Macchiavelli in Play?

I’m sure I’m not the only player who picked up Vampire when it first came out way back when, read through the material, thought it was so interesting and different than what had been going in gaming, and then sat down to discover I had no idea how to run or play the political intrigue that supposedly drove the game.

And it crossed my mind there might be a way to structure those interactions a little more.  The biggest thing is to give political and social bonds some sort of mechanical weight.  Here is a basic idea:

Social conflicts always have enduring consequences.  If you lose a battle of wills, you get a consequence recorded directly onto your character sheet regarding your relationship to the winner.  That becomes a demand your character must meet or pay some resource to ignore (back in the day, Willpower).

Ideally, over time, there would emergent tensions in those consequences, perhaps even to the extent that a single player would have conflicting injunctions. 

Some extra fiddly bits might be useful, like giving the victorious character a pool of resources they can offer their subject for following their injunction.  That sets up a follow and get rewarded or disobey and have to burn resources.

Of course, any given player should have a limit on how much bounty they can distribute in a single session, so that a player with lots of social power is in the position of having to play favorites.

Classroom Deathmatch, Hacks

So I played Classroom Deathmatch last night.  It was good fun, though I dare say it dragged a little toward the conclusion (that, though, may have had as much to do with the constrained amount of time we had to play as anything else). 

The basic concept is fairly dark (only one student gets out of the deathmatch–or, in our case, no student) and the mechanics very simple.  It’s a round-robin format, with a GM-lite figure called the ‘Superintendant.’  Narration rules are clever.  You never get to narrate the results of your actions, they are narrated for you by other players depending on whether you succeed or not.

Perhaps the most brilliant mechanic, though, is that every character comes into play with a random item, some terribly obvious in their use (throwing stars, guns), others a little less so (spray paint, morphine).  It’s playful and inspires creativity.

As an aside, it did seems like it was a little too easy to succeed and failure was an aberration.  That may have had to do with luck, but I suspect it also had to do with the low attachment you have to a character.  It’s pretty easy to burn their resources quickly because, well, it’s pretty unlikely they are going to make it through too many rounds of play.

Narration is a little amorphous in terms of how much to narrate at any one point, so it became pretty easy to end almost every narration with a character’s death.  Since there are 50 characters to go through, that’s not such a bad thing, but still, there is something not quite satisfactory about that pacing.

Which leads me to think about tweak play next time we try the game.  Most of these are aimed at making it a little easier to sustain small stories around the characters.  Ideas:

Targeting: make it harder to kill a character in one narration.  Require a player to be targeted before they can be removed from play.  It would be a simple mechanic.  When a player has been successfullt targeted, set a coin, tails up, in front of them.  The next time the player gets a turn, they turn it heads up.  At the conclusion of their turn after that, they remove the coin. 

So long as there is a coin on their character, they may be removed from play by a single success.  It would be interesting, too, if the targeting player then gets to narrate say, any two elements of the targeted player’s scene, thus driving them a little, almost as if chasing them.

Deferral: Give each player (not character!) three tokens.  At any time, after someone has narrated their character’s death, they may play a token and renarrate the scene so that their character survives.  Every other result must remain the same, though the details may vary.  Begin narration, “so, you see it going down clearly in your head like this, but…”

Variable Population: I’m not sure what the right mix would be, but for the evening of play we were looking for, 50 was a little too many people.  I would think abot shaving the population down to 20 or 30, esp. with the hacks in place.

The Roach and Rabelais

Because I hate to let the blog lie fallow for too long at a stretch, I wanted to throw out a little thought that has been working around the back of my head.  It’s simple, really, an observation about how I play the Shab al-Hiri Roach.

I play the Roach like something between a cross of Rabelais and tragedy.  The mechanics all but guarantee that the characters will be victims and the color helps cement that.  The characters are people cast into a maelstrom of ill will, subject to the grossest whims of chance, and capable of being degraded beyond their control, through the agency of a mere bug, a bug that crawls into their bodies.

But it’s more than just that awful tragedy, though.  The mechanics of the Roach cards, with their injunctions to eat and copulate, to conquer and enslave, emphasize the sheer meatiness of the characters, their appetites, their physical presence, but as objects, as things to be consumed.

The brevity of the mechanical contact to the amount of game play enhances this, giving each scene drastic variability.  The single draw of a card, the single roll of a die, shapes the entire scene and its aftermath. 

There’s comedy that can come of that.  But beneath that comedy there’s a fear, a fear that drives the comedy.  It’s a vision of a world where hope and despair are mere accidents of chance, where people are mere containers, vessels, for animal hunger, where people can become awful things wearing the tatters of their humanity like shame.

Little Bits of Character

I watched Babylon 5 The Legend of the Rangers tonight.  It’s pretty solidly grade-B schlock, the sort of movie in which everyone does just too much talking, as if you might not get it if they didn’t spell every development out.  Pepper liberally with plot holes, corny dialogue, and plot devices cribbed from a half-dozen or more iconic films, then serve.  

There was this particularly awful scene when they are introducing the audience to the cast.  The crew of the ship passes this star around, each saying their name, their job, and their ‘truth.’  Truths include such gems as “I’m looking for something” and “I came to space by a difficult road” and “I live to serve and serve to live.”  It would have been nice if those truths had had any bearing on the show. 

But!  The concept might not be terrible in a roleplaying game.  It would be nifty if, at character creation, players gave their character just such a generic, vague ‘truth.’  Mechanically, it would be something a player could invoke once a session with the understanding that the outcome of the conflict would lead to an increased specification in the truth.

After it had been specified a number of times, it would have to be resolved, perhaps requiring the character’s exit from the game.

When invoked, it should provide the player some concrete bonus over the entire course of the conflict.  If the conflict is lost, the player (or GM) to whom the player lost the conflict should get to add a new specification.  If the player wins, they should be able to add the next layer of specification.

Ideally, play would be driven by those truths, with sessions established to develop one or two players truths at a time, giving them reason to want to invoke them.  Perhaps some other layer might be built alongside that, to make sure that truths remained a primary currency in play.

I’m not sure what that might be, maybe something simple like fan mail currency for play that hits those truths well.

(This is, for the record, a modification of a mechanic found in Jason Morningstar’s 2007 Game Chef entry, Grover Cleveland).