Spleen wrote:I've always felt that, thematically, it's a darker fantasy world than Gaera, where we can blur the moral line like we don't do as much in Gaera RP; also, PCs will be more likely to be aligned against other PCs than in Main Gaera, which could create more interesting plots. People in Main Doma tend to be all on the same side in most ways, and I think it puts an interesting spin on it to have one group within the city oppose another.
All of these claims are based upon a remarkable lack of evidence.
Why
can't we "blur the moral line" in Gaera Main? Furthermore, how do you know it doesn't ever happen? (Amanda is presently running an RP that is gritty enough that tonight's game, which I joined late, left me feeling vaguely sick.)
PC against PC happens, but PC against PC doesn't work if people don't have the balls to GM. It's one thing for two PCs to spar verbally (or physically) or try to sabotage each other in a CI. In a GMed game, having party members working against one another is unproductive; it doesn't make the game more fun unless they're doing it in a subtle manner. Ham-fisted PC head-butting just wastes everybody's time. If a PC vs. PC conflict is going to have meaning, one of the "PCs" almost necessarily needs to be an NPC in control of the GM, or the game grinds to a halt while two PCs working on opposite sides duke it out. (And if they're directly opposing one another, why are they in the same party?) It's one thing when PCs have disputes in a GMed RP (hell, it's frequently entertaining), but if the party's left hand is trying to cut off the party's right, it has to be coordinated through the GM to work at all.
Here are a few sets of PCs that are either enemies or who
clearly don't get along:
Kamos Mazuo and Enlil or Will
Hakaril and Kristoph Akina
Tessei and Tassi Wells
Jak Snide and any drow
Shakti and Chancellor Vince
Eve Valerian and Stephan Hyral
Zea and Glykeria Aurelius (2Gen)
Malcolm and the entire cast of Drawing the Line (even Karis)
This is just a partial list, but keep in mind it's also been
heavily discouraged that people create characters that are incredibly antisocial or combative. I shouldn't have to explain why playing misanthropic loner #247 is probably a bad idea. This isn't an RP community where we have evil PCs for good PCs to battle against; we have GMs run plots so that PCs have antagonists to struggle against.
Think of Ash Fanrico, who thought it was a good idea to create a new greviously offensive character for every RP he was in--someone that was going to die by the end of the CI, because when Freddy Krueger walks into a bar full of adventurers and tries to cause trouble, why
shouldn't they kick his ass?
I don't think everyone in Doma shares this overarching, unifying set of ideals the way you seem so willing to assume. Doma has bigots. Doma has fascists and anarchists. Doma has intolerant evangelicals. It's just that their presences are frequently downplayed outside of plotted RP, because what's the point? How many people want to play more than one character who is irrationally racist or intolerant of others, if they even want to play one? Such characters are occasionally interesting, but they are poor for socialization and party cohesion. People play characters like that all the time, but they frequently have a change of heart in the name of character development. But if, for example, your character thinks elves are the lowest form of scum on the planet, what can you really do with that character in the presence of an elf short of spout hate speech and maybe start a fight?
If you want Doma to have more intolerant people, or to demonstrate that it is not super-happy cotton-candy kingdom full of heroic PCs, play someone who isn't like that. Even better, play an antagonist who isn't like that, and run a plot based on his or her efforts to sabotage the city's happiness.
That's an excellent way to summarize the argument I'm tired of hearing--it's the "Doma is Candyland" argument.
If you don't want Doma to be Candyland (which it isn't, and I personally think you would only make that argument from ignorance), do things to make it not be Candyland. Creating a new setting does not "fix the problem," assuming you believe one exists; it exacerbates it by encouraging people to continue assuming Doma is Candyland, and that if they want to get out of Candyland that they should play in Shadow Doma, because that's the
only way to escape the immutably fluffy setting that "everybody else seems to want."
Edit: Well, as far as I can tell, 2gen exists because it's essentially a way to see a vision of the future of Gaera. The majority of the characters who exist now that have human-like aging get to take a back-seat, many of whom are by now practically the "legendary heroes of old," and their kids get a chance to prove themselves.
I'm pretty sure that the original 2gen idea was "let's play the children of our characters." There's not much to that in itself, but the idea of being able to create characters with very specific ties to pre-existing characters opens up some interesting RP questions, like "what's the future ruler of Doma going to be like when she grows up?" and "how does Hakaril Silvar's parenting work out?"