So yesterday was Roy Batty’s inception date…
And nearly four years from now, on a rain streaked rooftop, he dies…
And in that time accomplished so very much, twice as bright, half as
long as the phrase goes, which got me to thinking about games and how long
characters last, not so much in chronological time, but in real time. Most campaigns I’ve been in don’t last more
than a few years, I’ve been in a few where it lasted longer than that, but for
most of them, it’s not even four years…
And how many of them go out blazing?
How many more of them just fade away?
Is there not something to this that our characters could learn? Live like there is no tomorrow, get involved
in things, take huge challenges and beat them down, don’t count the gold, the
gold isn’t the point, the life is the point, that’s all that matters.
And how many of us learn from that?
How many of us just fade away, piece by piece till all that remains is
the hope of what could have been? How
many of us live those lives of quiet desperation, hoping for nothing more in
the end than an end to that desperation? Is that what happens to Adventurers that never finish their adventures?
What more would we do if we only had four years to live?
Would we do more, knowing
that, or would we spend our time trying to find a way to increase the time without
watching it going by, achieving only at the end that we’d wasted the time we
had trying to increase the time that we have…
Most of us will never know, most of us will never get that
determination, the sure and certain knowledge that this is how long we’ve got, no
longer…!
I watched Blade runner when I was too young to really understand it,
all but that last bit, and the only reason I got it was the voiceover that most
people hated. I could appreciate that
something important had happened when Batty spared Deckard, but I needed it
explaining, and that explanation played a major part in how I play most
characters.
I don’t want my characters to get the castle and retire to rule over a
fiefdom, I can think of nothing more tiresome, more inappropriate for an Adventurer to do than cease
adventuring. The only ones that do that are
the Murderhobo’s, and they’ve got the whole wrong idea in the first place. If you make it that way and then go to your
castle and retire, be aware, because twenty years later, younger Murderhobo’s come
along and raid your castle with you in it and the cycle continues…
I’ve had short lived characters and long lived characters. Some died well, some got cut short before they
really started out (23 minutes including generation), some just faded out when
the game ended. Those are the ones that
I remember most unfavourably, the one’s that didn’t finish their story and
still live there out in the ether waiting for their closure, and for those, that
was very dissatisfying.
The problem for me is that very few of the games I’ve played in ended
on a high note, or indeed ended, rather than faded away, and it’s that lack of
ending that I’m looking at now when it comes to the adventures I’m writing.
So here’s the question, what does everyone else out there consider to
be a victory for their character when it comes time to turn the sheet over?
