Too Much Horror Business - Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft Review

blatz wrote: I don't know. Maybe I've been playing RPG's wrong all these years but I just don't really get a lot of this. I've never treated a character I've run like it was "me." I've always envisioned them as video game characters under my control where half the fun is seeing what kind of crazy shit happens to this guy. At WORST, my reaction might be "Oh man that sucks, I kind of liked him. It's a shame I rolled that 1 and fell off the wall into the poison oil."

On two separate occasions, I ran an adventure where players were playing versions of themselves. One was a homebrew Villains & Vigilantes adventure that I ran for my high school gaming group, and players ran randomly-generated superhero versions of themselves. The big surprise was that I brought in a non-gamer friend to play the villain, and had him hide in a room adjacent to the gaming area until the heroes encountered his character. The second time was when I ran GURPS Horror adventure called Flight 13, giving players the opportunity to translate themselves into 100 point GURPS characters, which in hindsight was an excessive number of points to represent normal college students.

Both sessions were fun, but we had to cut short Flight 13 when a player character got killed. It was on a critical miss, IIRC, so I couldn't fudge the roll behind the screen. The player wasn't especially distraught, but it sort of ruined the premise for him. That was the first time that I realized that I might need to handle players with a little sensitivity, because there were a couple of other players at the table who might have handled it worse.

When I played Amber Diceless, I noticed that players tended to create superhuman versions of themselves. Fortunately, the diceless rpg tends to leave the GM with direct control over the lethality of the game.

I know of one game where you are explicitly playing yourself. Timeliness, from BTRC (I think, it's been years...). The conceit is that you and your player buddies are gathered around a gaming table when a mysterious figure warps in and drops a very dense polyhedron onto the table and everything within 10 feet of it is warped into the past.

So you play as "you" and all you have to start is what is around you at that moment (which led to lots of discussions of which specific house we should play at and very close to a particular cabinet indeed

That's a concept that could lead to some pretty dicey player choices since actual history is full of the worst experiences. Just imagine how long a typical modern game group is gonna last in 1st century Gaul for example before they end up as slaves to some barbarian tribe.