Fire-Breathing Clowns

[GreenAdder]

Every time I read the passage "...no clowns. Especially not fire-breathing ones..." I'm left with a sense of morbid curiosity.

I have to know where this came from.

[luke]

i will ask my original tormentor to visit the boards and explain to you all.

of course, it's meant to be a metaphor for not playing deliberately silly and out of place characters. I've never seen a player actually have fun doing this.

-abzu

[eruditus]

unfortuantely I have and it is usually for the expressed purpose of game breaking. There are a number of players out there that seek to be clever and look to more get a reaction out of the players of the game than actually play the game. Others seek to play something they thought was cool r funny, much to the detriment of the rest of the game. Because they often will have prescripted ideas that they wish to explore with the characters (a sort of "what happens when my character faces this?") they tend to be sustained by going from schtick to schtick.

I loathe these players and usually end up confronting them about it.

[zhu_kwan]

Greetings. The clown has arrived.

Ah, Zippo. What a shame. What an awful, awful shame.

I stuck with Zippo for a long time. I had faith in Zippo; faith that he would somehow turn around, somehow become more useful to the group, somehow more fun to play. Zippo had brief glimmers of partial success from time to time, just enough to make the usual failures all the more torturous.

The game was Shadowrun. The character was a clown. An EX-clown. An occasionally firebreathing ex-clown. And he SUCKED to play.

Luke's point in the Character Burner is to make sure you have not just a good character concept, but a playable one. I maintain that Zippo was not entirely my fault. The concept of an emotionally disturbed former clown who had a variety of interesting fighting abilities as well as acrobatic and performing skills may not have been the most coherent character I could have introduced into our gritty, high powered, intrigue based campaign, but he wasn't a total failure as a concept.

He was a total failure because of frequent poor tactical choices by yours truly, alarmingly consistent bad die rolls, and the ultimate stupidity of the game's mechanics. I had decent skills, decent cyber mods, cool equipment, etc. but not a damn thing ever went right, and the other players who seemed to only have slightly better skills or slightly different mods seemed to shine where I seemed to fail.

But I suppose this leads more to Luke's point: Zippo was a bit of a forced character, a patchwork of loony ideas that I spun his history in circles around in order to justify. And he ended up being not very good at anything, poorly developed, and impossible to integrate fully into the campaign world.

I suffered playing Zippo, and Luke suffered along with me, trying in vain to find ways to encourage Zippo's development. (He even went so far as to allow the bioware implant that allowed him to breathe fire without the help of lighter fluid and his trusty lighter; of course, it never seemed to do any damage, or any good whatsoever; and why should I have expected it to? It was a stupid idea!)

Believe it or not, Zippo was not the worst failure I've had. The worst failure was, of course, another "clown." In an early beta-test (?) burning wheel campaign run by a friend of Luke's, I made an ex-court jester with some minimal spellcasting ability. He could make puppets dance. He could juggle. He could stand out in a crowd. I think he could even breathe fire, actually (the old fashioned way). He had a cool background story. He was in a party of about ten other characters, each of which could wipe out a small village singlehandedly without breaking a sweat. I had nothing to do, and no way to relate to these insanely powerful characters.

"But a jester can spit out the Ugly Truth, can play the social role that no one else can get away with," you might kindly suggest. There are all sorts of great roleplaying opportunities for such a character, as I discovered years later when I played just such a character (almost by accident) with wonderful results in a different campaign. But not only did my concept for Clown Patsy not include any idea of the good way to play a jester, the campaign was a hack-and-slash series of combat driven scenarios. Not a whole lot of room for the social aspect of the character there!

Which brings up the other crucial aspect of Luke's point: no matter how good the character concept is by itself, if it doesn't mesh with the GM's plan for the campaign, you will not have fun.

So, I have made a clown. Twice. And failed miserably both times in ways that scarred both Luke and myself. Therefore, while the firebreathing clown is not by definition a character that is doomed to fail, it serves as a powerful reminder of how easy it is to get wrapped up in "the coolest idea you've ever had" for a character and as a result, end up having the most miserable gaming experience of your life.

Learn from my mistakes. I have.

Rick

[luke]

Learn from my mistakes. I have.

btw, Rick has gone on to make some of the best characters I have ever had the pleasure of playing with. They were vibrant, vocal, quite different from Rick, and tied into the campaign.

When I run a campaign, I give players a "set up" and I try to encourage players to tie themselves in to it while still scratching their own itches. Rick learned his lesson and now works with me to ensure that his character has a reason to be in the game.