Yudhishthira’s Dice

Every time I read part of the ongoing argument about “are RPGs art or not” my immediate reaction is “what the hell do you mean by art?”

See I’m a post-positivist, a social constructivist, and a neo-Marxist. So when I hear the word art I do not instantly think of subjective purposiveness without a purpose, or any Kant, Hume, or Socrates. I think “power.” Art is a loaded term. Art is a word used to give value to one human endeavor or activity above another. Art is a way of saying “This thing is important to my stance on the human social condition and gives/takes power away from the part of society I inhabit.”

This can be anything from Du Bois’s “”Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists …” to the Frankfurt school’s contrasting of “mass culture” with “high culture” and “folk culture.” (The short version of which is “pop” then “art” then “craft” as judgmental terms meant to divide power along class lines – the rich and powerful decide what is art, pop is given to the mass of the middle class, and the things pursued by those without the cultural capital to enforce their taste on a large or marketable segment of society are relegated to the place of “folk crafts.”) For me personally the biggest influence on my thought is probably Gramsci and his take on art’s role in hegemonic distribution. Art, he says as I do, is something that people use in order to make everyone else accept their cultural power plays. If it is art, after all, you are a bad person if you try to stop it, a pig if you don’t understand it, and a bore if you try to dismiss it.

So every time I see these discussions I don’t start thinking, “Well what would Kant say?” I think “Why is it that we do and do not find RPGs worthy of giving them a title of power and prestige?” So I watch the arguments, and look for the power dynamics behind them.

Many gamers who answer “yes” are saying “I believe that games are worthy enough to be given the social position of privilege and power because they are important to my life and I don’t want to feel like a loser. Its art because that makes me important.”

Many gamers who answer “no” are saying “I believe that games should just be fun, and I don’t want to take them seriously. If I have to admit that the games I play might say something about me, then I’ll feel weird.”

So, with all that context, my answer to the question of “are RPGs art” is: “Yes” and by that mean “I believe that games are worthy enough to be given the social position of privilege and power because they are fun and they are play, and fun and play are very worthy things.”

Remember why I titled this blog? Because empires rise and fall upon games. Religions are based around fun and its place in humanity. Games create fun, and they have the potential to do so in a non-commercial*, personal, and individual way. That is wonderful. That is fun. That is serious. That is Art, because I want it to be important. Not because of some real an sich disembodied judgment of quality, but because it is a statement of social construction that I consider worthy of making.

Folk craft my ass.

*Think for a few moments about the folk-craft vs. pop culture vs. art implications of the Forge’s emphasis on owner creation and distribution. No, seriously.

When last I wrote, my Mother in Law (MiL) and my wife’s characters had just ridden onto the scene of a cattle raid. My MiL saw her focus character, her foster son, hanging from the nose of a bull and trying not be gored. My wife saw her clan’s cattle, the only thing keeping them alive, about to be stolen as well as her love interest about to be mauled by enemy warriors. Things had been good up to this point, and then while I’m sitting there grinning like a moron up rushes a brick wall to knock me flat on my ass.

It started innocuously enough, with my MiL saying clearly and (I though) unambiguously “Right now my foster son has to be my first priority. I go to help him.” The problem with this, of course, is that she’s on my wife’s character’s horse – and my wife’s character is going to go straight for the enemy warriors and the cattle. So I up and think, “Great, we can have a contest between the characters and they’ll decide who goes where, and who gets the horse and so on as the stakes.” I start to propose this, and then…

Well, I’m still not exactly sure how it happened. It started, I think, with my wife saying something like “I can’t do that, I have to go to the other place” and my MiL saying “Can’t we do both?” and my wife answering, “No, at least not in time to save both completely.” (Have I mentioned that my wife’s family has a way of talking over people and can be a little verbally aggressive when riled up?) So then I finally manage to interject, “That’s okay, we can just have a contest and the two of you can try to convince or force each other to go where your character wants to go, or to split up and see who gets the horse.”

My MiL then became a bit confused as to why we would need to do this. She didn’t seem to have a problem with the idea of the contest, but was having a hard time seeing the situation and understanding why she couldn’t just save everyone in one action. So I broke the description down a little, used some books to block out threat areas, and tried to give her a better idea of the space – focusing heavily on “The bull is here and the warriors way over there – you can’t get to both in time to save everyone.” She clicked onto that, and then asked my wife what they should do.

My wife, during all of this, was having flashbacks to family games played as a child in which both her and her mother’s competitive streaks (which can be fierce as wolverines) ended up with the two of them getting hostile towards each other. She was terrified this was going to happen again, in this game, if they ended up in a character vs. character conflict. Because of this she decided that she needed to teach her mother that in RPGs you have to think about the other players and work together as players (if not characters) to resolve problems and work out situations.

In the mean time, I’m over in the other corner not realizing how freaked out my wife is (I wasn’t there for those childhood games), and thinking “If we introduce her to character vs. character conflict as something that isn’t a big deal, it probably won’t be a big deal for her – especially if we manage to keep player communication and cooperation together with the character conflict.” So I start trying to explain that when the characters in this game system have a disagreement, we play out a conflict and let the dice decide who wins. At the same time my wife starts talking about non-mechanical (lumpley principle system) ways to resolve conflicts.

