Player Character Peculiarities

Many years ago a really nice person made a suggestion that I've been remembering every now and then ever since; Having some outright negative actions in the game for the player to choose with no positive outcomes whatsoever, other than the default action in some territories.

This person might not even follow development anymore, but the idea stuck on me. It's realistic and a great way to role play certain characters but it meant not only discouraging players from exploring freely, but also writing content that perhaps as much as 90% of the players would actively avoid. Then just a few days ago, while struggling with an unrelated idea, it finally hit me, we can get the motivation to do stupid, weird and gratuitously evil stuff by giving the player character unique interests, compulsions and tastes for us to manage and/or indulge.

Our character thus will now get 3 of these peculiarities at random at the beginning of the game. We'll be given infinite re-rolls to choose which set of 3 we are more comfortable with, so we will never be forced to have anything too icky. Furthermore we'll get a chance to change one of our 3 idiosyncrasies after each cycle for whichever new one our way of life and circumstances allowed at the time or keep the same ones, allowing some development over time. Whether this will be into better, more mature people or murderous psychopaths talking with the voices inside their heads is up to each of us.

In effect, this will often be a readily available way for players to lower their Weariness, so we'll also ease the problem of not having enough actions of the kind sometimes. For now this will use the same system as lobbies to generate events in matching territories. Suppose your character has a compulsion to steal things, you'll occasionally get the chance to shoplift in crowded places, not only giving you the material gain but satisfaction, though you'll still risk increasing Tension.

The available options will depend on the territory we visit, whether society has collapsed, and the prior way in which we've managed these habits and issues. Provoking too many fires because it makes our character feel good will make people suspicious, or perhaps your character just loves something as simple as reading a good science fiction novel but you can hardly find a place within the colony that sells them because you're the only nerd in it, incidentally giving you a taste of what my pre-internet years were like.

The idea is to experiment with the whole spectrum of peculiarities, from the deeply disturbing to the utterly mundane to make our characters deeper and more interesting. I believe it'll be a great way to encourage us to role play new kinds of characters without forcing anyone to do so.

And of course, there is a whole lot more we can do once the system is set in place. In particular, I'd really like to have renascent companions involved in a number of ways, but I want to wait and see how the basics develop before mentioning things I might later put aside like last time.