07.27.09
Posted in Game Design, Gameplay at 6:41 pm by Christian
Here’s something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Playing Ribbon Drive just reinforced this. Breaking the Ice might fall into this as well, but Lisa and I have only made characters so far, not yet played it.
As many of you know, I have a strong background in online “freeform” roleplaying. It works based on total character ownership, that is, you get to decide everything about your own character, including how other characters and their actions (including attacks) affect your character. While there’s a lot of difficulty associated with this–namely that conflicts between characters can be quite frustrating–it’s got a focus that I haven’t seen much in tabletop roleplaying, and that’s character interaction.
See, in those games, my fellow players and I would spend hours upon hours with nothing but two or three characters in a scene, bouncing off each other. Over time, the characters develop relationships with each other, and the interactions become more complex. Again, this can lead to frustration when you try to resolve a conflict between those characters and there’s no mechanism in place. But that problem mostly occurs when you play with people you don’t know well and don’t have a shared vision with (which is not uncommon in public freeform fora, where in my most active days you’d find several hundred players in the same place, all somehow interacting with each other’s characters).
Compare and contrast those interaction games with resolution games, where the focus is on resolving actions of or conflicts between characters. Most tabletop roleplaying games are resolution games with a strong focus on the mechanics that resolve tasks or conflicts.
For a long time after my ten-year-plus freeform experience, I longed for resolution games. I wanted things to move forward, actions to be resolved, conflicts to actually play out and end one way or another. I’ve played many awesome games recently where I got just that: a lot of events resolved in a short period of time. Whether it’s In A Wicked Age, D&D 4e, Sorcerer, or Beast Hunters, the game mechanics focus on and promote that sort of resolution play.
Recently, however, I’ve been missing the interaction focus. My mostly-regular group and myself have been playing our second series with Primetime Adventures. PTA is definitely one of my all-time favorite games. The advice in the game, however, is in line with other resolution games: try to have lots of conflicts to resolve. In fact, there’s supposed to be a conflict in every scene.
Our PTA game this time revolves around a family with all of its issues. The father, the main NPC, owns a mining company on a planetoid. The oldest son, Matthew’s character Saul, sides with the miners and promotes labor rights. The youngest son, David’s character Kyle, has a crush on the son of the corporate overlord who wants to control all of the mining activities, and Kyle rebels against his dad as well by signing up with the military. Natalie, my character, is devastated with grief over the death of the oldest Sanduski child, Sarah, who used to hold the family together.
Some of the very best scenes we’ve had have not been about resolving anything. They’ve been about the way these characters interact. We can have a conversation that’s not conflictual at all, but emotionally touching. We can have fights that don’t really get resolved, because it doesn’t matter who wins–it matters what they say to each other and how they feel about it.
That’s not to say that the PTA rules haven’t helped the game. They’ve helped immensely. See, the Screen Presence of a character tells you how many cards they get to draw in a conflict. But more importantly, for us, they indicate which character is in the spotlight for a given session, and which characters should play supporting roles to address the spotlighted character’s Issue. The setup of a TV drama, the connections and edges, all of those mechanics help our game, even when they’re not used for resolution. So PTA supports interaction games very well, as long as you don’t push for conflict all the time.
Ribbon Drive, a game by Joe McDonald that I played at Go Play NW and wrote about here a few posts back, is completely an interaction game. It has no conflict resolution rules. Two characters have a conflict, or a character attempts a task? There is no mechanic in the game to tell you how that turns out. While there are Obstacles that may come up and that characters can overcome with traits, they’re far from a real resolution mechanic. Ribbon Drive is just different. As I said, it’s all about the interaction of the characters. Their traits and their futures, along with the musical inspiration and the crucible of the characters being stuck on a road trip together, are perfect for promoting character interactions. We had a fist fight between two characters in our game, and we had no mechanic to tell us who won. But that didn’t matter; it mattered that they both showed that they had their dad’s anger in them, that they were interacting the same way even though they tried so hard to be different. We just cut the scene in the middle of the fight, then showed them both the next morning with marks on them. Was any conflict resolved? Not really.
Joe calls what Ribbon Drive does “character resolution.” And in the end, that’s true–your characters either embrace the futures that they thought they had when they started on the trip, or they abandon them. Something is resolved. But that resolution does not come from a mechanic (and I think this might be a key difference to Breaking the Ice, but again, I’ll have to play it first). You don’t roll to overcome your grief. You interact. And Ribbon Drive is a prime example of a game that facilitates something I’ve been missing for a while.
You’ll notice how this ties in with my most recent design, Within Our Eyes, if you go back and read those posts about it. Same thing: it’s all about the interaction, not the resolution.
I, for one, hope we’re going to see more interaction games in the future.
