[The Quiet Year + Chronicles of Skin] Drawing on paper

[Ron Edwards]

Sarah and I played The Quiet Year, and intrigued, I saw an opportunity to try Chronicles of Skin, for which Mark and Brian joined us. They're both games with a high, birds' eye view perspective over a landscape or map, playing through several phases of cultural change. The Quiet Year concerns the aftermath of a brutal war before the onset of "the Frost Shepherds," whoever they may be. Chronicles of Skin concerns the origin and events of a long-ago civil war. (It's sort of interesting to consider playing first Chronicles, then Year as a sequel drawing upon the details established in the first game, although it's not really consistent as Skin assumes the victory places the winning side in power for a very long time.)

The most immediate similarity between the two games, though, is the role of drawing a map. In The Quiet Year, you draw a map on a blank page, mainly sketchy geography to start, then symbols or filling in geographical details, both "discovering" things that were suposed to be already there, or making changes based on events. The prompts for doing this come from working your way down a deck of cards.

The Quiet Year is pretty abstract, as the cards provide nothing but conceptual bullet points which must be given their full SIS identity by the person speaking. Aside from the relentless march of the deck, the mechanics have an extremely light touch in terms of deterministic content. For example, when certain kinds of  in-game conflict occurs, the players have speaking roles, and that's it - no resolution as we ordinary see it. Or, you grab little red skulls from a common pool as a function of how socially tense things seem to you, and you can put them back at will later ... and they have no mechanical impact otherwise at all. (Callan, this seems a lot like the Marks in Diary of a Skull Soldier too.) The ending is mechanically prompted but also completely vague, as we know the Frost Shepherds end the year, but not what they are, what they do, or how that has anything to do with a fate for the community.

Chronicles of Skin is pretty concrete by comparison, although most of the rules-based prompts offer a deliberately broad range of interpretation. A lot of stuff is provided by name: the two cultures, components of symbols, names and certain in-setting positioning information about the characters ... but again, what the named things actually are are still left up to individual narration and interpretation. It's also mechanically more consequential, with draw-resolved conflicts and similar things, and with the pile-up of dead bodies from the seize-your-guy Puppet mechanic ultimately playing a role in the outcome of the war.

The one thing that I wasn't sure I'd like in Chronicles is the "designate the player who played the theme best" mechanic, but as it turned out, I think it was more focused than the weary "extra experience for the best role-player" gimmick, and there's a lot of room for it to jump around the table.

And the thing which sort of squicked us during play was the closing of a chapter in which the winner narrates what wonderful traits and virtues led the winning side to win - it seemed horrid and triumphalist until the realization hit that we were talking about what the winners absolutely would say. So the only people who know the reality which the retrospective, self-congratulatory narration is covering up, is us - outside of the SIS. 

Anyway, this post is reading too much like a review and I want to talk about the key creative point they share: drawing stuff together, both as a result of what just happened or as a productive prompt for what might happen next. I wish it'd happen more - something in between the finished, perfect, this-is-it fantasy map as a starting point, and an empty page with "I dunno" as the prompt. It has everything to do with building the setting in a Sorcerer & Sword game, for instance.

Best, Ron

[RangerEd]

As I get older and my friends and I continue to diverge in areas of expertise, I am left to wonder: how does a group converge (agree) with what is acceptable and realistic-enough content for story creation without agreed upon resolution mechanics? My question may come out of a simple lack of experience with minimalist-rules games, but I suspect the answer has something to do with a variable reliance on the CA. Do you think story-based games with minimal rules rely more on CA?

[Ron Edwards]

I think rules are always rules. By which I mean the procedures by which we make things happen in the fiction, what I jargonize as System. There isn't any such thing as "more" or "less" rules, non-intuitive as that may seem.

If the group knows how to use the rules (and again I am not talking about the compendium of stuff in a rulebook), which may or may not entail one person being the go-to-guy for details, and if they are happy with them - no matter how complex! - then they experience and perceive them as "transparent," "simple," "out of the way." We beat this to death with a stick at the Forge in investigating that holy grail of transparency, to discover that it is always and only a matter of the group liking what they're doing.

That's why I am really uninterested in simplicity vs. complexity for the rules. I do care about elegance, which may be found in very simple rules-sets (The Pool) or very complex (HeroQuest), and absent in very simple rules-sets (Wushu) or very complex (Shadowrun).

