So over in my ROs You Hate thread, one Julien Sim of the Vampire: The Masquerade series of CoGs came up, because he sucks, and after some joking around about how “at least you can get him killed by selling him out to the Inquisition” (to which I responded that I tried, but he beheaded me for my trouble, the prick) the conversation took a sudden, if brief, turn into this:
I’m the one who provoked that response by explaining how my character absolutely did not mesh with the VtM setting at all, chiefly in that she hated everything to do with vampiric society and worked as a courier to try and duck the Masquerade politics as much as possible. I’m not gonna get into everything she did, that’s not a conversation for here.
The last part of ElliWoelfin’s quote is the part I want to focus on: I never had a good way of explaining it before, but a large part of why I’m so contrary in the way I play CoGs is because many of them operate from this unspoken expectation of me just happily going along with things and never wanting to step out of line and take the plot in my own way - not “completely dismiss the plot and do whatever I so please,” but rather, “progress down the plot thread with the choices provided to me, without being forced into situations I don’t want to be a part of simply because the game thinks I should want to be.”
To put a visual to my point, one of the HGs here has you working as an agent at a supernatural agency. Standard fare, right? Except, you spend the majority of the story believing you’re human, if a human who has a weirdly insistent voice in their head trying to get them to “embrace their true power” or something to that effect.
Then out of nowhere, you get forced into transforming into a supernatural being, yourself, and you don’t get to say no to it. At all. And the game tries to go back and patch up the leftover plot holes by explaining that you’ve always been supernatural and simply didn’t remember since you were traumatized by an event that happened in your childhood, but that really didn’t do much to lessen the blow for me, having gotten nice and comfy into my human role only to be forcibly made a supernatural against my will.
I’ll be honest, it brought to mind a few horror stories about people playing DnD and having their DM attempt to force their Rogue to suddenly see the light of God and become a Paladin because the DM low-key just didn’t like Rogues.
This goes on all over the place - Don’t want to be a pirate in 7th Sea? Story gets really aggressive about you being a pirate, and if you keep refusing, you lose the support of the pirates in the endgame. Don’t want to join the agency and work with Unit Bravo? Literally a non-option. Don’t want to be a wizard and just want to return to your world? You have to jump through all manner of hoops before the chance to return to your world even comes up, and if you pick one wrong option, you lock yourself out of that chance - and there’s a chance that it’ll fail and you’ll get sent to somewhere else entirely. Don’t want to join the demon-hunting company? Well, you’re a magic user in a society that hates your guts, and not joining the demon hunters puts you square in the crosshairs of the local inquisition who very much want you dead.
It happens so often that when a story like the one where you’re a pencil-pushing bureaucrat for supernatural-mortal relations comes along and lets you choose which majorr plot thread you’d like to pursue without giving you too much crap about not going for the other ones, it’s a breath of fresh air.