My life with Master is not a game ruined by expertise in the use of system!

[Moreno R.]

In his Color-first Endeavor: back in action! thread, Ron wrote about My life With Master (both in general and about the specific exercise in that thread), adding:

I've listed my more-or-less instant reactions to what I read, and I urge you to correct me if I'm being unfair or didn't understand you well enough.

And that's what this thread is for!

I am starting another thread because this is specifically about My Life With Master, the intelligent use of system in a rpg (against the old "you should play badly to play well" of "don't play rpg with roll-players" D&D gaming of the bad old days) in general, and a guy with a dollar on the chest would only be noise, because I want to talk here about actual play.

I will try to recap the previous posts for ease of reading:

Musing about my color-fist endeavor entry (a MLWM game using this character based on this picture ) I posted in my "beginning character post", HERE:

The process of Master creation already show the GM what the players want, in a lot of ways: the game terms ("Beast", "collector"), the number (Fear and reason), and the vivid description of the Master that happen at the table when everybody add ideas, images, concepts

After that, how did I communicate what I wanted in particular for my character?

The first clue are the More than human and less than human.  I decided to give my character a more than human like "He can seduce everybody, man or female, but not when he is really attracted by that person" because I wanted "missions" that would put him in contact with people to manipulate, but at the same time I wanted to draw a precise and clear separation between these de-humanizing relationships and "true" ones. And make any of these a danger for the Master's plan (if Valentino begin to be really attracted by his target, the Master's plan could fail).
Then the "less than human": "he can't refuse the offer of any substance (from his mother's inedible cake to a shot of heroin) apart when he is his own home (I don't see him as an addict, but as someone with very weak force of will that try to please everybody)"

In this way, I have painted a very big target over my character, that show how the GM can easily use these MTH and LTH to bring Valentino in all sort of social situations where things can go wrong.

If we were at the table I probably would have talked about these reason, too, during character creation.

The connection, people he meet at works and at the diner, add to the "no past relationship" theme.

Notice how I am using the system to get the character that I want and to signal to the other players the theme that I want to address. A problem I see often with people who play this game the first times is that, even if they are all on the same page about the color of the setting/master, they create character that they don't want to play, LTH that they never want to be used and they feel deprotagonize their character, and MTH that they did choose thinking they could use in ways not allowed by the game (a classic is a MTH that they think will get them to avoid meeting the master of hearing his orders) or that give the GM the wrong message about what they wanted from the fame.

It's one of the many reason playing MLWM with "new" players is not enjoyable like playing other more immediate, grabby and less subtle games. (I love playing Kagematsu or A Taste For Murders with new players. In particular, Kagematsu is more enjoyable with people you have still not played it with)  Learning to use MLWM and get better results takes time, experience and deep knowledge of the system (I avoid being the one to demo MLWM at conventions, but I sign up every time I can play it with experienced players)

Other examples, from the same post:

What about my own course of action? From my experience, if you want a minion that will do as few evil deeds as he can, it's better to give him a high weariness score and zero self-loathing (in a recent My Life with Angelica game my character was made like this and he got almost to the endgame doing only damage to things and propriety and not to other people). He often get a good ending too. The cost is that he will fail a lot of times, and he probably will not be the one who will kill the Master.
By the other hand, a big self-loathing score increase your chance to be the one who kill the Master, but almost guarantee a bad ending ("bad" in the sense of death or something bad for the character).
That My Life with Angelica character I cited above was a guy I liked and I was sympathetic with, so I gave him zero self-loathing.  Valentino by the other hand I see as someone who at this point is driven by superficial vanity. I would like to play him more for making him really change, because I really don't like him just now. So I gave him 2 self-loathing, because in a sense, what it will happen to him... he had it coming.
Why not 3 self-loathing and zero weariness? I don't know, it just didn't feel "right" for the character to be so extreme.

This what I thought when I gave him these stats. For the most part is use of system, I don't know how much you see "color" in that, apart from the last bit (that is pure color affecting character: in my imagination he could not have self-loathing 3) )

Notice again: the system is used here TO GET THE CHARACTER I WANT, not to "win". For any meaning you can do to "win" apart from "enjoining the game".

