Character failings

[annwfyn]

So, last night, over dinner* a conversation started about characters. Specifically, in this case, about moustache twirling villains, and how they are, in some ways, oddly bad for the game. Because no one in real life actually walks into a room and says 'hey! I'm going to be evil'.

And then on the car on the way home**, Neill and I got talking about the converse problem, which is players who don't seem to think that their characters have any flaws. I'm not even talking the blatant Mary Sues. I'm talking about characters who are perfectly normal, don't have purple eyes and pet unicorns*** but who's players are maybe a leetle bit too prone to not seeing their flaws. You know what I mean, and I think we've all, at some point, found ourselves slipping into that place where we know, on some level, that maybe it wasn't reasonable to shiv up that eight year old, but if it comes up in conversation we just feel the urge to explain, over and over again, how in Billy the Brujah's mind he was right right right.

And so, as a kind of antidote to this, I have decided that everyone should share with me some of their character failings. As I should with you. It's a bit like AA for larpers. Character Apologists Anonymous.

So. Give me...

1) A proper character flaw for your PCs. And not job interview flaws! Real flaws, that makes them not-good people.

2) A situation in background, or with NPCs, in which your character has behaved badly.

3) A situation with other PCs in which your character has behaved badly.

4) An uncharitable, but entirely true description of your character - how they could be described by someone who knew them very well, but didn't like them at all.

5) A redeeming feature about your character.

And I add that last one on because all good PCs should be both good and bad.

I'll add my characters in comments.

Now, let's hear it from all of you. I am also pondering trying to integrate this into my writing_shadows June challenge, actually, and writing a series of little snippets of prose in which my PCs are the villains, or at least, petty, misguided, unpleasant and generally obnoxious. God knows that I write enough prose explaining why everything they have done is for the best of reasons, really.





* which was, as a note, very nice. I went out for dinner at the Harvester near the Essex game with pierot, adze, andyrebranded, bringeroflight, akonken, [Bad username or unknown identity: slick_mink"] and bakela666, and it was lovely. There was even pimms which made both Allison and Jeremiah extremely happy.

**which was a long and horrible drive due to traffic. What is normally a 45 minute drive became 3 hours and nearly killed me.

*** Michael Stands Ready, I'm talking about you there.

Comments

[adze.livejournal.com]

I only ever had a pet unicorn because you forced it on me. And which of us played a character with purple eyes, again?

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but everyone knew that Tegan was a Mary Sue. I even introduced her at the start of games as such.*


*Although I think she had a lot of depth for a shape shifting fairy related kinfolk with a Fianna Legend for a huband, purple eyes and all the appearance traits in the world. If you could get past the purple eyes, at any rate.

[colonel-maxim.livejournal.com]

I tend to play either good guys or monsters who think that they are doing what is best for the world. Of all my characters at present, I think that Mr Sleete is the most ambiguous. I confess that I am never sure in my mind whether he is a hero or a villain or, to put it another way, whether he is good man who does bad things or a bad man who occasionally does good things.
Without any doubt, he is a sociopath with no empathy for others who regards killing as merely another option. He gains no pleasure from the same but he equally has no guilt. He understands that there are consequences to these actions but even when it turned out that a woman and child starved to death as the result of one of his fairly casual killings of a 'bad man', he shrugged and regarded it merely as an unfortunate result. He actually regards his lack of emotions as a positive asset and tends to blame everything that goes wrong within Lost Society as a result of people just
Although he claims that everything he does is to protect the Free Lost and innocent victims, his crusade against fetches has everything to do with the fact that his fetch was a far better husband and father than Mr Sleete could be, even before he was taken to Arcadia.
I suspect that there are quite enough people who do not like him to give him an accurate description as a cold-hearted arrogant bastard who refuses to see his own flaws whilst contemptuously noting the failings of others. He would lay down his life to save any of the Lost of London and, indeed, fully expects to do so. You do not become a Bellringer and a Dragonslayer in the hope of retiring to a set of slippers and beekeeping in Sussex.