--- big aside ---
I've said this twice already, but the rules text is more often than not a confounding factor. Lots of games, AD&D first among them, are played with a System at the table, which works, and with a social identity which fetishizes the presence of a given book at the table, but aside from proximity and some verbal markers ("armor class," "Hand of Vecna"), the connection between them can be so tenuous as to be ultimately imaginary.

Ideally, we'd be talking about rules texts which both instruct and are utilized in functional ways for play at the table. If that's what's going on, then everything I talked about above does apply to "the game" (the published text) as well as to play. Otherwise, though, it's intended to apply to play alone.
----

The reason I went into that aside was to avoid pointing at books in the absence of play as a way to refute my point that rules can't be separated into simple ("minimal") vs. complex, only into elegant vs. non-elegant. And even non-elegant rules-sets can appeal to a group for a number of reasons, although I find that in practice they are doing something more elegant at the table than is found in their book.

And finally, to get to your question: there is no such thing as a game without resolution mechanics. Even if the single rule is, "Bob says what happens," then that's a resolution mechanic, with a designated time to be used, designated starting/stopping points, and a range of acknowledged effect upon the fiction.

I'd like to address the question on your mind, but I fear it may be a blind alley that your mind is careening toward. Maybe I misunderstand your question ... it would help very greatly, as always, to frame it in terms of actually playing games with real people, using genuine events to show what you mean.

Best, Ron

Best, Ron

[RangerEd]

Hmm, yes, I see your point about imprecise terms. This site has an unusually precise taxonomy. Intersubjectivity is important for productive discussion, but it is a steep learning curve for new folks.

My question could be restated: do explicit resolution mechanics in a rule set and implied resolution mechanics in a CA complement one other, in that one must cover for the other? Restating the question in this way answers the question in my mind, and feel like withdrawing it. I suppose I was looking to confirm a particular understanding for the role of CA.

[Ron Edwards]

Regarding a steep learning curve, you should have seen the Forge ...

Anyway, what jumps out at me from your restated question is "implied resolution mechanics in a CA." There aren't any. What a CA implies, or rather states explicitly, is only the kind of enjoyment being expected, shared as effort, or produced (especially the last).

That's not to say that resolution mechanics are irrelevant, but resolution itself is one of the subroutines of of reward mechanics, and should be understood - and judged effective or fun - in that context. Therefore, for instance, saying "we don't roll! we talk!" as some indicator of Narrativist priorities is grossly mistaken as an expression of the idea, and, in my experience, it's usually factually false as well.

Better to consider what larger cycles or processes the resolution is embedded in. In a game like the ones I'm thinking about most at the moment, such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess, character death is a potential feature (not ruiner) of play. So resolution in terms of saving throws or rolls to hit is a subroutine of "make it through this combat round or not," itself a subroutine of "live or die," and all of that embedded in "level up or not" at a larger time-scale. So the question is whether the single d20 and the Mentzer-by-way-of-Raggi use of armor class is effective in that context, compared to ... oh, I dunno, the system described in the Holmes D&D of 1977, or THAC0 from AD&D2, or shifting to d100 and critical tables like Rolemaster, whatever, the point is whether that particular roll and the expectations surrounding its use (what I called search time and handling time, for instance) can play an instrumental role in those reward processes without gumming them up. I should also stress that leveling up, one of the great big reward mechanics, does feed back significantly upon that roll's effectiveness for fighting characters in that game.

[RangerEd]

Ron,

Wow. Explaining resolution mechanics as a subroutine of reward was a big mental break over point for me. I suspect you wrote that exact thing somewhere else, but I failed to adequately understand it when I read it then.

By exposing me to The Quiet Year and Chronicles of the Skin, you have broadened my idea of what roleplaying can be. Although the exposure is limited to reading their websites and watching the posted links, I can easily envision a situation where I bring one of these games to the table for a game with my friends or a meetup group and having them reject the game in short order. That makes me sad.

Thinking more carefully about what may cause such divergence in the willingness to accept a game, I return to another rephrasing of my question (allowing ignorant people to ask a question can be annoying, because they often cannot ask the right question, sorry). What part of your theory might explain players of a game being unable to visualize an imaginary person (a character with motivation) well enough to interact with a setting (create story by triggering events) without a requisite number of specified mechanics?

