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.