Here's something about this game that kind of confuses me. I started this game when I was 29. That means that my character will always be 29. However, chronologically, he is 34 or 35. Been in the Multiverse for a few years. I might mature beyond my 29 years, and make different decisions because of that maturity. MJ is 52, but plays The Architect, who is at least 100 times that chronological age. How could you really know how you would react to being that old, but not being that old? Kyler is in his early 20s, but his character has the body of a 9 year old boy. God only knows how old his character really is. How could Kyler have a clue how he would react? Even more so because of the fact that he was probably 9 playing a character that was chronologically an adult. After Kyler was in the Multiverse for 10 years, he should be as mature as a young adult, but still being played by a 9 year old boy. Now he is a young adult, playing someone that is probably as chronologically old as some Biblical figures. I might be 500 by the time I get out of my current world (hey, it could happen) how could I even fathom how I would react at that chronological age?
In Verse Three, Chapter One, Robert Slade stays in one world for 80+ years. That would make him chronologically twice as old as MJ, who wrote the book. How could MJ have any idea how Slade would react? (Nothing against MJ's book, of course) Any thoughts?
I mean I can say with certainty that I am more mature now than I was a year ago when I started this game (Being proven wrong as many times as I have will do that to you) However, my character should be 4 or 5 years ahead of me. The Architect should be way beyond MJ, but he's still played by a 52 year old man.
Part of becoming more mature stems from your body wearing out. The daredevil stunts you pulled 10 years ago don't work as well anymore. A verser doesn't have that problem, but their mind is still growing and aging. I hope when I get to Heaven, I can actually become a verser and find out what it is like. I've compared being a verser to Heaven before, who knows? "With God all things are possible."
This actually gets into a theory of mine, that has to do with the psychology of immortality. I've probably done this rant here once before - I've done it often enough that I start forgetting who's heard it - but if you haven't heard it, it's simple. After a long enough time, knowing fully well that you have no threat of death, eventually your mindset would become nothing resembling human. Humanity is inherently tied up with the knowledge of a finite life. Removing one removes the other. Go look at Vampire: the Masquerade's "Paths of Enlightenment" to see what got me thinking about this.
Anyway, you don't necessarily have to predict what you would do were you 80. It's enough that you act in character, that the actions you take now reflect the experiences your character has had over the years, centuries, or eons of his life. After all, whatever you write him doing, that is what your character would do. That's kinda the point. It's just in better taste if what he does makes sense.
Osevens, I don't think you would lose your humanity completely. You have certain instincts and God-given thoughts that are inherent to being alive. You have a conscience, and things you do would haunt you. Imagine having an eternity to think about that guy you murdered 400 worlds ago. That would probably stop you from doing it again. I don't know. When I get to Heaven, I want to become a verser.
Well, I lost all fear of death decades ago, and I don't think I've lost much of my humanity for it. In fact, there's an interesting player character preserved under the name Peter Adams, played by an atheist, whose primary philosophy of the verse is that versers are victims of an unfortunate accident. However, part of his philosophy stemming from that is that versers are immortal, never really dying but being revived in new worlds, while the indigs of those worlds are still mortal. They, then, have something precious, a very fragile moment of existence. That, to Adams, makes the lives of the indigs more important that the lives of the versers--a verser gets killed, it's no big deal, but if an indig does, he loses everything.
To some degree, being immortal seems to have made Adams more human. But this proves something I have long thought: it is not what happens to you, but what you do with it, that matters.
John, you are correct that it is not so easy to decide what it is that your character would do after years, even centuries or millennia, in the verse. However, note that you don't have to figure out what he will do after all that time--only what he will do now. That's a distinction that I will have to clarify.
You (and John Mastick, I'm not sure of everyone else) are a bit of an exception here. Most of us have played many other role playing games before we started this one. I can remember playing
- an amnesiac maybe twenty-year-old girl aboard a lost colony starship;
- a mutant with a crab claw for one hand living five hundred years after the nuclear war that destroyed the world;
- a high-tech seven-foot-tall arboreal simian spaceship pilot in training;
- an amorphous blob space environmental scientist;
- a winged kensai in a magical medieval world;
- a twenty-year-old knight;
- an aging oriental wiseman;
- a half human half elven priest.
With Multiverser, you've got a head start already: you know who the character is at the moment he enters the verse, because he is whoever you were at that moment. You thus play what you would do given the circumstances in which you find yourself.
It is not quite as simple as that as it progresses. You are indeed still playing yourself, but you are playing this other self, this person you might have become. That is, today you are making decisions concerning what this character would do based on the notion that this is you, having gone through all that you have, seeing that giant preying mantis, talking to the Architect, fighting with (in both senses) the other versers, facing Godzilla, dying and coming back to life, fighting with an MP at Pearl Harbor, surviving the Japanese bombing there, being confined as a suspected spy, being killed by a German sympathizer, waking up in a primitive world, and working for over a year in training with a blacksmith. Who are you now? You are that person, and you makee the decisions that person would make. Sure, it's not as easy as deciding what you would do were you suddenly in his place; but it's not as difficult as deciding what you would do were you a thousand year old elf who grew up in the treetops of Lothlorien, or a Wookie co-pilot on a smuggler ship in Federation space, or a prohibition era gangster or eighteen hundreds gunslinger or post-apocalyptic mutant. You know this person better than anyone else knows him, because he shares part of your history, and you created the rest of it moment by moment to bring him to this moment. He is no longer you, but he is someone you created and understand better than anyone else can say.
And if one day you say, this guy is not someone I understand, there's no particular reason why you can't decide that this guy has a sudden crisis of self-identity, realizing that he has become someone he does not understand, and changing everything he can about himself to start over somewhere as a new person, a person he likes and admires and wants to be. And no one can tell him--or you--that he is not that person, because no one knows him as well as you do.
I hope this helps.
--M. J. Young