Bad Family: a game about animated sit-coms and families

[Steve Hickey]

I've just finished a playtest draft of Bad Family, a comedy game where everyone plays a star in an animated sit-com about a family having the worst day of their lives. It's the first game I seriously sat down to write after visiting the Forge for the first time: I've been working on Bad Family since 2004 (when it was known as The Lucky Joneses).

My goals was to make it as simple a game as I could: almost an introductory RPG with self-explanatory rules. A big design influence was Apples to Apples - but I have a long way to go yet before it hits that mark.

Part of what I've done is write the second half of the rules as a script for someone to read to the other players, guiding them through three introductory rounds that teach you how to play the game. I'd never written something like that before, and it was fun and challenging. I'd be interested to know if others think it achieves that goal.

It works best for four to six players, and it's designed so you can play an episode in about an hour (or just over).

To play it, you should be enthusiastically interested in family sitcoms (like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Modern Family) and / or relationships between family members and stories about dysfunctional families (like The Royal Tennenbaums, Breaking Bad, or pretty much any TV show ever).


Where can I get it?
You can download Bad Family here: Bad Family .pdf (from dropbox) (but it's definitely a game in playtest at the moment).


What do I like about it?
Aside from the subject matter and trying to write a simple game, it's funny: scenes are resolved using a best-case vs worst-case scenario mechanic that has always produced spiraling chaos every time I've played

I've also designed a few of the procedures in the game so that the players get to know more about each other as real people as they play.


What's it like in actual play?
It's been an odd game when I've playtested it. One-shots tend to go a little crazy with stuff happening like:

- a dad trying to impress Wayne Gretsky by bench-pressing a dolphin
- an office rivalry escalating to the point where someone needs to defuse a nuclear bomb
- a small child who wants to confront her fears about climbing a tree being blocked by the tree coming to life and mocking her.

But the game I've played in longest (about eight episodes now) has gotten a lot darker. It's a family that idolises the oldest son, Alex, who's perfect at everything (school, music, goes to Harvard, loved by the community) but is always off-screen. The legend of Alex has warped the entire family who are either trying to live up to his reputation, define themselves as separate people, being stalked by people who love Alex, or (in the case of the dad) are so focused on Alex that he neglects and forgets the rest of his children.

It's been really fun to watch, and we're now at the point where a lot of the characters have acknowledged that they're screwed up and they want to get better and be a better family ... but the game won't let them. Our group have all been surprised that a game that started out quite light-hearted has been capable of so much depth and sub-text.

Here's a couple of Actual Play reports from the previous versions. Here's one that talks about a game that had the tone of American Pie-meets-24, and one where a character's desire to prove to his friends he wasn't gay led to some edge-of-the-seat social awkwardness.


Next steps
From here I've really got to play the crap out of it. There are a few local conventions coming up here that I've playtested previous versions of Bad Family at and I'm sure it'll go down well.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Steve,

I regret to say I'd forgotten entirely about this one. Who would be so surprised as I to find myself in the linked threads?

I'm having trouble with your linked download; it gives me a "damaged file" message.

Do I read you correctly that you are OK with the freewheeling feature, which can produce such variations in tone or content? Would the following idea be a good paraphrase of your position about that?

Welcome to Bad Family. This game has no pre-set tone or setting. Whether you want a crazy dimension-opening fantasy, a gritty murder drama, or a frothy but dark comedy, as long as there's a screwed-up family involved, the game can do it. The person who goes farthest into the surreal, absurd, or the horrible takes the game there too. Be ready for wherever anyone goes.

The above is not written for style or grace and for either of those, it sucks. I know this. I'm interested in whether that particular point is part of your vision of the game.

Best, Ron

[Steve Hickey]

Hi Ron,

I love it when I find myself in a thread someone links to.

Not sure why the .pdf is coming across as 'damaged': it downloads when I access it from other PCs. I've put the file up on Google Drive, here. (If that doesn't work, I'll email it to you (and anyone else who's having the same problem and who's interested in checking it out)


TONE

I'm absolutely OK with each group of players defining their own tone for the game, or for the tone to emerge naturally out of the collision between the characters' wants. This isn't something I thought about particularly hard: it's more that I have really enjoyed how unique each game has been - and I wanted to share that feature with the other people who play it.