[morinon.livejournal.com]

For a character I have played once, but wrote up a wonderful story in new Changeling:
1) He is obsessive and possessive with regards to the family he made before he was taken, and will stop at nothing if he thinks it ensures A: that they are safe, and B: that they are with him. (He is aware of this and is taking steps to try not to fuck them up more than his fetch already has, but... Just because you know you have a failing doesn't mean you can adequately see it.)
2) He arranged the death of his brother. In his mind, he saw it as justice for her killing his mother and getting away with it, but he still coldly arranged the death of his brother.
3) Haven't interacted much, can't do this.
4) He is obsessed with regaining his past, regardless of the long-term repercussions. He is a skilled social manipulator who will do whatever he considers 'necessary' to get what he wants, he sees no higher moral judge than himself. Everything he does is for personal gain, and if he was sure it would get what he wanted, he would probably sell out another Lost.
5) He genuinely doesn't want to hurt others, and will honor any arrangement he makes that is not under duress.

[lslaw.livejournal.com]

1) A tendency to trust in others beyond what they deserved, and to not trust in himself, to the point that he would allow bad things to happen because he convinced himself that people would act for the best in the teeth of all available evidence. Of course, this being a passive flaw it rarely showed, at least until the results drove him a little mad and he began speaking up a little too much.

2) Well, there was the creepy corpse fetish he used to carry everywhere. What he did to get that was... well, perhaps not outright wrong, but certainly more sinister than he seemed to think.

3) Allowing a terrible thing to be done; a thing which he knew to have potentially disastrous consequences, for lack of speaking up in time.

4) Sullen, given to preaching; angry at the world for hurting him and apparently determined therefore that no-one in it should ever have any fun. Aggressive and obsessive.

5) There was nothing on the earth that had a soul that he did not care about.

Come to think of it, a combination of 1 and 5 is probably what got him killed.

[suave-steve.livejournal.com]

I don't play villains, I just have characters that operate in moral vacuums ;P

My IoD characters

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

1) A proper character flaw for your PCs. And not job interview flaws! Real flaws, that makes them not-good people.

Rosie - she's a spoilt little princess at times, and all that that entails. Basically, Rosie is a very pretty girl, who has always been treasured and valued and told she's special, even as an object in Arcadia. And it's had predictable results. She's quite bad at looking at things from anyone's point of view other than her own, she is sporadic in noticing other people's suffering and she genuinely doesn't understand, and therefore doesn't make allowances for, an awful lot of other people's vulnerabilities and frailties. They just none of them make sense to her, so she ignores them. And honestly, whilst she has a kind of quickness of mind, she's not necessarily that clever. She's quick, she's bright, but she's horribly ill educated, very scattershot in her mental processes and really has never displayed the focus or concentration to actually remedy any of this.

Venice – is a self destructive junkie, who is pretty much determined to waste her life. She is one of the brightest of my characters – she’s clever, well read, thoughtful, artistic, and she doesn’t want to do a damn thing with it. Instead she takes drugs to control and fake the emotions that she claims she wants to feel, she runs away from any kind of actual intimacy, she lashes out at anyone who wants to get close to her and she starts off every single encounter with anyone by being as much of a bitch as possible, and then when they react badly, she smiles to herself and tells herself that this is her being clever and proving that the world is a nasty place really. She is very bad at seeing the in people and goes looking for the worst, and really really has some very serious issues to do with being abused as a child which she completely refuses to seek help for. Along with the drug addiction, the eating disorder and the self harm masquerading as sexual decadence. For someone who is actually quite bright, she’s really amazingly stupid.

Rio – needs to let go of an awful lot of things and won’t. She also needs to actually admit to an awful lot of things (which she’s getting a bit better at), but won’t. And as a result she spends a lot of her life feeling angry and frustrated and not really knowing why and taking it out on other people. Realistically, she shouldn’t cling quite so hard to every single emotional tie she’s made since she was 12 and shouldn’t let them get in the way of making new ties and new friends. She shouldn’t create this totally false dichotomy between looking after her family and looking after herself. There’s no reason why she can’t help Rusty with his business, be there for Holly and, for example, start going to university part time. She’s 35/36 ish. That’s totally young enough to start a new career, to find some kind of fulfilment, but she doesn’t see it. She is also a vile cow when she loses her temper, and becomes utterly unreasonable when angry. As I think Jonah can probably testify, having been in the firing line twice.

Ruthie – needs to let go of things, even more than Venice. Really, it’s not good to live your life surrounded by the ghosts of 1940. Really, it isn’t. Having said that, she’s a vampire, so that’s a bit harder. I think she does make some dubious moral decisions as well. Chopping up people to make perfume doesn’t make you a very nice person.

