Teaser Review: C&P

Mike Sands over at Gamester at Large posted a teaser review of Crime and Punishment. Check it out!

Death and Mourning.

This post has been sitting in my pending file for some time, and Chris over at Deep in the Game reminded me that I never finished or posted it.

I remember a time when ending a game was a thing I never looked forward to. I remember, in fact, dysfunctionally digging my heels in hard and resisting it to the bitter, dissatisfied end. Characters are my emotional sockets to the games I play. They are the conduits that funnel my energy into and out of play, and the catalysts which allows me to play hard, right up to the edge, and not get burned. I didn't much trust my GM's to do my characters (or the story) justice in an ending, and that lack of trust was earned in many (but not all) of the games I played.

With the advent of Nar play, where I can push or pull endings of my own instigating, I find myself far more interested in participating in them. I've had a number of big ones over the last couple of years, one of which I talked about over on Fair Game in "The End of the Game", the other was Kika's end that I rambled about in my my push/pull actual play post.

In reflecting on them in recent weeks, I've been musings about character deaths and the preferences of players around them.

I have a friend (who played Dae, the barbarian warrior woman from the that Exalted game) who is adamant when negotiating her social contracts that the possibility of character death is NIL unless the player declares an authorial intention to die. This doesn't stop other players from choosing to receive the grim stabbies, but it means that regardless of her actions in game, her character will not die by any means but by her own out of game declaration.

Now before anybody asserts that this is a dysfunctional, dickweedy, or assy attempt to play without responsibility or consequence I'll pre-empt with this info: I've been playing with this player for about 12 years, and in that time, I don't ever remember a single situation where she spit in the face of death and then refused to die. Despite the fact that I introduced you to her as the player of a warrior, she usually plays social, non-combative characters.

Why the !death rule? Well now, that's a complicated question. I'm not sure I have the answer. I'm not sure she could even tell you herself. I have some theories, though. I may be talking out my ass, here, these are just based on observation and speculation and are not actually from the player herself. She does read this blog though and she's welcome to clarify or expand on anything I put down.

The concept of possibility is very central to her personality. In life, she's not someone who's comfortable with a lot of restrictions. She likes her options open, and she rarely closes doors behind her. She's so taken with possibility that she often finds herself having trouble finishing things. So on one hand, we could make a fair assumption that she doesn't like her characters to die simply because it means the end of the possibility of the character and shutting the door to possibility is fundamentally (as opposed to tangentally) antithetical to who she is.

RPGs are the playground of wish-fulfillment, and this player likes the heck out of that jungle gym. Every character that I remember her playing in has at least some element that the player would aspire to be or have something that the player would like to have (freedom to be uncensored or unfettered, considerable social power), and I suspect that she engages in immersion because (at least in part) it allows her the ability to feel like either she owns the quality (when she would actually aspire to have it) or the freedom to play in the quality tangibly.

There are definately times I do the same thing with my characters. mostly my big spots are confidence and power. I often borrow from my characters the ability to be hotheaded, spontaneous, thrillseeking. I borrow their bravery and courage, their right to live in the world without being morbidly introspective about it.

Is this the manifestation of our imago? Is there a creation and experimentation of the ideal us in the characters we make - even in those that aren't us, or that we don't like? Do we establish our own potential by being in the playground of someone who can, and is this why giving up characters is so difficult for some of us? Do we feel like what we have proven that we can do becomes unowned when a character dies? Do we mourn the loss of that potential when our characters die?

Now for myself, I've discovered that when it come to the end of a character, I actually prefer death as an ending to a living ending, and I had to look at why...

I think that its because unfulfilled possibility is a tragic thing to me, because knowing that there was a character that I'd invested in, that was the locus for such fun is still alive and still out there means that there is still room for exploration, still more to be played. A death means that everything was played out, it means tangible closure. Resolution and reflection are really important to me. I think that when the character dies, I can strike the set like I used to do in theatre and pack the bits and pieces back into me.

