Playing as an antagonist

Undergod

I was thinking of running a short game based on d20 Modern during the summer, just me and a couple of friends from school.

I've played a bit before and ran a game for a while, and this time round I wanted to do something a bit different. One of my mates who was interested said he wouldn't be around for a lot of the summer so I thought it might be cool if I played him as villian in the campaign, towards the end.

Has anyone done this? Got any advice or suggestions?

Zillah

I don't really understand. Are you talking about using the absent player's former character as the antagonist?

Undergod

He won't be around for the first few sessions, so I'm going to introduce him into the game towards the end, and he'll play as a villain.

Zillah

Oh. Thats a bad idea...if it worked it'd probably be cool, but I really don't see it working. For one, any sort of player vs player conflict is gonna end in tears. Also, what are the sheer mechanics of it? How do you limit player knowledge of each other's actions? Just play the villain yourself and introduce a new character for the player when he arrives.

Sarky

It takes hard work and preparation to do in any satisfying way, but when it works, it's really great. In an Exalted game I'm running on and off, One of the recurring villains I have is being played by a friend. The players have never met him yet, but a lot of the things they do are influencing and being influenced by him. I let him in on the details of what happened in a game session, and he tells me what steps he's taking to thwart them, and I base the next sessions around that.

Eventually I hope to have them meet up for a big f*ck off battle of epic proportions.

Undergod

The guy who I'm planning to play as the villain gave me the Exalted rulebook today actually, it's pretty cool.

What I was thinking of was a zombie survival horror campaign with pretty low-level characters. I was going to introduce the new player as the leader of a government clean-up operation, who at first seems like a savior and then tries to kill all the witnesses of the disaster. Nothing innovative, but I thought maybe having a player play antagonist might be interesting.

How do you limit player knowledge of each other's actions?

By letting him think up what actions he wanted to take, tell me outside of the session and I'd put them in. He'd be pretty easily able to see what the other characters were doing. I see your point though, it could be unnecessarily complicated.