Levi-Strauss in Amazonia -- MLwM Variant

[clehrich]

John,

I'm not entirely comfortable with it either, to tell the truth.  Here's my thinking.

First, a practical point.  Having read a lot of MLwM Actual Play threads, I notice that these dice aren't used all that much a lot of the time.  I realize that they should be, and are a core mechanic, but in fact a lot of really intense narrative gaming seems to happen without them.  That tells me that a slight bend in the system here will not produce drastically negative effects -- anyway, that's my guess.

Second, I am having trouble explaining it well -- in the revision and in the thread.  My concept is sort of halfway between how you're reading it (which is I think more or less how I said it) and what's there in MLwM.

The idea is that when you communicate with other people, you do so always through symbols.  But the thing is, you communicate, at base, because you want something -- especially to be understood.  The idea is that failure to communicate is really quite harrowing for the informants.  It's a fact of life for Levi-Strauss, and the source of his whole method, but for them it's a mark of their alienation from their own culture.  When they communicate for themselves, making overtures to Rapport, they want to be understood as people, not just as communicators.  They want to be understood as human, which for the Munde means as Munde.

Now a lot of that symbolic mucking about is stuff that to the Munde is quite obvious.  If you're coming on to a Rabbit Clan girl, and you're from the Lizard Clan, it's quite obvious that you offer her jewelery.  You don't offer her food -- you're a Lizard, stupid.  But of course that means nothing to us, the players, so we're as alienated from all this as is Levi-Strauss.

And that's the bind I'm in.  I can't see how to get out of it.  At the crux, the most important moment, the player is displaced.  The most important defining moment should be when the informant makes a play for Rapport in public.  Everything is on the line: he's gambling his whole status, his whole identity in fact.  And if the girl smiles shyly and takes the pretty necklace, then dances off to show her admiring friends, the informant is like Pinocchio: he's become a real live boy.

But the problem is that the players have to do this somehow in symbols, and those are arbitrary, created in play, and the whole system is totally alien to us.

So my idea was to use dice, but I admit it's a bad solution.  The emotional heft of the game should lie in a kind of partial immersion, an ability of the player to really "get" the problem of the informant.  And I see how that works negatively, where alienation and nostalgia are built, but somehow it's breaking down hard when we get to the positive.

The way it ends up now, let's suppose the player announces that he's going to use jewelery because he's a Lizard and she's a Rabbit and blah blah.  All made up.  He rolls dice, ta da, he wins, so I guess it turns out that that was the cool thing to do.  So the informant is now human, but the player is just rolling dice.  If he'd rolled differently, the jewelery would have been a bad move.  There's no real system here; it's all fake.

And so I'm stuck.  I don't think simply restoring the original MLwM system will solve this.  One version I had used both systems at once, and you had this thing with doubled dice and whatnot, but that seemed very crunchy and not at all the point.

I am convinced that there is an elegant, Paul Czege-style mechanic that will solve this problem, but I can't find it.  Not yet, anyway.  I'm too stuck in how the anthropologist thinks, I suspect.

Any ideas?

[John Kirk]

First, a practical point. Having read a lot of MLwM Actual Play threads, I notice that these dice aren't used all that much a lot of the time. I realize that they should be, and are a core mechanic, but in fact a lot of really intense narrative gaming seems to happen without them. That tells me that a slight bend in the system here will not produce drastically negative effects -- anyway, that's my guess.

Well, I haven't read a lot of MLwM threads.  But, I have run a couple of sessions.  My players use the heck out of the Intimacy / Desperation / Sincerity mechanic.  But, then again, my players don't have any background in narrative style games, so it might just be that they are more in need of "training wheels" than the players in the threads you've read.

The idea is that failure to communicate is really quite harrowing for the informants...The most important defining moment should be when the informant makes a play for Rapport in public. Everything is on the line: he's gambling his whole status, his whole identity in fact...I am convinced that there is an elegant, Paul Czege-style mechanic that will solve this problem, but I can't find it. Not yet, anyway. I'm too stuck in how the anthropologist thinks, I suspect.

Any ideas?

The player's gambling, eh?  Well then, you don't need another Paul Czege-ian mechanic.  You need a James West-ian mechanic taken from the Pool.  (Paul's fingerprints are already all over the game anyway :-)

How this: Keep the Intimacy / Desperation / Sincerity mechanic.  But, when a player makes an overture with Rapport, allow him to gamble with his Rapport.  That is, he can add more d4's to his roll by gambling Rapport points.  Each point gambled must be justified.  A semi-public display allows him to gamble 1 point.  A fully public display lets him gamble two.  Every symbolic element he incorporates that he has previously encountered allows him to gamble one point.  If he succeeds, his Rapport goes up by one.  If he fails, he loses all of the Rapport points he gambled.

So, a player that really wants to win a roll can gamble points:  I offer the girl jewelry (1 point gambled) made from jaguar claws (1 more point) and I give it to her at the hunt feast (another 2 points gambled).  If he wants even more of a boost, he can use Desperation or Sincerity to implore the girl to accept his gift.  The informant's chances of success have dramatically increased, but if he loses, it turns out to be a blunder of epic proportions which results in permanent loss of 4 Rapport points.  This might, in turn, trigger some event, such as "The Horror Revealed".