Note: I didn't post this so that somebody could start a debate about what's better or worse, or what's functional or not, so don't bother with those. I'm interested in our psychological and emotional attachment to character and to RPG's in general.

Game Chef Hangover

Man I'm tired.

Of course, work would ramp on up the stress the week of Game Chef. I feel like I've been staring at a computer screen for six days solid (oh wait, between work and designing I have). So the game is called Crime & Punishment and it actually got done and sent in on time. Considering that I didn't even really intend to do Game Chef, I think that's pretty good all on it's own.

It's a game built to create procedural dramas in the tradition of Law & Order, Law & Order SVU, Law & Order CI and Without A Trace. It can also be, I think, pretty competently used for CSI shows, but I don't watch them so I am less sure. We had a playtest last Wednesday, and it was a pretty high-engagement very thinky kinda game, which is to say I had fun, but it felt like an RPG boardgame. I suspect, considering the main theme was time, and the kinds of intervals allowed, that this was one of the intents of the competition.

The thing I find funniest about game design, is that I never try and design the kinds of RPG's that I really enjoy the best. I don't think that's very unusual from what I've been hearing from some other folks. Despite that, I find it pretty strange. I guess I build "T" games cause I'm a "T" person and when performing a design activity, I draw on all my "T" strengths. When I game, I become an "F" person. I'm not sure I know how to "T" my way into designing for and "F".

I'll have to muse on this one.

Killing Sinners for Vincent

Over on Fair Game, Vincent Baker and Clinton R Nixon are interviewing each other and Vincent said something that made me blink:

"Nobody I know of has played Dogs and not killed sinners just for sinning."

Now, John Harper at The Mighty Atom has already done this, but I thought I'd throw Jeremiah Wainwright, my first Dogs character into the fray as an example.

Jeremiah's never killed anything, for sin for fun, or for any reason at all. In fact, Jeremiah's got a trait to prove it: "I ain't killed anything my whole life: 1d8."

What's more, Jeremiah's whole premise is about the killing line: what it takes a person to get there and about how much of a man it takes not to cross it before the time comes and how much it takes to make that step when it does.

Through a series of escalating situations that line has been questioned, but the step over has never come. Brand will, eventually, get his ass into gear and run us some more of that campaign (she says, despite the fact that she currently demands 2 other games from him on a regular basis, so is really out of line with that "get his ass in gear comment"), and I am interested in seeing what's the point that Jeremiah might actually have to kill something, or someone, whether or not he'll be able to step up when we get there, and how it will change or destroy him.

There were two particularly memorable moments:

In the town, basically a man's pride in refusing to give his wife children had escalated to a group of women forming a false priesthood, engaging men not their husbands in adulterous acts for the sake of insemination. One of the characters was a mentally challenged wall of a man in his 20's one of those men beguiled by the women. He was angry, and confused, and Jeremiah, knowing August had sinned by fucking his brother's wife, as well as another woman in town, was confronting him to try and get him to understand the error of his ways. Jeremiah talked, August got physical, Jeremiah talked, August got violent, and Jeremiah talked him down, just before things got really really bad for Jeremiah. As it was, he took a lot of fallout from the challenge.

Later, in the moment the murder was coming on, August's mother, a prideful old convert was trying to kill her daughter in law after shooting the Steward who had started the false doctrine in the first place. Jeremiah tried to talk her down, and failing that, escalated to physical (in the face of her gunfire) and managed to eventually make her back down, getting in between her and the muzzle of his fellow Dog's gun. Once again, much fallout, but he never once escalated to violence, never mind gunplay, nevermind killing.

That's not to say he was easy on anyone. People were exiled, their houses were taken, they were put into public service, cut off at their knees in the public's standing.

Brand said afterwards that one of his only dissappointments in the game was, that no matter what he did, he couldn't force Jeremiah tto shoot anybody in the face.