GenCon: Misery Bubblegum 1/7

[TonyLB]

#1 of 7 games played at GenCon:

I started out the weekend with a nice, small game with two other players.  I'm pretty dang sure that I know their names, but somewhere in the many names that I think I know I'm sure to have made a mistake, so I'm going to leave everyone anonymous in all my reports.  Anyway, I got a chance to pitch Misery Bubblegum, which is always fun:  Basically, it's shojo manga fun, with the romance and the uncertainty, and the tragic inaction and shy reserve.  Whee! 

We decided, mutually, that though the game isn't about bang-smash violence, we wanted to play out our story in the presence of bang-smash violence.  As such, we decided that we would play teenagers who had been trained from an early age (quite possibly from birth) to be assassins and all around covert-ops.  We made up our characters:  (1) Junoichi, our in-your face kung-fu guy.  (2) Ryu, our reserved but determined guns-guy and all around sniper and (3) my character, Reika, the girl who sits back in the panel van and coordinates the movements with her real-time hacking of security systems and electronics.

Junoichi's dream was to fight someone for fun/recreation, rather than having to kill them ... and specifically, he wanted to fight Ryu.  He blamed Reika for making that impossible, since she was always being controlling and mission oriented.  Reika's dream was to have just one date with Junoichi and do normal teenage stuff ... maybe even a kiss!  She blamed Ryu for making that impossible, since he was always there, stopping them from having any private time.  Ryu's dream was to get Reika and himself entirely out of Company control, and make a life with her.  He blamed Reika for making this impossible, because she's too uptight.

We had three scenes, a few flashbacks, and three major heartbreak moments.

First scene:  We assaulted the living hell out of a corporate office tower, which may (or may not) have actually had bad-guys in it.  Folks were charmingly unconcerned with the really questionable briefing that I handed them, and that was cool.  Junoichi immediately went off plan and got into a big fight.  Reika freaked out at the danger he was putting himself into, and started yelling in Ryu's ear to shoot pretty much everything that moved.  Junoichi told Ryu that it was under control, and Ryu held off, letting Junoichi kick ass and take risks.  When Junoichi actually fought his way clear, Reika expressed her immense relief over the headsets.  "Oh, thank God you're all right, you had me so worried," etc., etc.  Junoichi just responded "Ryu ... thank you for understanding me."  Gah!  SCREW YOU JUNOICHI!  REIKA LOVES YOU, YOU DOLT!

I always want to protect ... well ... pretty much everyone in my Misery Bubblegum games.  And yet, they all get so hurt.  WAH!

Second scene, some bad guys (probably connected) counter-attacked the van and kidnapped Reika.  Junoichi and Ryu abandoned the mission and went after her.  They had a brief radio conversation (before her earpiece got snatched) in which Ryu expressed that nothing could possibly stop them from coming to her rescue.  Ryu even snapped Junoichi back into place when the brawler was about to diverge from their plan:  "This isn't for your fun, this is for Reika."  When the pair broke into her holding cell, largely due to Ryu's efforts, Reika immediately said "Oh, Junoichi!  I knew you'd come for me!"  Gah!  SCREW YOU REIKA!  RYU LOVES YOU, YOU DOLT!

Third scene, as they watch the burning warehouse:  Reika points out that they are entirely out of Company surveillance ... that they could do anything.  They could be normal kids for a while ... hint, hint.  Junoichi looks knowingly at her and at Ryu, and is quiet.  Ryu says that they could be normal kids for much more than a while, and Reika is resistant.  But he insists, and she can't quite marshall her arguments for wanting more than nothing, but less than everything.  So she agrees that the three of them should escape ... and Junoichi refuses, saying that it's not the life he wants.  Ryu takes a confused and hurt Reika, and leaves Junoichi behind.  Gah!  SCREW YOU RYU!  JUNOICHI IS SACRIFICING HIMSELF SO THAT YOU'LL HAVE A CHANCE WITH REIKA, YOU DOLT!

