It seems that nothing about Multiverser® has caused more upset than the fact that the rules recommend that you play yourself. Some have said that they are too smart to believe in themselves as survivors, others that you'll get in big fights with your players over their abilities,
| The Kid: He hit the 'verse at ten years old. What kind of skills and attributes could he possibly have at the start? He and the referee agreed on a sheet, and the game began. Finding his way to Umak Tek, he met several other versers, and discovered the world of mental tricks--the psionic bias area. He wasn't big, he wasn't strong, he hadn't learned a lot of combat or survival skills; but he was smart enough to realize that he could get good at these things. Before he left that first world, he could levitate and fly, create illusions, see and sense places from great distances--and much more. He picked up some combat skills, some tech skills, eventually a bit of magic, but he always focused his efforts on psi powers, ultimately coining the name for himself, "The Psientist". As he moves from universe to universe, he creates a demand for himself, and proves that even a child can change a world. |
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and still others that they play these games so that they can escape who they really are. These may all be valid objections to other "I" games, but I'd like to take a moment to explain why the "I" game is not a problem in Multiverser®.
It's not all that difficult to render yourself to paper in Multiverser. In fact, Breton Stron said character generation was part of the fun, and agreed with other critics that it was not a problem. Part of this, as Grover Penn observed, is that characters will improve and advance, learning new skills and building on existing ones. You begin as yourself, but can become so much more. And, as Willard Bowzer noted, the fact that you will become more than you are helps the players accept who they are now. None of the critics who played it as an "I" game had any problem with this part.
The idea that you can become more than you are is probably one of the key features which makes the "I" game concept work. Multiverser® is a game about possibilities, and the possibilities are endless.
| The Architect: Older and out of shape, this verser hit the game at near forty years old. But seeing new vistas before him, he attacked life with a new vengeance. Creating exercise and gymnastics programs and working on them everyday, building a new science in the strange world in which he had landed, working on psionics and magic as he was able, he quickly became one of the most adaptable characters in the game. He's become a hero in other worlds, helping those in need, opposing evil, and proclaiming his belief that God has sent him into the 'verse to help others. He demonstrates that you are not limited to what you are, but only to what you can imagine yourself to be. |
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You can become smarter, stronger, more agile; you can attend schools on a myriad of other worlds; you can pick up all the skills you always wanted to learn, and many you never imagined possible; you can equip yourself with gadgets of every description from every conceivable kind of world. There is no limit on what you can do.
And the longer you play, the more interesting your character becomes.
And if you fail to adjust, you die--but so what? Pick yourself up in the new world, and start again. Versers begin by dying; it's no big thing. Oh, everybody hates to lose the round, to get blown out of a world before accomplishing his goals or achieving his expectations. But while in other games non-survivable characters die and new ones are rolled, in Multiverser,
| Whisp: You don't even have to remain human. No one is certain exactly what Whisp is; he was once human, once a mercenary fighter in an alien interstellar war, once a potent magician, and many other things. Through a combination of accidents and intents, he is now an amorphous bronze metallic liquid being capable of assuming any form. That unusually-colored hawk which flew overhead might have been him. The bronze lion sitting motionless in front of the library might actually be watching you. He could be the chest of drawers in the corner. And if you think he's moved far beyond anything remotely human, you should see his mother. |
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all characters die, and keep going, and become more survivable. Some of the best, toughest, and most resourceful characters die the most often, because they take on bigger challenges and dream greater dreams. Some of the weakest characters live the longest, because they find people who can protect and teach them, and work on improving themselves, on becoming stronger.
And perhaps there is a point that needs clarification here. In most games in which you can improve yourself, you have to buy that improvement through adventures. Multiverser certainly allows you to learn new skills and improve old ones through adventures; it even allows you to do it right in the midst of an adventure. But let's be realistic: most of the things you learned to do, and many of the things you improved, were done in the quiet times at home or at school when there was nothing to distract you and keep you from practice. Does the great musician become great by playing on stage at Carnegie Hall? Is it not more from the hours of daily practice over many years by which he hones his skill? Does the great knight
| Chameagle: This winged man has the ability to conceal himself by blending his colors to match the background, whether it's the trees, the buildings, or the sky. How did he get this way? He was born this way--a character from another game system who met a verser and joined the verse. Since Multiverser® makes all things possible, everything he could do in that game world he can do in any world--within the limits of bias. He could as easily have been an elf, a dwarf, a hobbit, a Jovian, a Dar Koni, an intelligent dog; but he's unique, an example of a player playing not himself, but an alien imagined by him. |
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improve more on the field of battle, or lancing rings in the practice run? Clearly, both are important to his full development; but the practice during peaceful times gives both the musician and the knight the skills needed to face the true test. And so in Multiverser®, the weak character can become the strong character without taking the chances of an adventure. He can become smarter without facing the life-and-death riddles of the Sphinx, stronger where the most severe injury is likely to be a pulled muscle, and combat-skilled shooting at targets that won't shoot back. Your weak character can become your strong character without risking his life in the process.
But, as Justin Bacon was first to observe, if you really don't want to play yourself, it isn't at all necessary. Let's face it: in a game which allows you to create any type of character or creature you can imagine for use in any imaginable world; which prides itself on its ability to bring its players into and out of any book, story, movie, television show, or other game system; which believes that the only limits to play are those of human imagination; it should be a simple matter to create a "not I" character. And it certainly is; there are several ways to do it. Perhaps the best is to imagine the character you wish to play, create his abilities and build a character sheet as if you were he (and I suspect that some who play as themselves have done a bit of this in places, but that's not really a problem--if they exaggerate themselves a bit, it's no more than they could soon become). Easier than that, you can take a character from a story, a book, a film, even a video game, and imagine his abilities as your own. Perhaps the easiest way to do it is to create a character in another game system (or just use one of your old characters whom you'd dearly love to see go beyond himself), and convert him to Multiverser®. Our view of it is, if you can convert a real person into a game character convincingly, you can certainly do the same thing for any fictional character if that's what you would prefer. There are special rules for such characters (after all, if they aren't you, you can't assume that they know everything you know), but Multiverser® does allow players to play them.
The character snapshots on this page give just a taste of what is possible. So much more can be done, so much more has been done, that the notion that an "I" game is limiting is just one more of the dozens of things Multiverser® has turned on its head or thrown out the window. |
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