@Roz said in Factions:
I only played a couple different characters on it during its runtime - and there certainly wasn’t loss without drama - but one of the things I remember from The Greatest Generation’s gameplay was that it was pretty easy to join the game, get enmeshed and equally very easy to die. It was a bit of a bummer if your medic died because the place you were in got (suspiciously specific reference here, hmm), but there were other options you could jump into. I think TGG was less of a true RPG as we know Star Wars, WoD, Pern, Arx/L&L games more in the vein of a combat simulation a la (what I’ve heard about) BattletechMUX, so maybe that’s part of the difference too, as you kind of expected the characters to be short-lived.
I wasn’t on The Greatest Generation, but my impression of how people have talked about it really points at the expectation aspect to me. People went in knowing their characters were almost surely going to die. That was, from everything I’ve heard, kind of core to the game’s conceit: there were limited-time campaigns, and PCs would die. When players expect to lose their characters, it reframes our entire approach.
Oh, hey, TGG has been invoked. This was one of my favorite RP experiences (bolded for emphasis). Some players were mainly there for the combat, but there were also a handful of us who treated it liked Band of Brothers MUSH and that was very rewarding. I’d say the probability you’d lose your PC made certain little character moments more impactful, as did the short-run campaigns, yeah. The headwiz referred to it as a ‘game of two halves’ and I was always more into the RP half than the combat, though the combat was fun or I wouldn’t have played it.
It was also, and I think sometimes people who didn’t play it don’t get this, a purely PVE game. Everybody was a soldier in the same unit. There were no opposed factions in-play at a given time. It’s not really applicable to this conversation.