In the original thread I was asked "what would ruin the game for you?". One of the answers was "A GM that would not recognize and use the flags I put on the character", but that answer was very presumptuous, it assumed that I do know the system enough to use it perfectly every time. In actual play is much, more common for a game of MLWM to be "ruined" by players who don't know how to use the system (or are not interested in learning to use it). Another example of bad use that is not tied to bad misleading flags is hurting the connections for personal gain, interact with them in bad faith, or avoid searching for them, because a lot of new players see only self-loathing as a mean to be "badass" and are not interested in stat called "love". (all this, notice, can be done without changing the initial color of the game a bit. It's the final color that it's ruined, but at that time it's too late)

(this post is not finisher, I am stopping for a bit and I will continue posting after that, please wait before replying)

[Moreno R.]

(following from the previous post)

My post for the second "step" of the endeavor is here but I am jumping right to the third step to avoid making this post too long:

I am looking at John's character sheet and the result table of My Life With Master, checking what would probably happen before the endgame, with the experience of my past games ("how I would have played him")

Looking a John and at the Master, it's a reasonable assumption that most of the Master's orders will be about Villainy and not Violence. So, at the beginning, Self-Loathing will increase, but not weariness.  Doing Villainy to other will become easier action after action (the numbers of dice rolled by John increase steadily, the resisting die stays the same), but with the way I have chosen the numbers on the sheet, the Connection Rolls will stay the same (no matter how much Self-Loathing increase, I can't roll less than 1 die), and it's a roll that I can turn in my favor with the sincerity or desperation die.

From these numbers, looking only at the percentages, it would seems that both Self-Loathing and love will rise steadily, but Self-loathing will rise quicker. This in practice will not be true, because I will play trying to make John's acts require more than one roll (allowing him to refuse to follow up with the second roll, or at least have multiple connection rolls during the act), or to use the Less than Human or the more than human exception to make them fail, and the Horror Revealed rule associated with a low Reason (1) means that Self-Loathing will never rise more than 2 points above Love.

[...]

I would spread love between a lot of connection, to make my character less vulnerable but making THEM more vulnerable (if you have all Love invested in one single connection, the GM could be hesitant to kill that connection, making the player repeat all over again, but if the death of a connection would comport the loss of only 1 point of love, well, he become a target...)

If weariness stay very low (always at 1, probably, or 2), Love needs to go only to 6 or 7 to start the endgame. I would try to have it rise even more before going against the Master, but let's say for simplicity's sake that I can't, the Master give an order that I must absolutely rebel against, so the endgame start with Love at 7, self-loathing at 8, Weariness at 1, Fear at 4 and Reason at 1.
This means that the roll to kill the Master is of 6 dice against 12. Difficult, without having other minion's help or going for the sincerity die. Let's say that I go for this option, and I have 6d4-6 + 1d10 against 12d4-12. Still less than a 50% chance, but it's more even. Let's say that I kill him at the third roll (with a lucky roll or with the help of some other minion), so at the end John has Love at 7, self-loathing at 8, Weariness at 3, and Reason at 1: this mean that I can choose the ending 2 (John dies), 3 (John destroy himself). More important, in this case, John can't run away (ending 1) and can't integrate in the society there (ending 4)

The ending #3 has interesting possibilities in this setting hack: john could become an homeless drunk, or ha could confess and go to prison, or ha could kill himself, or he could even continue to play "Captain Free Market" all his life destroying himself that way. But ending #2 is simpler, so I choose that. John dies killing Ed White.

This part is almost all pure speculation about numbers, based on mathematic, the rules of the game (that allow a very limited range of fluctuation for the stats) and past games of MLWM.

Notice the part I underscored in the quote, too:  from past experiences in past MLWM games, I know that often you "can't really wait" to get stats big enough to kill the Master, you have to "kill the bastard, RIGHT NOW", or in other cases, it's the order that your character would never, ever accept without trying to resist (starting the endgame)

This is the human, in-your-gut part of the game. And in good MLWM play, it's a given. I can really trust that IF THE GM KNOW THE SYSTEM, if the GM is an EXPERIENCED MLWM GM, if WE PLAYED WELL, at that time I will want to kill the master.

I an trusting the GM enough, with this (if he know the game and the system), that I don't have "to make it happen" by myself.