The result is that for the next 30 minutes my wife and MiL have a conversation about what is happening, starting to guess at and project along the “if you do that, I’ll do this, and it will cause that” lines to not only a few turns/action in the future – but to the end of the scene and beyond. In the midst of this I was trying to bring some motion back to the game, to downplay the CvC conflict and to just let the characters do what they would do, and to find out what would happen by playing it rather than pre-playing it. If we’d been playing Polaris we probably could have gotten through this – but lacking the ritual phrases and with my wife far more freaked out than she ever gets at the gaming table, it ended up with a lot (LOT) of blocking, second guessing, and me finally running out of patience and saying “Look, it’s been a half hour now, and we’re guessing at everything that could happen. Lets get to the conflict, roll some dice, and see how it plays out.”

Now even at the time I knew this was probably not the best thing, but I’m hardly a perfect man and my patience is limited sometimes. As soon as I said that my wife’s back went up so hard that I could feel it all the way across the room. Her mother felt it too, and though she’d been confused and uncertain up to that point (in contrast to the certainty with which she had started the scene with her declaration that her foster son was the most important thing for her character) she now became paralyzed, not knowing exactly what had happened but knowing beyond a doubt that my wife was very unhappy with me at that moment and probably thinking she was the cause of it.

(BTW, Mo, if you have more to say about your PoV in this area please post about it. I want your side to be stated fully and fairly.)

So we sat there a moment, all very uncomfortable and by this point totally out of the game and the world, and then I called for them to look at their sheets to figure out what they would use for the contest to decide who went with whom and where the horse went. My wife, however, pissed and afraid of making her mother pissed, and probably knowing I was already pissed, stepped aside and had her character leap off the horse so that her mom’s character could use it to go save the foster son. It happened too suddenly, and obviously as a confrontation ender, and her mother was a bit taken aback by the whole business. (Both, I think, because of the social dynamic and because she’d been seeing the game as very much a historical realism/reenactment type thing, and the sudden acrobatics from horse back shook her assumptions about what characters could do.)

At that point all of us, being adults, took a second and had a deep breath, turned the CD back to some thematic music for the scene, and forced ourselves to focus and get a new start. My wife and I would have a talk about the issue later, and not come to an agreement even then, but for the time we managed to put the stuff aside and go with what was on the table. It was still awkward going back in, as at that point we were in the middle of an action scene but were lacking any momentum and with the immediate investment from the start of the scene washed away. I move to my MiL (not as a lab-rat, but just because she was looking the most ready to rock), and described to her the situation as she charged towards the raging bull and her foster son.

At this point, for the first time in the game, my MiL became very concerned about the system. I think it was partly because of the gravity of the situation (an important NPC possibly dying) and even more because she’d just seen some badness in the game and wanted to be sure she had enough understanding of the system to make sure she could do her part to keep it from happening again. I realized, at this point, that while she had a good innate dramatic grasp of traits and keywords and such she really had been playing without having any understanding of how the system worked. She knew to add her augments to her trait, but wasn’t even sure why she was doing that. She knew that they were all used because they all helped her character dramatically, but not why she needed to add them for system reasons. She also didn’t know exactly what the rolls meant or how they worked, even though we’d been over it in the contests she’d done earlier in the game. I realized at this point that I’d made a fairly bad mistake in introducing the system to her because I (a teacher, of all things) had forgotten a fundamental lesson of pedagogy: different people learn differently.

In games in general, and RPGs in specific, we often deal with object oriented thinkers who learn the system best and most comfortably by getting in and playing. Once they start to play and have the system described to them as they work their way through, they get a handle on the components and start to manipulate them – bringing a growing understanding of how the system works as a conceptual model that they have played through. So my (and many GMs) traditional style of introducing newbs is to give a very short overview of the system, then get into play to let them mess about with it and get their mental digits on the conceptual tinker toys. When it works, it works well and avoids boring mechanical descriptions in order to get to the meat.

My MiL, however, is (just like my wife) a process thinker. She works best when she is given a full schema of how a system or process works in an intellectual process model (and often in written form, though they’re both decent audial learners as well). I had never given that to her, or at least had not given her enough of one, and so she was having problems putting the tinker toys together, because I’d never given her the booklet that shows how all the parts fit together, much less explained what it was we were trying to use the tinker toys to build. Because of that the contests she’d already been through had seemed like Greek to her. They didn’t help her learn the system, because she learns by reading/hearing about the process first and then applying experience to the model.

The lesson I learned, as I did a quick process-procedural rundown of the system for her, was that we need better tools as GMs and RPG designers for introducing people with different learning modes and skill sets into RPGs. We’re still, I think, in the post-progamer/computer/math geek days where RPGs were dominated by component and object-oriented learners and have geared much of our approach to that kind of learning process. I suspect that a large number of players have either been kept out of RPGs, or had a much harder time getting into them, because they learn in modes not well supported by either our texts or the “GM Urban Legends” ways that we have been taught to introduce newbs.

