[The Final Girl] Wait, you mean this game is good? Yes!

[Ron Edwards]

I don't how to say this except straight up: Bret, I had low expectations for this game. I bought it, I own it, but in reading, it stank of 'story Game' to me, i.e., a wind-up toy that monkeys could use to pump out something with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with some engineered mechanic telling us how intense it was throughout, and relying on tired tropes long past the point of cliche for any semblance of punch.

I know perhaps as much as any living person that reading an RPG does not establish knowledge of how it plays. So that impression based on reading remained a private matter, one day to be tested, although in this case, I was not sufficiently intrigued to seek out a chance. Which brings me to Friday night at Forge Midwest. Nathan and I had arrived sort of late, and instead of crashing for a good night's sleep as planned, we both got roped into playing games. In my case, it was because a couple of people I really liked were at a table and they said, 'Play! Play!' 'sure, what are you playing?' I asked. And with their answer, I thought, aw man, there go two or three hours. (Which right there was really unfair. Reading isn't play!)

A bit of the fiction: our story would take place during Halloween night, with a slasher-killer on the loose.

During the first phase, no one really knew, and I'd forgotten, the mechanics of playing this bit. So with the possible exception of the guy who had proposed the game, few of us were strategizing or thinking about mechanical consequences. So the first few players relied on thespian enjoyment, which is fun enough but you know as well as me that two to three hours of watching people be thespians isn't as much fun as we were told it was back in the early 1990s. Furthermore, some characters were either really over the top or downright obnoxious, which led me to put on my neutral-nice friendly face and privately mourn again.

Our characters (two per person): a MILF, a hot teen with a devil-mask and drugs in her purse, a creepy Christian, a hot-headed cop, the head of the local asylum, a bratty little kid, a teenage vandal, an addled Vietnam vet, a drunk priest, and a nerdy baby-sitter. Am I missing two more? What about the woman who was banging the veteran in the van, when they got blown up? I remember her, but that makes nine, so there must have been one more. I seem to recall a pretty-ordinary guy in the mix too.

But a scene or two into the second part of play, not only I but everyone was deeply into the story and actively committed to doing our bit for everyone else, as well as angling for various things to get established insofar as possible. The obnoxious characters had either gained humanity or become genuine threats, the minor characters who'd been killed early were at least vivid, and some of the most extreme characters in thespian terms turned out to be unlikely heroes.

A great deal of fun is derived from determining who is screwing whom in the first scenes of play, which provides just about any and all you need to know for developing dynamics among the characters. After the first few easy kills, let's see ... the priest comes to a horrible end in his church, the rebel-lesbian slut drug teen and the vandal teen go on a spree, with the bratty kid tagging along; the cop and the psychiatrist do their best to restore order but both die characteristically (and heroically in one case); and the other characters mainly skulk.

Holy crap, we were into it. The story was excessive, hilarious, brutally splattered with ketchup, and full of ridiculous coincidences, but it was the good kind of Corman-level thriller, with characters we actually liked and wanted to survive despite every trope of the moment spelling his or her impending doom. The card mechanic was tuned perfectly: just random enough to permit any character to die, but with a very distinct graded likelihood thereof depending on that character's current status (which by the way, concerns the number of characters attached by relationships, so you know).

In fact, the various small mechanical parts each complemented the others in ways that are impossible to perceive merely by reading them separately and statically. One of them was the constant changing of character ownership, which really works. It allows characters you like to take on more depth and interpretation, and for you to advocate for them when you get them, and it means that characters you don't like undergo re-interpretation and development which often makes them more likeable.

Ultimately, the devil-lesbian teen rebel slut teamed up in mutual sinful attraction with the crazy Christian (this after she shot up his house) for the climactic battle against the slasher, and it turned out indeed that the Final Girl was in fact the final girl. The player who narrated the end added a weird French-movie symbolic finish, all about love and death and stuff, as the slasher turned out to be a mysterious woman whom the Final Girl throws a rose. (What the fuck? But OK!)

Profound? No! But it worked brilliantly and totally viscerally. If it had been a movie I would have been shouting 'No! Don't open it!' not in mockery, but in genuine involvement. Todd Fuist was one of the other players and we found that the two of us had undergone the same processes of reading, impressions, reactions to the early moments of play, and then discovering what a pleasant surprise it was.

Bret, how did you do that?

Best, Ron

edited to fix display - RE

[Miskatonic]

These guys were clearly having fun. I happened to glance over to see Ron roleplaying/pantomiming coming into possession of a chainsaw. Priceless.

