Game Ideas Un limited: Snubbed

  Our family physician is almost a friend of ours.  Perhaps it's because my wife has been a nurse known to the medical community for near two decades, and has worked with him much during that time, and I was known to the local doctors before that as co-host of a medical radio talk show.  Perhaps it's because we're highly educated and can converse on his level.  Perhaps it's only because he's an excellent doctor and makes his patients feel comfortable with him.  Whatever the reason, we often feel that our lives are connected to his.

  Not so long ago, he was chatting with my wife, and told of a recent encounter with someone he had not seen in many years.  The man was a patient he was called to treat.  What struck the doctor was how very poor the man's condition was generally.  I won't recount details, as I might have them wrong, but this patient was falling apart physically, and probably also emotionally, and from his appearance he did not seem to have been successful in material things.

  This hardly seems unlikely.  Surely we all knew people in the past who have not done well for themselves over the years.  This patient was someone the doctor had known in high school.  He almost didn't recognize the boy he knew in the man he saw.  Yet he did recognize him.  This was one of the cool kids, an athlete, a popular guy, respected by the student body.  He was also one of those who picked on those who didn't measure up to the standards that made someone worthwhile in high school--the nerds, geeks, or whatever we were called then.  That is, people like the doctor.

  "Remember me?"  That was about all the doctor could think to say to the patient before treating him.

  As I muse on that story, it reminds me of another.  Archie told this story.  He was a fat little kid in seventh grade, and the cool kids regularly beat him up.  He did not remain a little fat kid forever though.  The person I knew as Big Brother Archie gained a good deal of his eventual six and a half foot height and great hulking build in the summer between seventh and eighth grade.  Those same cool kids were coming up to him in September saying, "Hey, Arch, remember me?  Your old buddy?"

  "I remember you," he would say.  His memory was not so bad as they had hoped.

  I don't know how it was half a century ago, but in our generations it is not the athletes who are the success stories, in the main.  Someone has said to be nice to the nerds, because one day you're going to work for them.

  There is a bumper sticker which reads, Never hit a man when he's down; he may get up.  It's something to take to heart.

  In the movie A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More skillfully keeps a young man at arm's length who is clearly trying to advance his career by any means he can manage.  More sees through this, and refuses to be the means for this power seeker to reach his goals.  In the end, though, the young man testifies against him, lying in court to secure the conviction the King wants, and so ingratiating himself to the powers that be to advance his career ultimately to great heights.  He would not be snubbed.

  In Finding Forester, it is the hero who uses his power to step on someone, an English teacher whose book is never published because the respected author blackballs it.  The teacher never knows that this happened; he only knows that his manuscript was rejected.  The author found it, a book analyzing his own work, personally offensive, and would not be snubbed; he would snub instead.

  Another example came to my attention after I had drafted this article.  George Frederick Handel was offered a position as court composer for someone, I believe a German nobleman.  He accepted on condition that he be permitted to have an immediate leave of absence, as he had a chance for a commission to write something in England.  The sabbatical was granted, and he spent a year in England before returning to court.  He was not there long before he realized he was in great demand in England, and he asked for another sabbatical to write some operas there.  His generous patron granted his request, with the rather vague suggestion that he should not be gone too long.  However, Handel's music was quite popular, not only with the people.  Queen Ann herself became an ardent fan.  He was well off in England, focused much effort on learning the language, and rather unilaterally decided to stay there.  Not surprisingly, he was fired from his position back on the continent; but it hardly mattered, since he was writing operas for the Queen's Theatre regularly.

  That is, it hardly mattered until Her Majesty died.  It is not always clear who is next in succession to the British crown, particularly when the current monarch has no children.  In this case, the throne was assumed by a certain German nobleman who had previously hired, and fired, the Queen's favorite composer.  Handel was able to make amends; however, it must have been a tense moment.

  Even those of us who are the downtrodden, the sat-upon, spat-upon, ratted on, have in turn snubbed or offended others who fell below our radar.  They didn't matter to us; but they mattered to themselves, and they felt the offense our ignorance caused.

