[Black Cadillacs] - Blood for the Blood God!

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi,

Last weekend, three nice people signed up to play Black Cadillacs at Phantasm. First aside, Phantasm was a real eye-opener for me. This was the first "little" convention I've ever attended.  As a newcomer, it was immediately apparent to me that this was a community of gamers.  Maybe some of them only appear for Phatasm, maybe some of them are in Peterborough (Phatasm's home town) year-'round. Regardless, these folk know each other really, really well. The room (there was only one) had the trippy vibe of old friends pulling an all-nighter, but with the volume set at 11 (good god, do I mean 11!)

I'm chuffed to report that even though Erica, Cody and Richard all admitted signing up "because everything else was full", Black Cadillacs did what it always does: lots of bad shit happened to lots of people (some nice, some not), grief was heaped on the Troopers, and everyone was right there in the moment.

Second aside: when the "everything else" that was full was some iteration of D20 or late 1990s Sim (oh, there was GM fiat as far as the eye could see...), it's exceptionally fulfilling to see players (expecting the aforementioned fare) latch on to something weird and different and fucking run with it.

Here endeth the self-congratulatory gushing.

Here's the two rough bits we hit.  Both are trammeled up in the choices we made during War Creation (p.23 in the Ashcan/Steel Toe'd Edn.)

We settled on the Spanish conquest of the new world, specifically the "campaign" against the Aztecs.  I was really hoping for Spanish Troopers, mostly to do the stranger in a strange land thing. However, the will of the table was for Aztec troopers.

This led directly to two problematic things:

1) Everyone latched on to "disease was the Aztec's downfall" right away. We were playing dooooooooooomed warriors.  This was different than playing (say) the Germans in WWI.  The doom loomed larger than defeat. As players, we were all itching to jump straight to the doom.

This worked just fine for a con game, as it made for a great finale.  This would have been disaster for a longer term game, as that doom would have fought against the Blood Clock something fierce.

2) There was no home/front divide.  This hurt a lot.  The Aztecs were waging a punitive war, having driven the Spaniards out of their cities.  We're talking about 'sallying forth' and harrying the conquistadors.

It was cumbersome having 'the people back home' right there at hand.  There wasn't even a believable social divide to leverage - the warriors just hadn't left home. I don't know what this would mean for a more traditional "defending the homefront" game.  What I do know is that I didn't feel this when we gamed the Finnish Winter War (as the defenders) at GenCon.

I'm really at a loss for what, if anything, can be done about this.  My solution keeps coming back to saying "Don't do this."

To end on an upbeat note (and a little more gushing...)
We had a particularly keen "perfect storm" occur at the table.  The Troopers were executing a fighting withdrawal after a failed raid on a Spanish settlement (acutally, it was an Aztec town that had capitulated - bastards!) Cody declared something like "I want to jump out of hiding and scare their advance scouts with my war cry."

Oh good gracious me, did that go well.

The dice came up tied (we were rolling about 3 each), and as we kept adding dice to the roll, they kept...on...tying!

The tie finally broke when we were up egregiously large piles of dice in front of us.  It was something silly like seven 6s against six 6s when it finally broke.

Cody dumped all seven points of currency into Horror.

Success + 7 Horror + Scare the shit out of Cortez & Co = weapons dropping out of your hands because they're slick with blood, not noticing that you're not holding weapons any more, tongues being pulled from their seats, pulped brains, and one quivering porter begging for a quick death.

Seven!
D

[Ron Edwards]

That business about the home front is really interesting. I speculate - perhaps it's a matter of identification, particularly on your part? I'm speaking from how I imagine I'd deal with that scenario ... despite my low level of knowledge about specifically Finnish home culture, I'd be reasonably comfortable with fudging it based on Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian tropes. But Aztecs? I'm not even sure I know what their dwellings looked like, and my knowledge of their daily dress is limited to priestly vestments worn when piecing someone's penis or ripping hearts out of chests.

Maybe that was the real stumbling block.

Best, Ron

[Darcy Burgess]

Hi Ron,

You may be on to something there.  At least, it may have played a role.

However, we were never at a loss for "what to do", nor were we stymied by "oh hell, are we accurately portraying the situation?"  The scene-to-scene play of the game was smooth and engaging.

The stumbling block was strictly in dealing with that divide.  Memories were (fictionally) weak, and Stories were (as of this writing) non-existant.  To be fair, my convention play has yielded a ratio of Players:Stories of about 5:1 (these numbers don't count me.)  However, this was the first time that I didn't write one myself.  I can't pretend to speak for Cody, Richard or Erica.  However, I really felt that the impact of the Story was eviscerated without the in-fiction "filter" that being away provides.