Meaning: it's much, more enjoyable, at that time, if I really try to "game the system" , trying to bet a bigger love amount before resisting an order. Then it's much more powerful, gut-wrenching and cathartic than playing ignoring the system (or, even worse, playing "badly") as I had to do in games like D&D (played not gamist) because "only  power-players use the system as if they know how to use it, your character would not do that". In MLWM this doesn't happen, because "using the system" doesn't mean "breaking the game", but "playing the game well".

At this time in the post I think I can say it: I consider this a necessary characteristic of coherent game design. It's not sufficient, obviously (system is only part of the whole), but if a "coherent" game require, to be played well, that you artificially make "mistakes" (false mistakes in this case, you are really "having to play the system very badly to get the game experience that the game design intended for you")... then it's not very "coherent" at all, right?

It's the specific kind of incoherence that I talked about with you (by email) years ago regarding another designer's game , Ron, do you remember? The one about that old American war...

What if I don't trust the system? What if I say "I should stop playing in a way that help my character, I should play the dramatic rebellion of my character, thinking only of that and ignoring the numbers"? It's not another way of saying "I don't trust this system to work. I will prepare the story in my mind, fuck the system"? Or, to say it still in another way... it's not that "Story Before"?

My Life With Master is particular regarding this because the stats on the sheets are neatly separated from "how you got them".  I can say, with absolute certainty, that if I rebel against the Master with a specific amount of Love or more, I will start the endgame, period. This absolutely independent from "what really happened" in these connection scenes, who they are, what did I do, etc: and this allow me, yes, to talk numbers without talking too much about color or fiction.

This does not mean that fiction and color are not important for the endgame: as I wrote above, for this to work, I will have to really hate the Master at that time, and this can't be done with numbers. I am just assuming that IF I PLAY WITH PEOPLE WHO PLAY THIS GAME WELL (including the use of the numbers), this is what will happen. And not as a sort of "wind-up toy" (a wind-up toy would work even with beginning players, would not have any need of my real hate to work), but as a consistent, reliable result from playing well a good coherent system.

And it was a good thing that MLWM allow me to talk about numbers without having to invent fiction: I realized during the exercise that I had absolutely zero interest in inventing fiction. It's not even that "it didn't really happen at the table", it's even worse: seeing that the game allowed me to talk about the end results (the minion's endings) without having to invent a lot of fiction, that fiction would have been unnecessary, gratuitous, worthless.  Nothing like the real game. (and I am not saying this meaning "well, it's made up play, it never really happened", what I mean is that MLWM play is about emotions, not events: you KNOW you will get you point of love in a connection scene, as you KNOW that the master will die. A "I did that, he did that, then I killed him" is not the game, not even a false counterfeit game. It does not even resemble real MLWM play)

I had another problem regarding the starting color, I talked about it here. That error contributed to the difficulties I had in using the color in the exercise, but even if I had used the picture as a picture of the Master, I would have loathed wrinting false game fiction)

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So, after all this, I war really surprised to read this reply from Ron:

What I want to do is see how Reward and reward mechanics can get separated. I'll pick two examples in which I think the account lost track of the starting Color in favor of constructing a more generic, reward-mechanic oriented approach to play. I've listed my more-or-less instant reactions to what I read, and I urge you to correct me if I'm being unfair or didn't understand you well enough. All thoughts are welcome.

[...]

My Life with Master: On a purely personal note, I loathe playing this game with anyone who is thinking about those final values and the potential Epilogue. For me the Reward is in the accumulating, passionate reactions every character has, generating what feels and looks like a purely deterministic plot by the time the Epilogues come around, and their role is only to put a period (perhaps a meaningful one) at the end of it.

I was not surprised so much by the comments about the color, but (and this is the reason this is not only in another thread, but even in the subforum for MLWM ("your stuff"): this post is about MLWM play.  And the way this quote contradict every experience I had with the game.

I have already written in the previous post a lot of example of situation (common situation) where a lack of system expertise ruined the game experience or damaged it (to the point that I want to play the game now only with experienced players). This even happened with "My life with Angelica" at the last Internoscon. The other players are good players, they were interested in the game and really tried to play it. But it was the first time they played MLWM (or an hack of the game), and they mistakenly thought that the game was playable without having read the manual or without playing with agency (because one of them did read the manual beforehand, but he never played it before), believing that "playing my character" was enough, believing that they could be passive, believing (really) that SEARCHING FOR "LOVE" WAS POWERPLAYING.