In the previous draft of the game, I was pretty committed to letting the tone emerge naturally. Then Simon Carryer gave me some feedback about how, when reading the rules, he got excited when I described a game with the tone of a Wes Anderson movie and then I immediately said that the players couldn't pre-plan for that. He had a point ... so I provided an option for the players to carefully discuss what each of their characters wants, so the players can ensure each of those wants contributes to a consistent tone.

However, there are two parts of your paraphrase I'd tweak

The game could definitely do a crazy dimension-opening fantasy or a frothy but dark comedy (I'm not so sure about a gritty murder drama - there would have to be a pretty huge group buy-in to that tone because it's at odds with how I present the rules). But the thing I wanted to tweak is if the game is going down the 'emergent tone' route, then the tone that emerges is rarely as consistent or as uniform as you've pitched. Each character's story is slightly in their own world, and the tone emerges when the characters' stories cross over (there are rules to encourage that).

And the second part of your paraphrase ("The person who goes farthest into the surreal, absurd, or the horrible takes the game there too. Be ready for wherever anyone goes.") doesn't quite work. The game has something called the Rule of Cut, which allows people to delete material they think crosses a line.

When I ran Bad Family at a convention, that rule saved our session from cratering. We were joined by someone who none of us had ever played with before. He wasn't very good  at reading social cues, and he came up with a radically different want for his character: he wanted his character to marry the two actresses he was filming a porn movie with. The Rule of Cut allowed us to express our discomfort very naturally (but I also ended up having to take him outside for a gentle chat).

[Steve Hickey]

In my previous post, I meant to say: "Then Simon Carryer gave me some feedback about how, when reading the rules, he got excited when I described a game with the tone of a Wes Anderson movie and he was then disappointed when I immediately said that the players couldn't pre-plan for that."

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Steve,

Two things. First, I think I wasn't clear in my comment. The last thing I wanted to do was get any exact detail of the game explained correctly in my little statement, as I haven't read it. (Yes, send it to me by email please) The point was one, single thing: that if I were to play this game, I would very, very much need to know at the outset that the content, genre, tone, whatever you want to call it, was completely up for grabs. I could be very happy playing this way, but only - and this is key - if I knew it was to be that way, at first, before starting, in full. That's the only thing I was trying to get across.

In your playtests, especially the current ones, are you making that clear?

Second, and I'm reluctant to go into this because it's spinning off the comparatively minor point of "phrasing it right," your proposed solutions are making my uh-oh sensors twitch.

1. "Let's all talk about it first" is not really a good option. Some games have rules to do this, like the Tenets in Universalis, and they seem to me in practice to be bipolar - with some groups they work so well that it seems almost superfluous (but probably isn't), and with others they turn into a hideous quagmire of endless negotiations about ever-more irrelevant suggestions. I suggest either leaving it wide open and telling people so (as with my main point above), or setting up some procedures along the lines of drafting terms or key phrases which serve as a baseline for all other input.

2. My take on your cut rule, using only your playtesting account as my indicator, is that it does not work. If it worked, then you wouldn't have had to take the guy out for a little talk. Consider the situation as well if the game designer had not been present - it's possible that in that case, the guy could have brazened out his presence at the table and simply refused to be swayed socially.

You're going to have to bite the bullet and choose. Either play-content is wide open, in which case, say so and then only people who want to do it that way will play, or it's not, in which case either specify the fictional content or come up with a procedural way for such specifications to occur.

Best, Ron

[Steve Hickey]

Thanks for clarifying that, Ron.


TONE: EMERGENT OR PRE-DECIDED?

My most recent playtests have been testing the rules simplifications by continuing a game from two years ago. That group's very familiar with Bad Family so I haven't had to explain the tone or how it emerges to them.

With a new group I'd give them the pitch on page 3 and then give them at least the first two lines from the Setting and Tone section on page 7:

* The Jones family live in a modern-day small city.
* The group of people you're playing with will develop a unique tone for your show.

The way I've played it every time is to let the tone emerge naturally. That's how I'll present it to the next lot of playtesters. Based on your comments, when I do the next draft I'll consider whether the "let's all talk about it first" needs to be presented differently (perhaps as an optional rule; perhaps with strong guidance) or removed.


THE RULE OF CUT

It works. It's always felt like an entertaining, natural, non-threatening way for players to bring up lines and veils.

My story about the guy was a tangent, I realise now: I just wanted to share a 'bad convention experience story' about someone whose ability to read social situations was at the far end of the bell curve. (It has a happy-ish ending - I took him under my wing a little, and saw him improve slightly over the weekend of gaming.)