and three of them dropped out within a month. The forums were getting dead and the Ottoman Empire was totally not represented. So I came up with some fictional characters and had them create characters for the forum. BUT, I didn’t want the other players to know that people had been dropping out and were being replaced by NPCs, so I just played the characters as if they were real people who had happened to stumble onto the forum and started playing. (One of them was a Hussar with a missing limb that had a primitive cyberware pistol attached to it; the other one was a Turkish sturgeon fisherman; and the third was a Russian noblewoman in an open relationship living in Sevastopol.)
The game was going really well for awhile and the Russian woman and the caviar fisherman were starting to hit it off after his boat had picked her up when her private ship was sunk by the French navy along the Ukrainian coast. Then I accidentally posted as the Hussar using the Turkish guy’s account, and the remaining three players found out that I was just playing the others as NPCs. Two of them got really ticked off and left the game after an exchange of irritated emails. With only one PC left, the game collapsed after three exciting months. /_\
The thing that I don’t understand is why they got so annoyed when they found out that three of the characters were NPC personas. Although they didn’t exist in “reality,” they existed in my mind as deeply as any personality I have ever constructed: the personality I use when dealing with the registrars, the personality I use when DMing, etc. I even had figured out the birthdates and families and blood types of the fictional people playing the PCs. (Two of them were history majors at Princeton and one of them was an iPhone developer in New Delhi.) In the gameworld within the world, they were as real as I could make them; and the interaction with the players had with them was totally real. They were real in the terms of the game.
Now, if one of the other players had asked me, the DM, “Hey, are these people NPCs?” I would have told them they were. Of course, if they asked the *NPCs* “Hey, are you a NPC?” then of course they would have reacted with surprise and befuddlement. The NPC doesn’t know that he is a NPC!! *-* It is impossible by the very nature of existence for an NPC to acknowledge their “unreality.” At least I assume it is.
I am reminded of the sample adventure in the old RPG Over the Edge, written by the great Jonathan Tweet, in which the player-characters discover that they are just fictional characters in a RPG, and the game ends with the PCs encountering their “real” selves. I’m also reminded of “The Circular Ruins,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which a person travels to a mysterious shrine in the jungle where they discover that they are not real, but only someone else’s dream. Do RPG characters have an existence outside their creators? Is playing a PC or a NPC in a RPG “faking,” or acting, or what? I think that as long as it’s sincere, it’s good.
(There is the small factor that a manufacturer of Crimean war pewter miniatures was buying ads on the site and encouraged me to keep running the game so he could make money and split it with me in this profit-sharing scheme. -_- But let me tell you: Google ads money or no Google ads money, I would have kept that RPG going. I loved it just the same.)
By the nature of your post, I will assume that you are fully aware of this conversation.
http://www.critical-hits.com/2010/01/15/king-of-rpgs-king-of-viral-marketing/
And just to let you know, I have contemplated this very thing for PbP forum based games, but never tried it. This is not because I was afraid of the consequences, but because I was afraid of the potential work involved. DMing and playing multiple characters playing characters could potentially get to be a bit much.
Actually, play by e-mail has different conventions than table top gaming. By not telling your players that some of the other characters had become NPCs, you were, in effect, cheating them. By that time it wasn’t really a game, so much as an ongoing fictional story.
There was a virtual table top, one that everyone virtually gathered around. It was in a fictional space. The thing that got a little weird is when that virtual fictional space became actual fictional space, with fictional participants. The fact that there were characters played by the GM is conventional. The fact that the characters were virtual players is novel and unconventional. The actual players were playing a game, one where most of them played one character and one played many. The fact that the game was 2 layers deep didn’t fundamentally change the activity of “lets pretend.” It just changed the meta-space. It was shocking, but I would consider it interesting, not insulting or objectionable. I am not who you think I am, so who cares if I am just a figment of your imagination? If the interaction is meant to be “lets pretend” and you enjoy it, why get all bent out of shape when you you are surprised by who the players are?
I believe you answered your own question in your other recent post about the problem of NPCs http://ultimatedm.com/?p=694
@Lee — I totally agree, there is nothing wrong with having multiple layers of reality! Once I was running a horror game where the PCs in the game (controlled by the players), hanging out at home prior to the monster attack, decided to play Dungeons & Dragons and even made characters. I was worried that the game would be sidetracked until one of the PCs succumbed to one of his Mental Disadvantages and got uncontrollably angry and threw the game books across the room (IC, not OOC… or at least, on the ‘first level’ of IC.)
@Meg — Yes, running too many NPCs is always a problem. There is always the risk of the DM becoming too narcissistic and running games just for themselves and not for the players! -_- The nice thing about doing this in a PBEM/PBforum game, though, is that since there can be different subplots in different posts/email threads (as opposed to the DM just having one voicebox like in a standard tabletop RPG), the players don’t have to be bored by stuff that doesn’t concern them if I want to do a few posts about the situation back on the Turkish home front. I can even see running a PBRSS game where each player subscribes only to RSS feeds that concern their particular character.
but even if the DM is running the NPCs well, it doesn’t mean the other players will trust that the DM is really doing that. When someone discovers that another person has much more power over the game than they previously realized, that’s going to lead to suspicion. Even if it was meant for the good, it is still based on a lie-by-omission, leading to distrust.
(I know, DM was the wrong term, i’m not a war gamer :P )
Hmm :/ Yes, trust is an important factor in any kind of game or invented/moderated social activity. You raise good issues. -_-;;
It takes an exceptional DM to compartmentalize their mind well enough to behave fairly to all the people in their game *and* to NPCs. On the other hand, I know a DM who always plays a “PC” at the table during their games to fill out an empty seat, and I think this leads to even more potential confusion and accusations of partiality.
I could see that being a problem as well. Glad it hasn’t come up for me.