I was aggressive. I had a plan. I had only three hours of convention time, and I wanted to "kill" Angelica in that time. I created the character to get that result. I ruthlessly hunted every occasion during the game to have a connection roll, even inside a villainy scene (I asked a npc accomplice, a night guard, for help, and asked him why he was doing that). And all of this, without betraying my concept of the character even one single fucking time! (there is no need to betray it! there is no need!! not if the system is really coherent) I was going great! I would have got what I wanted from the game, not by going "story before" (as it would have happened if I had decided to play like an actor playing a part forgetting the system), but by PLAYING THE GAME.

But I was, I think, the only one. All the others... didn't know what to do. They got orders, they did violence and villainy, and waited for connection to come to them. Some of them even refused the chance. One of them even tried to rape his connection! (really a good way to get love...).

At this time, I think I and the GM made a mistake. At least one of us should have stopped the game  and said "now, this is not working. It's better if we stop a little to talk about what you have to do in this game". Do you know what I should have told them, what I think would have saved the game? I should have said "play to get love, it's the way to win!! Go for love, every time! Try to take at least two rolls to do what the master order you, so you can stop before the second roll, even if he will punish you!".

I should have teach them to "play the game", and stop worrying about "playing the system" and be called "powergamers"

I didn't. I confess I was not in a good mood. They were ruining, in my eyes, the game, and I didn't understood at first what their problem was (It's passed too much time from the last time I ever worried about being called a "powerplayer"), I thought that they were not engaged by the premise or the color, and I angrily thought "why did they sign if they don't like this game?". It was only near the end of the time that I started to realize what the problem was, but it's was to late at that point.

So, did I miss my chance to kill Angelica? No. Why? Because, seeing that we had lost a lost of time in the aimlessly wandering about of the players, the GM "gifted" us, a couple of time during the game, free Love points, to try to get to the endgame before the end of the time slot.

Even with these free points, I was the only one to be able to rebel at the end. So I (my character, but I prefer to use "I") went to Angelica's home, rang the bell, and then (after feigning a little to be still smitten about her), when she tried to order me to do a thing, I simply told her to fuck off and went outside, laughing.

So, I was satisfied, right? I got what I wanted from the game.

Wrong.

It felt empty. If felt like a rehearsal of the "real" scene, that I did not get to play. It was not "real", because I had not "earned" it in play.

I want to play My Life with Angelica again.

I want to play it with experienced players. With players that will count their scores, that will try to angle to get more love and less weariness, with players that will take any chance to score a point of love, with players that will know what to do in every moment of the game.
It's not necessary that they count the scores for their preferred ending (I don't do it, apart from the initial choice of Weariness/Self-loathing), but if they do it...so what? What does it means in game terms? Do you want to survive and so you try to get less self-loathing? So what? It's what your character would try to do anyway!

It's not even a matter of disagreeing with Ron: I don't even understand WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED at HIS the table to get him to say that. So this is my question: what happened? What problem were they causing?

I mean, I can understand hating to play with people who don't care a bit about their character consistency, but I call them "people who don't care a bit about their character consistency", not "anyone who is thinking about those final values and the potential Epilogue."

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P.S.

Some of the things which interest me about those plots include the relative degrees of humanity and monstrosity the Minion achieves through his or her own actions (e.g. the details of following a command, or the way a Connection is dealt with). But I also care a lot about the specifics of a Minion: the look and feel, and what that means. For example, did John play Captain Freemarket to the hilt, without caring about it one way or the other, and only get irritated about something else Ed made him do? Or, conversely, did Ed give him anything he wanted as long as he acted like Captain Freemarket 24 hours a day? How exactly did wearing that precise outfit and promoting that persona interact with the Love mechanic? Without any of this, I find the character utterly non-compelling. He could have been a dog-faced boy, a girl with a withered arm, or a potted plant, merely a placeholder for "Generic Minion character."

The details of following a command still feels too much "false" to me (maybe with another game I would nit have this problem, but MLWM is one of the games I associate with "sincerity": and not only because it's the bigger die.), and the original concept of Valentino was wrong, as I explained in my last post. But in that initial concept, he would loathe the costume, but wear it anyway in front of his "fans".

