Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Azar_of_Faerun 03-26-07, 12:42 AM	Free will, though often spoken about, what is it really? It's easy to talk about slavery all day long, considering it a think out of textbooks, until you witness it up close. Really ugly. The thing is, we're stolen of free will everyday. Advertising, subliminal messages, the way the economy and other urban factors in our life are managed. Are we truly in control? is slavery something only done with shackles and camps? That's why I wanted to ask you folks how you've done mind control, or the theft of free will before in a horror themed game. Whether or not it's a puppeteer or the newest kid's cereal, it's all good! :)
j0lt 03-28-07, 03:29 AM	Not used in a horror setting persay, but in Darksun my halfling ****** off a mage who then dominated the group's half-giant. *shudder*
Fgarber 03-28-07, 02:04 PM	The important thing about running Mind Control on your PCs is that players always want to feel in control of the character. They might feel there is no safety, or that the character has limited options, but because the players sat down to play a RPG, they don't want to watch their characters do things. (IMHO) That said, I think the best way to do mind control is to have it happen, and the PCs not see it. See the movie Gothika for an example. As the PCs discover what they did, they will also seek answers WHY they did it. For examples: They wake up covered in blood. Whose (or what's) blood? Why? They sit down to lunch in McDonalds. There is a shimmer in the air, and they've lost time. Everyone else in the McDonalds is now dead, and it looks like it's from the PCs weaponry. PCs have all the food in the place on their table. Or, conversely, you can pull a trick from the old WWolf game Wraith. Make player A portray Player B's 'controller force,' and vice versa. Then, when Player B fails his Will roll to keep in control, have Player A describe what the controller does. Of course, when Player A fails HIS roll, player B gets his "revenge." You can even give them guidelines for the controller, so that the controller moves your plot forward. And for your free will philosophical question, for the most part, Free Humanity can choose to expose our selves to advertising, the economy, or any other "enslaving" factor. We can (for the most part), work in any industry we want, or train ourselves to work in said industry. If we want to move to a different part of the world and start over, we can. The things that "enslave" us: love of friends/family, fear of failure, desire for social interactions, etc. are things that help define us as human beings. Rolling back to the RPGs, the best horror of Mind Control I've heard of is a friend's game, where he had the players undergo various fugue states, and afterwards, they found that while possessed, they were more successful, hung out with cooler people, had sexier girlfriends, etc. Of course, it was all a sham: The demons acquired these things by inhuman means. The players had to reject all of their new shiny status symbols in order to try and expel the demons. And, of course, there was no way to get their old, normal lives back. And every time the demon took control, they had a new shiny toy, leading to the great quote: "[Frack!]! Another [fracking] Porsche! What did I DO last weekend?"
Melpomene 04-03-07, 05:19 PM	There's also the sort of mind control that was featured in "They Live" or several episodes of Star Trek. The chatacter is somehow immune to it, or given the clarity to see it, but is alone in a world of the brainwashed and dilluted.
Bruunwald 04-05-07, 01:05 PM	I don't know that we're made slaves, or that our free will is completely taken from us by anything a free society provides, such as advertisements, having to go to a job, etc. What happens is that we sacrifice and compromise our free will in order to obtain other things, or because we think we are obligated to. That's still voluntary, however we might feel coersed. Madness and extreme addiction would be situations where free will was removed from us, truly. Incarceration is a situation where freedom of movement is removed, but rarely free will in the truest sense. In a game setting, I try to keep away from actual removal of free will as much as possible, because I find players in general to be rather resentful of it. Not every player can be mature enough to say, "Well, I'm dominated now, and that's just how the game goes, and I'm okay with that." Most get upset that they can't do what they want, make their own decisions, etc. That sort of resentment can really ruin a game. In practice, I find it's best to refrain from actually doing it, as much as possible. However, the threat of it being done is a potent tool for horror. When the players think they might be taken over at any moment, the tension becomes palpable. As they see NPCs falling to the control of some other thing, the tension is ratcheted. Soon they don't know who is who or who they can trust. Passing confidential but irrelevant notes to players helps a great deal in this, as the others do not know if you are giving instructions, and soon begin to suspect each other. Giving the PCs reasons to act strange at this point is a good idea: if one guy thinks there are ants under his clothes and starts jumping around, but the other guy can't see why, the second guy is going to think the first guy has gone nuts. In this way, you can maintain the illusion of the threat by causing each player to think you have already done it to the others, but can avoid anybody getting angry over having their characters "stolen" from them. Of course, the ideal situation is one where the players enjoy even those aspects of the game that remove control from them.