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07.15.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:07 pm by Christian
I’m considering including something in Anima Prime that will allow players to play on their own or without a GM. The way to do this is to “automate” adversity. I would write up charts (lets call them Tactical Action Charts or TACs) for each opponent that’s included in the book. The TAC shows a list of priorities with conditions, and you go down the list and check if the conditions are met. If so, do the action that’s listed.
For example, here’s a simple TAC for the Steambot Dreadnought:
- S4+, C4+: Full Strike with Force Attack
- S6+: Full Strike
- Maneuver
When it’s the adversity’s turn, the player(s) go down the list. Does the Dreadnought have at least 4 Strike and 4 Charge Dice? If so, use all Strike Dice (up to the limit, of course) on a strike and spend the Charge Dice on Force Attack. If not, the next check is: Does the Dreadnought have at least 6 Strike Dice? If so, use all of them (up to the limit) to strike. If those conditions aren’t met, do a maneuver to earn more dice.
The only thing to add to the TAC is how the Dreadnought picks targets. Either it picks randomly, or it picks the one with the lowest defense, or the least wounds, or something like that.
Now you can either write up modules where the opponents are listed, and players just go through (with a determined number of character scenes in between), or you play kind of freeform until the players agree that in the fiction, opposition arises, and what it is. The third alternative, I guess, would be to use a deck of cards, with black cards allowing character scenes and red cards indicating a certain type of enemy.
I’m not sure this will make it into the first edition of Anima Prime, but if I don’t get this figured out in time, it’ll be a free add-on once I do.
For solo play, the player would need to play at least two PCs and be open to playing them with each other, like a writer who makes up scenes between characters (or like we used to do with action figures when we were little).
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07.01.09
Posted in Gameplay at 10:32 pm by Christian
So… Ribbon Drive. The most emotionally touching con gaming experience I’ve ever had. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, given my previous experience with Joe’s Perfect.
I’ve played with Joe several times before, consider him a friend, and have a good baseline of trust with him. I’d played with Julian and Jonathan the night before, in a game of Julian’s design (“Storyjamming”) where he specifically had differently-colored chips to indicate how vulnerable you as a player want to be at a given time in play, so I felt that they were aware of the possible impacts of emotional play, which was good. It was the first time playing with Shaun, but he seemed like a cool guy (which it turned out he was). So overall, I felt like I could take some risks in that group.
For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Ribbon Drive is Joe McDonald’s game of musically-inspired road trips. If possible, players create mix tapes/CDs/playlists with a theme of their choosing, though in the con environment we picked from what Joe had on hand. The first mix we picked, randomly, was called “The Good That Won’t Come Out.”
Next, the players listen to the first song (without talking) and read its lyrics, then create the road trip situation from that. Our song was Blue Ridge Mountains by Fleet Foxes, and after tossing around several ideas, we decided that our characters were headed for the funeral of Caspian Godat, an abstract artist who used to be full of life and charm and passion, but who also fathered several children with different women and didn’t stick around. (Quote from one of the characters later in the game: “He started a lot of projects he never finished: my family, and yours, and yours…”)
Our characters were to be based at least in some ways directly on the second song, to which we all again listened silently. It was Westfall by Okkervil River. Now, wow. A song about murder and the banality of evil, about a guy who seems completely normal, but just “happens” to kill some random girl (“It was so easy to kill her, I just wanted to kill her again.”). Somewhat hard for me to listen to, as someone who’s unusually sensitive to stories about these kinds of things (I always choke up when reading news stories about bad things that happen to good people, especially children), but there it was. Given my level of trust with the group, I decided to take a risk and embrace my discomfort: Sophia, my character, was the youngest child of Caspian whose mother was murdered 20 years ago, when Sophia was 4. When Caspian slid into dementia in the last 6 years of his life, Sophia took care of him, because she was the only one left. Sophia was currently enrolled in nursing school.
Characters have a couple of traits and two futures that, in the course of the game, they may either embrace or reject. Sophia’s traits were “I take pictures for solace” (some of dad’s artistic talent), “I can see through their skin” (quote from Westfall), and… something less important, I guess, because I can’t remember. Her futures: “I will never go home again” and “I will never have Faith.”
I’m shocked to realize that I have a hard time remembering the other characters’ names. We didn’t use them much, because for a lot of the time we were more acting directly through dialogue rather than narrating, and when I was narrating, I’d usually use “you” instead of the character’s name. It felt more personal that way.
Let’s see. Joe’s character was an artist who had studied under Caspian decades ago. He also was the only non-family member. There’s more to him, but I’ll save that for later. Then there was Julian, who played the oldest son, who carried a lot of anger with him (and had his father’s tendency for passionate outbursts). He had deep emotions but trouble talking about them. One of his futures was something like “My life will always be unjust and miserable.” Yeah, anger. Jonathan played Barry, Caspian’s younger brother, who had fond childhood memories of him–this later caused him to clash with the abandoned sons. And Shaun played another son who’d never even met Caspian, and whose future was “I’ll find out who this man was.” I think he rejected that one toward the end of the game. His main trait was “Commensurate Fuckup”, which just about summed him up. The character had that vibe of being happy-go-lucky and careless to avoid really dealing with anything.