Once I’d given her some better mapping of the system (which she still seemed a little uncomfortable from, but which did allow her to use the system in the contest and the next one in the game), we got to her saving her foster son. I asked her, in order to get the exact stakes she was playing with and her exact goal for the contest, what the best and worst things she could conceive of happening were. Thus I got her to describe her total victory (saving her foster son and using the bull to cause a stampede to move the cattle away from the raiders) and total failure conditions (the boy being killed, her being knocked from her horse, and the raiders seizing the bull). Doing this helped me, not just her, understand the goal with more clarity than any of the other goals in the previous contests and to set the stage with a clear sense of urgency when the dice started rolling, as everyone knew exactly what was at stake. I’ve started using a modified version of this when doing contests in HQ in other games – not just getting goal statements, but short statements about best and worst possible outcomes. It works tremendously well for focusing contests. (And thanks to the Trollbabe “free and clear” stage for the idea.) She picks her stats, figures her target number, rolls and gets a Total Success – the first Total Success in a closely matched conflict I’ve seen in HeroQuest. So she saves the boy, stampedes the cattle away from the raiders, and rides free and clear. She’s happy again, both because she had a better understanding of the system, and because she’d won something that was important to her.

My wife, meanwhile, jumps into the middle of the enemy raiders and immediately calls on her “Sacrosanct” ability. My MiL, at this point, says in a slightly exasperated voice, “I didn’t know we could do THAT!” We stopped the game to explain that the stat was part of her Druid keyword – as no one can harm a druid without suffering vengeance from the gods. She then gets a look in her eye as we finish the rest of the scene. My wife beats the raiders, so they can’t get past her to get at the stampeding cattle, and then she threatens to satire them – making them flee in fear for their manhood. They leave behind one straggler, whom Drassal Bull Neck (the strongest warrior in the PC’s clan) is about to murder.

At this point I tell my MiL she’s getting back to the scene, and she and my wife work together to use their female and druidic powers to make the big male warrior back down. Between satire and the “hearth fire respect” of the two women, they back the warrior off and claim the hostage. My wife and I have a quick sequence of exchanges where we switch up fast between IC and OOC, knowing each other so well we didn’t do much to mark the shift between except for our normal mode-shifting body-language methods. A three way debate as to his fate then starts up. My MiL, having heard Drassal talk about blood and vengeance one time too many, up and says “I’m sacrosanct, and a woman, and older than him, and I probably helped birth the nasty jerk.” Then shifts IC and says “Dras, shut up and go away.” She volunteers the stats for the contest without me asking, and Drassal shuts up and goes away like a good little boy.

This struck me two ways. First, I loved the archetypal unstoppable warrior man of all RPGs in history being sent home with his tail between his legs by the dismissive words of a woman. It was one of the reasons I love me some HeroQuest. Second, I was impressed by the way my MiL was quick about picking up the contest this time, and the way she was shifting between IC and OOC. At first she’d been a good narrator, but was unsure about what she was doing with voices and stances. But by this point in the game she was starting to become comfortable with them. Part of it, I know, was from watching my wife and I. She watched the IC/OOC switch up with great interest, and obviously learned from it. However, it wasn’t all that as she never used either mode in quite the same way that we did. She started to develop her own style, and even though I later found out it made her a little uncomfortable as she figured it out, it was a remarkable thing to see.

So with Drassal gone the women face off again. This time, they gear up over what to do with the hostage. My MiL wants to let him go scot-free. My wife wants to geas him and send him back in disgraces. (Drassal had wanted to take him hostage and beat him.) However, just as it starts to look like we’re going to have to either take the conflict to dice or have a repeat of the previous badness, my MiL folds out of the contest – saying that my wife’s character was the expert on inter-tribal politics (being a diplomat and all), and so she had to have final say on it.

This was an interesting little exchange. It was obvious that my MiL had just, on her own and without any real prompting from us (other than talking about their characters profession keywords during char-gen) developed the idea of niche protection in order to avoid CvC conflict. She was in no way upset about dropping the conflict, and in fact seemed quite pleased with the way she’d resolved it, so I didn’t push. My wife, glad to avoid the badness, didn’t either and went on to give the poor captive a satire (during which my MiL said, “Oh, that’s how you do it!” when she saw my wife summarize an artistic performance without actually doing it) before sending him home.

It was at that point that I was sitting there trying to figure out how the enemy clan would react to this – easily taken as a sign of weakness and certainly a blow to their pride in a world where both things are critical – when I finally felt something click. In this type of game, with this system, I don’t have to judge for the world. I do not need to figure out “what a real feudal Irish chieftain would do” or even what I think they should do in order to push the plot in a specific direction. In fact, doing so is harmful to this kind of game. What I have to do is push the NPCs and turn things into contests between them and the PCs. How would the NPC chieftain react? That would depend on the results of a conflict between his pride and vengeful and the PCs stats.

Seriously, when they let the hostage go I went to say “They’ll screw you for that” — but of course, that isn’t how it should work. There should be a contest, then or later, that lets them turn the issue into story meat and push on it the way they want it to be pushed on. This is a setting, after all, in which great works of mercy and vengeance come out of the same characters within pages of each other (seriously, have any of you read the annals of the kings of Ireland?) and the way to replicate that isn’t to decide what is right, but to make it into a contest between moderation and extremism, between compassion and violence. I saw it in big bright letters of fire behind my too-long illusionist and simulations eyes: “These things are contests that lead to questions, not judgments that lead to punishment or reward.”

