[Pride and Prejudice]: A game for two players

[rgrassi]

Straight to the point.
Title: Pride and Prejudice
The game: A game for two players defining the past, the present and the future of their characters (and eventually killing the one moved by the other player).
Reference page (in italian): http://www.levity-rpg.net/it/?page_id=1043
Draft playing procedure (in italian): http://www.levity-rpg.net/it/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/OrgoglioEPregiudizio-sketch-proc.pdf
English procedure (and reference page) under definition

What I need: generic feedback, useful hints, playtest (I've playtested through the last year with 15-20 games), questions about design choices...

I'll use some image that I hope will immediately clarify the game procedure.

The game has a Preparation phase.


After the preparation phase Scenes are Played. Scenes are played in two phases.
Phase 1: "Moving forward the Narration" (Player A narrates scenes 1, 3, 5. Player B narrates scenes 2, 4, 6). Phase 1 ends when the player says "Scene End".



Phase 2: "Fighting for my character". This is the 'fighting' phase in which the players try to force truth of fictional elements through playing statements. This is the phase when Pride, Prejudice and Token values are used (and are affected by the winning and the losing of one statement with respect the other).



But is better understood with one example:
PRIDE in Action


PREJUDICE in Action


At the end of Scene 6, Phase 2 the final scene is played.
This basically happens with Player A and B
- Narrating their desired ending (ending must respect all fictional constraints determined by previous scenes)
- Rolling 1 die + Pride and Prejudice values + token (x2)
The highest result wins.

The game lasts around 60 minutes.
It is possible to reduce playing time around 20 minutes reducing scenes (and modifying a bit the currency mechanic).
I'm going to write in the next few days the final version of the manual (ready for editing and publishing purposes).

Thanks for any feedback.
Rob

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rob,

This may be the single archetypal example of a Story Game. Which is a problematic term for me, because it connotes a "hamster wheel" (a game whose reward mechanics are only there to repeat themselves with little genuine Reward) as well as a built-in, automatic quality to the story being made (which means it's not really being made, merely delivered).

But in looking at your system, I find that you may be solving these problems! Which, if you are, would make this a rather wonderful little "narration management" or Conch game that actually works. Historically, Conch games don't ultimately turn out to be fun; nor do games which put "story control" into a competitive context. Although both of these are frequent design goals, it's so hard to make them work that I'm not sure they can ...

... but I'm willing to see if you've managed to break that door open.

Now, you are the one who's played 15-20 times! I want to know some things about those experiences.

First, what kind of fun are we talking about? Is the real payoff about wresting control of the story away from the other person and landing them with a shittier story than yours? Or is it the opposite, in mutually providing enough tension and quality control so that each person ends up with a better story than they might have been able to do by themselves?

"Either or both," is not a possible answer. Over five years of manifestly broken play for Capes has taught us that.

Second, what genres have you observed? I hope a lot; in other words, I'm hoping that your game is truly customizable at that level, which was a deeply failed design goal back in the 1980s.

Best, Ron

[rgrassi]

First, what kind of fun are we talking about? Is the real payoff about wresting control of the story away from the other person and landing them with a shittier story than yours? Or is it the opposite, in mutually providing enough tension and quality control so that each person ends up with a better story than they might have been able to do by themselves?

Hope to give a proper answer. I've observed different "kinds of fun":

The first kind of fun I've observed is the one deriving from adding up fictional segments and "let the whole fictional stuff stay together preserving integrity and internal logic". This is like putting together a Lego toy, adding bricks and trying to construct a very complex toy. Then you "raise your hands up" and it doesn't break. This does not mean that the players necessarily make a "Story" in the narratologic meaning. In this sense I think that this satisfies yours "mutually providing enough tension and quality control so that each person ends up with a better story than they might have been able to do by themselves". This kind of fun is continuous through the play (but is more evident in Phase 1) and it is stimulated at each scene because the game asks the players to continually "create / check if it fits / adds up" fictional bricks.

Another kind of fun I've observed is the one deriving by forcing fictional elements to favour my character. This does not necessarily mean that the other character loses. I've played a test in which the Prejudice statements of Player A were always in favour of Player B (and viceversa) (i.e. "You'll be saved by a dragon." "You'll be king." "You are the best socceer player in the world.") What is interesting is that until the last statement the players don't know what the other player will try to force in the fiction. So, for example, I may be fair up to the last statement and then say "You'll be killed by me" and win. So, the fun, in this case, may be of different type: "Favour my character against yours" or "Favour both characters" or "Let you thrill until the last statement because I may harm you till the end even if I have been a 'good boy' up to now". This kind of fun is also continuous during play (but is more evident in Phase 2) and it is stimulated up to the ending.

