This is the blog’s 200th post! I’ve written a lot of stuff in the last few months, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Thank you one and all for giving me the continued gratification of reading these many lines!
Now instead of making this a stats-laden article, I thought I’d write another post from my most popular series so far.
With winter setting itself for the long run in the frigid wastes of Eastern Canada and my reaching the mid-point of the glorious 30’s, I see the specter of my seasonal depression approaching.
While Self-esteem and assurance have reigned supreme these last few months, now self-doubt and brooding moods are reappearing on the horizon.
Historically I used to handle such periods of time by visiting my seldom-used shell more often… and let time do it’s thing.
But now, I have a blog, I can spew all my angst and self-criticism to an established readership…. no?
Wait, don’t leave…. 🙁
Nah! Don’t worry, that would be self-defeating as no-one wants to hear about the blues of a guy who, when it’s all said and done, has got it going for him in more ways than one.
Clinical aside: While I make light of this, depression is a very serious condition that hits gamers as much as anyone else. I went through a pretty serious one recently and needed a lot of help to get over it. If you are living with a perpetual cloud over your head, fight it and get help, be it clinical, spiritual or friendly. The Seasonal blues is, I believe, just a periodic slowing down that can usually be chased away with some pondering on our situation and fighting it off soon after it’s onset.
So why not try to tackle this darker period differently, and more constructively, with a trope-inspired post on the very subject of the blues, seasonal and otherwise.
First let’s start with a character-focused trope:
This character exists solely to bring everybody down, but not in the Deadpan Snarker sense; they are defined entirely by their complete inability to be happy for more than a few seconds at a time, an emotional state that usually arises from their only-occasionally-justified suspicion that they are the Butt Monkey of the entire universe. They are the walking Anthropomorphic Personification of clinical depression.
In RPGs, angst and dark, brooding personalities are the meat and potatoes of Method Actor-driven players. Exploring the darker reaches of the Human (or Vampire, or Drow or …) psyche can be a nice exercise in internally-focused character development and can help move a game forward in new, interesting ways.
But, as people don’t usually enjoy seeing Harry or Anakin being all whinny about how unfair everything is, constant in-character depression usually does not interest the other players all that much.
At worse, it can lead to serious intra-party (and intra player) conflict when the brooding character’s player uses this (consciously or not) to stop others from having fun. So here are a few twists on this character concept to play or DM in new ways.
Go ahead and have the character be depressed and generally hard to motivate…
“Ahhh, what’s the point to kill that Dragon? Those peasants will all die of a horrible disease, or if they are lucky, as Orc fodder in the next war”
However, make him/her get really excited, even to the point of making it a monomaniacal obsession, about One Thing.
Maybe it’s Magical Instruments
“Oh, you mean that’s where the Lute of Flarnigan is?…. Well what are we waiting for? Let’s go SLAY THAT FOUL WYRM!’
The possibilities are many:
- Guns (Think a depressed Jayne)
- Gold, gems or treasure (Makes for a great Manic Depressive Halfling Rogue),
- Hate of a certain person (Severus Snape comes to mind)
- Power over others (a great mix for a Gothic Overlord)
- The misery of others (Marvin!!!)
Player motivations aside: I am aware that some players thrive on creating discomfort and more or less try to sabotage the party’s efforts to succeed in tasks. These players are usually Outliers (From Robin Laws DMG II essay, which I’ll address in my next Laws’ post). You must discuss with them on how to meet their need for self-defeat without making the other characters (more) homicidal (than they already are).
Manic depression is also an interesting challenge, if played in stride with the party’s interests. My own character in Franky’s McWod game oscillates widely between shy social ineptitude to rampant psychopathy whenever his unarmed or has a gun in his hands.
The idea is to switch between Apathy and Overconfident Impulsiveness (Gurps players should spot where I get my inspirations for this one) in such a way that will be entertaining to you and all the others.
I believe you can pull this off by having a well defined trigger that creates a switch from one state to the other.
For example:
- Night and Day (including, possibly your distance to light sources)
- Seasons (the inspiration of this post)
- Exposure to drugs/alchool
- Combat
- Discussions with Strangers.
- A certain sound, or smell or taste (any sense works).
Making the trigger clear to the other players. This can allow them to try to influence your character by acting on the trigger themselves. This gives them some form of control on the effects of your character’s personality on the game and at the same time it gratifies you as a Method Actor because you get the others to act on your inner-conflict and you can start exploring how the PC would react to more or less evident manipulation from the others.
Ironic Aside: I would have never guessed that I would one day write tips for method actors/storytelling players…
Of course, if the other players are being jerks about this and shamelessly exploit this trait so that you stop having fun then you can reveal that other trigger (i.e. too many switches) that unlocks that very dark, very unstable mood.
If you can pull this off by having the DM give you a special power linked to that mood, usable only when you both agree that the time is right, you can pull a Hulk on your whole party and have a most memorable session!
This post is already longer than I wanted it to be, but there is one last aspect of this trope I want to tackle…
When Depression hits your game world at large.
As a DM you can also use depression as a theme or as a plot device in your games.
- An enchantment that makes all citizens filled with apathy and unable to break free from the domination of a Spirit of Death.
- A God of Hope and Joy is slain (or corrupted) in the your world(s) and all followers are stricken with a suicidal depression that makes the economy of a large kingdom crash in less than a fortnight.
- Pushing apathy to it’s limit, you can go Guy Gavriel Kay on your players and have the Campaign’s BBEG completely destroy a kingdom and disperse it’s citizens. Then have him cast an enchantment that makes all sentient beings in the whole world unable to acknowledge the existence of that cursed, vanquished place or it’s citizen.