And lo, the heavens opened. And lo, the clock struck 2 in the morning, and the game ended with the PCs going to gather up the cows while Drassal told my MiL’s foster child that he saw him wrestle the bull and knew he would grow up to be a “great man slayer, skull splitter, brain rainer, blood drinker.” My MiL’s character clenched up, my wife’s character went to get her horse, and the game ended.

I never got to kill of the chieftain, nor have the kin-strife fun.

In conclusion, it was a fascinating and fun experience. Were I to continue it I would probably switch up the system a little – neither my wife or MiL would have any patience for an Extended Contest, for example, as it intrudes the system too much on their way of playing. They are both skilled dramatists, and find much of the “system support for story structure” to be “system blocking creativity” or “system sliding in where I want to do my own thing.” For my wife I can blame this on years of training about what RPGs are supposed to be, but for my MiL it was an honest reaction based on her experiences of the system and of RPing. With time she may have changed, but my gut doubts it.

Next Up: More Actual Play — Brand plays at a Con Game with Simmers and 16 year old newbs and learns how we train each other to play and not play.

Later: Emotional Agenda — putting the humanity back into theory.

So it was, two days after chargen, that my wife, my mother in law (MIL), and I sat down to play Pagan Shore with HeroQuest rules. If you have not read the post about character generation you should read that, then come back here.

It was my plan to run a game that started out simply, with some daily life in the rath to establish some conflict between the Christians and pagans in the town, between the generations that are going and those coming into their power, and between the powerful nobles of the tribe. I was then going to have a cattle raid, which was a common thing in the time, to get some early action and let the characters do a bit of adventure while dealing with family in trouble and the politics of desperation. Then the game was going to kick into high gear as the old chieftain died, and the nobles introduced all started to make their bid to become chief – which would involve politics, religion, sex, and family killing itself. King Lear meets The Book of the Dun Cow. I made a big relationship map with people of the rath fucking and hating and owing blood debts to each other, and the druids and priests and representatives of the kings who were all waiting and eager to jump in and drive those conflicts to fuel their own agendas. All of this is tied to both PCs by blood, love, and family as well as the NPCs they had created to be critical to their character. Good grabby stuff. (If I ever find the notebook, I’ll post it all in Random Encounters.) This was, in retrospect, very much overambitious, but hey, go big or go home, right?

We played the game in the living room of my MIL’s cabin, which is a nice comfortable space. It’s homey and close, and well setup for gaming in general. However, I didn’t have any specifically applicable theme music, and we only had one candle – which nixed the possibility of playing by candle-light or firelight (no fireplace either). Because of this I quickly became aware of how much I’ve come to depend upon things like mood lighting and music for my games. The “other space” you can set apart with different lighting and music is a very helpful thing, and without it I always take longer to get into things and never manage to stay as deeply embedded for very long.

Compounding my slow start-up was my wife’s hesitancy, as she believed there was a lot of potential for badness with the religious themes of the game being played out in conjunction with her mother, and my MIL’s newness to game which gave her a certain level of apprehension that isn’t typical for her personality. As a result we fluttered about and took longer than I would have liked to get started. Finally, however, I found the Lord of the Dance soundtrack – which is at least quasi-Irish – and put it on and started the game.

Those that have played with me can testify that one of my trademarks as a GM is a certain level of poetry in my poses, especially my opening poses. (La Ludisto once referred to it, half in admiration and half in disgust as “pulling poetry out of his ass.” ) So after a moment of focus, I opened the game with a narrative segment that went like this:

“It is a hot wind that blows down the ridge of the eiscirs towards the north and west, and that makes it an ill wind, the wind of the pale lords who ride with black and shining eyes, the lash of their unbound hair singing dirges just beyond the ken of mortal senses. It blows across the caked-mud tracks that in previous seasons would have been streams and over the sere and shriveling heath to howl about the stones of your ancestors’ cairns where they watch you from atop the granite-boned drumlins which guard the lands of your people. It sweeps past the lean cattle and the bo-aires who stand in the meager shade of fading trees, hiding from the hottest summer that even the oldest of them can remember. Eddies catch the dust of the packed earth of the rath’s walls and send them spinning down the streets, where children watch listlessly and adults fret at the length of the summer. It is a lean time, a hungry time, and a hot time – but winter will come, and without luck or blessing, many of the people who you call kin will not see the next spring.”

At this point I took a moment to explain to my MIL what a bo-aire is (a warrior and rancher owing service to the local noble family, a freeman but with duties of honor – much like an English yeoman). I then asked, thinking my wife would answer first, what their characters were about on this day, showing the way they interacted with the tenuously regular life of the rath (the fort that is the center of their tuath, or tribe).

My wife, however, hesitated for a second and without missing a beat my MIL stepped in, and very confidently said (as close as I can remember):

“In whatever narrow shade I can find” (pause as I said it would probably be behind the chieftain’s house, and she took to this idea inventing a porch behind the house that was used by the women of status to do work related to the maintenance of the tuath) “In the narrow shade behind the chieftain’s house, under the rattling eaves of the porch, made of sod and now dry and hard as bone, I am trying to churn butter. The milk is thin though, taken from cows whose dun hides cling to their protruding ribs, and with the heat she pumps mostly in futility, churning up only a thin rim of cream.”

She then looks at my wife and asks if that’s okay.

