Conversation via comments with Joshua A. C. Newman, maker of Shock:, went pretty well after I confessed to my reasons of disconnection from the game. Josh deserves some serious kudos for how he handles critiques of his game. I know I’m personally inclined to try to look like I’m as calm about negative feedback as Josh is, but having met him I suspect Josh actually is that calm, and I envy his facility with that. Me? It’s a case of making myself act like I think I should, and hoping my adrenal response will chill the heck out and follow suit.
Anyway.
Later on, I talked about melding Shock: and Diaspora together in a particular way that I thought would suit my sensibilities well, and allow some of the potency of Shock: to make its way into a game I’d feel more connected to. This is where the conversation got particularly interesting for me. Some excerpts follow, focusing on the line of thought that brings me here.
Fred: “… the lighter weight crossbreeding I’m proposing here is more about letting the issues exist out in the environment, and allowing players and characters to encounter them at what is perhaps a less breakneck speed, less strictly directed.”
Joshua: “Antagonists are the primary route toward keeping players focused on Issues. They’re the teeth.”
Fred: “That focus is a little too relentless for me, though. Because we’re looking at a relentless collision with the issues, the issues never get to sneak up on me. … Which is why at the end of the day I’m suggesting that embedding the issues in the setting, available to be explored but not constantly clubbing the characters, may be the way to get me my absorbed/sympathetic/identification itch scratched.”
This is a little funny, because I like relentlessness as a general principle in gaming. I like using it to keep the pressure on throughout, pumping up the heart rate all around the table, getting folks leaning forward in their seats, fully engaged and rocking out. So why is this failing for me with Shock:? And for that matter, why do I experience some similar failures in some other “indie” style games?
I suspect the problem has to do with how on-the-nose systems of this sort can be when it comes to the Central Issues Of The Day. I like thematic play — a lot — and hitting character issues hard and heavy seems like a great way to achieve that. But for me at least, that “seems” may exist only on paper. I’m coming to realize that in play, I like my theme when it emerges more naturally, when it’s less forced, or at least when the vector of encountering it is something other than head-on.
Aside from the Shock: relentlessness I’ve already mentioned, I also see this in my play experiences with Prime Time Adventures. There, character issues are truly king. Whatever character has the highest screen presence for a particular episode causes the entire form of play to warp around it. The episode is about that issue, and everything else is in support of it. I like that dynamic for what it does to the sense of cooperative play at the table, but I’m rarely deeply engaged with my play of the game. The issue is out there, very plain, and hitting me head-on all throughout. While there are ideas that will emerge over time, perhaps even with a bit of surprise to them, I’m rarely left feeling like I never saw something coming, and never left feeling like I emotionally connected with what was going on. (Which is no judgment on Matt or the game, remember; this is me and my issues with getting engaged by games.)
So maybe the whole idea of “what is your game about?” turning directly into mechanics isn’t the best idea after all — at least for producing games that I want to play. But actually, that’s not true. I think it’s important to have mechanics for what your game is about … but I don’t think that should be the end point, or even the primary central mechanic of the game. A PTA game that didn’t explicitly demand that the episode place a driving focus on the main character’s issue, with some more scaffolding supporting doing other stuff, might grab my attention more. Ditto for a Shock: game that’s not all about biting me with the teeth that are the Antagonists (who are essentially personifications of the Issue’s need to keep coming right at’cha).
At least, that’s what the conclusion seems to be. It’s worth testing out by looking for games where I have been engaged, and seeing if any can be found that engage but still come right at me with the issues and/or themestuff. And I can’t easily think of them if they’re out there in my cloud of experience.
So I look at Fate. Yes, characters can have their themes and issues writ right on their sheets in their aspect list, but the system also provides plenty of other pieces for doing stuff that’s “off the nose”. Skills get rolled, stunts have their effects, and aspects can come in to use theme and issues to put a little english on the resulting rolls. That’s essentially an indirect effect right there, allowing thematic elements to emerge and nudge the story in another direction without landing on it all like a two ton gorilla. No shock really given my involvement in Fate’s development — and perhaps another indicator of why I feel like I sit on the fence between traditional-game and story-game sensibilities.