  It is difficult to bring such ideas into play.  Seldom if ever do characters play out their youth, such that we could create the sorts of complex interactions of growing up.  Even were we to play that out (as in Multiverser's unusual setting, The Zygote Experience), getting the complexity of life at a level that allows such characters to be snubbed along the way is extremely difficult.  Players have far more time to deal with far less action in the game than people face in high school.  Setting up the snubbed character is very difficult to do directly.

  Even less promising is doing it in current play.  You can set up the brother of a defeated villain, as John MacLaine faced in Die Hard II:  Die Harder; that's almost personal, but for the fact that the player characters never knew the brother existed until he suddenly hits them full force as an enemy, and can't regret having mistreated him before.  Similarly, in the Oriental Adventures for the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ there were among the family history options the possibility that you have an ancient family feud with another family.  Suddenly it is your great great grandfather who snubbed someone who wants to take revenge on you.  Again, this hardly seems like your fault.  The characters with whom you're dealing on a regular basis probably are going to be afforded the degree of respect expected.  You're not going to make an enemy of the farrier or the cabbie, and even if you do it probably isn't going to mean much in the scheme of things.  The odds of accidentally offending someone who rises to power and holds in his hands something you need is, in a game world, negligible.  It would almost have to be a set-up.

  So, how do you set it up?

  It helps to create a character who is annoying and persistent.  If this kid who obviously doesn't know what he's doing and is too young to be risking his life keeps nagging your player characters for a chance to prove he does and he isn't, it will wear their patience thin.  Of course, they might take him along, and he might get killed, or severely wounded, in the process.  If you can keep him alive, you've got a lose-lose situation.  If they never take him out, he will always feel that they didn't give him the chance to prove his greatness.  If he is seriously injured on that first outing and never goes out again, he can blame them for not giving him a fair chance after that accident that wasn't really his fault.  If they take him out several times but try to keep him safe, he can blame them for treating him like a kid the whole time.  If they let him risk his life, he can back off, and then blame them for not providing the support he needed at that critical point in his development.  Now you've got a character who holds a grudge against them.

  All that remains is to find another calling for his life, one that takes him into places of power.  He could become a clerk for a nobleman, serving the function of adjutant, such that anyone who wants to see his lordship has to pass through the nerd--er, the offended young man--to get there.  Similarly, judges have clerks who handle a lot of their cases and take notes regarding the facts and the testimony, so there's a definite possibility for trouble there.  Given a few years, such a snubbed dork could become captain of the city guard, particularly if he knows someone who will get him such an appointment so he'll stop nagging him.  There are dozens of possible posts for an ambitious young man with the ability to nag successful and important people.

  Once your snubbed man is in place, how do you assure a meeting?  One thing is, don't let your players know where the man landed.  It's always a surprise in this sort of story.  I recall that in Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang the hero met a young woman named Truly who having complained to him about the way he was raising his children proceeded to advise him on why his candy-making machine wasn't working right.  He immediately dismissed her as a busy-body, and took no note of her advice.  Then he was trying to show his interesting treat to Mister Scrumptious of the Scrumptious Candy Manufacturing Company and again encountered Truly--who turned out to be Miss Truly Scrumptious, daughter of the man he is trying to see.  (Can you tell that the story was written by Bond creator Ian Flemming?)  Protagonists are always blindsided by the relationships the people they snub have to the people who matter.  It is so completely unrealistic, and at the same time so very like a story.

  Take it one step further, and employ a bit of an illusionist technique.  Put the character away until you need him.  Suddenly when the player characters face charges before a local judge, who should emerge but the annoying kid with the grudge, His Honor's clerk.  Later, when they're seeking the favor of a local nobleman, the kid shows up again, now working for the baron thanks to a recommendation from his former employer.  Some time later they have a run-in with the local guard, and there's the kid, appointed to this position by the baron.  Who knows?  After that he might actually be the next judge they meet.  Every time they meet him, it's clear he doesn't like them, because he still holds this against them.  He can show up anywhere, as long as there's no reason he can't.

  There's something so enjoyable about the groans that emanate from players when they realize that the annoying kid who resents them once again has landed in exactly the right place to make their lives difficult once more.  It's a bit like having a Nemesis for them, but that they really can't kill this guy, because he hasn't done anything to justify it, and he seems to have a lot of friends in high places now.

  Next week, something different.

-----

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.