Rae – needs to look at a dictionary and realize that denial is not just a river in Egypt. Plus, sex does mean something, magic is real, half the new age bollocks she likes isn’t, and she needs to acknowledge that she’s in a relationship, whether she calls it that or not. Right now, her obtuseness in this area is potentially very harmful to those around her, and she’s too wrapped up in her own fears and insecurities to notice. Plus, she’s not that pretty. She’s not got striking looks, and she’s probably a bit pudgy due to eating too much ice cream.

Re: My IoD characters

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

2) A situation in background, or with NPCs, in which your character has behaved badly.

Rosie – she dragged Malachi into the Hedge on a drunken adventure in which they managed to pick up some poor little hob girl, convince her she’d found a husband (without meaning to), and then messed up the engagement party and disrupted a bunch of rituals with epic disregard for the poor girl’s feelings, or any of the cultural values of said hob tribe. And all because Rosie was drunk and thought it would be a good idea, and had no idea of ‘consequences’.

Venice – she drugged up a teenage girl in a nightclub and dragged her off to Constantin for a threesome which was of dubious consensuality at best. Basically, she pretty much set up some girl to be date raped, because she was wallowing in her own crazy abuse issues and trying to prove a point to Constantin.

Rio – she is currently quite involved with the Hellfire Club in London, and is honestly betraying them as well as the Uratha. She is building up a relationship of trust with the woman in charge of the London Hellfire Club, who she kind of idealizes because Jessica has a lot in common with Rio, and has come through it – she came from a crappy council estate but got out, married the handsome and charming rich guy, got to live in this amazing and privileged world, and Rio can’t get past that. She can’t see that Jessica is also pretty much a psychotic thrill killer, and also can’t see that she can’t really be friends with Jessica whilst she’s not telling this woman that her entire family are actually werewolves.

Ruthie – you know, it’s not nice to ghoul someone, keep them with you, love them, embrace them, and then abandon them because you don’t know what to do with them. She was, really, a very very bad Sire.

Rae – she didn’t want to tell her then boyfriend that she could hear ghosts because she wanted to be thought of as normal, didn’t want him to think she was a freak. And so when his friends decided to hold a drunken séance in a haunted house on Halloween, she didn’t say anything until after one of them was dead. And that didn’t even teach her a very good life lesson – she just convinced herself she was bad luck and shouldn’t have relationships anymore, instead of the far sensible life lesson which was ‘tell people if there are nasty spectres around’.

3) A situation with other PCs in which your character has behaved badly.

Rosie – so far she’s been responsible for Malachi losing an eye (dragging him into the Hedge on an Adventure where he got picked up by Privateers), set the chain of events which killed Carin and Aria and Satrap Sam in motion and is about to set off on a new Adventure with Aidan, Kieran and (if she can persuade her) Deyanira. Heaven help them all.

Venice – I don’t think that convincing Constantin to give up on trying to be reformed was a very responsible thing to do. I don’t think half her casual and chaotic acts of button pressing (introducing Nyght and Moorcroft, persuading Mac that she could be a bitch too, sending Zenica into PSD related flashbacks) are really particularly nice either, even if she does have a whole complicated philosophical justification for it. And dear gods, Rex Black is a saint to even talk to Venice after the amount of shit she has put him through, starting off by overdosing on cocaine in his front room whilst he is still cut up and bleeding from her earlier escapades and continuing from there.

Rio – she’s not been fair on Jonah and Karei. At all. They were (and maybe are) both her friends, and she basically created a situation in which they were dating, then freaked out and has been punishing the pair of them for it ever since. And that’s not fair, and not good. I also don’t think that sleeping with Mal has ever been a good idea and has basically messed him in the head whilst she tries to use him to work through some of her bereavement issues.

Ruthie – asking her ex-ghoul to share his emotions with her so she can put them in a perfume was not a reasonable thing to do at all.

Rae – poor DataWraith. At the very least, she could acknowledge that they are in a relationship.

Re: My IoD characters

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

4) An uncharitable, but entirely true description of your character - how they could be described by someone who knew them very well, but didn't like them at all.

Rosie – spoilt little princess.

Venice – psychotic junkie.

Rio – stroppy wolf blood.

Ruthie – creepy stalker perfumier.

Rae – dipshit hippy.

5) A redeeming feature about your character.

