Over_the_Edge_Players'_Survival_Guide

CHAPTER 3
Over the Edge
A lady with silver hair is surreptitiously pointing
an odd device at passers-by on the street. From what
you can see of it, it looks like an old adding machine
with a tuning fork mounted on top. She notices you
watching, slips the machine into her purse, and ducks
nonchalantly into a shoe store.
A tall, bald woman, whose ears have been surgically
removed — a professional job, hardly any scar tissue
— stands on a portable street-corner stage and recites
in an aggressive singsong from a sheaf of computer
paper:
Star chunks. Wet and wild action.
Downtown is clown town, no how.
The siblings are dribbling, melting
down the coliseum wall like Dalí
watches. Available counterfeit now,
cheaper but just as gooey. Katya
has never had a birthday cake -
guess we’ll have to eat her.
The jaws of life are coming
For You
Hope you can dig
The Positivity
Metal is the petal of the rose
I gave to you
Mailed priority speed
From my forty-five caliber Smith & Wesson
Love gun.
Another passenger boards the jitney you’re riding
on: a goateed fellow wearing a beret and a leather
bomber jacket. He waves to the man in front of you,
a bespectacled Malay gent in a navy blue suit. The
suited man speaks:
“Hey, Rick, how’s it goin’?”
Rick sits down beside him.
“I’m in spiritual crisis, man.”
“Really?”
“I dropped some C last night and talked to Hecate.”
“That so?”
“Yeah, and you know what she said? She said I
should stop shopping for new religions all the time,
that I was raised a Christian and should find some way
to come to terms with that tradition. And that anyway
there wasn’t a real continuance of pagan worship
past the Dark Ages, and that we were all pursuing a
consumerised dream of phony wishful thinking and
should just leave her alone and let her sleep.”
“Wow. What a bummer.”
thoroughly discussed. PCs who heedlessly throw
themselves into certain danger are as much on the
endangered species list as perch-sitters (see “Credibility,”
below). But don’t be afraid to construct a character
willing to take reasonable risks. If on occasion you
underestimate the risk your PC is taking, your GM
will be more forgiving if the miscalculation is part of
a pattern that has helped her pacing in the past.
Interaction
The above considerations might not apply if
your GM uses the cutaway editing style (described
on p. 185 of OTE). This approach allows the GM to
exert more control over pacing by running each PC
in a separate concurrent storyline. Concerns about
group decisions are eliminated, which means that
you can’t use them to your survival advantage. In
a cutaway series, however, there are other means
at your disposal.
Beneath the separate threads of a cutaway series,
the GM will typically be weaving a unifying base
of events. For example, one particular conspiracy
might be behind not only the weird science device
your character is investigating, but the dopplegänger
who follows a second PC, the burglars who rifled
the apartment of a third, and so on. Even if no such
connections exist, you can give the plot a greater
unity by seeking out opportunities to pool resources
with other PCs. If you create the kind of character
who’s always alert for chances to form new alliances
and seek out extra information, you can make him
the nexus of a game series. As the plot continues,
the GM will assume that these connections will be
maintained. If your character needs to be around to
keep them active, his own survival chances go up.
Even if your networking doesn’t become important
to the plot, it still can pay off for the GM, which
rebounds to your benefit. Be a foil for the other PCs,
allowing them opportunities for fun characterization
bits through contrast with your own. Accentuate
comic or dramatic differences between PCs. Think of
entertaining situations for other players’ characters,
and try to set them up. This doesn’t mean that you
should go to war with other PCs; the sorts of conflicts
that work best in this regard are more subtle ones.
Minor differences between heroes are a great source
of humor and pathos, as you’ll note when you look
at the relationships between a classic TV starship
crew or fantastic superhero group. They also serve
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