Monday, January 09, 2006

[Maps] Protagonists

From the text.

  1. History. Some major event in the protagonist's past shaped her life in a dramatic fashion. This could be very recent, or very ancient, but it is important. Write a very brief summary of this, and assign it a number between 4-7, depending on how much it matters to her. This is the protagonist's initial Wound.

  2. Work. Write down one or maybe two roles that the character plays in his day-to-day life. Assign these a value of 4-7, depending on how skilled the character is at the job (4 = competent beginner, 5 = quite skilled, 6 = excellent, 7 = genius). This is the protagonist's initial Role.

  3. Purpose. Write down four things which are any of: Goals the character wants to achieve, people the character loves, people the character hates, things that the character is unknowingly destined for. Assign them the values 1, 2, 3 and 4. These are the protagonist's initial Impetuses.

  4. Authorship. One player can take responsibility for the authorship of a particular protagonist. However, this is not the only option. A protagonist can also be left to the shared authorship of the group. Each player may only have sole authorship over one protagonist. The GM may not be the sole author of a protagonist.


You will most likely want to use this process several times, to create several protagonists (at least two.)

A note on impetuses: Protagonists must share an impetus with the protagonist created before them (a shared impetus must be about the same thing, although it can conflict or not, and further can have a different numerical value.) Further, protagonists must have a conflicting with someone else in their community. (The last protagonist made must additionally share an impetus with the first protagonist.) In the end, each protagonist should have at least two impetuses intertwined with other protagonists, at least one of which carries conflict.

3 Comments:

Blogger Troy_Costisick said...

Heya,

Does (can) authorship have a value like the other character components that shows to what degree a character is owned by the player or other players?

Peace,

-Troy

7:06 PM  
Blogger ScottM said...

Interesting. The characters that should come out of this seem similar to the Alyria storymap characters, though centered on something different (not Good v. Evil).

2:52 AM  
Blogger Ben said...

Troy -- Given the mechanics, that would mean that people with authorship tend to get more authorship over time. Which would be silly, and defeat the point of shared authorship and the "at most one solely authored character" rules.

The way that shared authorship works is that authorship is distributed by scene. I think.

Scott -- Yup. Alyria is deeply influential in pretty much everything I design.

yrs--
--Ben

7:03 AM  

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