Critical Miss: Issue 4 (Jonny's House Rules)

Jonny's House Rules

Play Your Own Gender

Now this is a fairly controversial one, and I've already discussed it back in Issue 2, in Men In Dresses. See the Issue 3 and Issue 4 IMHO pages for all the people disagreeing with me.

But for the sake of completeness, I'll briefly outline it here.

In all the games I've played in, where men have roleplayed a female character, I've just never felt that it worked. So I generally don't allow when I GM. (See the above mentioned article for details).

The Character Is Mine / Belongs To My Campaign

This will probably make me sound like a complete control freak, but here goes.

What is it that makes a character more than a collection of numbers on a character sheet? Sure, you can answer that it is the way the player roleplays the character that breathes life into it, and that's certainly correct.

But to me, the character only has validity because of the setting, the campaign world that the GM has created. The character was born in that campaign world, will live in that campaign world and will die in that campaign world.

So, since the GM controls everything about that campaign world, from the smallest blade of grass, to the stars in the sky, that surely means that the characters are as much his as they are the players. If his world ceased to exist, so would they.

Example:

Say I am playing in another GMs super hero game. He creates a far future universe set on a distant colony planet - similar to Earth in many ways, different in many others. I create a high tech super hero, The Void, and play him in a number of scenarios.

If the GM then gives up that campaign, I can't just switch the Void to another campaign, set, say, in present-day New York. When the GM gave up, and his campaign world ceased to exist, so did everything in it, including the Void.

Basically all this means in practical terms is that when I am doing a campaign:

All the characters much be created as new characters. It would be illogical to allow in existing characters that had been played in games run by other GMs in other settings. (Since the things that the character had done had never happened in my campaign world, the question would be: had he done them or not?)

Between sessions, I keep hold of the master copies of the character sheets, just as I keep copies of all the NPCs. Players are, of course, perfectly at liberty to keep a second copy of the character sheet.

To me, this is normal and natural. It always annoys me when I am playing in another GMs campaign and he expects me to keep hold of my character sheet between sessions. I always feel like saying: "Look mate, don't you care about your campaign setting? If I lose this character sheet, and we just have to try to recreate the character as best we can remember, it's the reality of YOUR campaign that just been weakened!"

But then that's probably just me.

Use Character Names

Whenever one character refers to another character I always want the players to use character names.

Right:

"Sir Swithen, can I borrow your horse and lance."

Wrong:

"Ricky, can I borrow your horse and lance."

Create Characters That Work For The Setting / Story

When players create characters for a scenario or campaign, they should create them such that they will work within the setting. Conversely, GMs have an obligation to make sure they give the players sufficient information to achieve this.

Whenever I'm am starting a campaign (which since most of them grind to a halt is distressingly often) I always set out various preconditions to the players.

For example, I might say: "Okay, this is a super hero campaign set in Scotland in the present day. You will play super-powered characters who have some loyalty and connection with Scotland, and who are broadly heroic in nature."

If a player does not wish to create a character that fits those preconditions, then that - to me - is tantamount to saying that he does not wish to play in the campaign as I envisage it.

That might seem totally obvious, but I've have played in games which have been destroyed by characters being totally unsuited to the plot (e.g. a bunch of evil bastards in a scenario which assumes that the player characters are dedicated to altruistically helping those in need).

Finally...