Monday, July 8, 2013

Money! Science! Musing! A bit of SUE!



This won’t be a full post; it’s more of a musing.

“It’s my money, and how I spend it is my business”

To his credit, GM!Marty has never said this in defense of his own decisions. It is, however, the first defense of any of his characters, and the funny thing is he actually believes in it. Once he’s said that, any criticism of the actions of his (N)PCs is utter folly, and the NPC in question will usually set the hounds on anyone too persistent.
See, GM!Marty is like a lot of people up here, in that, in short, money is the center of their moral code, kind of like a religion. I’m not about to start flipping money-changers’ tables over, here; I don’t mean they’re profaning any sacred anything. I just mean they tend to operate on the idea that anything they can buy, they should be allowed to have, because blah blah free market; there’s a sort of sanctity of money at the core of their ethos, stretching from beyond "do not tell me how to spend my money" to "anything I spend money on is morally unimpeachable". They brazenly buy essays, pay people to take tests for them, bribe anyone who will take the money, and that’s just what they do in school. I hesitate to guess what they do in their home lives. GM!Marty, to his credit, has not bought any grades that I know of. He’s more of a fanboy, defending the plutocrats on the above logic largely because he’s convinced he will one day own at least as much.
This leaks into his gaming in a big, bad way. His rich people are invariably eccentric to the point of insanity, and the PCs are, as often as not, hired to see to it that they get what they want; the assumption is always that if they fail, there’s always more people willing to take the proferred reward or less, so they’d better not negotiate—and if they try anything, there’s always the funds to buy assassins pointed at them. They’re neither amoral nor immoral: they’re wealthy, which means they speak…slowly and make…the rules.
This reacts very poorly with his players. We’re fairly normal products of our generation; in general, our opinion of the upper classes of any given setting varies from wordless, choked-off cursing to punching a hole through the nearest wall. I’ve learned to use that to get money to the PCs; the more ludicrously childish and insane I make my wealthy, the more they believe them and the more energy they’ll put into taking them down. The worst risk I run is them forgetting the actual theft and going directly to horrifyingly imaginative violence, but that’s what their private police are for: mooks! I use the rich like WH40k uses orks: an endless source of violence, comic relief, and swag. By and large my players seem to like it.
But then there’s my own Mary Sue archetype. I generally employ technical people in the same light Marty employs the super-wealthy; they’re generally right within their areas of expertise, they tend to float rather than freeze, and my players frequently come to depend on them for missions – even if their boss is someone else entirely. I blame my own thought process for this. It’s just easier to explain what the PCs are doing, especially in an investigation-type game, as some sort of experiment. Here’s what we know, here’s what we need to find out (and what we think it might be), here’s the minimum definitive set of data to determine that, so please go find it. (A similar thought process works synthetically.) It flows more naturally from my coroners and my mad scientists than my chiefs of police and generals, I suppose; I try to structure things so that coming out of the investigative phase they’re largely self-motivating. Still, it's a typecasting, and I keep finding myself making all of my intelligent villians take after Ozymandias.
That’s all I really have for this one. I’m curious, though, if anyone else out there has NPC types they tend to associate with being fairly hoopy froods by default, and how well the association is received by their players.

10 comments:

  1. Wizards. Wizards are always the ones looking for a way to make water run uphill, simply to say they can. Basically, imagine Discworld wizards: every single wizard in Griffonford and beyond is like that.

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  2. Elderly peasants, and related. Urban campaigns I've played in tend to have intelligent/charismatic leaders, guards and lieutenants of middling mental acuity, and a broad base of Monty Python skits around them. Some working folk have good sense if no education. However, if you make the mistake of saying "The closest person" or "The first man I come across"...

    Well, it's comic relief.

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  4. Reasonable Authority Figures are my go to. In universes full of both awful monsters and politics, a get-his/her-hands-dirty type of guard captain, commander, agent, sheriff, or other authority figure with enough clout to give the players permission to do potentially questionable things without too much hassle, without being such big names they can move mountains for the players (Thus making the players do some things themselves) are excellent sources of direction for me. Usually they break the rules a little too, for the good of everyone, because wading through red tape slows down things the people need right then, even if the red tape exists for perfectly legitimate reasons. For instance, a colonial security captain might encourage the PCs to lean on a suspect harder than would normally be allowed to get him to spill the beans on a killer, because using physical force (Not torture, of course) to get a suspect to talk is faster than a formal investigation, and might save a lot of lives. Its both a boon to the players and a character flaw, and it can come back to bite this PC benefactor if the PCs play a little too loose with the rules and then namedrop him too many times or he has to keep covering them. Usually the players tend to like these characters, seeing them as relatable, dependable, and knowledgeable, while still having distinctly human qualities and motivations. Plus, I can usually give him a snotty stick-up-the-ass rival or senior officer who can make life hell for the character, and use that character as a quest to help their benefactor (The snotty officer is, of course, totally unwilling to help the players and is more of a bureaucrat than any sort of reliable assistance).

