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Old 05-25-2005, 02:20 PM   #1
Brody
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Has anyone here ever tried to recruit new players to take on roles as relatives in a roleplaying game? Share successes and failures. Also, share how much of the character's life/personality was predetermined and how much the new players got to flesh out themselves.
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Old 05-25-2005, 02:37 PM   #2
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Never had any bites, but I've offered family/close relation roles for my characters before. However, I refuse to just post a recruitment and allow the first person who shows interest to have the role. Mostly it's people I trust.

Namely with one of my technophobic characters, I've offered two roles to a couple people before. Admittedly the reason I hold back on just doing a recruit post is I have a basic idea of what the character is about. One of the relatives ICly is to have known my character quite well for the past 80 years, I'm not going to just lightly offer such a role.

Both times I've offered I got turned down, but it wasn't a big failure since it was a bonus, not anything critical I needed to have.

And to answer the second question: Definately have a set of ideas for the characters' behaviors.
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Old 05-25-2005, 03:22 PM   #3
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I've never actually put any thought into having players be my relatives. I'm sort of an anti-social MUD player. Mainly because my friends don't like to play text-based games. They think they are too complicated. I can't blame them, some of them are really hard to get used to, but I actually put the time into learning how to play them whereas they just give up the moment they see all the letters.
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Old 05-27-2005, 11:52 AM   #4
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Anyone else want to share experiences along these lines?
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Old 06-08-2005, 11:22 AM   #5
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I think I was early on the family bandwagon on Chia, because i've always liked entering the game with a glot of familiar people (ICly) around me. On Otherspace this was briefly sucessful, but really wonderful when it was, when I would do things like brother-sister relationships.

The problem with brother-sister, or any one single kin relationship, is that so often players or just the character stops connecting as much. Even in romantic relationships, you get the feeling that you're the crutch, where you're rping with each other because it's too hard to o initiate RP with other people. And when you just RP with one or two people, often the char gets stagnant, and you don't wanna play them anymore.

What happened on Chia was that there's this feudal system with six houses. So, that's six families, and if you create a noble char you're related to everyone in your family, albeit somewhat distantly. Then you can have closer ties too, and somehow it's more socially acceptable there to do so: there are big families, with the mother and the children all played by PCs, and cousins thrown into the mix, and then second cousins, and uncles, and...

So what that means is that even if one person slips idle, there's still a bunch of relatives. Together you kinda devise ways to excuse peopel not being around as much, and on Chia, if someone really does disappear, the character often goes up so someone else can play them.

It tends to -create- a lot of intrigue, just because if you need your brother's permission to marry, and he doesn't like your beau, well, that's tension. If your son is behaving unacceptably but has a very powerful position, what as a mother do you do?

So anyhow, I really like it when it becomes the norm-- not a rule, but almost everyone is related at least to someone in that social class.
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Old 06-08-2005, 07:52 PM   #6
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I briefly touched upon this in another post, but I had been playing a character for a couple of years at least and decided to approach another long-standing character regarding an investigation to my character's past (he had intermittent mental instability and memory loss). The other player OOCly asked me if there was something in particular that they should be finding, but I gave them leave to whip up whatever they wanted.

The other character (who was female) came back and told mine that they were half-siblings, my own character being a frowned upon half-elven bastard of her pure, noble, elven bloodline. This actually ended up providing a whole host of entertaining roleplay, especially as the two characters did not overly care for one another. They also both tended to fit together well ICly as siblings, both having a bit of the crazies and being rather well experienced in magic.

My character ended up taking her last name and publically playing up their relation while she, embarassed, tried to downplay it. The two characters often ended up on different sides of various conflicts, but ended up sparing one another or making some sort of unusual consideration because of their odd relationship. This situation also opened up good RP opportunities with a character that was once the half-sister's husband and a sometime ally of my character.

All in all, a very positive development.
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Old 07-01-2005, 11:27 AM   #7
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/bumped for further discussion.
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Old 07-02-2005, 02:09 AM   #8
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I have on two occassions recruited a family member, though both circumstances were different.

In the first example, I recruited a friend of mine to play the nephew of my character. However, the situation with my character meant that neither of us could publically recognize the family relation which led to two types of RP with them: publically, we'd act like strangers while when alone we'd talk like an uncle and nephew would about family, back home, etc.

The second time I recruited a family member, it was through marriage. Basically, my current character on a game is related to another friend's character through marriage (his character's cousin being married to my character's brother). However, our characters are very different people so there's a different dynamic being non-blood relatives than in the first example I gave.

For all of my characters, I've created in-depth backgrounds with biographies for parents, siblings, grandparents, etc. as well as a family tree showing relationships between those characters (in the bios), my character, and in some cases famous characters in the game (this applies only to my present character who has some famous relatives).

Take care,

Jason
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