"Either or both," is not a possible answer. Over five years of manifestly broken play for Capes has taught us that.

I really don't know what to answer. It seems to me that both funs are pursued in the game. If you ask to me what I prefer, generally (meaning that I prefer to obtain the first if I have to choose one or another), is the first one, but not always. It depends with who the other player is, how experienced he is, how much time I have, my aestethic priority in that moment for that game and a lot of other stuff...

Second, what genres have you observed? I hope a lot; in other words, I'm hoping that your game is truly customizable at that level, which was a deeply failed design goal back in the 1980s.

I think you mean "fictional genre". Well I've played sessions with the two characters being a married man and woman, two animals, man and animal, Satan and God, two soldiers of different armies, two soldiers of the same army, now i'm playing by forum, a sultan and his guard, two india-men, two characters involved in disinfesting an alien cove... Genres played are horror, sci-fi, romance. Genres depend by "the statements said by the players".

The Game has a risk, obviously.
Adding up fictional elements without a predefined 'design' may lead to many "holes" in the 'fabula' that must be filled. This usually occurs, if the players desire, AFTER the game.
Rob

[rgrassi]

As Ron asked here...

That's why it would be very useful for you to go the Your Stuff forum and post a little account of some game, any game, you participated in, as long as it was totally non-problematic and totally fun. Tell us who did what in the fiction, and who did what in real life. I'll describe every bit of the Authorities in action.

This is my example of playtest happened on 22/7/2012.
After some playing of other games (non rpg - storytelling) I proposed to make two different sessions of playtes of "Pride and Prejudice". We were 4 players, so it was OK. Everyone agreed. No one has ever played/tested the game before. The girl playing with me said that she had no experience in role playing. The other two players are experienced in role-playing (I'd say old school standard roleplaying, just to be understood).
I explained the rules and the playing procedure to two players and just followed the beginning of the game to check if everything was ok. During first ten minutes, many questions were done to check what was allowed in terms of rules/procedures and what was not.
Then I started my session of Pride and Prejudice with the other player, following the same approach (i.e. explaining the rules and the procedures and so on). For playtesting reasons I had to follow what was going on in the two sessions, to check if everything was ok.
I was the starting Narrator of my session (the other player, asked for that, in order to learn some sort of narrating style to play better this specific game).
The title of the first scene was "Twenty minutes to midnight".
I quickly introduced a situation in which there was my character looking his watch and saying that time was 23:40 of 31th December 2042. My character was on the top of a skyscraper in Rome, looking St.Peter cathedral in the distance. Just twenty minutes and it should have been destroyed by our bomb. My partner in crime was in a precise point according to the plan, as we had agreed. (And I told that "my partner in crime" was the character of the other player"). She said "Scene end" in brief and we went to the second phase of the scene playing, stating our Pride and Prejudice statements.

Is that enough to show me your "authority" concept? Or should I focus and zoom in something?
Rob

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rob, thanks for writing this!

I need a lot more than that. First, the game begins with assigning titles to the scenes, right? What were the titles?

You stated what happened for phase 1 of scene 1, which is only the barest taste of your game in action. What happened in phase 2, the pride/prejudice part?

I basically want to know the entirety of scene 1: what happened to the characters, what the characters did, and all the interactions between the two of you that made that happen. I'm comfortable with your account of phase 1. Now I'd like to know about phase 2.

Best, Ron

[rgrassi]

Hi Ron.

I need a lot more than that. First, the game begins with assigning titles to the scenes, right? What were the titles?

Fortunately, I've stored the papers we've used during play.
Scene 1: Twenty minutes to midnight
Scene 2: Vengeance
Scene 3: The end of the empire
Scene 4: Twelve years before
Scene 5: The escape
Scene 6: He-Who-Lies
Scene 7: Ending

You stated what happened for phase 1 of scene 1, which is only the barest taste of your game in action. What happened in phase 2, the pride/prejudice part?

Now that I'm reviewing titles there's another important particular in the fiction to be reported.
While I was narrating Scene 1, I introduced a 'female' character that was somewhat "in between" our characters, saying that she was in love with the other character (the other player agreed).
So to recap, in the first scene there was my character that had planned an act of terrorism with my complice. This was the last of a serie (two years before the tower of london, the year before the Tour Eiffel) and, according to my narration, the last in absolute. There was a lady between us, and according to the narration I left her role vague by purpose. Also, the narration stop at "ten minutes to midnight" with me waiting for the explosion.

When the other player said "Scene End" I played my Pride statement.
"I'll betray you."
She played:
"I will give priority to her with respect our plan."
I won the die throw.
Pride +1 for me.
1 token for her.
Fictional Constraints:
"My character will betray my complice"
"Her character will not give priority to her with respect our plan."

