Indirect

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.