Re: [HOE] Yet another Unity review... (Shane)

["Kai Tave" <kaitave@harborside.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Maybray <reginald_q_bumbershoot@hotmail.com>
To: hoe@gamerz.net <hoe@gamerz.net>
Date: Thursday, April 18, 2002 10:19 PM
Subject: Re: [HOE] Yet another Unity review... (Shane)



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>> >more spoiler space...


And lo, though I sacrifice my academic well-being for the sake of discussing
games...

>How many ambulatory brains can there be in HoE anyway?


Taken in Hellstrome's context, every single automaton that's ever existed,
every warbot, and a handful of cyborgs.  This isn't to mention the freaky
disembodied heads in hoverjars.

Yes, Hellstrome's character, physically, is likely to be unique, but he's
still a robot with a human brain floating around inside.  Why a posse should
implicitly trust him because he (it, whatever) says that he's actually Dr.
Darius Hellstrome is completely beyond me.  You can program an automaton or
can to speak in an accent, and the Reckoners have tried stranger things
before.  Can't be too careful, especially in the middle of a war.

>Well, if that's the case, it's the players' own damn fault.

Or the GM's.  Or the writer's.  But, y'know, on second thought, nothing can
EVER be the fault of the GM or GOD-FORBID the writer, so it MUST be the
players' faults.  'Cause, y'know, they just couldn't accept what was thrown
at them at face value with no reservations.  What's up with THAT?

 While no one
>except for me and one other guy in our group have any of the books, I let
my
>players' know that they can borrow my books to read. Strongly suggest they
>read the grey pages (as Shane pointed out in The Unity, they don't just
>write those 'cause the like to make books bigger). If they don't know the
>histroy of the setting, then feel free to really make 'em feel like jerks.


*BZZZZZZZZZZZZT!*  *Woop!  Woop!*

I don't think you quite understand what I'm getting at.  It is very possible
that some posse members in the sense of CHARACTERS will not know who
Hellstrome is, or if they do, they simply know of him in passing.  The
PLAYERS may know who Hellstrome is, what he's up to, etc., but the
CHARACTERS might not.  Think savages.  Think characters whose last exposure
to Hellstrome was a talking toaster oven 13 years ago.  Think characters
who, even if they know about Hellstrome, don't know what ever became of him.
Think characters who have good motivations for being wary of a robot in a
spaceship tossing around Rubix Cubes (I'd say that covers just about
everyone, personally).

So what you're proposing here is for players to read the books and then
attempt to use out-of-character knowledge.  That's not a great way to do
things either.  I prefer to keep my player/GM knowledge and attitudes
separate from my character knowledge and attitudes, and would prefer that
any players I had would do the same.

So we're still stuck.  We've got zilch for justification or motivation, yet
the whole story hinges on this point.  There has to be a better way than
"Well they'd better just DO it, or they're jerks and it's all their fault."

--Kai Tave