u/GreenTeethBurger

If you signed up for a pretty stereotypical slasher horror game, and said slasher was relatively mundane, would you want them to have some form of plot armor?

By "relatively mundane" I mean they're basically just a big dude with a thick leather jacket and a meat cleaver. They might be strong or resilient, but not superhumanly so. Realistically, if they got shot with a handgun, they'd be seriously hurting. If they got shot again, they'd probably be dead on the ground.

By "plot armor" I mean either the game has rules for and/or the GM comes up with some kind of contrivance for how they escaped a trap, lived through seemingly lethal damage, or otherwise why a solid plan to kill/entrap them didn't work. The plot armor lasts until some unrelated, predefined moment. Like, for example, a certain number of people dying or a certain amount of real life time passing. They're free game after that! But any time before, and they can only be temporarily slowed or impeded. That whole sorta vibe, if not that specific implementation.

This is less a game design "should slashers have plot armor?" kinda question and more a preferential "what do you personally think of slashers with plot armor?" kinda question. I've seen this topic tangentially brought up a few times in the comments of a couple other posts, usually with respondents in various positions around the fence. So! I decided to make it an entire post.

I dislike the sound of people speaking. I appreciate the utility it provides as a very direct, quick form of aural communication. I just dislike the actual, physical sound of it. I really wish I didn't since it'd probably make so many things so much more tolerable! But...

Every voice I've ever heard in my entire life, whether it's from regular interactions in real life, to actors in a movie or play, to singing, to people giving speeches, has sounded annoying or grating to some degree. I've never heard anyone who sounds "good" or even just "okay." It's always "slightly irritating" at best. It's rarely ever "unbearably awful" but it's always enough that I start to get headaches or, more rarely, feel sick if I listen to a lot of it without breaks.

I regularly take measures to avoid hearing people speak. When I watch movies, shows, or videos, I do so with captions turned on and the volume muted. I exclusively listen to instrumental music. I'm not sure why so many video games give the option to mute character voices, but I'm happy to take that option! Otherwise, I mute sound effects entirely. When I'm out in public, I wear noise-cancelling headphones to drown out the sound of people talking. All of my friends are online friends since (among other reasons) I can't bear to have vocal conversations on the regular. Speaking is difficult for me since the sound of my voice reverberating through my body feels horrible.

I know this sounds extremely strange and like I'm just making this up, so here's a few weirdly specific things I've experienced that I don't think most people have:

1. I'm very annoyed that Youtube doesn't have a way to download clean transcripts for if I want to read a video instead of watching it. There's a button to view transcripts that I can copy and paste into a .txt file or document, but it's filled with a bunch of timestamps. I had to make a script to remove them.

2. Some years ago when I played Paladins and Overwatch, one of the reasons I liked the former was because ultimates played a map-wide sound effect. In Overwatch, some ultimates have a map-wide sound effect, but the game wants you to rely on the map-wide character voices instead. I'm not sure if this has changed since it's been like 4 years now and I haven't played either since. (Also, in Paladins, even with voices muted you might still hear their echoes depending on the map.)

3. In the PC port of Kingdom Hearts I.5+II.5 HD ReMIX, you can't actually mute voices. Setting the volume slider to the lowest possible setting just makes them really quiet instead. I had to download a mod to actually mute them.

4. There's an alternate start mod for Skyrim where you talk to a statue to choose where you want to start. I was very annoyed that the statue's voice was considered a "sound effect" and not a "voice," meaning it could speak even with voices muted.

I feel like the "stereotypical" World of Darkness player character is the edgy, independent, lone wolf kinda type, even if they're not actually that common. In regular groups though, I've noticed that characters still tend to be "close to the ground" with their connections being the other player characters and maybe one or two NPC friends. They might be powerful and established, but still more of a rising star than someone already, truly high up. That's all just my personal experience though.

What's your experience been with the opposite kind of player characters? Whether you've played as one, with one, or even ran a chronicle for one. What was the character like? How did they behave and act? What did they do? What happened to them? If it was someone else's character, what were they like to play with, or run chronicles for? How often do you play as or see such characters? What's your overall experience with them? This is mainly to spark discussion rather than any actual "I have to know the answer to this!" ...But I still genuinely would like to hear other people's thoughts!

(What I mean by "highly connected or influential" is a character with a lot of dots invested into Backgrounds (or social merits, for Chronicles of Darkness). Someone who's high up on the political ladder, complete with lots of money, servants, allies, and contacts at their beck and call. They may not even necessarily be socially competent! Just someone who ended up with a whole lotta bridges one way or another, and may even be dependent on them to get anything substantial done.)