Fun session.  Lots of sad, lots of sweet.  Start to finish (including explaining rules and making characters) took ~90 minutes.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Tony,

I remember you telling me that you'd turned a design corner a while ago, and that the game had really started to fly. I also heard some great things about the game you're posting about, which is great!

What procedures of play, i.e. changes in the rules, made all the difference? I mean, compared to the previous drafts.

Best, Ron

P.S. Misery Bubblegum is technically still unpublished, right? Let me know; it's a which-forum issue.

[TonyLB]

It's technically still unpublished:  In the playtesting forum?  I wasn't sure ...

A few things, I think, made the big difference.  A major one is that I stopped playing with playing-cards from a standard deck (which were nice, in that they're omnipresent) and started playing with a customed deck where the cards themselves have flavor text.

The game has an Opinion mechanic, in which you express an opinion in-character and give the player of the target character a card.  That never quite sung with playing cards:  "I say that your character is an arrogant jerk, and I give you the Ace of Spades."  Fundamentally, people could barely remember who the Ace of Spades came from, much less what it stood for.  Plus, the ace in your hand in no way incited you to any particular action ... you could use it to be a saintly, selfless soul yourself.

But once the card you're getting is labelled "Arrogant," that whole mechanic changes.  Then you say something more like, "But ... but ... my character isn't arrogant.  I'll never get to play this card.  It's just taking up space in my hand, and I'm only allowed so many cards in my hand, so that's an active problem!  I gotta get rid of this.  Oh, hey, wait ... I know someone who'd actually use this card ... and then, whatever spin I put on giving it to them, that'd be what folks remembered when he pulled it out again.  Okay, lemme phrase this just right ... 'John, you act like you're so tough, but I think it's all just bluster because you're so damned scared of being rejected.'  Here, have a card."

And, of course, as a side-effect the "Arrogant" card is a much better tag into the human memory:  You remember, even if you play it an hour later in the game, the context in which it arrived in your hand.

That's the pre-DexCon to DexCon difference, and I think it's the largest one in terms of playability.  It creates a strong dynamic in which to make cool characters cooler still.  I wish I could remember some really good examples of the opinion mechanic in action, but it's got a wierd inevitable-in-hindsight feel to it that makes the actual memories slippery.  I'm pretty sure, for instance, that during this game Reika gave Junoichi a "Cut Loose" card, with the opinion flavor that he needed to get himself under control for his own good ... but I honestly can't remember if that happened after the incident with him losing control (so that it was me responding to the player's portrayal of the character) or before (so that it was in part the player responding by portraying his character to my opinion).  In hindsight ... that's just how Junoichi is.

The dream stuff was new at GenCon, and was about making sure that we have cool characters in a fraught situation in the first place.  It went through a few evolutions (of which this is the first), but the basic notion is that your character has a dream they want to achieve, this dream involves at least one other person (because acting only for yourself isn't just selfish, it's boring) and some PC is an obstacle (because conflict is fun).  It's a useful tool (particularly for the GM, but really for everyone) to assure that there are no scenes that start out with "Well ... whaddya want to do?  I dunno ... what do you want to do?"

[Ron Edwards]

I see! I especially like the way the new cards make the game more transitive - they turn the players' attention upon one another's characters. It reminds me of the assignment of adjectives to characters in InSpectres, in a way.

Best, Ron

[Marshall Burns]

Here's a brain-twister:  I don't like this game's source material, at all, but it sounds like five kinds of fun.  Does that make me crazy?

-Marshall

[Judd]

Here's a brain-twister:  I don't like this game's source material, at all, but it sounds like five kinds of fun.  Does that make me crazy?

-Marshall

I was not at all interested in the game's premise, even after hearing my roommate and his lady-friend talk about how excited they were to play it at last Dexcon.  I only sat down to play because I wanted to game with Julie, Tony and Anna.  But I had an absolute blast and it was the game session of the con for me.

