Hellos!
I was wondering if this question should go somewhere else, yet I found the topick within the World Burner section of the rulebook, so…
Is it REQUIRED (ie. an obligation) that at least one PC be a Figure of Note in the World? My players really don’t want the responsability, so they declined (thus all Figures of Note on their side are NPCs). But I was wondering if this ain’t a big error on my part.
Thanks
GGDD
Page 67. At least one player must be an FoN. However, I sense there’s other trouble in your group here. So I’d put the breaks on this game before going forward. We should take this over to the Fevered Circle.
What “responsibility” don’t your players want?
The players don’t want the…wha?
Seriously?
Punch your players in the throat. :mad:
p.
His!
They don’t want to be kings, but “the power behind”…
One wants to be spymaster (working for the gov),
One wants to dethrone the Ruler (a planet’s forged lord) who killed all her family,
Another want’s to be a Lord-Pilot Anvil,
& yet another wants to be the new Forged Lord (he leads the now-ousted rebel faction)!
Funny thing’s the Forged Lord was created for the Human side, not the Vaylen!
GGDD
All of those roles could be figures of note. You don’t have to be president to be a FoN. Vice president Cheney for example, is the vaylen FoN right now, not Bush.
-Chris
Right! Bush is just his 2nd in command!
Matt
LOL.
What Chris said. All of the positions you described are FoNs. I don’t know if you’ve read the Sheva’s War comics, but Hardy, the boy, is an FoN as well. He’s not even in command of a farm!
FoN = the characters who get the spotlight time.
In a comic book, they’re the ones with the most dialogue bubbles and take up most of the frame. Meanwhile, more “powerful” characters might be in the background doing their thing, but they’re only there to set the stage for the less-powerful-but-still-the-focus characters’ activities.
Vaylen FON, heh.
p.
Hellos!
Hey man, thanks! Twice in a row you have answered stuff - kwl! I thought comic book auteurs were too busy getting into fights w/big corps for making crappy film adaptations (lol)!
I agree completely: ALL of those are FoN; yet, none of my players wanted to be called that role “in game” - they wanted to have a buncha NPCs make the relevant rolls (+ get attacked, etc.) & such. Yellas - the lot!! Now I’ll tell 'em!
& about Bushy jr., it’s Bushy sr. who pulls the strings (remember he’s a CIA spook who’s sore about losing the 1st G war & not getting re-elected. Plus also remember his standing in the Masonic inner chamber, (what would the secret masters think, for the Great Architect’s sake?)). Too bad he’s got a bad clone.
Thanks
GGDD
Just so you know, being an FoN can only help. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be “attacked” more or less. It doesn’t matter if the players play 3 LP janitors. They’re in the spotlight. The game is about them. They are going to suffer the brunt of all of the bad and the good.
-L
I’m sensing a fundamental disconnect between what the players want and what the game offers. “Sensing” as in “I’m going deaf from all the alarms going off.”
What do the players know about the game’s premise and structure? Have they read any reviews of it? Any Actual Play reports? A couple of us have posted up fairly comprehensive analyses of our Actual Play experiences and they may prove useful.
p.
I agree with Paul.
I can’t imagine not playing an FoN in a BE game, or not wanting to.
Matt
If the players want to be the hidden puppetmasters that is fine I think, but they are still the impetus for events, so they make the rolls.
This might insulate them from the initial violence in a campaign, but once the enemy has gotten wise to them (i.e. Assess) and has started to discredit and kill off their carefully placed puppets the PCs will have to start dealing with threats to their personal safety. They shouldn’t be worried about this! Who Dares, Wins!
I’d probably enjoy the chance, as the person running the Vaylen side of things, to take the PCs lovingly-crafted mouth-pieces and hull them. That’s what you get for not taking power into your own hands.
Well, almost by definition the puppetmaster is the Figure of Note. The guy on the throne who they are direction is just some stoolie doing the bidding of the man behind the curtain. Generally speaking, think of the figures of note not so much as the people who the war is centered around but the people who this particular story is centered around.
It’d be a pretty lame BE game that doesn’t have the characters as the FoNs, mostly because if none of the players are the story focus, then they are just playing “those guys over there” while the dashing young heir to the title of Forged goes off and saves the galaxy.
Uh yes!
I realise now that I didn’t actually say “puppetmasters are totally figures of note”.
Bad, bad, no biscuit.
There is another alternative that I thought of. In our current game with Luke, me, Gooderguy, and Carly, the PC and NPC FoN’s aren’t really the rulers of a world, they’re the movers and shakers in one district of a much larger planet. By agreement, the fate of the neighborhood will presage the fate of the world. But it allows for a smaller-scale sort of struggle.
Matt
Yeah, I’ve often thought about running a BE game that’s a very small, intimate family drama – the outcome of which is symbolically represented in the Infection. I love the idea of the Infection as strictly a backdrop to what’s going on among these brothers and cousins and in-laws who are all at each other’s throats about melodramatic stuff.
To the OP, maybe some clarification is in order: Do the players not want to play world leaders, or do they not want to participate in the Infection mechanics?
p.