I was good, and didn’t laugh my ass off. Okay?! I’d never seen a player take a riff off one of my opening poses like that, nor try to throw it back at me. It wasn’t okay, it was exciting and wonderful. Not having played before, I guess she simply took my verbosity as the standard.

My wife just said, “That was great! You did way better than most long-term gamers I know!” I then ask my wife what she is doing, and from a combination of not wanting to upstage her mother, nerves, and off-kilterness she stumbled for a moment or two, and then made up a quick story about a negotiation with a chieftain to the south who she was sent to work out water rites for a nearby river with. She is just returning to the rath to report, and stops at the gate to speak with the gatekeeper, a distant cousin of hers, about what has transpired while she was gone. This worked well for me, as the gatekeeper was a powerful guy in the community, and one of the core folks on the relationship map, and so getting him and his issues in early was all for the best. I introduced him as a bit pompous but generally friendly, but with an overbearing wife who kept his balls in a bag.

We then cut back to the MIL, and who should come upon her unsuccessfully trying to churn milk but the mother of the gatekeeper’s wife – the most prominent and devout Christian in town, who happened to also be of my MIL’s character’s age, status, and rank n the clan. A battle of word ensued which mostly consisted of the Christian trying to alternately bait and shake the faith of the PC, while the village children gathered around to watch the women that were god-mothers to most of them have at it. The other woman said that the reason for the drought was that the pagan gods had no power anymore, and the only way to save the rath was to turn to the Christian God. My MIL, however, would not either be baited nor shaken, but also would not put the woman in her place. She turned the confrontation around and made a contest to tell a story of Brighid (her patron goddess) as a child and how she overcame the strife and bickering of her elders to lead them to a holy state that brought them peace and plenty. My MIL then proceeded to actually tell the story, rather than recount an outline. When it came time to actually roll for the contest, my MIL continued her earlier instance on having/using only the “right” trait. She didn’t care about trait levels, but was very specific about what the name of the trait was and that it fit exactly what she wanted to do. At one point she even suggested that one of her traits, which I thought was fully applicable, be penalized because “it wasn’t quite right.” This, I must say, is something I have never, ever seen a veteran RPer do when playing HQ. They may accept it when I penalize them, but they don’t suggest a penalty for themselves.

Two other things came up at this point. Much as she did a very good job with the story, my MIL obviously struggled with it and (I found out later) felt very much put on the spot. At the start of the story I told her she didn’t have to make up the whole story, that she could just give a simple outline of it, but she passed right over that and went into a sort of “I must say what my character would say” mode that refused any abstraction. Later on my wife would summarize a poem she wrote, rather than making up the whole poem, and my MIL reacted with astonishment and wondered why she didn’t just do that. To be honest I wasn’t sure then, and am not sure now, as all of our talk and play to that point had been sprinkled with OOC summaries, back information given out of character about in character events, and so on. I think there must have been some combination of my MILs storyteller nature that wouldn’t let her back down from the challenge, even if it was uncomfortable for her, and something about really getting into a character in an immersive fashion that got her locked into a channel that she didn’t really get out of until she saw someone else successfully do it another way. From this I have to conclude that the whole “don’t speak out of character or summarize, show everything and tell nothing” aspect of immersive RP that we often blame years of actor stance only RPG guidelines enforcing has some basis in the instinctive mode of play for some (many?) new players.

This was also the first instance of what would become an ongoing theme with the character: she would want to win, but would want all of her victories to be moderate, humane, and unifying rather than overwhelming, crushing, or leadership forcing. She never wanted to prove her opponents wrong or force them (or the onlookers) to accept her as the authority, the leader, or the spiritual center – she always wanted to come to a compromise, to show that there were other ways of doing things, and to leave onlookers to decide for themselves what they thought about things. Needless to say, this is something of a change from the traditional RPGing goal of “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women” and while it was all good and fun, it could occasionally be interesting to adjudicate – as the character’s goals would usually end up requiring what would normally be a minor success or so. However, as HQ’s system depends upon you getting a degree of what your goal was, this either meant that the character had to be less effective because she was asking for more moderate results (if you ask for the world and get a minor success, you get America. But if you ask for a Big Mac and get a moderate success you get a Big Mac without cheese), or having to find a way to swing it around. I started, by the end of the game, deciding that one of her primary goals (which she would never fully state) was moderation and peace – and so that would be part of how successful she was. If she won, she’d win, but it would often be a rough and untempered victory unless she got higher levels of success. Thus if she gets a minor victory over Mrs Christian-face, she accidentally makes her look bad in front of the children, resulting in a pagan win but not a temperate one – but if she gets a full victory she can hold her own, make everyone see both points, and leave everyone to slowly ponder out what they really believe about things. Ironically, perhaps, it started feeling more real than most HQ contests. Really, which is harder – brining massive force down to crush the enemy, or getting the enemy to freely and openly acknowledge your points while getting everyone to honestly question and consider their own emotions and thoughts?

