Monthly Archives: October 2013

One More Problem with Advancement

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There’s plenty of problems with character advancement. Granted, I’m not against it, but I know people who like to argue against it. Still, there are problems, and this is one of them, but from a different viewpoint than I’ve heard before.

Recently I learned the term iconic character. I had been aware of the concept, I just didn’t know it had a name. I don’t know how widely this term is used, but since I think its an important concept, I’m going to use it here. Iconic character is a character which doesn’t really change as time goes by. On the other side, we have the dramatic character. Dramatic characters have arcs. They fall in love, out of love, learn to live with trauma and so forth.

Examples of an iconic character:

Sherlock Holmes is interested in intellectual problems. He doesn’t move away from them. Watson gets married (twice, in fact), but Holmes only meets a woman to show how invested he is in what he does (although the more modern version have made him more interested).

Each of the Simpsons is very iconic, but I guess Homer most of all. He might have become lazier and his fatness is emphasized more, but basically he is still the same (granted, I think I haven’t seen any episodes after season 14, which would be about a decade ago).

I first identified this type of character in House, who is strongly based on Holmes anyway. I felt the show lost its way when House began to change, or they tried to change him. I guess its a natural inclination for current stock of writers, who have been taught to write arcs, but sometimes its just wrong.

Now, from the point of view of a classic RPG advancement, it mostly forces or at least strongly coerces the characters into becoming iconic. You don’t change. You just delve deeper into what you already were. Fighters become better fighters, magi learn more powerful spells, cyborgs update their hardware and/or software and forth. None of this helps with their arcs.

As RPGs are moving towards dramatic storytelling as opposed to the more epic storytelling of the past, when campaigns where basically just a series of events in the lives of the characters, moving into systems, which support more dramatic approach in this regard as well, would probably be for the better.

I guess certain systems have bypassed this and some systems support this kind of gaming. Apocalypse World has bypassed this by emphasizing the stuff you’re not good at, so even if you use your advancements to make your character even more iconic, he or she will still have to face the world as a dramatic character (although I’m a strong proponent of letting people use what they are good at, at least somewhat).

Then, of course, we have the DramaSystem. I have Hillfolk on my desktop, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. However, from what I gather, the system uses some sort of currency for letting players win or lose scenes, so that everyone gets their spotlight, but will have to give up something to get it. We’ll see. Probably when the physical book finally arrives.

Learn to Lose

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Although back in the day, I didn’t really have this problem, since people in my part of the world weren’t really very good in Magic: the Gathering, these days if you want to be good, the thing you need to know learn first is losing.

Obviously this requires some explanation, as its somewhat counterintuitive. But yeah, you need to be good at losing before you are going to get anywhere.

First, there are simply people who will get pissed after losing and return next week to the FNM with a chip on their shoulder. They will use most of the week to think about how they will beat the player they most felt embarrassed them, even if they won’t necessarily play against that player and will lose focus of the big picture. Gladly, there aren’t too many of these people, but if you happen to be one of them, you need to lose this attitude.

Second, you need to be able identify the reasons you lost. You might want to think you lost because certain circumstances didn’t happen. What you need to think about is how you can bring about those circumstances. You might have a dream scenario with your deck, but if its too fragile or slow, you might have to rethink the validity of your scenario or how you can make it better. This is a game of high variance, but you can control it somewhat. Don’t get greedy with your mana. Shuffle your deck properly, even if its late and you are getting tired of it.

You might also just have been outplayed. Many new players are unsure of priority rules and the stack, so they play things on their when they could be waiting for a more opportune moment. They may overextend and leave themselves open for sweepers, or they might not play a card because it might be countered or leave a creature off of their deck because it always gets killed.

But, to learn how to recognize where the problems are, you need to be able to step back and analyze the games you played. I make mistakes all the time, but I try not to repeat them and usually I don’t. When I do make a mistake, I just take a moment to think about it. Not too long, since I don’t want to slowplay, but just enough time to balance myself again.

Here’s one example of how this can help. You make a mistake, and do what you can do to help.

In many cases you won’t have outs, but here Mihara was able to find a chance, which he could use. It wasn’t much, but this was in the quarterfinals of Worlds 2006, so you need to look for any and all possibilities. He was able to because he didn’t let the mistake rattle him. Well, he did, but instead of sitting back or compounding his mistake, he was able to get his head back in the game.

I’ve seen people do very stupid things. That’s fine. We all do that. But what you shouldn’t do is to compound those mistakes. I’ve seen people activate their [scryfall]Mutavault[/scryfall], see that it was a mistake and attack with it anyway. Yes, that might seem like a good bluff at the moment, but it won’t help your game in any way.

So, we all do stupid things. What stupid people do is not learning from their mistakes and refusing to identify their own mistakes. That’s not the right way.