My friends, having been exposed almost exclusively to D&D-like games, must have D&D-like character stats and mechanics or they struggle to role-play. What actions might I consider to help broaden their horizons such that I could buy these games and expect them not to occupy a brown box in my basement? I do not accept that there is nothing I could do, but showing up with the game probably won't work without a specific approach to help them have fun.

Ed

[Callan S.]

Hi Ron,

(Callan, this seems a lot like the Marks in Diary of a Skull Soldier too.)

That's still a sticking point? Good - it's kind of a mark itself...

I remember a actual play thread on the forge about someone who went ballistic when his PC's ears were cut off. There was a great deal of sympathy in the thread for that, regardless of what position folk took.

And yet - marks do not touch that stone? I mean push a pin through someones tear duct, wiggle it around and you might as well have killed a person, even as their heart still beats (and potentially created another (brain damaged) person).

Marks are the pins of circumstance, driven home. The human brain just doesn't have much sense of itself, for when it is attacked/damaged (take Aton's sydrome patients, who are perfectly blind but will time and again insist they can see and will confabulate evidence of such) - we get the cutting off of ears. But the brain? (BTW, check out the three pound brain blog for anarchy and cog science horror. It's by that Scott Bakker author guy. Learn 'fun' anecdotes like the Anton's syndrome one! :) )

I grant I did not contact the cultural touch stones to get across what marks are. Perhaps if I'd made a version where it's all about bodily disfigurement like the ear cutting (then some sort of paralel system that relates to the mind, to draw a paralel) it would more easily transfer. But you are pretty pragmatic about the human brain, so I feel that if I'm not getting across to a pragmatist, I still don't even know the cultural touch stones that I need to activate, anyway. So it sits still, upon this conversation.

As for little red skulls - well, it doesn't even seem to involve the level of anyones ears being sliced off, let alone the very foundry of their mind being bent. Plus you can put them back - I never said you can put marks back! I don't see the relation (though I understand in the confusion of what marks are, they could seem related).

Thanks for remembering DOASS! Wait, that's a terrible acronym, I just realised...

[Callan S.]

Oh, meant to mention

And the thing which sort of squicked us during play was the closing of a chapter in which the winner narrates what wonderful traits and virtues led the winning side to win - it seemed horrid and triumphalist until the realization hit that we were talking about what the winners absolutely would say. So the only people who know the reality which the retrospective, self-congratulatory narration is covering up, is us - outside of the SIS.

You realise this is atleast potentially simply an act of creativity and innovation on your part/on your groups part? That it's not necessarily for engaging in the hubris (yet also reflecting on it), but instead might have been just purely what it is?

Actually it reminds me of something I started working on (I wonder how far I got and where on my harddrive it is now?) after being horrorfied by the collateral murder video. The mechanic was that you all had to talk up killing these dudes with your massive machinegun from a gunship, safely hundreds of meters away and the men totally unaware of you, wooting about it and even begging some gutted guy on the ground to reach for his gun so you can hose him (all in the video), which gains you points towards avoiding the end of game condition where the PC's then go and gun down a woman and child who walk down the other side of the street (who are actually in the video as well - human carnage on one side of the (admittedly wide street) and latter, a woman walks on the far side with her child in hand). So your bleeding liberal heart might be appaled at high fiving and wooting about killing these guys (who, IIRC, turned out to have a telephoto lens, not a freakin' RPG - not that an RPG can hit shit at hundreds of meters away), yet if you don't get into the heads of the PC's, the woman and child are killed at the end (I think the more points you got, the better the chance, so you could game it and try and hold back on a full on murder hobo spree - if you're lucky). Not that a van that drove up with kids in it didn't get a salvo and children in it were left in some not specified state. But now I'm soap boxing instead. Indeed I've also talked about something a bit too much that I didn't finish...but the idea of getting into the head of someone who you kind of find appaling is rather nifty. Just is it actually in the game, or did you invent that yourself?

[Christoph]

Hello Ed,

Having played The Quiet Year twice and having had similar fears to yours a decade ago regarding "innovative" RPGs, one way to tackle this might be not to call it an RPG. Otherwise, it opens up for debate the very question of what an RPG is, a usually unfruitful and often times even painful discussion, whereas you just want to play this game, because it's cool to draw a map and to play a tribe surviving in a post-apocalyptic setting. To be honest, I still haven't decided if The Quiet Year is an RPG or not, but to be honest, I couldn't care less. I guess I just enjoy playing it from time to time. Maybe it's a card game, or board game, or... I'd just describe it as a "game where you steer a post-apocalyptic tribe through a year of need and development, drawing a map along the way".

