[Mist-Robed Gate] The best playtest I've ever experienced

[Elizabeth]

So at last weekend's JiffyCon Boston, we had the first playtest of Shreyas Sampat's incredible wuxia game entitled The Mist-Robed Gate. It was supposed to be an intense, quiet, introspective game, but the emotional brutality and spot-on color had everyone hooting and applauding, and we sort of disrupted the rest of the room. It was really hard not to though; I've never had a game experience like it before.

I'll cover the first half or so; hopefully someone else who was there will pick this up and continue the thread. I'lll add more later, too. And if I've forgotten something, let me know.

The playtesters were as follows:

Elizabeth (me): Yuan Xiulan, calligrapher who refuses to marry until she perfects the character for "Truth"
Kat: Yuan Li, scheming younger sister who longs to marry; has a dead twin that died under mysterious circumstances

Kelly: Kane Zhongyu, alchemist and patriarch of his noveau-riche peasant family
Teddy: Kane Kwai-Chang, fiendishly devoted to the family and the destruction of the Fa

Matt: Fa Jin, patriarch of the formerly-in-charge, currently insane-from-inbreeding Fa family
Josh: Fa Zhang, eldest son who is devoted to a mysterious grave
Shreyas: Fa Mulan, unhinged youngest daughter who never sleeps

We discussed the kind of game we wanted to play beforehand, and decided on something along the lines of "Wuthering Heights meets House of Flying Daggers." We decided there'd be three factions to start with-- warring families. The Fa family would be insane and the former heads of the province; the Kane family would be hardworking peasants who made good; and the Yuan family would be genteel artists.

Everyone chooses a color and a type of weather, too-- these are things that you narrate into the scene to sort of show who's dominating it at the moment, and to add additional color. Also, everyone creates a set; instead of an actual setting, you just have stages that the scenes play out on, complete with how many people can fit on a set. It's awesome and very cinematic. The first round of scenes were short, just things to introduce the characters and their loyalties, much like in a movie.

For the first scene, I created a calligraphy studio with yellow curtains and snow falling outside. Li came to confront her sister about her refusal to marry. The scene consisted of Li standing in the doorway, staring daggers at her oblivious sister, who was painting TRUTH over and over in black ink. Kat spent the whole time eviscerating me with her eyes, it was fantastic.

In the next scene, Josh created a graveyard. Zhang was wearing blue, and there was an insane amount of hail. He kneeled meditatively in front of a gravestone that has been so worn down by hail that it's impossible to read. Ninja appear! (Since they are extras, they become a prop.) He crunches one face in his large iron gloves, and then punches through the chest of another. Everyone goes crazy. Teddy and Matt both want to claim the ninja as their prop, but Shreyas rules that you can only claim the ninja if you're willing to show up in the scene. The leader pulls off his mask and it's Zhang's father, Jin! (Matt claims "some ninjas" as his prop.) Jin congratulates his son on passing his test and implores him not to be late to dinner.

Kelly creates an unused barn as a set for the next scene; color and weather kind of got forgotten here. Zhongyu and Kwai-Chang discuss the fall of the Fa family, while Fa Mulan hangs upside-down from the rafters. Zhongyu reveals he has invented gunpowder! They test it, and the barn explodes, sending Mulan flying into a tree.

The next round of scenes is where the system really started to shine.

Xiulan and Li are still in the calligraphy room, but this time, the ink Xiulan is using is red (which is Li's color). Some leaves blow into the room through the window, and Li flicks her long sleeves to knock Xiulan's brush, sending a crimson arc of ink over her work. This starts the knife ritual.

The knife ritual is the most intense conflict resolution system I've ever seen in a game, period. See, from the beginning of the game, there is a knife-- a real knife, either in a sheath or a knife that folds into itself-- covered by a cloth on the table. The first time conflict occurs, the knife gets uncovered.

The next step in the ritual: Kat wordlessly handed me the folded knife. You're not actually allowed to speak at this point; you are forced to make eye contact and implore with your eyes. It's this really intense thing, where you hand someone the power to hurt you, and guilt or shame them into giving you what you want without actually naming it. It's passive-agressive and brutal and brilliant. Xiulan misinterpreted her sister's look and offered to help her with her pottery. Xiulan tried to give Li something that would please her, so I passed the knife back to Kat. She passed it to me again, with a heavy-handed hint: "Pottery is for children. I am a WOMAN now." Rather than escalate, Xiulan promised to fix the injury, and began to write a letter to Kwai-Chang, entreating him to elope with her sister. (This created the prop "Letter from Xiulan.") I still held the knife, and it made me uncomfortable.

The next scene was also in the calligraphy room; the snow had turned to hail. There was a knock at the door; Xiulan answered. It's Fa Zhang! He was angry. "Is this how you greet me, I who have not set foot in this house in five years?" This was obviously a conflict. I didn't think a meaningful glance would cut it here, so I unsheathed the knife and handed it to Josh, and made a demand of him: "Leave this house and never return." It was a serious "holy shit" moment, you could feel the mood at the table change-- because the knife was drawn now, it could never be resheathed. No one could go back to the meaningful glance part of escalation-- it's all direct demands. Plus, if he chose, he could now drive the knife through my character sheet and kill Xiulan.

Instead, he passed the knife back, making a counterdemand. "Only when I have a daughter of the Yuan family to take as a bride, as was promised before the death of your sister." Xiulan promised him Li, rather than breaking her calligraphic oath.

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The color of this game is spot on; I really felt like I was in and watching a great wuxia movie. And honestly, I can't stress enough how intensely affecting the knife ritual is. It's funny, because the kung fu fights are more like ballet; they're not violent, they're a lovely way to burn off steam and aggression. All of the brutality is in the way the characters relate to each other emotionally, and, I mean, fuck.

A game where you hand someone a knife and, only through silent pleading glances, beg them not to use it.

It's amazing.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Thanks for playing and posting! I keep trying to post a response and failing, so I posted my thoughts on the playtest at my blog.

[Elizabeth]

Thanks for the response, Shreyas! I think you covered most of the main issues in that blog post, and Josh brings up a good issue in his comment as well. The only issue I'd add is more of a sub-issue of there being no mechanical support for the kung fu fights themselves right now-- it would be great if there were some kind of system which both resolved the issue of who wins the kung fu fight AND encourages really badass description. I think we did a good job of keeping the kung fu compelling, but that had more to do with our investment in keeping an already-great game great, and less to do with being faithful to the mechanics, if that makes sense.

I'm not convinced that de-escalation needs to happen easily. I mean, there were definitely points at which de-escalation would have been nice for a longer-term game, but I would be sad if you lost that "holy shit" moment where something happens that cannot be undone. Since it's supposed to emulate a wuxia movie, could there be special rules for one-shots? I like the idea of Chinese-food-and-movie-night, where the movie night part is really a game of Mist-Robed Gate.

I'm really interested in the solutions you alluded that you've been thinking about. Are they shareable yet, or are you still noodling with them a bit?