[TonyLB]

We transitioned directly from game #1 to game #2, picking up a fourth participant and moving to a bigger table.  As we brought our new person up to speed, we polled interest and folks were keen both on a sports-story and on giant robots.  So we did a sport that involved giant robots, in space:  Grav-Ball.

I was pretty impressed, honestly, with how little the presence of the giant robots made a difference to the story.  Basically, we were telling the story of a soccer team, just with really wierd narrative color.  Characters:  We went western, so our second Junoichi of the weekend was shortened to John (the inadequate but determined goalie), we had Steve (the vain forward) and Floxie (the slightly crazy captain).  I created Sarah, a rival star player.

Floxie's dream was to win the prize money for the big game and increase her current tally of 2500 pet cats to an even one million.  She blamed John for stopping her, because he was a terrible goalie.  John's dream was to save the team by blocking one of Sarah's shots in the big game ... he blamed Steve for making this impossible, because Steve kept the ball off in the opponent's sector of the field so effectively.  Steve's dream was to be recognized as the best individual player on the Sports Satellite (which would mean besting Sarah), and he blamed John's poor play for holding him back.  Sarah dreamed of having a team that could match her skill, so that she could have friend rather than just admirers.  She wanted Floxie as a member of this team, and blamed John for making Floxie feel that the team needed her too much to jump ship.

I didn't really know what to make of the one million cats dream, honestly ... it seemed like something that was just tossed out because it was past midnight, and the player wanted to get playing.  It just didn't seem to matter to the other players, though we tried.  I worry that the lack of strong ties there gave Floxie's player less tools for interacting, and effectively sidelined her a bit.  Changing the phrasing of the dreams questions to help people get those links became a big issue for me going forward.

This was the first game where we had serious betrayals.  Steve consistently blew off the team to pursue his personal vendetta against Sarah ... enough so that when Floxie and John (in a zero-G observatory filled with 2500 bouncing cats) noted two trainer-mechs playing "tag" amidst the drive-flames of incoming shuttles, their response was just "God, there they go again."  Floxie expressed so much dissatisfaction with her team that Sarah actually got up the nerve to say "We should be on the same team, our team-mates are just holding us back!" and Floxies response was "YEAH!

Only John stayed true ... dramatically so.  He played tons of mini-scene cards, flashing back into his past as a failure (we had a montage of goals he'd let through, with the other players around the table getting together to do annoying "BZZZT!" sounds every time John's player reached out to attempt a block), all of which served to fuel his determination to live up to his teams "trust" in him.

He tried to make this trust a reality by handing people good opinion cards in the process of thanking them for giving him a chance:  like "Captain, you're the greatest!  It is so cool of you to give me a second chance!" (hand "Cool" card over to Floxie).  This tactic worked on Floxie, who felt obliged to live up to the expectations;  She created a brutal training regimen to try to help John fulfill his dream.  The same tactic didn't work on Steve, who basically said "Yes, all the good things you say about me are quite true, and that's why I deserve a better team-mate than you, John."  He didn't quite say that explicitly, but ... yeah ... it was there.  It was a cool dichotomy.

Where John shone, however, was in conflicts against Sarah.  He kept cards about holding fast and staying true in his hand, and deployed them unrelentingly against her.  Sarah tried to get him to quit the team, citing (quite correctly) that no matter how much training he had, he'd never be anything but a liability to them.  John shot back that she didn't understand the "spirit of the sport" ... how it was about more than just skill, it was about heart and holding together with your team-mates ... and he forced her to take that idea on board, not just blow it off.  That tinged everything she did from that point forward, and weakened her to the point where John actually got his dream:  He blocked her crucial shot, put it back out to Steve (who shot the goal that put his individual record above Sarah's for the number one slot) and the team won! 

Steve succeeded in a conflict in order to be completely ungracious about it, crediting John with nothing.

Our epilogue scene was the middle of the next season.  The team had shattered after winning the big game.  Steve was on a team of his own, yelling at people for not giving him the opportunity to shine.  Floxie and Sarah were on a team together, both near the top of the individual rankings, but they spent a lot of time with their million cats.  I think we decided that Sarah was allergic, but was keeping it a secret.