Ron, when I played this game, the shared imagined space was both times quite unusual for me: while the setting and the tribe's need, dangers and development arcs were quite clear, I had a bit of a difficult time having a sense of who the people themselves were, and we rarely even described a particular individual. You described the game procedures being abstract: did that carry over to the SIS for you as well?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Callan,

It'd be nice if you'd consider that maybe someone else does actually understand and appreciate Diary of a Skull Soldier. I think I really do see your points. However, I did not say that the skulls in The Quiet Year are the same as Marks, but they merely remind me of them in a single regard - that they do not contain any gears-locking with other mechanics. For those who might be interested: Diary of a Skull Soldier - highly recommended.

Your question about whether we were projecting into the text is valid, but I think the phrasing is actually pretty specific - we simply didn't notice until we read it word by word that the instruction is about what future generations say and not an account of what we saw happen during play. I don't have the book on hand at the moment but will quote from it when I get the chance.

Hi Ed,

What part of your theory might explain players of a game being unable to visualize an imaginary person (a character with motivation) well enough to interact with a setting (create story by triggering events) without a requisite number of specified mechanics?

This question applies to the "outer" levels of the Big Model: the Social Contract and the Exploration. The overriding question for the first is whether there exists at the table a genuine agreement (unspoken or not, "aware or not, I don't care) called "Let's play this game together." And unless there isn't a preview-type scrutiny or anticipated construct of Exploration, that can't happen.

Exploration is composed of inseparable components: characters in a setting, which given the necessary specifications together become situation; system which in action imposes the passage of fictional time and events' consequences; and color, which suffuses all the others.

What I'm seeing in your question is any number of ways in which that preview-type scrutiny fails to generate an anticipated construct of "what play will be like." It could be an over-narrow definition of what proper play needs to look like, it could be a fetishization of a particular label or brand-identity for the familiar way to play, it could be unfamiliarity or fear concerning system features. It could be purely social ("But Bob is the GM, not Dan!!"), or technical ("But if players get to narrate they'll ruin everything!! Chaos!") or whatever - even utterly unarticulated neophobia, or the sense that playing something "unofficial" is somehow betraying the hobby.

Hi Christoph,

I totally agree with you about the sterility of defining role-playing, itself completely a legacy term applied without regard to definitions. No surprise from the author of Spione and S/Lay w/Me, I'm sure.

... while the setting and the tribe's need, dangers and development arcs were quite clear, I had a bit of a difficult time having a sense of who the people themselves were, and we rarely even described a particular individual. You described the game procedures being abstract: did that carry over to the SIS for you as well?

It turned out that the characters-list we built in play saw extensive use. Some pretty strong personalities emerged, and a couple even changed their views and positive/negative associations for us as the events proceeded. So although I wouldn't call it too similar to playing my character in the narrow but most common way found in the hobby, it wasn't all birds'-eye-view abstracted either. I kind of got the idea that both Sarah and I would have joined the hallucinatory-berry, resurrected-pre-apocalypse-pod-guy, libidinous sex cult that got going up in the mountains. The several people involved in starting it, and their antagonistic relationship to the main woman back at the main community (who started as a "pushy bitch" but evolved into a fierce, reliable leader) were quite vivid.

I'd really like to see your thoughts on playing Chronicles of Skin. Character play is more central, but a great deal of it involves your character's actions being instigated by other players, and characters tend to die and get replaced too. So it as well carries an interesting tension or at least an interface between high-up and right-in-there play.

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

Hi Ron,

Hi Callan,

It'd be nice if you'd consider that maybe someone else does actually understand and appreciate Diary of a Skull Soldier. I think I really do see your points.

It just didn't seem that way last time - okay, I stand corrected. Which is good!
[/quote]However, I did not say that the skulls in The Quiet Year are the same as Marks, but they merely remind me of them in a single regard - that they do not contain any gears-locking with other mechanics.[/quote]
I risk going into a design discussion on non topic game, but you have end game results in other RPG's (well, more the indie ones). The marks are end game results. Depending on what marks you end up with, how are you going to live with the end game - that's part of the now game. Perhaps a bit of a tragic now game, but yeah. Other games have end results and maybe an epilogue. They don't exactly get into living with the end. What do you think about end game conditions which are aquired mid play? I'll grant, yes, they aren't in play any more, except in their side effect quality of how you are going to live with these suckers. Granted DOASS(!) runs pretty damn fast so maybe there isn't enough time to wollow in the misery?

