They brought up CRAUs and being against them, and I'm inclined to agree with them on that matter.

It does fuck with the tone of a game because you now have to account for the tone of wildly different games happening that someone has memories of.

Also a lot of time those memories boil down to "I was put in the torment wiggler for ten-thousand cycles" which, if your game isn't a different configuration of torment wiggler, means most the cast doesn't know how to respond beyond "jesus christ dude" and if it is also a torment wiggler who cares you got wiggled in another processing plant first.

But the other use case of it seemed to be people just going "I already played this arc out with my friends and we would like to keep that going, even though the previous game did The Move and imploded violently and dramatically." at which point, I think I'd rather the guy going for new game+ top score on traumatic memories.

i think it depends on the type of game, imo. i usually love seeing what happens with the way games cook a character's brain so i'd work real hard to make CRAU/PGAUs viable within a game's mechanics as much as possible, if it were up to me, but some premises simply aren't cooperative with going too hard on the idea and that's just the nature of the thing

Because honestly even if you do basically the same character development beats again from zero, it's a new setting and a new extended cast with new circumstances and a new larger overarching plot, it's gonna play differently.

as someone whose fondest rp experience is from a game that let me revisit an old character whose arc wrapped up insufficiently satisfyingly for me when her game imploded years back and thus gave me a shot to reach a conclusion i remain deeply satisfied with and some of the best IC interactions i've ever had completely aside from it, like.

that's a courtesy and a chance i'm into paying forward, if i can.

dorohedoro I feel like you have to design it a very specific way from inception for CRAU/PGAU (and I realize I'm using one to mean both here) to not be something that would be tonally jarring, but I will admit it seems a delicate balancing act and most people wouldn't go as hard as you did on making it work

Also my rambling ass never even got to the question and you've inadvertently answered it halfway for me.

Which to cut to the chase now that I've laid out my grievances: in my experiences years back where CRAU/PGAU were allowed, I never once saw someone in a way that mattered actually conflate mechanics from their previous game to the modern one.

You might get a thread or two of "oh but won't the bad thing happen here?" so their friends who have been here longer can go "no! we are free of the bad thing here! It can't happen again!" but I want someone completely misunderstanding the mechanics of a game and confidently eating shit.

I just wonder if that's me thinking it'd be fun and novel or if that'd wear out its welcome too fast to be anything but bait for anon comms.

i mean as someone who did in fact have fun with my character nearly throwing whole teamgame setups because of psychological hangups caused by experiencing sense-flashbacks to games like the one they were in (and who had a team absolutely on board with letting me), as far as no one else doing it, i can only say ... "skill issue"

it's just a matter of being comfortable and communicative with the other players!

Talking to you actually makes me miss this hobby a little, ngl.

(she did, in fact, actually throw a few games because of mental trauma caused by the previous games-plural and their mechanics, but those weren't directly because of misunderstanding the setups, those were just because she was no longer capable of sanely functioning under certain kinds of pressure.)

(so i don't count those as actually intersecting with the conditions of the question.)

(... i also briefly carried that character onward to another game that recently fizzled out just to do a personal victory lap and had them legitimately eat deliberate shit by getting cocky and thinking they had the whole premise of a minigame worked out based on having seen a few metaphorical pixels in their time, but i only got to do that once, alas)

i think part of it is also that you have to make the failure state interesting, or have a bunch of players who find the failure interesting, which is to say - you need people on board with the actual game premise, and willing to commit to playing along with that premise because even when it has "negative" consequences for their character

Yeah that last one was more what I was thinking. And after seeing your comments I'm realizing my answer is that you can do that about once, maybe two or three times with the right setup (minigame sufficiently different) and team, before people will understandingly ready to throw you headlong into a wood chipper.

those consequences are ones they want to engage meaningfully with, as part of why they're there to play.

i mean it definitely helped that i was on a team that was deeply cohesive and tight-knit and comprised of multiple characters who could and did reflexively throw the whole team in a woodchipper because they had a panic attack and hurt themselves in their confusion every few minigames and the whole team was just. like.

well it's not like we can point fingers, can we

just things that happen when you're on a team with beatrice umineko--

yeah that definitely comes with the territory!

me nodding extra hard at the character reveal

yeah that tracks actually

anyway i largely don't have a horse in this race because i tend to take my crau's to psl land, but i do sympathize for like, situations where you really don't want to keep rehashing the same initial beats of a character arc but want to keep playing the character

that being said, i have one memorable good case of crau and one memorable bad case of crau

the good case was someone apped an ex-ryslig character into balance and kept the monster transformation and horror hunger, which acted as a potential negative outcome on rolls. poor guy actually had to account for eating people once a month or so and whether he'd snap and accidentally murk someone unintentionally

sadly the character didn't stick around long but that was really cool to see and something that could only arise from that specific combination of craus

the bad case was someone in a game years ago who was playing a crau'd character who'd been crau'd like.... three or four times in a row? just hopping from game to game in a series of events

and while i could see how that could be written interestingly, it just made for a really frustrating experience to play against because the character had become incredibly jaded and genre-aware and used it as a platform to grandstand about how he'd seen this all before and knew what would happen

and bro some of us play for putting our character in The Horrors, stop trying to solve jamjars and win the game

on the flip side craus are also weak to the Infinite Torment effect where people will basically crash any attempt at a non-horror tone by throwing their thrice-traumatized blorbo at it and having been on the receiving end of that man I don't like it

I think CRAUS are a concept that are like. really interesting but if it's not a game where you have some strict checks in place to make sure this doesn't become disruptive in an Unfun Way then I wouldn't risk it

the same way I understand why most games ban WoLs