    The tricky part is making the character less-than-by-the-books without letting them slip into sliminess or depravity. Knowing which rules s/he breaks, and which rules just get bent, and which rules have to be maintained is important.

    Then on my end, my way of inspiring hatred in my players is two things: Organized terrorist groups, and selfish pig-headed officials who are after one thing only: Advancing their own career, even if that means climbing over everyone else's career to get there. The first is usually some group with an unreasonable motivation or demand, and the size, cleverness, and funding to actually make themselves a threat, and the second is usually a very effective foil to the NPC go-to I've established for my players, as some tight-ass who uses the helpful NPC's rule-bending as an excuse to come down on them mercilessly and make a big scene, ensuring their name gets brought up everywhere as the one who put a stop to all the corruption. They will of course be totally inept at actually DEALING with all of the problems the helpful NPC deals with, instead filtering them through the inefficient bureaucracy to get dealt with "eventually".

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  5. "We’re fairly normal products of our generation; in general, our opinion of the upper classes of any given setting varies from wordless, choked-off cursing to punching a hole through the nearest wall."

    You and I clearly have different definitions of "normal" - mine doesn't involve becoming incandescently rage-y just because of the amount of money someone makes.

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    1. Nor mine. A bit envious, perhaps, but I can't recall a time someone was infuriated by someone else making more money than they.
      Aside from, y'know, lunatic SJW-types, but those guys are far from normal to begin with.

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    2. Eh. I know plenty like that who equate Money with Moral Failing. Basically no one that is rich can be moral, and almost certainly were petulant, unrepentant, evil as sin in order to get there. It's not too uncommon, particularly in the vaguely defined "middle class". And with the thought that they are morally inferior, the justification to take them down a peg. No matter how petty it is.

      Though probably my favorite NPCs to use tend to be random peasant schmucks, oddly enough. It comes to the point where in fantasy stories my players start realizing that if they want to know what's going on (or at least get information without various personal and political motivations getting in the way) they don't go to things like the Captain of the Guard, or the local Baron, or the local High Priest. They go to like Joe the Carrot Farmer. Who will frankly and directly tell them what the problem is. What it's worth solving. And any information they have.

      Mostly because they don't care beyond "I want the trouble solved".

      It's a weird thing and a lot of players have a hard time grasping that Joe the Carrot Farmer as it were might be the best contact that they can foster in the city. But those who do get really suspicious about it. They're always trying to figure out what angle their playing. If they're secretly some demonic cultist or something.

      Because they have a hard time believing that something like the random fisherman who makes his living on the lake was willing to tell them about the lizardmen in the lake, and take a community collection drive to pay adventurers/mercs to kill them.

      While I have the powerful people in town not necessarily EVIL per se... but they're always looking to work the angles. Yes, killing the lizardmen that are a threat to the fishermen is good... but how can they make that really good for themselves personally? And as such they're less reliable and tend to be setting up players one way or another.

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  6. "Basically no one that is rich can be moral, and almost certainly were petulant, unrepentant, evil as sin in order to get there."

    I've heard the same about poor people, interestingly, usually from upper-middle-class types and politicians of all stripes.
    "All poor people are lazy welfare queens, good-for-nothing junkies, and thugs" is a pretty common sentiment - and the worst part is, some poor people vote for these people -based on those verifiably false claims.- (Often because the poor people siding with them are thinking "they're not talking about ME, it's those [racial/religious/ethnic group] they're talking about.")

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  7. I tend to cast basic fighters and mercs in my awesome light. I think they're cool. That said, they're never invincible or unbeatable, they're just tough, good at hitting things, and tend to be basically sensible. Usually I use commanders as this to be questgivers, but I have a variety of those as there's a great many situations where military/soldier types and commanders just don't fit.

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  8. My worlds tend to have very competent, but small-scale monarchs and a generally uncorrupted clergy of a monotheistic Lawful Good religion. Every tiny farming hamlet you find is actually its own city-state with its own local king, and the king is usually a decent questgiver. And when he isn't, the local priest(s) of the worldwide Church are.

    I treat wealth as basically a non-factor towards competency and morality, and don't find political villains like Thieves Guild leaders or the like fun the way I think a big dragon or lich sitting at the top/bottom of a big dungeon waiting for a climactic fight is.

    My settings are built on two big conceits: 1) The religion that looks like Medieval Catholicism is the GOOD GUYS and so are anyone allied with them and 2) dungeon delves and hex crawls are the most fun possible adventure templates; everything else is background fluff

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