Perhaps there could be some coping with marks mechanics, perhaps a trade off between being effective in the field vs being effective at coping in the short term (and also after leaving the army - though that's more end game sort of stuff), and these could tie into some mechanics of further play. That could be a viable play addition. But really marks are the end game, but early. I wont be putting them into (further) play directly. I'm thinking you feel the marks are kinda like unmoving lumps (that build up over time, even) - I think I've explained it, but having seen both perspectives, what do you think?

Your question about whether we were projecting into the text is valid, but I think the phrasing is actually pretty specific - we simply didn't notice until we read it word by word that the instruction is about what future generations say and not an account of what we saw happen during play. I don't have the book on hand at the moment but will quote from it when I get the chance.

The texts...

I'd prefer to talk to the author and ask - even then I'd be leery of post hoc rationalisations of it being the method you describe. But maybe he/she would just say it straight it is that and if so, cool! But man, after the religious threads - really we both know how the tone neutralness of texts can be used so as to inject the tone one desires (or even fears!) into the text. Anyway, I'm just leaving some ambiguity on the subject.

[Christoph]

Ron, did I miss this character-list thing or did you add this technique yourself? It sure seems possible to play without it. Just trying to wrap my head around the "secondary-ness" of the characters in this game. You once told me that what was important in an RPG was ownership of something, which did not necessarily have to be a whole character, and that's how I understand the limits of "looseness" in play of S/lay w/me: the important decisions are always up to either I or You, regardless how much we share narration and to what extent. In The Quiet Year, we quickly gravitated to certain types of projects that each player led: in the one game, I was all about reactivating a light-house and doing stuff with it, while the other player fiddled around other stuff. Do you have any thoughts about this? You were saying at the time that the culture wasn't  really prepared to talk about such stuff, but here we are, six years later, with all sorts of new games and practice in between.

I'll keep you posted if I buy and play Chronicles of Skin.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Christoph,

I completely agree that the concept of ownership has undergone a great and exciting transformation. It's hard to believe how much pushback its beginnings received in 2006, or even the year previously with the relatively mild deconstruction found in Polaris. I think the worst meltdown was at Anyway.

I wasn't using the rulebook for The Quiet Year myself; Sarah was using it and teaching me through play. My understanding was that the character list was part of the rules, but I have not yet read them myself.

Best, Ron

[SebastianHickey]

Hey guys,

I was directed to this thread by a colleague.

Ron, thanks so much for trying the game and taking the time to talk about the experience. It's a real treat and a real surprise.

So, there's not much I can comment on here except that ambiguity that S Callan introduced. I'll answer that here.

Chronicles of Skin was always a game about propaganda, even during development during game chef. Whenever I finish a game with players, I'll ask them about their experience. It's very satisfying when a player considers the whole story as a didactic myth or a piece of propaganda rather than a fantastic tale of real people.

I've talked about this in a couple of interviews.

This is the first AP report I've read that has acknowledged that experience (possibly because nobody else is playing it ... unfortunately, the presentation of the game rules, flabby with unfamiliarity, doesn't engender confidence). There are other elements in the game that are intended to lead to that conclusion (Themes, the Glyph of War and the switching of tribal focus). If you'd like, I can expound on that but it would probably bore you to death.

Also, grab the rules from chroniclesofskin.com.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Sebastian,

The game definitely needs love. I think it's very playable and fun - a great place to find oneself off the springboard of Universalis, like so many of the games in the 2005 Ronnies/Iron Chef and those which were inspired by them.

Go ahead and expound! Some of us won't be bored.

Also, if any of the interviews are available on-line, please link here. I'm fascinated by pop SF and war-oriented politics, largely because I think there's some truth in identifying geekery as more fascist than it thinks. You can see some of my comments about that in [3:16] the betrayal of planet Girlfriend, [3:16] Ape Beasts on Planet Durer, and [3:16] Does It Encourage "We didn't roll the dice for three sessions!" Behavior?.

Best, Ron