John was the captain of a team of under-dogs.  They loved him.

It was a wierd ending ... John who got the most beat up in a lot of the practical matters (ending up on a team of losers) was clearly the person with the happiest ending.  I think, in fact, that was an outcome of the dynamic of the flow of cards:  John gave away valuable cards attached to (by and large) positive opinions of other people.  Other folks gave away less valuable cards, often attached to negative opinions.  That means that the flow of good cards was strongly away from John ... but, also, it meant that John came across as far and away the strongest and most inspirational character in the game.  The others were lovably snarky, but John was a freakin' rock, and I think we all believed that no matter what happened to his dysfunctional team he'd somehow land make a place for himself.

[Landon Darkwood]

So, I was Junoichi and John in the two games that Tony described. I was also Junoichi and John in two games he hasn't described yet, and I ran a game of it at Tony's request. In fact, with the exception of Sunday night, Misery Bubblegum comprised nearly the whole of my gaming at GenCon... and I'm totally not disappointed by that. That's how good it is.

Ron, I'm not familiar with the previous versions of the game except in passing mention and from previous forum discussion, but I think I can answer your question regardless.

What the current mechanics of the game do is provide a fertile space for players to render judgment on the characters and express that judgment naturally as play moves along. I think it straddles the "players as audience" vs. "players as actor-writer-directors" fence better than maybe any other game I've ever played... a lot of the content that gets generated is subtext that is purely for audience's sake, and yet is organically integrated into the mechanics.

Tony's talked a little bit about the Opinion mechanic, which is part of the cocktail that makes the above happen - ultimately, the opinion you give says as much about your character as it does about the character receiving the opinion. If I say, "I love how you always stand up for your beliefs," and then hand you the Arrogant card, we know two things - that my character thinks yours is arrogant, and that my character is also too chicken or too conniving to be straight with you. It captures how people filter what they say to one another in a concrete, very real way.

The conflict mechanics also play into this, because the central thing at stake in any conflict is who gets the last word... essentially, who can force whom to shut the fuck up. So, successfully climbing the cliff? Who cares, we just agree on the most interesting way to color it and narrate it. Who gets bragging rights? Now that's a conflict.

Similarly, you can also play a card to do a "force" - essentially, your character presents a statement that *must* be responded to in one of three ways: agree entirely, disagree entirely, or flee the scene. So I could force with, "We're in love, and we'll be together forever." And if you don't have a card that can beat mine, you must respond with "No, we're not in love, and we won't be together forever," or "Yes, we are, and we will." or flee the scene, which has ramifications of its own.

The magic sauce in both of the above things is that they establish nothing besides the characters' statements and points of view - just because I win a conflict by saying, "You can't help but fail at anything you do," it doesn't actually make that statement true in the fiction in any sense... it just means you have to shut up about it now. So now we have an opportunity to manipulate the fiction in a whole bunch of potential ways to lend meaning to that exchange. Is my character right? Is he wrong? Was it good for him to confront your character? Does it turn out he's just a jackass?

Forces are the same way - nothing said in response to them has to be true or false, necessarily. You totally could affirm the force and be lying out your ass... and a lot of times, it ends up being very poignant when we know that as audience and see you do it anyway.

Given that you're pressured to bring things to a head as the cards run out, it ends up creating the quickest bang-for-buck gut-punching emo Narrativist engine I think I've ever seen. The decision of how to shape the fiction in response to the statements made by the characters, to create meaning from that bevy of context, is laid right at the players' feet in an effortless way. It didn't fail to create magic for me every single time.

And it doesn't require familiarity with the tropes of shoujo manga/anime at all to get into - only a familiarity with real human drama. Simply following the mechanics creates the shoujo feel. So, so cool.

[TonyLB]

Similarly, you can also play a card to do a "force" - essentially, your character presents a statement that *must* be responded to in one of three ways: agree entirely, disagree entirely, or flee the scene.