I find myself identifying reasonably well with characters in Polaris as well. Here, I think that the strongly tragic theme in the game manages to emerge gradually through the system. Polaris kills you by inches, with structured language resolution that makes every conflict an exercise in bitter compromises. I like this; it feels explorative rather than prescribed. The character’s sheet doesn’t necessarily proclaim Here Is How I Shall Fall.
The real king of exploration and emergence, I think, is Dogs in the Vineyard. Dogs certainly brings themes and issues to play, but it “stats” them indirectly, placing them in the characters’ paths to be explored. Towns are where the moral dilemmas live; as Rob Donoghue has said, they’re akin to D&D’s dungeons, but with goals radically different from kill and take stuff. So here, the issues and themes are environmental. They’ll come along when you come along, and there are no handy road signs saying ISSUES HERE. The exploratory element carries through into the conflict system. You can enter a conflict in Dogs knowing where you’re trying to head, but as the back and forth plays out you may find your agenda changing. Dogs goes gradual on you all over the place, and for me at least, that pays off straight up in emotional involvement.
Though I am not a Burning Wheel headed guy (there are some parts of it that come off as too baroque, and besides, I have Fate), from what I know of it it I can see it gives you plenty of other-stuff-ness to muck around with in addition to the whole passions/issues/whatever things going on. There’s lots of territory to play around in for certain. And given Burning Wheel‘s continuing successes — it’s the tiny giant of the small press scene — I wonder if there’s a connection of some sort between what I’m talking about and the ease of grabbing a larger hunk of mindshare. Though if there is a connection, it’s bound to be tenuous, since clearly a few other “on the nose” games have done well.
At the end of the day, it’s the desire for themes and character issues to matter to the story that comes about, but for their effects and presence to be felt indirectly, that keeps most of my personal RP living in more traditional or traditional-ish (ala Fate) systems. I want the thematic elements of the story to come about in oblique, surprising ways; I want them to sneak up on me. When a system dials its design down to delivering only mechanics and rules which pull out the big theme/issue club and uses it to bash all problems and conflicts, the lack of subtlety gets real clear to me real fast and takes me right out of the moment.
And honestly? I don’t know if my own game Don’t Rest Your Head qualifies for bad or good “grab me”-ness. I’ve run the game far more than I’ve played it, and when I’m GMing I am less about getting emotionally involved with a particular character’s perspective and more about creating an experience. The character questionnaire for DRYH certainly suggests I’m getting the themes and issues right out there and readying ye olde club for the swinging. But I don’t think the system puts a heavy weight behind those. The questionnaire, ultimately, is more about getting the players and the GM into a common head-space and exerting a little spin on the character concepts and stories that result. So from that perspective, maybe DRYH is designed for what I’m talking about after all, at least in the sense that the system only lightly engages with the character’s issues.
But I’d be happy to admit that maybe the game I build is not always the game I want. And I’d love to see more of the latter in the world, games with enough complexity and meat in the other stuff so that the hard-boned skeleton of What The Game Is About has something on it that can really move me.
19 Comments
This whole concept is so incredibly up there in my brane right now as an issue that your blog couldn’t be more perfectly timed.
I really love your blog and your train of thoughts, and chapeau bas for the emotional and business transparency too. I hope you never get tired of writing it.
Need to chew on this.
For comparison’s sake, how does D&D 4e stack up in this scheme? (I’d like a completely trad measuring stick, if you will.)
Hard to say. 4e is a hybrid of so many things. I’ll think about it.
This reminds of something I was reading a few months ago. I believe Vincent Baker proposed an idea he called “the fruitful void” and it’s a concept that’s weighed on my game design thoughts a lot. Basically, the idea is that an RPG supports X and Y mechanically, but the RPG is really about Z. But Z is something that the game never really directly addresses. Instead, everything else in the game leads you towards Z, and the end result is like a black hole: there’s nothing there (in the game text) but all the play is inexorably drawn into that space.
I think you see this in Dogs in the Vineyard. You’ve got towns, and characters and connections, but I don’t think the game ever really states what it is about. Rather, you just enter conflicts are start spiraling around that unnamed thing which is the heart of it. In a Wicked Age is even better for this, but always gets overshadowed by Dogs. I really think it’s Vincent’s overshadowed masterpiece.
