{"id":34458,"date":"2016-09-17T13:28:07","date_gmt":"2016-09-17T17:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34458"},"modified":"2016-09-17T13:28:07","modified_gmt":"2016-09-17T17:28:07","slug":"rutskarns-gminars-ch7-the-gamesbow-8-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34458","title":{"rendered":"Rutskarn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s GMinars CH7: The Gamesbow 8-10"},"content":{"rendered":"

With this miniseries, I hope I’m demonstrating how important a game’s rules are. Mechanics direct and shape gameplay on a profound level. The first few games we talked about stretched their rules across the entire world, for GM and players alike, and asked the player characters to be essentially plugged in <\/em>to an objective framework. The middle games demand only creativity and initiative of the GM and reserve almost all of their rules for players to interestingly <\/em>determine success and failure. Now we’re onto the latter games, where the rules define how the players tell the story–and the GM doesn’t exist at all.<\/p>\n

Mist-Robed Gate<\/a><\/strong><\/em> (2008)<\/p>\n

The elevator pitch for Mist-Robed Gate: <\/em>instead of dice, you use poker chips and a knife<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Seriously. Mist-Robed Gate <\/em>is a wushu RPG that’s all about dramatic, symbolic gestures, and one of these is that the pace of the game is dictated by how visible, accessible, and in-use <\/em>the real, actual knife <\/em>in the center of the game is. In purely mechanical terms, there’s a sort of “tension level” that increases as characters take decisive actions, with higher tensions levels both allowing <\/em>and demanding <\/em>that character actions have serious consequences. In not-purely-mechanical terms, the “tension level” is a goddamn knife. <\/em>It starts the game covered. Then you uncover it. Then you unsheathe it, or unfold it, or however your knife works. Then you stab character sheets. You actually stab character sheets in this game. <\/em><\/p>\n

I can’t promise you’ll love MRG<\/em>, but I can promise you that after playing it, rolling to see if you climb a 45-degree slope successfully will lose some of its luster.<\/p>\n

It’s also worth talking about how the game resolves its central wushu combats. Players don’t roll anything–they simply narrate back and forth, describing how they counter and return each attack, how they use the environment, etc. The other players vote on who they think should be winning by dropping poker chips of the player’s color into a bag. Ultimately, the winner is decided by a random draw from the bag. There are several games that frame combat as performance, and define success by the skill and appeal of the narration, but Mist-Robed Gate <\/em>is one of the few I’ve encountered that does so for relatively serious drama–as befits a more solemn wushu epic, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon<\/em>–rather than Western pulpish shenanigans. It’s an interesting and nearly wholly unique experience.<\/p>\n

Fiasco <\/a>(2009)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Fiasco <\/em>is designed to create self-contained stories where a broad cast of eccentric people get themselves into bad situations because they’re bad people. As these bad people realize their ship is sinking, they try to make things better–badly. If you’ve seen a Coen brothers movie<\/a>, you’ve got the basic premise.<\/p>\n

What’s interesting is that Fiasco <\/em>doesn’t waste much time explaining this idea to its players. It manages to get across the basic idea solely through its mechanics.<\/p>\n

Players begin by choosing a prewritten playset. Every playset is designed around a premise; they range from fantastical, like “You’re adventurers who’ve just killed a dragon and now you’re bringing the loot back to town,” to mundane, like, “You’re a particularly quarrelsome homeowner’s association,” to historically grounded and frankly dark, like “It’s the day of the Kennedy Assassination.” More importantly, playsets contain information for character creation, which in Fiasco <\/em>is a very creative and communal process. There’s no stats, there’s no skills–there’s just relationships, which are defined as the group distributes items from a long list of places, qualities, and objects. These are unique to the playset and are usually as specific as possible–players might share the “need” to “get out of dodge before the heat comes down,'” the “item” “a bloody golf club with Dickie Harrisburg <\/em>engraved on the shaft,'” etc. Players use these relationships to figure out who their characters are and how they fit together.<\/p>\n

From then on, the game is broken up into “scenes.” The rules explicitly allow scenes to be out of chronological order, to be short or long–there’s very few constraints. Scenes are nearly entirely improvisation on the part of the players, who might play characters in the scene or might provide a little GM service (“The rain’s coming down hard,” “There’s a knock on the door,” “Suddenly a shotgun goes off,” etc.) There’s only three things that must be defined:<\/p>\n