Just to keep one thing straight: the play records to date haven't shown that particular element because the rule was invented between thursday night and friday night.  The rule made its first appearance in "Generation Fleet Zodiac," which is game #4 of 7.  Soon :-)

[TonyLB]

#3 of 7 games played at GenCon:

This will be the scantest report, for the simple reason that this game was our third of the evening, and started somewhere near 2a.m.  My memories are very hazy.

We had a whole pile of people, and so we decided to go with a nice Scooby-gang type Buffy the Vampire Slayer knock-off.  It helped get everyone grounded in terms of what the situation was, and work from there.  I played a naive witch.  We had a slayer, a library-geek (who dreamed of killing a demon by his own hands, and blamed the slayer for hogging all the bloodshed), a crazed weapons inventor ("Oh cool, my threads from the ... ahem ... well, from a certain famous shroud ... arrived.  I'll start making bullets!"), a demonologist who dreamed of opening a dimensional gateway to nirvana, and Dirk.

Dirk's the one whose story I remember most clearly.  Dirk was the half-demon half-brother of our slayer, a broody, sullen teenager who shied away from the peppy energy of his little sister.  His first scene was at the breakfast table, describing how hard he had it was to restrain himself from trying to eat his family.  If I recall correctly, his dream was to die at his sister's hands.  He considered his very existence a pestilence upon the world.

We turned up the dial on that:  There was some sort of demonic convergence happening, and all the demons were getting more ... demony.  Dirk immediately predicted that he would lose control, and fell back on his (apparently extensive) contingency plans for keeping himself in check.  The library-geek directed our (very unhappy) slayer in carving binding runes into the flesh of her brother, and Dirk's player was revelling in the raw suffering of it all.  As the end of the world unfolded, Dirk got worse and worse.

Well, at some point, a couple of us players started fighting back against his spiral of self-destruction.  The slayer's player and I (and eventually most of the rest of the group) started handing him really, really strong opinion cards and expressing our faith in him.

Typical exchange:

DIRK:  "Urggh ... I feel them calling me.  Dark Gods from beyond time.  TIE ME DOWN!  DO IT NOW!  I CAN'T CONTROL MYSELF!"
Slayerette:  "Dirk, no!  You can do this.  I believe in you!  You've always been so kind to me, even when times are hard.  Don't let this beat you now!" (hands over a fistful of cards)

I think it would have been cool either way:  If he'd turned, and we'd had to put him down, it would have been massively heartbreaking.  As it was, he (reluctantly) drew strength from people's faith in him, and started to believe in himself.  He turned out to be the key player in preventing the apocalype-of-the-week.  We had a straight up happy ending, in which all of the characters helped each other through their conflicts, and came together to trash the demon attack.

I thought that was pretty cool, really.  There's a degree to which we bossed Dirk's player around, and pulled him off his planned track for the character ... but it was all soft pressure.  He didn't have to use any of the awesome cards we gave him, after all.  We just communicated very clearly "We think it would be this cool (hand cards) if your character found some kind of redemption in the faith of his friends."

[TonyLB]

#4 of 7 games played at GenCon:

Come friday evening, folks gathered together for a run at the revamped-since-thursday rules.  We had a whole crowd of folks (five other players and myself), which was good fun.  We decided to play the crew of a star-travelling colonial fleet:  Generation Fleet Zodiac (with their twelve ships, of course).  Players hit me with the idea that (due to cosmic-radiation-exposure-handwaving) anyone above sixteen was required to be put into cold-sleep cannisters for the remainder of the voyage.  So they were hitting their teens, and simultaneously the most senior people awake on the fleet.