For a counter example, I’ve had very bad times with getting my own designs to fly and I think it’s because of the fruitful void. I have a bad tendency to state upfront what I want to accomplish and then putting in elements that dive right at it. I’d actually suggest that is missing the point. Call of Cthulhu isn’t about sanity or loss of it; confronting monsters that damage your psyche instead of your physical body is the spiral that swirls around the stories C0C is good at telling.
Sorry for double post, further clarifying thoughts:
Thinking about Shock in FATE terms, I think I understand what you’re getting at. If you get the players to just put the shocks down, flat out, then the game becomes very confrontational and focused on trying to find those themes. On the other hand, if a player puts elements of a shock onto their sheet as an Aspect, then the game very much becomes about that, but in the manner of the spiral.
Like if we want to do a story about cloning, then I’d suggest that players use Aspects like ‘Born in a tube’ or ‘Genetically enhanced strength’ Then when those come up, the story is about cloning. And I think Joshua Newman is right about antagonists. I could give the big bad a few clone aspects too, maybe make him upset about the cloning. But it’s never the driving thrust of a story, the characters are. We’re just spiraling around the issue.
I end a lot of sentences with “…and besides, I have FATE.”
Seems like we’re on a similar wavelength regarding how we make games we like to play — I wrote something tangentially similar (and striking Josh tangentially as well!) yesterday. As usual, your article is less specific and more interesting, so thank you!
You said:
I’m wondering if there is a disconnect between games-GMs-like-to-run and games-players-like-to-play?
Shock: isn’t and can’t be about Shocks. They’re not themes. It’s much more about Issues — and curiously, it’s about those written down maybe 1/3 of the time.
Everyone here: I’d like to point out that, as players, you spend literally ten minutes with the Grid. There’s an entire game to Shock: that you’re not addressing at all. This stuff that you’re talking about as the beating heart of the game is more like its toes: important for keeping it upright, but certainly not central.
I’ll give a little primer so the discussion can be a little broader.
Praxis are how you get things done. They’re the “stats” of the game, and have everything to do with the characters and how they act. Not what they care about, not their Issues, not their feelings. Just their actions.
Links are people and assertions. They’re what the character cares about as a person. They’re often in tension with the Issue in play. They’re usually people and institutions (unions, religions, philosophies, very occasionally meaningful possessions). You threaten them in a pinch.
Minutiæ and Audience are the players’ sense of humor, given force. They texturize the world and make it a big, unpredictable place. The distribution of their authorship, both random and according to assignment on the Grid, means that the world is bigger than any player ever knows.
The Grid is also used from time to time to figure out who has authority on a topic— it’s for asking someone for little side stories about how things got this way. I’ve never seen any discussion of Shock: hybridization that addresses this, the way you use it most in play. Most of the time they say the equivalent of, “Oh! That object has a steering wheel! Let’s put a steering wheel on this other object so it will change direction, too!” without looking at steering linkages or how a car moves.
And the reason it’s like this is so you have actual protagonists (that is, not just in the technical sense of the game, but in the literary, “character morally and materially opposed by fit opposition”). Considering it, I can see only one possible way that your character wouldn’t be a protagonist, and the entire group would have to be in on the experiment. Your Protagonist might be unsympathetic, might even be a wishy-washy character, but they can’t help but make stuff happen when the chips are down. And by “stuff”, I mean “things that change the world forever”. (Included in that “change” is concretization of the world as it apparently exists.)
Ultimately, Shock: is about what happens to the world, including the *Tagonists. The Protagonists are points of view made complex through their cares and labors, but they’re constructed and played as parts of the world. It’s my particular take on science fiction (and this is where you and I just have different tastes): it’s not about the people. It’s about the world. The people are how we illustrate the world.
Now, I’ve been reading some SF I really like lately that you probably do too: Use of Weapons and Deepness in the Sky, most pointedly. They’re research for a game I’m working on right now called Human Contact, which is much, much more about the characters. In broad strokes, it’s my critique of Star Trek and its trivialization of the earth-shaking social and technological aspects of the series. At its heart is the unspoken assertion in Trek that contact with new cultures doesn’t change the explorer, only the explored, that enlightened society brings civilization to unenlightened society. And to address that, the characters need to be people. So you’ll be seeing some curious stuff from me at some point on the topic.
