Preface: We're thinking of starting a new game, which Bob will run, that will take place in Rokugan. Basically, it's oriental D&D.
I know that a couple of players read this esoteria, and hope that they forward my impressions so that I don't have to start another email blitz diatribe like last time. And if you're not on the mailing list, you should sign up, darn it!
I guess my thought on this has less to do with Rokugan itself than of character development. I recently revisited GameWISH (a weekly topical discussion on roleplaying) and found an article on "midwifing" the character creation process. (Ironically, this relates in a loose way to my recent treatise on Plato, who insisted on his metaphoric role of birthing men's intellect, but that's another topic of discussion.)
Basically, the question is how a GM or other players can help bring a character to the game. Ginger talks about the great game, Everway, using it as an example of how characters could be created so that everyone has an adequately rich background and works well with the other characters.
Everway makes the players draw cards with paintings, like baseball cards, and use them to create a story that describes their character. Players are encouraged to work with other players to create a short story that leads to motivations for their character to be in the group or to interact with the rest of the party. I think this type of character generation is important for long-lasting playability.
One thing that has arisen as a complaint in our Saturday games is that our characters aren't interesting enough to ourselves to want to play them for an entire campaign. Of course, this view necessarily ignores any involvement by the actual story, so bear with me. Assuming our characters are more involved with one another from the start, we should be more inclined to be together on any action we take.
Here also is a nugget I gathered from last week's Pyramid and have seen take place in our game. Jen's character has picked up a cursed weapon. It's not too bad, but she could be doing a lot more damage. Through some unfortunate turn of events that I can't remember, my character has also become enthralled by this curse. My character plots to kill Jen's in her sleep and take it...
The point is that we have something that ties our characters together, for better or worse, and will end up strengthening the party in the long run. Honestly, it takes much effort to recall what happened in our last session with those characters, but I do remember coveting her weapon and having roleplay based around that hook.
I think that as we're crafting our characters for this Rokugan campaign (if we decide to do it, which I'm still not sure yet) we should consult with one another and find out what we all intend to do. Maybe this will help keep some players from getting "too creative" with their characters, making them too limited to use in actual play.
I'll admit that the idea of non-human characters has an appeal, especially in some of the very strange characters. But if you're the only person in the party like this and you have 5 ELs to make up for, not only are you going to be a hindrance to the party, but you're going to be bored with your cahracter sooner than you might expect. These are suppositions, of course, but have been mostly true in my experience playing with 3rd edition D&D.
Rather than creating heavy backgrounds for our characters outside of the game and bringing them and the stats to the table, we should create a framework of a character that other players can hang things on. Players can create hooks between characters that the GM can play with and will strengthen the bond between characters and by extension, players.
While I'm on the subject...
"Wanting more roleplay" and "wanting all roleplay" are not the same thing. Even so, sitting around talking about what we should do next is not necessarily roleplay. Buying things, no matter where the store is, is not roleplay unless you play the role of your character with the GM plays the role of the storekeeper and you barter, discuss the weather, or otherwise interact.
Pacing, pacing, pacing... I say this a lot and I guess people think I'm talking about walking back and forth across the floor. Basically what pacing means in regard to roleplay is that you need to intersperse combat with roleplay.
If you remember back to writing classes in high school or college in which the teacher would draw a diagram on the board indicating rising action to a climax, you'll recall that it wasn't a line that lead diagonally straight up to a peak. It plateaued in places. This indicates the pacing that I'm talking about.
A foundation is laid for the scenario in which the charaters are delivering wine to a distant temple, during which the party is attacked! The characters discover strange symbols on the slain bodies and decide to stop at the nearby town to ask about the symbols. In the town inn, a bar fight breaks out involving the characters. After asking a few people and getting mostly nowhere, they encounter a young girl who is willing to help them, and decide to meet her in an alley at dusk. She's there, but just as she's about to tell the vital secret, an arrow from the bow of a fleeing attacker impales her. The characters chase the attacker over rooftops, but he disappears into the woods. The ranger's tracking abilities trail the attacker, and lead them through the forest to some abandoned ruins with markings similar to those on the dead bodies...
That's a well-paced start to a scenario. For giggles, let me do a similar scenario that is not well-paced, so that you can contrast them.
Same deal- The characters are walking down the wooded path with their casks of wine, when they're jumped by thugs. The characters dispatch the thugs, then walk 50 feet and are attacked by wolves (who were the thugs' pets, but the players don't know that). After killing the wolves, the players hear loud sounds to the east, which turn out to be boulders being hurled at them by giants. After the characters kill the giants (who were charmed by the thugs' leader, but the players don't know that) they decide to make camp in the forest because they're tired and there isn't anything else to do, but in the middle of the night, the characters are attacked by a fire elemental (summoned by the thug leader, but the players don't know that), and it's extra hard because the posted guard fell asleep. After the fight, a new character arrives to replace the dead one, and he seems to know something about these thugs (that the players were previously unable to glean from the "meaningful" monsters), so he tells the party that they have to head back to town, but on the way, they run into more giants...
Here's my new general rule: Always default to roleplay. When it looks like the players might even be starting to get bored, throw a single, justifiable combat at them by introducing it into the occurring roleplay.
If the characters are well-developed; if the time was invested during character creation to give the characters something to talk about, then it should not be difficult to provide reasonably long-lasting talking points for roleplay on a regular basis. Insert the periodic staccato of arrow fire, and you've got yourself a memorable game.