- Make the PCs citizen of that kingdom and breaking the curse the campaign’s goal (if you like that Plot, read Tigana, it’s a slowbut awesome, very story-telling friendly fantasy Novel).
There you have it, making depression and associated mental disorders actually usable in an entertaining way in your favorite RPG.
Now please excuse me, I have some Brooding to catch up with…..
😉
Thanks for being there! Woot 200th post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Congrats on CC, Chatty!
I was so excited to congratulate you I forgot to tell you that I have greatly enjoyed reading your blogs. You have given us all much fodder for our diabolical gaming machinations!
Thanks for sticking with it!
–Scotticus
Hey Scotticus!
Thanks for leaving such a nice a comment! I always appreciate it and “seeing” new faces is always fun!
Just so you know, when you leave a comment, you now have 15 minutes to edit it if you want to add stuff or change anything!
Thanks again!
See, you mention a nifty piece of code like that, and now I just have to test that feature out. Stop appealing to the technophiliac in me. Or is that the codiphiliac.
That editing is pretty nifty actually. Nice and simple and smooth.
Yeah I think a lot of people missed that comments can be edited….
I have a nice list of other plugins waiting to be implemented but I want to have the Blog’s look re-designed 1st (and feature that kickass banner I took my avatar from)…
But right now we have stuff to deal with… Priorities….. sheesh:)
(I take it there aren’t that many method actors in those who comment… or talking about the blues gives the blues to others… Ahhh I have a contagious trope on my hands!)
I’ve met very few method actor gamers, and the ones I’ve met have always been phased out of groups pretty quickly. They probably go find their own groups of all method actors. Still, I think method acting can be very good when incorporated into another gamer type. If taken to extremes, method acting can disrupt fun for others at the table. I always do a little bit of it though, trying to figure out my character’s motivations and who and what they are to the game world.
When I asked Yan what my Player type was yesterday, he told me Method Actor/Storyteller… (Just don’t say this too loud… I have a rep ya know?)
That came as a surprise… but he’s right… I’m actually a Specialist/Method Actor and I almost always play Mentally unstable Smartass rogue-types.
So you’re just method acting a crunch overlord? 🙂
I’m a fan of the roguey skilled types as well, for me though that is because they give me the most options in play style and what I can do in the game. If I do it right, in DND, I get to be decent at intelligent combat, play the social person, and then sneak around stealthylike too. If it’s not dnd, then it depends on the system. It’s been ages since I’ve played gurps, but I’ve got their newest core books winging to my doorstep right now.
More precisely, as a DM, I have a preference for a system’s mechanics and cool use of the rules to construct challenges for players (on which I try to tack on engaging fluff).
As a player, crunchiness makes me Zzzzzzz and I’m more interested about the setting, background of an adventure and such.
Heck the best game I ever played as a PC was a Fantasy Hero convention game where all players were bards and the only ‘fight’ was a concert we played to have an evil king free us at the end!
Well I like skills and the feeling of competences they give to your character. So I tend to choose any class that has many skills.
I played a cleric once and what annoyed me the most was total absence of skills… Argh…
This class need some love and I seriously hope that they’ll get out of the stereotype for clerics in 4e and give them something else to do then just healing…
Well, I don’t know about skills, but healing is going to be much more passive. The estimate from the preview book said they expect a cleric to use, at most, one standard action dedicated to healing in an average fight.
That, and all classes have some ability to self-heal.
When you think about it “the town that has lost hope” is a staple of wandering the earth type stories. Just being driven to help this town or group you pass through purely because of how low they have been driven.
Hey Seth, good to see you.
I wrote a Con adventure once about a city filled with Apathy where no one got up before noon.
It was thought that this was caused by a mysterious black tower being constructed by unseen workers at night…. up until the PCs revealed that the whole town was under an enchantment to build it during the night…
The apathy was plain old lack of sleep…
What was cool about the adventure was that all PCs were monsters!
That adventure idea is really kind of nifty. I’d love to run that for my group sometime.
The enchantment was a 2 piece puzzle. The Candle holders (made by the coppersmith, BBEG 1) and the candles (made by a possessed candle maker) when combined (and used) sent villagers to sleep only to rise, dominated, to build the tower…
I’ll try to see if I can find it again in my stuff…
Late to the game, but I was going through the archives. I have this to say – Guy Gavriel Kay is amazing, and is indeed a good inspiration source for game ideas. Not to mention he seems completely under-appreciated here in the US. I don’t know how it is in Canada or anywhere else, but I can only rarely find a book of his on a store shelf. They are chain stores, but still.
You cover Tigana well, but Arbonne (the PCs are some combination of Arbonnaise [sp?] and angry Gorhautian analogs looking to take back their kingdom from an unstable, easily-manipulated king) works well too. I’ve heard of version of the basic Fionavar premise (people from our world dumped into a fantasy world) being done many times.
You could even make a whole adventure (maybe a campaign, but it would be stretch), from that bizarre dream-world war that Baerd takes part in Tigana
.-= Sam Erwin´s last blog ..The Land of Beasts, Talamh Ainmhi =-.
Hey Sam, no thread is too old here and thanks for reading. Although re-reading the post to answer your comment made me cringe. God I really need to better edit myself… I hope I’ve become better at it.
Kay’s books are all staples of Canadian Bookstores, including megastores. However, apart Tigana, I’ve yet to finish another of his books. While I know that they are majestic pieces, getting into the flow of things often requires a commitment that I find hard to maintain.
But the Tigana premise remains one of the campaign model I so would want to play. It’s also entirely compatible with the 4e Point of Light (non) setting as the core assumption is that all kingdoms are long forgotten.