[Bret Gillan]

I have watched a lot of horror movies, and I started to identify the things that the movies I liked had in common:

- Unpredictability. I wasn't actually sure what was going to happen or who might make it which caused me to become invested because I couldn't immediately identify the protagonist character and then just wait for the movie to end.
- Characters that I care about and that have things going on besides being imminent carcasses.

So then I wanted a game structure that created a horror movie that I would like, rather than just a horror movie.

I thought emotional investment in characters, either love them or hate them, is set up by character relationships. Whether we like or hate characters in fiction is often set up by how we see them interacting with other characters. So I tried to set it up so that, assuming I was right, more character relationships and connections meant more investment and meant more survivability. Voting for who you want to live is too obvious and disconnected from the fiction, but relationships let you communicate investment and give you something to riff off of fictionally. But I made sure that it was never a sure thing for any character to walk out of a scene. Nobody ever had it locked down, they just improved their odds.

But playtesting proved me right! Even if the movie premise was silly, we found ourselves rooting for certain characters, and we'd get collective, "Awwww!"s around the table when certain characters died.

Lack of character ownership came from Tony Lower-Basch's Capes which I've played a ton of. It was a solution to the problem of "What do I do when my character is dead?" By creating a communal pool of characters rather than having players have "stables" of characters, there could never be a point where someone had lost all of their characters and had to sit and watch other people play. Also, in playing Capes I saw what you described happening. People reinterpreting characters, zooming in on aspects of other people's portrayals that they had enjoyed and diminishing parts they didn't, until you get this shared vision of characters which is just fun and something I'd love to see in more games, and also I think it helped the players get attached to more characters than just the ones they had created.

I'm glad to have a chance to talk about this. I'm really proud of this game! And I'm glad you all had a good time playing it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

There's some deep history here. See When players think the GM is trying to kill them ... (a classic example of the productive mess type thread from those days) and especially Railroading with dice, a core mechanic, as well as the recent reference and links to Dead Meat in Zombie Outbreak. I also think people tend to forget that player ownership is moved around formally using the turn-structure in Universalis, and not merely picked up whenever and by whoever as an ordinary detail of play. A lot of the 2004-2005 games like Capes come from there, I think.

Dead Meat, Zombie Cinema, Dead of Night, and Final Girl all do it a little differently, and very well in each case, in my experience. I'm interested now to compare what player-commitments and play-skills are best suited to each. I'm also curious to know what other games seem like good shelf-partners for these, in others' opinion.

Best, Ron

[dreamofpeace]

What about Escape from Tentacle City in that context?

[Ron Edwards]

It certainly belongs among the games I listed toward the end of my last post. Its ownership is a little bit like Dead Meat's, in that you're playing a "stable," although one at a time, and you created that stable. Not the same in every detail, but different from The Final Girl, in which you play any character that happens to be available at the moment.

Did you have anything more specific than that in mind? I concede I missed a valid reference, but I imagine there are a few others that could have been tossed in too.

Best, Ron

[dreamofpeace]

I'm also interested in the differences the games have regarding character ownership, and whether a player having sole ownership of a character like in Zombie Cinema or Geiger Counter or more of a slate like Dead Meat or Tentacle City, or temporary ownership like in Final Girl requires different skills to pull off a good game - and if the rules should provide any more specific guidance in these cases.  It's an interesting issue that I'm not sure has been explored much...

[Ron Edwards]

The slasher/zombie/survival games are a great closed-lab experiment to examine this issue, but it should be understood as a bigger issue. I'd even go back to the early "fantasy wargaming" stage, as what's now called role-playing was originally called, when playing a little handful of characters per person simultaneously was common. For example, it takes a bit of squinting to realize that the whole 5th edition T&T rulebook was written in the unspoken assumption that each player would be doing just that.

In raising this question much later, in 2004 or so while developing Spione, I and nearly everyone involved in the conversations had deeply internalized "one player = one character = full authority" as the default concept, based on our historical training. Concepts like character stables from Dark Sun, for example, were considered game-specific exceptions. But as soon as we looked a little harder, it was clear that this default concept was yet another thing - like hit points - which was a specialized application from a much broader range of options which had become holy writ at one point or another for completely contingent reasons.

At that point I realized the question was not, "How do we expand role-playing from the [reasonable, normal] one-player-one-character-full-authority model to the [radical, difficult, counter-intuitive] range of wider-distributed character play," but rather, "How do we overcome the historical-contingent habit, when doing so would be optimal for a given game concept?"