D

[Paul Czege]

Darcy,

Perhaps you need to impose a different filter in such games. Frex, perhaps the stories told are historical or religious in nature?

Paul

[Darcy Burgess]

Hey Paul,

Hunh.

Ok, let's run with this.  Currently, the procedural diagram for Black Cadillacs looks like this:

A Nice Flowchart I made

What are the implications of changing the nature of the filter?  Specifically, if changed, what kind of gravitas does it engender?  Under default mode, it's a filter that generates "The lies my soldier daddy told me."

Pondering...
D

[Paul Czege]

Hey Darcy,

Oops. My suggestion creates confusion because I didn't use the Black Cadillacs meaning "Stories" in my post.

My thinking was aimed at the issue of home events occurring at the front. What I meant was that if geography isn't the divide (ie. home/front), then you need a different divide. The obvious options to me are time (events of the "home front" are historical) and religious/mythic (the events of the "home front" are mythic/scriptural).

Paul

[Darcy Burgess]

Hey Paul,

Crossed wires?  Over the internet?  Never!

Ok.  I see where you're angling, I think.  Your idea (essentially) boils down to accentuating the difference between being *at war* from being *at home* by driving home the reality (groundedness ?) of the Troopers situation vis-a-vis the situation for the civilians.  Hightened "reality" (Troopers) vs. Hightened surreality (family).

If grandma's primary concern is the scrying of the intestines, how do you talk with her about the buddies you just lost?

Hunh.
D

[Paul Czege]

Hey Darcy,

It's all about values, right? When you're at war you're fighting for something, and the dramatic issue is whether events at home recognize the same values, appreciate you and your fight. Well, you can do that same dramatic tension if the "events at home" are instead the events of a mythic or scriptural narrative which expresses its own values, or are the narrative of historical events foundational to your culture and its values.

Paul

[Darcy Burgess]

Hey Paul,

You know what's interesting?  That we've worked our way around this thorny issue (and I think that your idea is spot-on), and we've arrived right back at where Ron was upthread (Damn you, Edwards!  Damn youuuuuuuuu!)

You need a cultural framework.

It doesn't have to be much, but you need something.  In retrospect, maybe we didn't have enough to go on at Phantasm to make Stories & Memories hum.  We had enough to generate scene-to-scene play, but that's hardly surprising.  Scene-to-scene play is about fucking war.  Whether it's waged with tanks or clubs, war is...well, the same shittiness the world over.

Hunh.  Double-hunh.
D

[Jason Morningstar]

I think playing the Spaniards would have been a better move - familiarity with the culture, a "home front" across the ocean, the sheer alienness of it all, the rapacious lunacy of their commanders, the unbridled opportunity of the Valley of Mexico.  I'm a fiend for Nahuatl history and I'd want to play the Spaniards*

Maybe you need to define some touchstones so that everybody has a common frame of reference, and, failing that, you revise your initial concept.  It seems like a bad idea to choose a war any player is iffy on, in terms of broad images and feelings. 

* (or more awesomely and geekily, their Tlaxcalan allies). 

[Ron Edwards]

I've played a hell of a lot of war-setting games over the past few years, partly as one way to deal with the heinous state of affairs we face as real people. I've noticed a lot of other role-players doing the same.

What I've seen is that often one person is kind of the point-person for information about a given war setting for the game, whether it's wholly fictional or based on a historical event. That point-person serves as an information bank about details, yes, but I think his or her most important function is to highlight the kinds of personal crisis experienced by the participants. Mainly those which Black Cadillacs is most aimed at revealing, the ambiguities of loyalty and motivation (and most especially their lack) found among those who, at first glance, are doing the most unambiguous things of the whole megillah, specifically the killing and the dying.

All of this is to respond to Jason's point, in two ways. First, "yes," in that the whole group should be oriented toward those ambiguities as well as to certain key features of the immediate theater. But also, "no," in that I don't think everyone needs full mastery of them. The orientation in the "yes" part arises from the point-person constantly interacting with everyone else and providing information on a snippets-basis as seems relevant to the particular player and moment.

Best, Ron

[Darcy Burgess]

Hey,

I'm thinking that injecting a 'stick your neck out' phase (like Death's Door's goals or Spione's transgressions) into War Creation may go a long way to solving the problem.

Everyone puts one personal issue into the pot at the beginning of play, and one gets drawn at random.  The choices made during War Creation are required to be made in light of this constraint.

I'm picturing it primarily as a tool for weeding out innapropriate settings.

Yeah?
D

PS -- If I've misquoted game terms in James' or Ron's games, that's because the basement (where my books are) is too damned cold to visit for a reference.  We had snow on effing Hallow'een.  Sue me.