Shock: on the other hand, will remain about the world. Improvements in the game in future versions may do that better (including making people a richer part of the world), but it will remain about the world, because that’s what it’s for.
Thanks for the reminder on the full scope of Shock: — sorry if I’ve been focusing overmuch on the one part. It was really just a trigger for today’s thoughts.
I’m glad to hear Shock: is about the world, because it’s *really good* at delivering world!
Specifically, about the world crushing people as it changes.
I very much agree with your entire post; thanks for expressing it much more clearly than I would have.
Especially, I like what the game is about to be an emergent property of play, not something decided on beforehand. For me, Dogs is best at that, but I’ve had very good results with DRYH too. While I claim what I’m looking for in a game is illuminating character through making hard moral choices that have consequences, I suspect what I’m really after is “What does it mean to be human?”
The more on-the-nose a game is, the less it suits my tastes I’ve found, but other’s milage may differ and I’m cool with that.
I am brewing up a response in my noggin but it will have to wait a while.
But its-a-comin’.
Is an emotional disconnect bad? Of course I don’t mean one that keeps you from being ‘in the moment’ in the story. I am somewhat of a newbie, but I think if I leave a game and it’s viscerally gripped me and I can’t think about anything until the next session… then I have not hit a healthy balance, because there are other things in my life I should be thinking about. (Just my personal experience here too.)
An emotional disconnect is one step away from not giving a shit about when the next game session happens, if it ever happens, for me.
Of course the far-end extreme you’re detailing on the other end of the spectrum wouldn’t be healthy, but I think it’s a little silly to suggest that it’s the only shade of emotional connection possible.
You watch TV or movies, right? You emotionally connect with them, right? But then you leave the TV room or theater or whatever afterwards and still somehow manage to wash yourself, do your chores, work your job?
Hey Fred,
To a large extent I agree with you. I don’t really like the kind of fiction Shock is rooted in for the sterile reasons you mention. That’s why I was so surprised to discover that I actually enjoyed playing Shock a great deal. It’s about using short stories to drive the evolution of a setting. You invest in the setting, not the character which, like you, I don’t do easily.
I also agree that many games are “too tight” and there’s a lot to learn from games that manage to keep play about meaningful stuff without making the whole engine of play revolve around it so specifically. Burning Wheel, The Riddle of Steel and Sorcerer are all “about” things but give you room to “play” the way some other games don’t. In fact, one of the things I try to tell new Sorcerer players is to go Color First. DON’T define Humanity. Instead think about what Sorcery and Demons look and feel like. What do they do and need? Then when you’re done playing with all that raw *fantasy* ask yourself, okay so what does all this *mean*? That’s your Humanity definition and because you’ve organically derived it from the fun color stuff you won’t ever really need to think about it much in play because it’s built into the very fabric of everything you’re playing with.
Perhaps a bit ironically the problem you’re describing with Shock is the exact issue I have with FATE. Once I’ve built a character I have no desire to play him. His ten Aspects tell his story. It’s done. All that’s left is going through the motions of “Oh, OF COURSE, I’ll follow her blindly after all, ‘I’m a sucker for a dame’, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, take my Fate point for the Compel. And then later, “Hey you know what? I’m going to spend a Fate point to Invoke this Aspect because….” big grin, everyone nods because they already know what I’m going to say and in fact all say it all together, “‘I always charge in FIRST!’” or whatever.
Now, I full admit this is probably an application issue, however, I’ve seen the behavior enough times to really put me off the game.
Jesse
I recognize that risk exists in Fate. And at least in SOTC, which doesn’t take itself too seriously, that probably happens a fair amount. But the non-SOTC Fate I play tends to involve a GM working hard to make compels *hurt* as choices go, the sort of thing you want to consider refusing. Because for me, refused compels, and compels accepted reluctantly, is where the rubber really hits the road. If you’re always having an “of course”, then your GM isn’t being enough of a bastard.
Needless to say, I agree with this right down the line, and did three years ago when we first started talking about this.