Once the Christian woman had been temporized by my MIL’s major victory, and the children sent off to ponder the mystery of Brighid, the PCs hooked up as my wife’s character rode up just in time to hear the end of the story. They chatted for a few minutes, but as neither player seemed comfortable with that (probably due to a lack of chat-RP experience or focus from my MIL, who was highly story oriented, and from a lack of comfort with the setting and the emotional oddness of playing with her mother for my wife) I moved on with some action. One of the older boys comes running into town, yelling that there were raiders heading for the tribe’s cattle. As loss of cattle = starvation, my wife’s character, who has some warrior/messenger functions to her role in society, gets ready to charge off to stop it. My MIL, on the other hand, decides this isn’t something for her priestess character and goes to make sure the children are okay. I ask her if she wants to be involved OOCly, she says yes, and so I have one of the children tell her that her foster-child was out with the cattle, as he was just now old enough to start watching them with the men. Her character freaks out, chases my wife’s character down the street yelling for help, until my wife’s character finally wheels about, scoops her up onto her horse, and heads for the pasturelands.

The characters then do a cool pose where my wife uses her horses magical ability to ride on water to ride up the river to the pasture, while the priestess puts a flowing silken headscarf on so that it blows out behind her – making them look like a fae lady rushing up the river to attack the raiders. Their dice, however, sucked and neither wanted to spend a Hero Point (though, in retrospect I’m not sure my MIL, or my wife, fully understood how to use Hero Points – which is my fault), so the raiders only ended up hesitating for a moment. I then lay out the scene: the raiders outnumber the tuath’s defenders 20 to 1. The most powerful warrior in the village and the bo-aire that my wife’s character has an emotional connection with are trying to hold them back while the young men, including the foster child, try to get the cows down to the river and along its banks towards town and reinforcements. Just as the PCs ride in, one of the bulls panics and starts trying to gore the foster child – who grabs onto its nose ring and holds on for dear life. So now the PCs are faced with hard choices – save the warriors, save the cattle, save the kid and you probably can’t do all of them.

This is when things get bad for the first and only time in the game. It also gets bad on just about every level, and takes some work before it gets good again. However, I am once again back to 4 pages, and so I shall once again call a pause. Part 3, the Cattle Raid Disaster: filial fears, hostage taking, making conflicts rather than judgments, and Brand’s post game, shall be coming soon.

My wife and I just got back from a 3 week long vacation in which we went to her family’s cabin in the woods. There we laid on the beach, went camping, went to Mackinac island and ate fudge, and played a game with the HeroQuest rules set in the Ireland of Pendragon’s Pagan Shore with her mother, my mother-in-law.

To introduce my mother in law: She’s Irish (very) Catholic and the daughter of a miner. This means she has a rather tough attitude towards life, a sort of no-nonsense practicality, and willingness to cuff your ear that’s right out of a Michael Crummey novel. Despite this, she also is artistic, does photography and painting, and has done work with drama in the past. She had never played an RPG before, nor done any kind of collaborative fiction, computer RPG, or any such thing. But because she always wants to understand and be involved with her daughters she had read parts of the Tribe 8 books years ago so that she could see what Mo and I were writing. Ever since then she’s been trying to wrap her mind around gaming so that she can explain it to her friends, and I finally decided the only way to get to it was to do it. So when we went up, I brought games for my wife and I to play, and some more to see if her mother would play with us.

I have to admit that I had a certain amount of trepidation approaching the game. Though my mother in law has always been exceedingly nice to me, she’s a formidable woman. Plus, the whole concept of playing with ones mother in law was a bit out of the box. I mean, it shouldn’t have been, she’s just a person – and a creative person at that. And yet, I realized that I had not played with anyone over 40 my whole life. I played with my dad once when I was a teen, mostly so he could see what the games were like, but that was while he was still in his late 30s. I was now going to play with someone that was a full adult long before RPGs came onto the market (she would have had a 7 year old daughter before the first D&D set came out), who was mostly focused on education and mainstream activities, and even in her youth was a lifeguard, swim instructor, singer, and very much non-geek. It wasn’t just that she was my mother in law, or a senior citizen, or a non-gamer, it was that she was very much from a different world than I am, or the majority of people I’ve played with have been. I have inducted many non-RPGers in RPGing over the years, but they were mostly young geeks with interest in computer RPGs or something similar. I have also played with kids, but kids are easily lead and often into many of the “geek” tropes that have infested mainstream media, and so have a little bit of geek interest a simmering. Most of the “us” traits that my gaming groups have traditionally relied upon were absent this time, and so I wasn’t fully sure what to expect.

To make it more interesting, she has a thing about violence – in that she thinks that the gratuitous saturation of the media in every conceivable place is disgusting and the product of lazy minds churning out toxic garbage for easy thrills. As we all know the place that violence usually takes up in RPGs (99 pages of combat rules!) this lead to me immediately deciding that I had to use a game that was not in the traditional mold and a system that could encourage multiple avenues of conflict and resolution – not just the big fighty-fight.