Rosie – there’s not an ounce of malice in her. She gets angry, she gets fired up, but there’s nothing cruel in her. She doesn’t mean to be mean, she does always really want to do the right thing, even if she doesn’t quite know what it is, and she does love her friends and family very much indeed. She’s hopeful, imaginative, brave and gallant. She just doesn’t really know where she’s going with all that.

Venice – she’s another character who is, on the quiet, fiercely loyal to those she cares for and would happily carve out her heart for them without a moment’s hesitation. She has also had so much very crap to deal with throughout her life, which she has come through on sheer grit and steel – she’s probably the toughest of my characters, mentally speaking. She’s clever, witty, creative, generous, talented and very good fun to be around, I think. She just has a lot of baggage she carries with her.

Rio – she’s the sanest of my characters. No, really, she is. OK, she has issues, but they are all big and real issues which she actually does try to cope with as best she can. She’s savagely intelligent, fiercely loyal and does do her best to hold her family together. And (OK, this is a group redeeming feature), they do all stick together. Honestly, the Knight/Anderson/Richards/Wolfman extended mob feels like the most realistic family dynamic I’ve ever played and I’m really really fond of it.

Ruthie – she’s a true artist, she experiences the world like almost no one else.

Rae – she cooks, she cleans, she likes gardening and animals and she also gives all body tongue massages. How many people can you really say that about?

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Yes, we were talking about you and your shotgun carrying response to mortal dilemmas in Forsaken last night. :p

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, a fun game :)

Sulien, I think.

1) She was expedient as all hell. She lied, kept secrets and made promises she had no intention of keeping simply because that was quicker and easier. And she never seemed to learn that it always went wrong.

2) She treated Robin abominably, really. I know her reasoning, but there was no reason that she couldn't have told Robin why she was acting like she didn't give a shit about him. He was a Ragabash, for crying out loud, they're good at secrets. But she made his decisions for him. Still, to be fair to her, it would probably have worked out OK; if Caragh hadn't died...

3) I still agree wholeheartedly with Sulien that after she disobeyed Fergal's orders, told Tegan what he was trying to do, actually showed her his letter and generally risked getting in a whole world of pain for treating her as a person rather than property, Tegan owed her. (And I still personally think that Tegan shoulda got hit upsides the head by her geas for insisting that Sulien to pay her for having done something that had no good outcomes for Sulien whatsoever). However. The correct reaction to that was not to make a promise she had absolutely no intention of keeping, and had already worked out ways to stay within the words but outside the spirit of. Suli kinda deserved what she got for that one.

4) A, arrogant, tyrannical, lying, cheating, hypocritical bitch. (And if she'd heard anyone describing her like that, she'd've smiled)

5) She was never selfish. Almost everything she did was for other people - often a world full of other people - even if she did sometimes go about things in entirely the wrong way :)

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Yes, three people yesterday said to Rosie, in tones of mild horror 'Mort left you his wife.'

[suave-steve.livejournal.com]

Surprisingly few of those have been sorted with a shotgun... kidnapping and sacrificing maybe... :P

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Oh for flip's sake LJ, stop randomly logging me out!

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think Tegan and Suli operated in slightly different worlds at times, and that particular scene was a wonderful example of two totally different paradigms colliding very badly!

Now, having just splurged forth essays on my IoD characters, I need to do the same for my Zeitgeist characters, which I'm sure no one will read due to length.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I guessed it was you, anyway. My powers of deductive reasoning came in handy there, and no mistake!

[adze.livejournal.com]

I will!

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

That's what you think. Never forget the obsessive in the corner, that's what I always say!

Crystal

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

1) Spiteful - she bore grudges forever and never let an insult go. Instead she stored them all up inside herself and withdrew from the world because if you never forgive you can never care about anyone. And yet, she never believed Mark or Drago could do a thing wrong - they were gods to her.

2) Oh gosh, where do I start? So many situations! I guess the worst was she sold out Worthy... I won't say why or who to.

3) Blimey - can I have one where she behaved well, there's fewer to pick from! Trying to make Rosalba constantly lie to Domdaniel - the scene was funny, but orchestrated purely so Crystal could see what happened

4)Evil, vicious, spiteful and manipulative bitch - her one redeeming feature being she could be relied on to do what she said she would do and she was also often right about situations (not people). More a tragic figure than actively malevolent, however, too locked in her own world to destroy lives, thankfully.

5) When she loved she loved absolutely. People thought she sold her memories of Switch, Dominic and Rosalba, but they were actually stolen from her. She would have died for her family and friends, and in the end actually did more than that - she put herself into eternal imprisonment and torment for them.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Well, you and Neill now say you'll read. And that's totally enough for me!