Like hit points, this default concept for playing characters isn't terrible or wrong or dysfunctional. The point is that it's simply not a default, i.e., having fun with role-playing doesn't live or die depending on whether it's in place. It's game-specific. You can see that across my designs: Sorcerer is bluntly exactly that model (my character, period); Elfs deconstructs player/character identification, both mechanically and thematically; Trollbabe looks like it follows the default model but in fact narration puts GM/player into one another's shoes for both trollbabes and relationship characters; Spione simply abandons single-ownership even for the principal characters; and so on.

I didn't get to the Spione level of design for this variable until after a lot of the small independent, often free games of the early 2000s had messed with this aggressively, with Soap and Dead Meat being good examples, and Universalis certainly being the breakout. Sometime in 2006-2007, Vincent extended the Forge discussions at Anyway and the principles diffused widely into many game designs.

History didn't help us much, though. The remarkable practices of de-protagonization ranging from the mid-1980s to about 2000 muddy the waters really badly, so that people defend my-character-I'm-the-player with great fierceness. Granted, they did so mainly to go turtle, but one can at least understand that. Turning this fierce single-ownership into a source of fun was a big priority in c. 2000 designs too, and just after. It lies at the heart of Sorcerer (and more recently, Apocalypse World and its spawn), but especially in all of Paul's games. So you can see two superficially contradictory design trends at work, one of which is historically much easier to understand and is more emotionally resonant. Even in 2006 and continuing today, Spione baffles people in this regard and games like Universalis get routinely house-ruled to restore single-player character-ownership.

All this is to say that I don't think the range you mentioned is a linear spectrum; I think the model should be more like a big category or Venn diagram box, with the largest being no permanent ownership at all, but featuring many different internal ways (i) to own/advocate for a character, (ii) to trade out or transfer such ownership, (iii) to organize the four levels of "character" in the first place, and (iv) to exert authority outside of that ownership at the same time. The internal boxes would historically look very isolated and delimited, but in concept and potential, would be incredibly messy and overlapping.

It's instructive to consider that Primetime Adventures features no player-character mortality - whereas the very sort of TV it's designed to emulate includes both "no main characters die" and "anyone can die," equally functionally. If you were to invent Spartacus: Blood and Sand from scratch via PTA as written (and without known historical constraints), then characters like Barca would have to be NPCs, and it would be quite hard to play what seems to me to be optimal, with (for example) Spartacus, Crixus, Batiatus, and Lucretia as player-characters, with no idea who would end up killing whom.

So far I've been using really loose and entirely crappy terminology, which is dumb because we've thrashed through perfectly good terminology already.

1. "Ownership" is a terrible term. We're talking about two very different things, authority and advocacy. Authority in this case means saying precisely what the character is (back-story), says, and does. (The character's feelings insofar as they are felt by players are an emergent property and not a matter of authority; however, citing or narrating feelings as a prompt to action and dialogue is a matter of authority.) Advocacy is playing toward a character's best interests, particularly consistently with the character's in-fiction knowledge and perspective.

2. A totally different variable is how authority and advocacy are distributed, per character. Even this isn't a spectrum, because you can have more than one person share these things in different ways for a given character, but you can also separate people across/per character, and not to overlook the traditional GM, you can also have multiple characters per person. Then the final question is whether these distributions are temporary or permanent, and if temporary, how they're organized.

3. There are also the four levels I identified about "character" in role-playing (see The class issue). Embedded in those are the real-person and in-fiction issues regarding the associations among the characters, from dedicated team to anarchic blood opera.

As usual with techniques, they can be mixed and matched and combined in nigh-infinite ways, and the only question is what particular combination works best for a given Exploration (all five components in place) and Reward (how the game is supposed to be fun).

Bringing it all the way back around, what might the loosely-associated variables of slasher cinema, zombie, apocalypse, survival (which is really bottle) horror-drama, and splatter have to do with this? Let's see: it/they ... gets over the hump of character mortality, takes a more ensemble approach to the cast, necessarily opens up adversity to internal vs. external, admits of endings, and more. In other words, necessarily not "be anyone go anywhere do anything goes on forever," and currently a popular, widely-familiar set of fictional tools for relevant content nicely disguised by excess.

It's not optimal for the overall dialogue to compartmentalize the issue into this single limited range of fictional topics, because I think that allows people to dodge admitting that the bigger issue is so big. But I can certainly see why within this topic, the range of experimentation is both broad and easily grasped by participants

Best, Ron

[David Berg]

Let's see: it/they ... gets over the hump of character mortality, takes a more ensemble approach to the cast, necessarily opens up adversity to internal vs. external, admits of endings, and more.

Sounds like Game of Thrones.  If I were to play something that follows that many characters and kills some of them off, a Final Girl style of character-player relationships might be a nice fit.