Take a step back from character and role for a few minutes...
Avalon is a large and complex game. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it is frustrating. Much of it is original, in its own way. It is over 25 years old yet as far as we are told no other game of this type comes close to the scale and challenge and possibilities of character development. No gameworld gives the player opportunity or freedom to make an impact on the realm and ALL its population (current players and generations yet unborn). No player is an island. The future is a story unwritten.*
Big picture: five distinct meta games play alongside one another, with much overlap in potential involvement (for a player) and consequences (impact from one meta on another). These five are PVP, ADVENTURE, WARFARE, WEALTH and POLITICS. Three of the five are by definition interactive and at times unavoidably multi-player plus conflict-competitive. Politics is quantified by popularity and influence, winning votes and position over others. Victory is as diverse as public opinion. Wealth is woven into every area of the gamesystem and underpinned by "real money" and risk-vs-reward and gathers ambition and avarice into its sphere. In its way it is competitive beyond mechanism.
We know most players have their meta-game preference and many claim 'mine is best, it is the real Avalon' especially the PvP exponents. They are only half correct. All the meta-games are inter-dependant and twined in subtle as well as obvious ways. One player's excellence in PvP or victory in Warfare depends on others playing out their success in other of the meta-games. This is Avalon's unique gamesystem and as far as we know it is still a genuine original. This is a society in microcosm in a real and challenging form. All metagame paradigms are the real Avalon and without all five, this would be an inferior gameworld and a challenge more ordinary.
Consider this: in almost all games there is a development of player from new through growing and acquiring to reach a point where they are top of the tree and they have mastered the game. This tends to be the end-game, the goal and the time people take their final triumphant bow.
In Avalon that bow becomes instead the moment a player is ready to take their place on the stage and it is not so much a bowing out in victory as time to utter the first line, spotlight trained, as one of the stars of the show...
=* note: many games trumpet similarities in gamesystem and noise the promise of gameplay breadth. At time of writing, however, this is simple hyperbole and advertising phooey. The soundbites claim much, sure, but then along come the rules and regulations and limitations and inevitable shortfalls between claim and content: reality bites. Fact is, it takes an enormously flexible and original gamesystem plus a genuinely masochistic administration sworn to make impossible ends meet - like five writhing hi-voltage cables spitting venom and vitriol but all different and all passionately alive and critical to the whole. You see we must all be willing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, gods and mortals alike, but especially the players: brave enough to remember why fantasy worlds exist and that gaming, like life, is supposed to be the agony and the ecstasy, not mere number crunching and hills of somnambulist stacked beans.