Then I played Prejudice:
"You will not betray me."
Her statement:
"You will make a mistake."
I won again.
Prejudice +1 for me.
1 token for her
Fictional Constraints:
"Her character will not betray my character."
"I will not make a mistake".

Scene 1 concluded.
Playing time: Around ten minutes all included.

Cheers, Rob

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rob,

I have to provide one qualifier: I do not actually see any play in your example. Unless I'm missing something, this game looks like a way to storyboard a script in a two-person committee, which would then be passed to a junior writer so he or she could fill in the dialogue, and then to a director so he or she could organize capturing it on film.

But again, I may be missing something. At any point, do the two people play the events? As in, do they say what the characters say, describe what the characters do? For example, in the Jeepform games I've read or played in, quite a bit of the large-scale action in a scene is scripted or imposed ("someone betrays someone in this scene"), but the motives and certain core information are left unstated, to be added by the people during play (depiction) of the scene.

Unless that happens, I'm not convinced there's a Shared Imagined Space, in which case you're talking about a medium for your activity which is out of the range of my interests.

But let's go on anyway. What I see are these:

Your character has planned a terrorist act, with an accomplice (the other character). This is content or back-story; so in this case we are looking at Content Authority. The same applies to the history of the previous two bombings, and also to the female character who is in love with the accomplice.

The stated time and location information for both characters is situation; so here play requires Situation Authority.

In both cases, all content and all situation was established through your rules in a formal back-and-forth way, including dice rolls, so that we can fairly say both Content and Situation Authorities are, in your game, distributed rather than centralized.

The second phase resulted in this set of constraints:
"My character will betray my accomplice."
"Her character will not give priority to her (I presume this means the third character, the one in love) with respect to our plan."
"Her character will not betray my character."
"I will not make a mistake."

This is an interesting case of pre-fixing Outcomes, so this is Outcome Authority. Although I'm not sure whether it is then applied to play or whether it is considered a finished product, in which case we are looking at a storyboard rather than a finished fiction.

Do you see that by "Authority," all I mean is that somehow the necessary information gets established, and that it is better for a game to work when we know how? By "how," I mean many things, most especially whether a particular Authority is consolidated in a single person or (as in your game) distributed in some way. My final important point is that any of the four levels of Authority I've described can be treated independently.

Best, Ron

[rgrassi]

Hi Ron, thanks for reply.

I have to provide one qualifier: I do not actually see any play in your example. Unless I'm missing something, this game looks like a way to storyboard a script in a two-person committee, which would then be passed to a junior writer so he or she could fill in the dialogue, and then to a director so he or she could organize capturing it on film.

This looks very interesting, and, actually not so far from the truth.
Infact one of the first usual comments after playing is: "Great! We could write a script!"

But again, I may be missing something. At any point, do the two people play the events? As in, do they say what the characters say, describe what the characters do?

When fiction moves forward, in phase 1 of all the scenes, there's not THEY.
ONLY ONE narrates and, sure, says what (ALL) characters say and describes what (ALL) characters do. He narrates in first, second and third person, singular and plural, conventiently switching narration style according to what he/she has in mind while framing the scene/situation.
But he/she cannot say whatever he/she wants. The other player may oppose Vetos (aestethic vetoes and coherence vetoes) and Conflicts (when narration about actions and feelings of owned character are not accepted).
Example:
Player A (Narrator) "I enter the room, in the darkness, turn on the light and... i see you. Sitting on my favourite couch."
Player B: "Hey, this is not good to me." Conflict (with thumb down). The Narrator MUST reformulate the statement.
Player A (Narrator) "I enter the room, in the darkness, turn on the light and... i see my wife sleeping on my favourite couch."
Player B: "This is OK. Go on."
Player A (Narrator) "How are you dear?" She cries... "Oh, John, it's horrible. Chris was here." (Let's imagine that Chris is player B character).
Player B: "It's OK, Go on."

Unless that happens, I'm not convinced there's a Shared Imagined Space, in which case you're talking about a medium for your activity which is out of the range of my interests.

Don't know if my previous example clarifies how the game is played and if A SIS is established through that. There's no playing in the sense that the two propose different statements. The player B can only say: "It's ok for me, go on." "No way. Veto. [Agreement or rolling]" or "No way. conflict. [Thumb Down, the other player restates]."

The second phase resulted in this set of constraints:
"My character will betray my accomplice."
"Her character will not give priority to her (I presume this means the third character, the one in love) with respect to our plan."
"Her character will not betray my character."
"I will not make a mistake."
This is an interesting case of pre-fixing Outcomes, so this is Outcome Authority. Although I'm not sure whether it is then applied to play or whether it is considered a finished product, in which case we are looking at a storyboard rather than a finished fiction.