I've been really missing that game lately. I'm glad it ended when it did, and how it did. And I don't want to play any of my PCs again, because they all got the right endings for them (and god knows, right endings are hard to find) but I really miss so many of the PCs in that game.

I miss Sulien and MSR, and MRT, and the SFS, and Petra, and Jade, and the whole of Team Assamite, and the Idiot Moon and just...

...oh, just all of them. It's like I've moved to a different city and even though I know my friends in the old city are all OK, I do still miss spending time with them.

[adze.livejournal.com]

I know exactly how you feel.

I keep finding bits of tat that have a memory attached, or hearing songs that remind me of things, and really missing the game. The other day, I found a letter MSR wrote to Tegan, in case he died when challenging Fergal, and it reminded me of the whole thing...

So many good memories, good characters, and I miss them all.

Charlie

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

1) Hot tempered - and no that's not her vice. She ends up doing stupid stuff because of her temper and impulsiveness. (she has more, this is one)

2) Umm.. all the ones I can think of I am afraid I won't reveal

3) She gets so damned angry with Danny on a regular basis - and about half the time it's not justified. He does wind her up, but others wind her up about him too, and she takes it out on him. She is very tired of being the cobstant target of bitching about Danny, from so many corners, and she'll usually fight his corner to others then bitch him out to his face.

4) Mutton dressed as lamb - she's over 300 years old, it's time to stop playing the neonate.

5) I think she has a lot of them actually - loyalty, quite a lot of honesty, courage etc. She is the nicest of my characters now, genuinely one of the 'good' guys, but still a vampire so still innately 'not good'.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

And now, reaching back a looooong way:

Rhian Macintyre, called Wind Walks Lonely.

1) If any of my characters should have been on medication, it was Rhian. She was a depressive alcoholic who couldn't seem to tell the difference between 'private' and 'attention-seeking'. For ages she just kind of limped along, not quite managing to actually do anything useful but being all martyred about trying to. And when she eventually did realise that she needed to sort herself out, she did it by hiding in the Verbena chantry taking a lot of drugs; and giving the Garou so little information that several people set out to look for her. I mean, honestly!

2) She let one mistake - and it wasn't even a mistake - cast a shadow over her entire life. She kept feeling guilty and wishing that she'd died with her first pack, instead of accepting that she was alive and that this was a good thing.

3) She okayed Shadowshrub taking the cubs of Oxford on a non-stop tour of the spirit realms - including Malfeas - because, essentially, she was too drunk to care about anything other than that it made one of her responsibilities go away.

4) Whiny, self-righteous, self-indulgent alcoholic.

5) She was caring, ethical, and honest to the point of insanity (as far as I can tell, she had a physical inability to tell even the slightest lie!) Rhian probably had the strongest moral compass of any of my characters, and that's saying something.

[becky-spence.livejournal.com]

But, you know, if you really want to get into beekeeping, Adrianne can make it happen for you :)

[hardwired.livejournal.com]

T.S.
------------

1) A proper character flaw for your PCs. And not job interview flaws! Real flaws, that makes them not-good people.

His Rage. It get's in the way. He had a purpose. Now he doesn't. And it makes him angry. So angry. And his jaded emotions means its the big one he feels. And it comes like waves, and fucks up his efforts at trying to find out who he is.


2) A situation in background, or with NPCs, in which your character has behaved badly.
He and his team did bad things for the Invictus. Purging Domains, stopping Democracy. Nasty stuff.


3) A situation with other PCs in which your character has behaved badly.
Zagreus was bloodhunted. They wanted him torpored. So i did the task, I grappled him..and torpored him. He hit me with some curse of the Crones, which triggered a latent memory. So, in a polite moment of calmness (The calm that an angry person has when they have chosen to act) He asked, over Zagreus's body, if he was still bloodhunted. The "Yes.." came. The "But..." came a little too late after he had punched his head off in a fit of Pique.

4) An uncharitable, but entirely true description of your character - how they could be described by someone who knew them very well, but didn't like them at all.

He's nice, polite at times, friendly, easy going...until he gets angry. Then he changes. He isnt the dsame person. i think he could snap at a moment. He sems to want good things for people, but what if he loses it. He's the worst sort of animal.

5) A redeeming feature about your character.

He is trying..real..hard...to change.