Characters and dreams were a hoot:  Junoichi (the captain) loved KeiKei (the EVA specialist), but then so did Siss (the retiring and female communications officer).  Junoichi had the authority, plus the dubious backing of the "genetric programatron" that said he and KeiKei would be a good choice to propagate the species.  However, none of that would make a difference if they couldn't find a suitable planet ... and Ryu had dumped his job in agroponics in order to appoint himself "security chief."  His brand of individualist anarchy threatened to destroy Junoichi's dream.  Meanwhile, Emma (the librarian/archivist) was secretly in love with Ryu (that bad-boy!) ... while the ship's AI (Franklin) who manifested as an eight-year-old boy (but was, in fact, much MUCH older than that) was quietly in love with Emma.  KeiKei, meanwhile, was just scared to death of ending up in cold-sleep, wanting to stay awake and savor the burgeoning bond that was forming between her and Siss on all those long space-walks where the communications officer's calm, caring voice was her only human contact.

Basically, the relationship map was too much for me to easily take in at one go (as I expect it is for my gentle reader), so I figured I'd count on people to remember their own relationships, and just shake the whole status quo hard.  I announced that long range sensors had identified a planet that appeared to be good enough for the people currently awake to colonize, but which, even with terraforming, would likely never be good enough to wake the cold-sleepers.  So, essentially, a chance to bail on the mission for your own personal benefit.  People who hated the current setup (KeiKei, Emma and Ryu) insisted that this was a course that MUST be followed.  Folks who liked the current setup (Junoichi, Siss and Franklin) dug their heels in hard.

This saw some of the first uses of the (new as of Friday) "Forcing" mechanic, which worked basically like this:  Junoichi said to Ryu "You've never cared about the fleet.  You just want your own selfish, petty little way.  You'd actually go to this planet, rather than continue the search," and played a card.  Ryu played a card to try to dodge the question (and give himself freedom to answer in a nuanced way) but eventually got beaten out.  His options were then (1) to say "Yes" to every item, all as a group, (2) to say "No" to every item, all as a group, or (3) to flee the scene.  He went with "YES, I'd go to this planet," which meant tacitly agreeing with "Yes, I've never cared about the fleet and I just want my own selfish, petty little way."  Fun stuff ... used to great effect by people to brutalize each other.

It was eventually decided that they'd head toward the planet, but by then everyone who wasn't desperately unhappy about the decision was pissed off about the process.  There were a lot of battles about authority, and secrecy, with an ongoing plot-line about Franklin keeping key information from people for their own good (information like "Hey, how long has this fleet been in space, anyway?"), and a lot of secret meetings as people maneuvered to see whether or not they were going to mutiny against captain Junoichi.

Turns out mutiny was unnecessary (though Ryu, Siss and Emma agreed that it was the right course):  Junoichi succumbed to the pressure and went to KeiKei for comfort, revealing his dream of them raising their eugenic little children on a real live planet.  KeiKei tried to let him down easy, but what it came down to is that she didn't want to go down on a planet ... she wanted to keep her life up in space, and her bond with Siss.  Junoichi straight up asked (with a mechanical force) "Do you love me?  Will you come with me?"  The answer:  "No."

After that, Junoichi was pretty much a dead man staggering through various scenes waiting for something to do in his mortal form.

And then there was Emma:  Ryu had snubbed her pretty badly during the coup planning, and she was heart-broken.  We set a scene with her in an airlock that she'd switched to manual control, not wearing a space-suit (of course) and contemplating the controls.  Franklin tried to convince her that there was a lot to live for, but his emotional neediness led him (played by me, I must confess) to the following mechanical Force:  "Please Emma, come back to me.  We love each other.  We'll be together.  We'll be happy."

Emma refused to say that she didn't love Franklin (though whether it was "Love-Love" was never clear) but she also wouldn't lie to him and say that she'd be happy.  If I'd thought things through more clearly, I would have realized that the rules gave her a third option.  She vented the airlock.

Awkward.

Things pretty well went downhill from there.  Junoichi wilfully gave his life in the ensuing crisis, spitefully passing on captainship to Ryu, who promptly purged the AI core (destroying Franklin) and basically threw the entire Generation Fleet into manual control dark ages.  It looked, at the end, like they were going to limp to the discovered planet, and leave Siss and KeiKei up on the barely-functioning ships, with the mandate to get them running again.

So Siss and KeiKei had a happy ending, anyway.