camwyn | Just a bit of gamefoo - character dynamics really. (Reply)

Ever since we had the game some three weeks ago I've been turning a few things about it over in my head. One of them is the character interaction - it's interesting to see how people who got yanked out of their respective fictions got along when plopped all together in the same one. Lord Wimsey and Dorothy got on splendidly; that was a synergistic relationship if I ever saw one. The Shadow and Sergeant Preston, on the other hand, got on about as well as the north ends of two magnets. I was talking with

batyatoon about this, and this is what I wound up realizing:

"I think I have figured out exactly why the dynamic between Preston and the Shadow is so damn prickly, even before the Sergeant reads Cranston's record (and only gets stronger once he's done so). He'd never phrase it this way himself, because I don't think he knows the words or history behind it, but... Sergeant Preston dislikes Lamont Cranston because Preston is a samurai and Cranston a ronin. I have tried a few times to think of conversations between the two, as if it were for another series of comic books, and the one that keeps coming back to me features Preston looking at the other man and snapping, "Who do you serve, Mr. Cranston? Do you even know?""

Later elaboration:

"Well, the idea grew out of the fact that I told someone else who saw the sheet, "Congratulate me. I've found a way to play a paladin without a deity in the picture." Let's face it, it's hard to get more AD&D Lawful Good with characters like this... After the game I sort of thought about it for a while and realised that the paladin analogy wasn't quite right. Preston is beholden to a secular power structure by his own choice, and is part of it. Combine that with the very strict personal code of honor and you've got samurai. (Which, perhaps, goes a bit further than my other explanations for why he let Prufrock bleed; a samurai wouldn't give a quick death to an honorless foe - but then again a samurai wouldn't have been concerned with questions of whether the case could be brought to court in the first place. Anyway.)

Cranston, on the other hand, has no official place. Money, power, destructive capability, yes - but no official place, no solid identity. His whole life revolves around being the Shadow and working through other people. It's all a matter of false faces and false guises, and though he might have a code of behaviour, he has no honour. At best he's a wave man, a masterless samurai - a ronin. At worst he's a ninja, since they grew up as the efforts of the disenfranchised to protect themselves from corrupt and dangerous warlords - but ninja, being stealthy and operating outside the law, also had no honour."

*sigh* And I was so proud of finally playing a Westerner, and a mainstream one at that. Oh, well. BTW, if you're reading this and you recognize the question I see the Sergeant posing as some kind of a quote, let me know. It's not B5: Crusade, because I have never seen Crusade, but it sounds too familiar. (It's not Saruman, either. At least I hope it's not.)