I am not surprised you don't find the character compelling. That was my problem, too. I thought that using MLWM could solve this, but it works only in actual play, it's not enough to "imagine" MLWM play to get sincere attachment/loathing for the character(s).

[Ron Edwards]

Oh, Moreno! I did not call you a powergamer.

I appreciate your point and it's a good thread topic. Please at least consider that I'm the guy who said "system does matter" and received the blast of disapproval for it from what appeared to be entire internet and the entire industry. I doubt I'm the person who's saying now, "Oh God, you paid attention to the numbers, you must be a powergamer and that's evil."

So let's not have this thread be about you and me. You raised a good point for others to discuss. It's actually the heart of real Reward, in my opinion.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron! It seems that my walls-of-text are scaring people away...

I have the very bad habit, in forum posts, to jump from talking to one person to talking to the invisible audience, and back again, without saying so when I do it. And the more I care about an issue, the more it happen. Sorry about the ramblings in these two posts, I will try to keep separate the personal from the general here.

Oh, Moreno! I did not call you a powergamer.

One of the two question directed to you was exactly this: WHAT did you call me? I have read enough of your posts to exclude from the beginning that had anything to do with labels like "powerplayer" (that part was the "to the invisible audience" one, a rant about all the people I see - and sometimes play with - still ruining their own games thinking that "only bad players play well"...), but then I didn't understand what the problem was.

Tied to this, the second question: when you write

My Life with Master: On a purely personal note, I loathe playing this game with anyone who is thinking about those final values and the potential Epilogue. For me the Reward is in the accumulating, passionate reactions every character has, generating what feels and looks like a purely deterministic plot by the time the Epilogues come around, and their role is only to put a period (perhaps a meaningful one) at the end of it.

, what problems did you observe in actual play?

I am assuming that you are not talking about a creative agenda clash (you would have called it "a creative agenda clash", instead here you talked about techniques), and the problem was not simply bad playing, playing in bad faith, playing to show off, different interpretations of color, cheating, disconnected narrations, or any other kind of specific problem that has a specific name or that is bigger than "thinking about their final values".
I am assuming (and maybe it's a wrong assumption) that you are talking about players who are playing their character with integrity, with a story now creative agenda, on the same page with the others about color... but you see them, during the game, making calculations about how their character could end, and act to change that.
I have never seen this ruin a game. Maybe I have never played with someone who make calculations during the game more than me, maybe I was lucky, maybe we are really talking about different things, but in MLWM, what I see is people who try to get a "good" ending, or to be the one who rebel first. In the first case they have to try to get more love. In the second case, they have to try to get more love, with a big self-loathing score, and this simply make it more difficult. But this is not simply what I should have explained to the players at the internoscon game? "play to get more love"?

Let's see what I think it's possibly the "worst" case: someone who want to become the new master. This is, I think, the only case where this counting tell you to avoid getting love (your final Love must be zero). But if you do that, you are out of the game, useless. You lose almost half of the scenes, that become horror revealed ones. The scenes left are about you doing what the Master tell you. If there is not a much bigger problem (a creative agenda clash or a player who want to suicide his character because he didn't really want to play) he will soon understand that he will not enjoy the game that way.
Another possibility is to play normally, but with the plan to get his own connections to die at the end. Imagine doing that, without hurting the character consistency, and with sincere Story Now priorities (so, you do this not to show off to the others, you care for what happen, it's simply that you see this as the right end for the character). You'll have to kill all your connections, yourself. THEN you'll become another master.
I think it's powerful. And if it isn't, it's because it has other, bigger problems.

I appreciate your point and it's a good thread topic. Please at least consider that I'm the guy who said "system does matter" and received the blast of disapproval for it from what appeared to be entire internet and the entire industry. I doubt I'm the person who's saying now, "Oh God, you paid attention to the numbers, you must be a powergamer and that's evil."

Well, your passage to the dark side of the ForGe would be very dramatic at this point (especially if you begin to wear a black armor with a malfunctioning gas mask that make a lot of noise), but no, I didn't think you meant that.  The problem is that I don't know what you meant!  (and the powerplaying rant got mixed with the rest)

So let's not have this thread be about you and me. You raised a good point for others to discuss. It's actually the heart of real Reward, in my opinion.

I think it's still too vague, and this keep people from joining the discussion: are you interested in other people's personal experiences with MLWM in general, or in the specific point about "counting numbers"?