Now, after setup, players take turns framing scenes after listening to the first bit of a song from the mix. The song’s mood, then, mainly inspires what kind of scene we’ll play next. Players are encouraged to bring out their traits and start addressing their futures to either embrace or reject them later.
I felt that our game played out like an art house indie movie. We were a bunch of emotionally troubled people, all linked through Caspian, captives in the crucible of the car. Everyone was initially caught up with their own troubles, which led to some interesting clashes. For example, the other characters didn’t understand that Sophia took frequent breaks on the road to take pictures to distract herself from her loss and to delay the inevitable funeral and thereby the decision point of where to go from there, so they were quite annoyed with her. We soon started to have deeper conversations, all colored by our character’s relationship to Caspian, about religion and art and, most strikingly, parenthood and family. The characters had a huge debate about whether or not people, when they become parents, suddenly must devote their whole lives to their children. Sophia thought that was too much to ask, and some resentment came out that she was stuck with taking care of Caspian for so long. Basically, due to Caspian’s dementia, it was like she’d had a child at 18 that she had to take care of because there was no one else, and that was just thrust upon her.
The two sons soon butted heads, with Julian’s rage burning hotter because Shaun appeared to be so nonchalant about the whole thing. Shaun was trying to figure out who Caspian had been, as the accounts of a genius artist and inspiring professor, absentee dad, and older brother who took Barry fishing when they were young just seemed too incoherent in his head. Ultimately, at the cottages where Barry and Caspian had spent many summers of their youth, the two sons ended up in a fist fight (proving that they both had their dad’s outbursts), while I finally allowed myself to cry on Joe’s shoulder (unaware of the fight going on outside).
The next morning, Julian tried to leave Shaun behind, but we persuaded him otherwise. Shaun was too cocky about that, resulting in more clashes. It was really amazing to see the characters just bounce off each other like that, and I think we all were immersed into the whole thing at least to a certain degree. I surely felt some of Sophia’s sorrow, but also how she worked through it. She figured out that being a family was a choice, and that we didn’t have to repeat Caspian’s. We could break free from his shadow. (So I abandoned “I will never go home again”. Also, a bit later, she made peace with the fact that she wouldn’t have faith; one can have a meaningful life and connections even without that.) I think it helped that we were on our second mix by that time, themed “What Keeps Mankind Alive.”
We had another rough scene where, finally arriving at the town where the funeral would be, Joe explained that Caspian’s painting on display from 20 years ago was the last one he did from his heart, and that it was about suicide. Julian exploded at him, especially when Joe said that after that, the other paintings were all about mortgages (i.e., he painted to support his numerous children financially, even if he couldn’t be there for them emotionally or even just physically present).
At the funeral, Sophia was to give the eulogy. At this point, I felt like she had grown up a lot through the course of the road trip, and I’d learned a few things with her along the way. She began to talk about Caspian, and about how none of us knew all of him. You can never know a person fully, she said, but we can all share and get a better picture of him who touched all of our lives. But Julian jumped up and said, “The only thing we all have in common is that he abandoned us.” His outburst got worse from there, until Julian stormed off and drove away. Joe left as well (each one abandoning “I will learn to forgive him/love him again”).
We mostly left it at that, except with some epilogues: Julian drove our road trip car off a cliff soon thereafter (committing suicide), and Sophia stopped going to nursing school after realizing that she’d been pushed into it by taking care of Caspian.
Now, one more thing, and I’m not sure yet how I feel about this. At the funeral, Joe revealed that his character was the one who’d killed Sophia’s mother 20 years ago, out of jealousy. I had completely forgotten that part of his character soon after the game began; either I didn’t catch it when he first said it, or I just got too deeply into Sophia to remember. So I realized at the funeral that the man who had done this to her was also the man who’d comforted her and helped her overcome her grief, and that happened naturally from us playing our characters, not from deliberately steering it in any way. So, I’m not sure what to make of that yet. Part of me feels bad about that, like it’s some kind of cruel joke on Sophia. Part of me thinks it might say something connected to the part about not knowing people fully, ever, or about getting over the past, or about making choices. In any case, I guess it fits with the art house style we had going. I could see this happen in that kind of movie.
So, we agreed that, while a lot of the characters were in a hole, there was a sense of hope. One can, with the right choices, make their way out. Some manage, some don’t, and that’s part of life. Family is what we make of it.
Alright, that turned out longer than planned. I really want to talk about the fact that, after the setup, we only ever used the resolution mechanic once, but I’ll do that in another post.
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The latter would make it easier for me to add people, if you put the link to your blog or site in your comment.