Dave Thomas has often made reference to Colonel Sanders.  The references have always been highly favorable; The Colonel seems to have been regarded as something of a mentor by Dave, and Dave often indicated the debt he owed, the amount he learned, from him.  Yet at the same time they were opponents in a field of battle so cutthroat that Sun Tzu might well share a bookshelf with Hans Christian Anderson.

  I do not know whether the admiration was mutual.  I do know at least pieces of the history.  Dave Thomas, while in high school, had a part time job in a restaurant; he apparently enjoyed it, as he wrote an essay for a high school English project stating that he expected his future career to lie in the restaurant business.  He was soon employed by Kentucky Fried Chicken as more than just a counter person, where he did well and learned much about the industry working closely with the successful Sanders.

  Eventually he left.  According to one Thomas obituary, they parted when he disagreed with Sanders over how to make chicken.  I note that for decades the only chicken you could buy at Thomas’ Wendy’s Hamburger Restaurants was a boneless filet on a sandwich bun, but I don’t know whether that was what he suggested.  Thomas and Sanders were now opponents, adversaries in the warfare that is the fast food industry, an industry in which companies with years of experience vanish almost overnight.  Witness the near demise of Roy Rogers.  Failing, it went up for sale.  Marriott was interested, but only wanted those restaurants established in Interstate highway rest areas; a deal was struck which sold all other Roy Rogers locations to Hardee’s, who intended to combine the chicken and roast beef menu with its own hamburgers and so expand into new markets.  But they couldn’t make a go of it, and so their portion went back on the block, this time to be grabbed by McDonalds.  The industry leader wasn’t interested in the chicken or the roast beef or the name or any of the other assets.  It converted to McDonalds those few locations which were not already within a few miles of an existing one, and shut down the remainder.  The one nearest our home was leveled and replaced with a bank.  This is the nature of the beast, the competitive demands of the industry; this is the world in which Colonel Sanders and Dave Thomas faced each other.

  Yet Thomas always spoke well of him.

  I am aware of other examples, mostly in military history, of what I would call rivals:  two leaders on opposite sides of a conflict who have only respect for each other, who admire each other and may even know each other, in some sense friends off the field; or who as enemies still give a certain amount of recognition to each other as worthy opponents.  I do not know the details of those so well as this (and my knowledge of this would be considered sketchy).  But there is a dimension to the conflict brought out by this sort of tension that does not often find its way into the games I have seen.  There, the enemy is bad, and we don’t care how good he is at what he does.  But what if despite representing much that we oppose, he is a great man?  What if he is even a friend, someone with whom we shared something in the past; or like Sanders to Thomas a mentor, someone from whom we learned much in the past, someone we came to respect and honor even as we oppose him?

  Rivalries need not be so strong opposed and dynamic as this.  Rivals can work together toward the same ends by the same means, and still have this tension between admiration and competition.  One of my players commented once that he had always found a tension in any party that had two cavalier-type knights of any sort; and later when he played an anti-paladin in a party which already had a samurai, that sort of one-upmanship was quite evident, as each strove to have more kills, more damage, more victories than the other–exemplified in a perfect picture by the time they were both charging (on horseback) a fleeing enemy, and the anti-paladin skewered the creature with his lance, only to have the samurai finish it by cutting it off the lance with his katana.  They worked together, and trusted their lives to each other, but they were always in competition.

  This sort of thing probably requires a certain amount of cooperation between the players and often the referee.  To establish a nemesis as someone for whom the player character has some respect, even connection, is a challenging and delicate balance; yet it is also rewarding, and worth the effort.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.