I think that she was even more uncertain about the whole affair than I was, and when we approached her about it her concerns mostly centered around how much time it was going to take, and if once she started she’d have to play a 2000 hour long game or not. This is quite reasonable when you consider that the game she has probably heard the most about is my wife’s Exalted game, which has been going on for over 3 years, with games twice a month at about 5 hours each game. I assured her that was not the case, and that in fact I was getting a little weary of long lasting games and wanted to do this as a one or two night deal. Thus reassured we went through the games that I had brought, quickly discarding the vast majority of them as being unsuitable. You’ve never seen Mutants and Masterminds, Exalted, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Unknown Armies get tossed off a table so fast. Honestly, this wasn’t a surprise to me – no geek from her, no love of comics, a distinct distaste for horror, a mild enjoyment of fantasy at best, and a complete unfamiliarity with anime make for a very different desire in RPGs than that which I’m accustomed to. Dogs got taken off, I think, because the she wasn’t a big western fan, and possibly because my wife didn’t so much want to be between the Catholic mother and the Mormon husband in a game about religious judgment. Which is, I must say, totally reasonable. Unfortunately she didn’t identify that fully, and this would lead to issues.

In the end the very Irish Irishness of those sitting around the table lead to us picking Pagan Shore, which I proposed running with HeroQuest rules as I’d somehow forgotten to bring Pendragon. The was probably partly on purpose, probably, as Pendragon is very focused on the knightly combat aspects and even with the passions and traits doesn’t give as good of coverage to the other aspects, but I can’t remember if I ever made a real decision about the issue or just didn’t bring the book. My wife and her mum were familiar with Ireland, having been there multiple times and still having family there, but not fully familiar with the time period. So we spent an hour or so talking it over, with me running down the basic themes and conflicts: the old vs new, pagan vs Christian, the independent tribes vs the growing septs and confederations, the instability of Irish law especially around succession to the chieftain’s throne, and so forth. We decided to set the game in Ulster, as that’s where they have family and had spent much of their time in Ireland and so would at least be comfortable with the geography. My mother in law had also spent a couple of days in a historical-recreation rath, and so had a good idea of what common life during the period looked like. With this, and the help of the pictures in the book, we got started on making characters.

My mother in law immediately proclaimed that she did not like the nasty great septs, and wanted to play an independent tribe who were struggling to not bow down. My wife and I were all along with this, and so I asked about religion – figuring that we’d end up playing members of a Catholic/Christian tribe. But no, my mother in law immediately identified that she wanted to be a pagan and to be opposed to the nasty Christians. At this point I felt a faint alarm in the back of my skull, and looking over at my wife asked her if she’d be good with that. She squirmed, said yes, and we moved on. The thing about it was, she wasn’t alright with it at all. She just didn’t want to get into why in front of her mother, and so went along with it. I knew parts of this, and so when the whole aspect of paganism vs Christianity came up I felt a twinge. I should have followed my instincts.

LESSON TO BRAND: Playing with family can bring up issues that people are not comfortable dealing with. Extra sensitivity is required.

The process of creating a character was interesting. Almost immediately my mother in law dove in with some very clear ideas she had about the character she wanted to play. She wanted to play an older woman, established as a figure of respect (but not deference) in the community but who was still physically capable enough to “get into it” if necessary. After that she spent about 30 minutes building up a story about how her character was a wise-woman of some kind who had a child that died years ago. She found a child at some point, under mysterious circumstances, and started to raise the child as her own in order to make up for her guilt over the death of her actual child. She quickly then added that she wanted the focus of much of her characters conflict to be through and about the child – her character was strong in her ways and the pull wouldn’t be about her changing or not changing so much as it would be about her guiding her adopted child in a semi-representative way showing how mothers and the women of a community guide (and fail to guide) the future of the community and the choices that children make. She further developed her take on the religious struggle: her character was not adverse to many of the ideas of Christianity, and did not think that “the religion of her mother is perfect, it can be improved, but the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater.” When I asked her if she wanted to deal with the difficulties of syncretism she said yes, but with the caveat that she wasn’t interested in converting, but would be interested in seeing how people with all the best intentions make their choices in the face of overwhelming change.

It was fascinating to watch the process of her mind at work on this character, because she approached it from a full opposite of how most experiences RPers do. She didn’t start with numbers, or with background – she started with conflicts: identifying where her character was pushing and where she wanted her to be pushed back. From there she developed background and personality, and pretty much ended up letting me fiat her numbers. After we finished she told my wife that she was worried she had taken too much of the story away from me, and that it was going to be all about her character. The funny thing is that by the time she was done making her character I had more gameable ideas and bangs running through my head than I’ve ever had for a more traditional character. I think some part of my mind had been wanting to run an RPG set around communal conflict, with an emphasis on women’s rolls for some time, and had traditionally been denied the outlet by the adventure-male-freebooter model traditional to RPGs. This character fell right into a role that guys like John Kim talk about as being difficult in most RPGs, but which worked perfectly in this setting and with a system that could give weight to the traits that such a character would use to effect the setting through the game rather than just by GM fiat.

Also, while she wasn’t concerned much with the numbers of the game system, my mother in law was very concerned about the specific words used to describe her traits. A word that was close, but not exactly what she was looking for was never good enough. Each trait had to be exactly and specifically worded to give the proper connotation of her character. At one point she was coming up with a trait that generally reflected her ability/personality/community position that allowed her to stand up for what she believed with the weight of feminine communal power behind her. We spent almost 20 minutes on this one trait, going through ideas for names from “overawe” to “generative force” and “pillar of the community” only to have her veto them one after another. When I suggested that we just write down “strong willed leader of the community” and come back to it later, this was also vetoed. Her mind had seized onto the trait and couldn’t let go of it until it was right. This, BTW, explained a lot to me about the way my wife creates characters – it’s pretty obvious that she inherited her specificity about language from her mother. Finally, after much ado, we came up with name “Hearth Fire” which played into the characters association with the cult of Brighid, the matronly control of the hearth, and the idea of a fire that warms and has the strength to build a community without being blinding or burning. This kind of specificity would come up again in play. In both cases it was clear that to my mother in law what was important was not the rating or numbers of the trait, but the definition of character that the name and style of the trait gave her. I would, by the end of the play session, come to think that there was a degree to which some level of that pov is needed to make HeroQuest work.

