I’ve always been hesitant to use charm spells or effects against my players. First, players don’t like to lose control of their characters. And second, I don’t like players to lose control of their characters. As a referee, I have enough other entities to manage, without needing to run the PCs too.
I’ve been reading Demonspore recently though, and every shroom has charm person memorized. Shrooms are also supposed to be evil geniuses, so they should fight deviously and use all their powers to maximum advantage. If I want to run this module honestly, I need to decide how to consistently manage monsters that charm.
Here is my first idea. If a PC becomes charmed, I will give them a short brief regarding their new priorities. No more than a few sentences. Maybe I’ll write this down beforehand, or maybe I’ll just vocalize it. Then, the player will be responsible for taking actions in line with the brief. My only power as a referee will be to disallow actions that seem to contravene the brief. Attempting to twist the words of the brief, within reason, is permitted (and even encouraged) as that provides space for player skill and also models the idea that the PC’s nature is rebelling against the control. XP for particularly good adherence to the brief may be in order, but if I go that route I would like to find a way to do it that is not too subjective. Maybe something like 100 XP, with -10 XP for each time an action is disallowed by the referee? With negative XP possible?
I wonder how other people handle charm person, or other similar effects (geas, quest, etc).
In the past I’ve just told the player of a charmed PC, “The guy that just charmed you is your new best friend,” and had them figure out what that would mean for their character’s actions; this is pretty similar to your idea, and it worked pretty well for me. I’ve only used charm a few times, though. I would be interested in both hearing about how charm works if you run Demonspore and seeing a list of priorities if you do ever write them down.
Charm Person on PCs is tricky and you stated all the reasons. I don’t allow it player vs. player and play it by the book the rest of the time. It’s extremely difficult to make a player harm other players and even more difficult to keep the charm a secret until it’s too late (Metagaming! I see you rise your ugly head!). But done right, it’s a wonderful opportunity for roleplaying.
I think it’s a good idea to offer them xp for the gig (I would go for 100 xp per level and no penalties, but that’s a matter of taste, I suppose).
Also: the weirder the tasks, the better. Maybe a table of, say, 20 tasks and make the players roll for it when charmed? If only to give the players the feeling they had some influence how they were charmed (make them involved and they get involved, etc.).
You could also paint a clear (not to clear, maybe?) picture what could happen, but keep it secret who is charmed and with what task. Maybe conflicting tasks, too? Gives them a full taste of the paranoia as soon as someone starts to act weird.
And Demonspore sounds like fun, by the way.
Staples: your comment seems to have disappeared, and I’m not sure why. I certainly didn’t delete it. Maybe it’s one of those blogger hiccups. I have a copy in my email from the blogger notification if you want me to post it.
JD: I like the idea of a table that the players can roll on, though I would probably want it tailored to each enemy that might use charm, so that might be a lot of work. Totally agree that getting players involved by rolling helps build buy-in (that’s the beauty of traditional saving throws, too).
I really like the idea of communicating the info by folded notes to build paranoia in other players, rather than just saying they are charmed. Never would have thought of that. Just like rolling dice behind the screen though, I would probably sometimes need to give out secret notes when nothing special is happening so that giving out a note is not an automatic tip-off that something important or bad is going on.
About communication: I don’t know how long your sessions normaly go, but you could do this between sessions via mail or in person. I do this once in a while and it’s astonishing how much information players willingly keep for themselves when they didn’t get it during play (when everybody sees they did get SOMETHING). Notes work fine, too. Just one more red herring to fool the players.
I’m not sure what happened to my comment either. Eaten by the Internet, I guess. If you would re-post it, I’d be grateful. Thanks.
Handing notes out is a great idea, and one of the advantages to gaming in person that I’ve missed since I started gaming over Skype.
Performing the comment necromancy ritual…
Posted by Staples to Untimately at 29 November 2011 23:34
In the past I’ve just told the player of a charmed PC, “The guy that just charmed you is your new best friend,” and had them figure out what that would mean for their character’s actions; this is pretty similar to your idea, and it worked pretty well for me. I’ve only used charm a few times, though. I would be interested in both hearing about how charm works if you run Demonspore and seeing a list of priorities if you do ever write them down.