Free Will among the Wild Fae?

[exploding_brain]

I had an idea to play a pixie character, but I wasn't sure if fae ever have enough free will to be allowed as PCs. Yeah, a changeling comes close, but that isn't quite what I had in mind.

Took me a bit of a search to find actual game text covering this, but in the description of the Knight of a Faerie Court, it says that the Knights are the only members of the faerie courts that have mortal free will.

Two questions:

As far as Billy, Harry, and Bob understand it, is it possible for a member of the faerie courts to have non-mortal free will?
As far as Billy, Harry, and Bob understand it, are all wild fae completely creatures of their nature, or are there some that have a degree of free will (positive refresh)?

Sure, I can play a unique case, a fae who acquires free will under special circumstances, or maybe it's on of those things that Billy, Harry and Bob just don't know about.  Still, if I'm going to try this, I'd like to know how far I'm bending the expectation of the game world.

Thanks.

[LCDarkwood]

As far as I understand the setting, being a full faerie is sort of an exception to the refresh rule - they're incapable of acting contrary to their nature, so it doesn't really matter if they have a positive base refresh or not. Full Red Court and full Black Court vampires are kind of the same way.

That's a conceit from what the Jim sayeth, though - until now, those characters have always been either opposition or heavily in the "supporting cast" role in the books. There's simply just no going back for them.

However, I fully expect that people will do high-refresh and/or "anything goes" kind of games, where the only requirement is a positive refresh and a stronger enforcement of high concept compels. And hey, that's cool. My assertion was that people would feel really put upon by the idea of a compel you simply cannot refuse and that can actually force you to respond a certain way, which is what the loss of mortal free will would effectively mean.

I stand by that assertion. But, you know... I could be wrong as far as your group is concerned.


-Lenny

[SoulCatcher78]

You might consider it a body switching issue:

Mortal makes a deal with one of the fae to use his body for something.

Mortal's body gets dead leaving the poor guy/girl trapped in the pixie body.

Mortal looks, walks, and quacks like a duck but is really a mortal.

Add aspects and or a sponsor and you've got a free will pixie who longs to have his/her old life and normal sized body back.

[exploding_brain]

Thanks for the feedback Lenny.  I'd always assumed that "Incapable of acting contrary to their nature", "Lack of free will", and "Adjusted refresh of 0 or less" were basically identical statements.  Will have to ponder the implications that they're not.

I guess I'll have to just be a little more persuasive when I try to tell my gaming group that Fizbin Thistleborn, Pixie Knight Protector of Central Park, is a perfectly reasonable PC idea.  Even with his Welsh Corgi mount (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Corgi#Description check out the 4th paragraph under Description).

Love the body-swithching idea SoulCatcher, and I might steal that for another character idea, but I want to try this one as a (sort of) normal Pixie.

[JosephKell]

Faeries (be they pixies or sidhe) do not have freewill.  That is why the Queens have Knights.  The Queens can't harm anyone not associated with one of the Faerie courts, they may want to kill someone (they can even tell people they want it done), but they can't.  That is what the Knights are for.  They can have the Knights (which are mortals with freewill) go off whoever.

Their lack of freewill is evident by their binding to oaths.  Faeries can't break their oaths once made.  They just can't.  That means they can't make an oath they can't fulfill.

Most of the Sidhe seem to have "freewill" but really they have very broad high concept aspects (and probably a few other aspects, I imagine "common" faeries just have a high concept, a trouble, and maybe 1 other aspect).  Lea definitely has some aspect related to acquiring power (

(click to show/hide)

this aspect forced her to acquire the black athema which did terri-bad things to her mind, hence the white streak in her hair

) and looking at her "stats" sure enough I found "Power is my drug of choice."

But power is very generic, and as Faeries see it, it takes many forms (personal power, favors, possessions, position, influence, money, territory, even allies).  A faerie may seem to act contrary to its nature because it is fulfilling its end of a bargain.

(Small Favors spoiler)

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Mab makes Harry forget about using fire magic and takes his blasting rod so that it is harder for Summer to find him in Small Favors.  This technically makes Harry a weaker emissary to fulfill a task she set before him (which seems opposed to her nature), however it makes it more likely that Harry won't die (and therefore fail a task for Mab) which justifies it.

Being a Changling isn't that bad.  It is the closest you'll get to "Faeries with Freewill."  They can even be entangled in Court Politics (Changlings are associated with Faerie if not one of the courts just by virtue of a parent).  And if their Faerie parent is female, there is a good chance they were raised partially by the parent (to me Changlings represent "poor man" knights, i.e. a Queen can beat on them without using her Knight and they have Freewill so they can do some Freewill tasks).

Why else would

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Maeve be so interested in Dresden knocking up her Nixie handmaiden?  She wants a wizard--although I suspect she specifically wants a child with Dresden's "anti-outsider mojo" potential--that she can influence.  Wizards aren't just powerful--Maeve has power--they have power AND freewill--and a lot of creatures seem to know about Dresden's "auspicious birth/omg he can pwn an Outsider backed dude."  Heck!  She even offered to service Dresden herself!