It is applied to play, in the sense that players MUST actualize the outcomes in the fiction through narration (during phase 1 of next scenes) or in the ending. The player cannot complete the game if all the outcomes have not been satisfied (i.e. explicitly narrated and agreed).

Do you see that by "Authority," all I mean is that somehow the necessary information gets established, and that it is better for a game to work when we know how? By "how," I mean many things, most especially whether a particular Authority is consolidated in a single person or (as in your game) distributed in some way. My final important point is that any of the four levels of Authority I've described can be treated independently.

I agree that levels may be treated independently and about the "authority", even if I don't agree with the term, I have no other way than "I will live and I will support it." :)
Rob

[Ron Edwards]

I get it! Phase two of a turn sets up constraints for playing phase one of the next turn.

The way you describe phase one being played is a big relief for me - yes, that is a Shared Imagined Space, and therefore yes, phase two is exerting Outcome Authority on aspects of phase one of the next turn.

This point also shows me where Narration Authority comes in: during phase one of the next turn, when we discover exactly how your character betrays the other character, as well as the rest of it. This is a clever construction because Content Authority for that turn is being applied at the same time. You may now count me as motivated to try Pride and Prejudice at the earliest opportunity.

I am sad to report that Seth Ben Ezra's brilliant two-person design called Showdown has not been further developed. Its rough draft was already very fun to play - two combatants carry out their "final battle" forward in time through a series of scenes until the defeat of one of them, but between each scene, a flashback is played, and those are conducted in reverse chronological order. So by the final fight scene, we finally understand what has brought these two people into deadly confrontation. You would have liked it a lot, I think.

A side note: I am perfectly comfortable with describing the interaction in phase one, in your game (one narrates, the other modifies with vetoes and agreements), as "they." I do understand the difference between it and the less-constructed, more familiar typical way to role-play. My own game Spione is quite similar to yours in the speaking rules for the phase of play called Maneuvers.

Best, Ron

P.S. The term "Authority" is currently being used as a place-holder for whatever term I eventually decide upon. We can both realize that and not let it be a constant debate. Let's not provide constant qualifiers about that as we discuss the real issue, which is how it works.

[rgrassi]

I get it! Phase two of a turn sets up constraints for playing phase one of the next turn.

Almost right. :)
For one playing phase of the next turns or for the Ending.

The way you describe phase one being played is a big relief for me - yes, that is a Shared Imagined Space, and therefore yes, phase two is exerting Outcome Authority on aspects of phase one of the next turn.

Yes.

This point also shows me where Narration Authority comes in: during phase one of the next turn, when we discover exactly how your character betrays the other character, as well as the rest of it.

Exactly.
Constraints define the WHAT.
Narration, Vetos, and Conflicts, sculpt the HOW.
Players have not to mandatorily satisfy the outcome in the immediate next phase. All they know is that the constraint must be satisfied, before the end of the game.
The more constraints they do not satisfy, the more complex will be the narration and plot to be 'sustained' by players. In the worst case, each player has to narrate an ending with 24 constraints (4 x 6 scenes) to be respected. I grant you it's as difficult as being a juggler with 22 pins rotating in the air and two in his hands.

This is a clever construction because Content Authority for that turn is being applied at the same time. You may now count me as motivated to try Pride and Prejudice at the earliest opportunity.

You're welcome.

I am sad to report that Seth Ben Ezra's brilliant two-person design called Showdown has not been further developed. Its rough draft was already very fun to play - two combatants carry out their "final battle" forward in time through a series of scenes until the defeat of one of them, but between each scene, a flashback is played, and those are conducted in reverse chronological order. So by the final fight scene, we finally understand what has brought these two people into deadly confrontation. You would have liked it a lot, I think.

Yes, definitively looks like a game I would have liked.
Also, your comment, allows me to precise that scenes don't have to be played in forward cronological order. Player may play in flashback, flashforward mode a whole scene, or even mix the two techniques in part of a scene.
The playsistem is 'agnostic' with respect the narration technique involved.

P.S. The term "Authority" is currently being used as a place-holder for whatever term I eventually decide upon. We can both realize that and not let it be a constant debate. Let's not provide constant qualifiers about that as we discuss the real issue, which is how it works.

My last try.
"Authorship" as the paternity/responsibility to provide content/text/narration and "Authority" as the "Yes. this is the approved fiction." would fit?
Rob

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rob,

I think we have reached a conclusion of our dialogue about Authorities, in which I wanted to show you the types that I'd isolated and how they might be organized for a given game.

I am completely uninterested in debating the term itself here, because it's an unnecessary distraction from the goal of understanding the concept.

Best, Ron

[rgrassi]

Ok thanks.
Rob