Nighttime Animals is a Revolution

[Jonathan Walton]

So, I was commenting in another thread about how Vincent Baker's Nighttime Animals Save the World is a great game for beginning roleplayers, which gave me the excuse to go back and read it again, which made me have an epiphany and conclude, once again, that Vincent is a genius.

I mean, look at the game: what is it?  It's not tabletop.  It's not a larp.  It's an entirely new hybrid beastie that nobody's really noticed or explored before.  The players are imagining the action of the game overlayed on top of the actual environment, very much like a larp or in De Profundis, say (another hybrid beastie), but, unlike larp, they're not actually acting it out themselves.  Instead, they're imagining their character as seperate from themselves, but out there doing things in the real world or a place very much like it.

I mean, traditional roleplaying is often described as imagining that you are "some other guy."  But here, you're not even necessarily that guy.  Or you are that guy, but he's not here doing what you're doing, he's over there in the bushes doing something else.  It's Sim of a different color, where you are encouraged to watch your character from the 3rd person, like playing a video game or something.  Much more audience oriented than actor oriented.

Maybe this isn't such a revelation to other people, but this is HUGE for me and takes away many of the barriers that kept me from really getting into larp or larp design.  I love imagining things going on in the world around me, but I dislike all the costumes and running around and and the pseudo-RenFest atmosphere and getting in trouble with the police, which often accompanies larping.  And, get this, you can play things that aren't human sized or shaped.  Vincent shows this right from the bat with the cast of nighttime animals.  But you could play flying creatures or crazy wuxia heroes that jump from building to building.  You could even play it in the car (without someone else driving, probably, just to be safe) and imagining a chase scene or the freeway scene from Matrix Reloaded happening around you.

Anyway, there it is.  Hopefully this means something to somebody else too.

[Callan S.]

The coin exchange mechanism, how does that work and produce results?

The imagining the world...I'd wondered about doing that but never developed it this far. I mean, you don't need to dress up or act it out...you don't do that at table top and it works. This is just like table top but you walk around and use the real world as an imagination sparker and place to stage the imagination.

[Jonathan Walton]

The coin exchange mechanism, how does that work and produce results?

It's like this: big coins win, but winning gives you small coins.  So you have to intentionally lose a few conflicts into order to gain the power to win where it really counts.  It's a resource-distrubution thing, but one of a different color.  It ensures that the characters will face hardship but win out when it really counts.

I also like that you could potentially just play with the change in your pockets.  People with a lot of change would win a bunch in the beginning, but the money would end up redistributing itself out in a fairly equitable fashion.  In fact, it might be a good strategy to set yourself up for a big failure, just to gain bigger coins.

Then again, I'm more interested in the out-of-body larp aspect than the actual mechanics of the game, but the coin exchange really is well-suited for this kind of play.

[Gamskee]

I ran a game of DBZ outside once. Using a parking and describing the destruction done to it and actually pacing out the size of the fireballs really seemed to add somethign to the game. Perhaps this use the terrain idea isn't a bad one.

[Andrew Morris]

Jonathan, I really like Nighttime Animals, but I don't see it as a hybrid game. In my mind, it's pretty clearly an RPG. Can you define exactly what about it makes you consider it a hybrid? I mean, so it's not designed to be played at a table...how's that any more "hybrid" than, say, an RPG that doesn't use dice, or pencils, or Mountain Dew, or anything else that's traditionally part of the RPG experience?

Maybe the problem is that we just don't have a good definition of what LARP is. And, I believe, tabletop RPG is just a cludged-together term that means non-LARP RPG.

[Callan S.]

I sort of have to agree. I mean, you could do the same thing at a table top with some minature scenery plonked down...you could just imagine the action happening there.

However, this idea does tap into a rich and solid resource for the imagination...the real world. And the coin system supports that element by its practicalities.

It's a game design that takes advantage of a visually stunning resource, with crisper images than any computer game. It's not a hybrid, but damn it is smart designing!

[timfire]

Hmmm, at first I was going to say I thought the game was a hybred, but after thinking about it, I have to say that I think it's not. Let me explain.

This thread reminded me of a game I played a few years ago. In the game, we all played ourselves, but with superpowers. The game world was our real life neighborhood, and we all lead our normal real-world lives, though in the game our real-world lives were just covers for our superhero activities.

Now, we didn't walk around, we all sat at a table like we always did. But the imaginary action took place in the real world environment. Things that were going on in the neighborhood found there way into the game.

But this experience was definitely a fairly 'traditional' table-top experience, and it really wasn't much different from how (I imagine) Nighttime Animals would play out.

So I guess this is another vote for 'not a hydred but a fine design.'

[Jonathan Walton]

Well, I don't want to necessarily get into an argument about "hybrid or not?"  I also don't think drawing a sharp distinction between larp and tabletop is beneficial to games that want to straddle those lines.  But I think Nighttime Animals is qualitatively different than the situation Tim describes or the tendency of White Wolf chronicles to play out the supernatural world overtop of the city in which the players actually live (perhaps borrowed from their larp lines, come to think of it).

The problem with just imagining action taking place in real spaces is that you have no exact reference points.  In NA, a player can point to a specific tree, say that's where his squirrel is, and then point to the tree that his character is trying to jump to.  And then the GM can assess the difficulty based on actual, real world distance.  You're limited by the specifics of the environment, but the point, I think, is that the environment will necessarily spark ideas that you wouldn't have thought of in a normal tabletop environment.

You see a building that looks especially sinister and suddenly it becomes the headquarters of a criminal organization or dark wizard.  It's kind of a variation of the game that people often play in airports or when they're people-watching with their friends, where you pick individuals out of the crowd and try to imagine what their lives must be like, what they're problems are, and where they're going right now.  It's sort of like a Fortune mechanic actually, based on the random things that you'll encounter while walking around outside.  

I view it like playing Engel with its tarot-interpretation rules.  You flip over a card, look at the image and the given meaning, and interpret it into the game.  Similarly, in NA, you stmble across some fallen branches from a recent rainstorm or a little creek that you never knew was there, and it instantly becomes a part of your game.