After all the work on my MIL’s character, my wife says to me, “I think I want to play an Eachlach who is also a bard, and does satires.” I say okay, and tell her he keywords, and she writes them down and starts coming up with a list of her non keyword abilities. Her mother starts and says with a degree of apprehension and annoyance (somewhere between “did I do this wrong?” and “what the hell was that?”) “So I spend an hour working on my character and she says five words and is done?” It took some time to convince her that no, my wife wasn’t done, but that she was fleshing out her character on paper and she and I were going to talk about her character’s conflicts later. In retrospect I think I should have forced my wife to do this more transparently, so that her mother could see the similarities and differences, but at the time it was getting on to 1 in the morning and I wanted to let her get to bed.

We quickly did the numbers for both characters, which in both cases mostly consisted of the women letting me tell them what levels they should take things at as they both saw their traits as being more important than the level of their traits, and then my mother in law went to be while my wife and I went to the beach to talk about her character’s conflicts. She ended up playing an Eachlach, which is the special messenger, diplomat, and spy of a chieftain who was also a bard famous for her satires. This position put her in something of a bind between the place of men and women (as she is a woman who is also a warrior and traveler, in a social position that normal women of the time would rarely have considered and that men often reacted with mixed emotions towards), between the world of politics and religion, and between the chieftain and the people. I found the contrast between her character, who was a woman in a moderately male role who got her power partly through the patriarchal structure of the clan (and partly on her own abilities, given by the gods and semi-separate from social ties), to be a powerful comparison/contrast with her mother’s character whose status in the clan was fully related to being a mother, a skilled priestess, and an established woman of the community.

Two days later we played, but I’ve gone long on this one, and I’ll save that for a second post.

At one point I’d been toasting ideas about the Game Chef’s competition, and got onto the historical angle and started futzing. I never could tie in another element, and I was so freakishly over-busy with projects that pay me that evil money that I couldn’t focus on it. I did, however, come up with this short sketch of an idea that I may develop into something useful at some point.

STRIKE!

An RPG set around one of the wildcat strikes of the late 1800/early 1900s that emphasizes the hard choices made – safety vs power, family vs self, and so on. There is inherent conflict in any strike situation, and doubly so in those early strikes, so there is lots of rich thematic material to be mined. For the miners there is the issue of risking everything in order to get an incremental gain, for the owners the issues of money vs responsibility (especially in cases like the Pullman strike where the owners had shown themselves to have concern for their workers and to be somewhat socially progressive for people of their class and time). For the government there is the ever-present violence and repression against freedom and protecting the people, and for the community as a whole there is the whole host of issues around developing economies, clashing ideologies, and hegemonic domination.

PCs could be set up to be on opposite sides, one of them working for the union, one of them representing the wildcat strikers (this can be divided – one representing the locals, another representing the general cause of unions probably with socialist/communist/anarchist leanings), another representing the corporation, another the families of the community, another the government (and/or the army), a newspaper, and so forth. Then each would have to have a lot of mechanical pressure to not just “be nice and get along” – something to push and spur the conflict.

The Army guy knows that if he can push the situation to violence and the resolve it well, he can get a promotion to general – which will never happen if there isn’t a confrontation. It may well be his last chance to make the big leap.

The newspaper guy knows that no one wants to read stories of peace, they want the mud and blood and bomb throwing anarchists facing off against tight fisted corporate fat-cats. He has no interest in the truth, but a lot of interest in getting a story that will get him out of the basement and into the lead reporter seat.

What about a system where you get points for hitting goals, and at the end (if you’re alive) the number of points you have determines what you get? So if the army guy has lots of points he becomes a general with a job in Washington, if he gets middle he becomes a general but in a nasty place, if he gets low he gets nothing, if he gets really low he gets court-martialed and shot. The union guys can get things even if they don’t get it for themselves (being dead or in jail or having not made the company back down) – the points they get determine how their families are treated and how they push forward the cause of unions elsewhere.

Set up a circle of characters so that the sides get played out. Like if there are two then you have to have the wildcat and the corp. At three add the community, at four add the army, at five add the newspaper, at six add the anarchist, and so on. This could be more flexible, but should be set up so there is always conflict.

There should also be a “turn taking” mechanism that allows the players equal chances to gain points. That way everyone has a chance to either get points or block others from getting points. It should also encourage replay in the “what if the army wasn’t in this one” mode. For example, you should get two different games if you have the corp, the strikers and the community than if you have the corp, the strikers, and the army.

Articles:

The Pullman strike is probably one of the best models, as the issues of both sides can be clearly seen and defended. The massacres (such as Ludlow) are more weighted, and so can be used for fodder but probably not for the main conflict.

The Pullman Strike
The Homestead Strike
The Ludlow Massacre