[The Drifter’s Escape] Drives, Dreams, and peyote

[Ron Edwards]

I found a rough draft of a post I thought I'd finished and posted - but never did! This dates from a couple of years ago, when we playtested a medium-done draft of Ben Lehman's game, The Drifter's Escape. The group included me, Tod, Julie, Maura, Ben, and Alexis. I've rewritten the topic from scratch.

You can find the original 24-hour Ronnies contestant version here, and Ben is close to completing the final version now. What we played fell somewhere in between, and it so happens I was recently able to locate that file too. The block quotes in this thread are taken from Ben's current draft, which differs somewhat from the one we used, but not too much. So you can think of this thread as promotional for the upcoming publication, in addition to being last-minute feedback.

I also recently and fortuitously found the diagram I sketched to summarize the system, which I'll link to when I start discussing it.

The prep processes of the game begin with Setting, based on simple discussion, and move into Situation, based on drawing some playing cards and working with their content.

My notes say, "1969 - rural America - BRET HARTE, OKLAHOMA," and I should stress that the location bumps the culture-signature back at least five years. I'm not sure how many people reading this really grasp the era in question, but it has a lot more to do with Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums and Ken Kesey's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test than with anything currently associated with "the 60s" in common parlance. So when I say that Maura played the female Drifter, more-or-less an early hippy, or perhaps late Beatnik, looking for her draft-dodging boyfriend, I don't mean a flower child. I mean someone who is clearly an Outsider to the point of seeming like an alien being. Maybe even close to the archetypal female Drifter, Mona in Vagabond only not so bleak, as you'll see.

Also, in the context we'd chosen, such a character was especially unusual because she was especially vulnerable. I should remind everyone that at that time, a woman's testimony regarding her own rape was inadmissible in U.S. courts. Although that issue was not part of our story, it's a good indicator of how Maura's female Drifter was definitely not "a guy who happens to be female." Juxtaposing the late 1960s with an extremely rural U.S. setting charged this up to the maximum tension level.

Ben took the part of the Devil, with the rest of us playing the Man. Ben's text about The Man and the Devil is better than anything I could paraphrase:

Then one player should take on the role of the Devil. The Devil represents all aspects of evil outside of the grasp of society: Criminals, cult leaders, gang leaders, bandits, and most especially evil sorcerers. During play, the player who takes on the role of the Devil will control all of these characters, saying what they say and what they do. Additionally, there will be characters beholden to those characters: drug addicts, prostitutes, gang members, cult victims, and all those that live in fear of the people mentioned above. The player who takes on the role of the Devil will also control all of these characters. The Devil will also tempt the Drifter to evil acts.

The rest of the players, in aggregate, are the Man. The Man represents all aspects of evil within the grasp of society, as well as the crushing grasp of society itself: Corporations, banks, mind-crushing boredom, bosses, suburbs, union busters, the Greyhound bus company, and most especially the cops. Additionally, there will characters beholden to those characters: average joes, union leaders, farmers with three mortgages, minimum wage workers, and all those that live in fear of the people mentioned above. In play, players who take on the role of the man will control all of these characters. The Man will also tempt the Drifter to evil acts.

In the end, the Devil and the Man want the same thing: They want the Drifter's soul.

Unfortunately, I can't remember the Drifter's name, but I do recall that her main Drive for the game concerned getting her beat-up station wagon fixed. The Drifter player can choose up to five Drives, but it seems to me now that Maura had less, maybe even only two: finding the boyfriend, fixing the car.

We began the situational prep by drawing six cards to form three sets of two designated characters, using their cross-references and various features of the cards to make up six characters from a simple but highly-charged chart. Or rather, I should say certain core components of characters, as the chart only provides a single detail, and each entry varies in scope and scale. You then use a couple other card features, like which suit has the lowest value, to set things like whether the character is associated with the Devil or the Man, and you come up with various supporting characters as well as seems necessary, flipping up more cards as needed.

You can sort of reconstruct how we came up with the following prep from our draws by reading the instructions, but since the file I have doesn't preserve Ben's chart (I think he was carrying hard copies), I can't quite recall exactly which features were due to the draws. I've bolded the things I do know were taken from them, but at least some of the other interrelational stuff came from the cards too.

1. (the Man) dominant control over another, which led to
- Edward Lacey, a youth group leader in the local ministry, with a strong influence over a young man named Stephen Collins
- Daniel Sellers, the minister, who despises Stephen's dead father (see below); Edward wants to keep him quiet

2. (the Man) vastly wealthy, which led to
- Stephen Collins, the property owner's son, 20 years old, whose father Hector Collins has just died
- Myra Collins, his mother, who has a gun

3. (the Devil) alcoholic, which led to
- Abe Fogel, a former Drifter, a maintenance guy, who wants a pal

(It's important as our game turned out that there was only one Devil character. I don't know whether we overtly decided to do this, but it mattered a lot.)

I really, really enjoyed using this technique, which has some parallels with the setup for Grey Ranks and for In A Wicked Age, and which works tremendously well in my experience. Ben says it should take only about fifteen minutes, and that was about right. To summarize:

i) Through dialogue, arrive at a basic shared-Color focus with a certain excitement to it
ii) Consult some randomized and/or listed elements, imposing certain relational content among components (places, persons, things, interactions)
iii) Through dialogue, specify what those components are in terms of the fictional context of (i)
iv) Add, refine, remove various pieces and parts

My play history has often boomeranged between (a) extensive GM-prepped back-story vs. (b) overly-developed group too-much-story discussion, and over time, I've learned how to get out of that either-or brand of thinking. A lot of my work and designs reflect that learning process. I'm in danger of hijacking my own post, so I'll stop here, but there's a lot more to talk about, maybe later in the thread.

You also designate some places associated with the Devil, meaning that the authority of the Man doesn't apply there. In this setting, it would be the places the police simply don't monitor and that most people know all about but never discuss; we decided they included "the seedy motel" and "down by the river."

I pulled out a pen for one of my patented role-playing system diagrams, which I've just re-"drawn" and posted here. Here is my best attempt to accompany it verbally.

1. A given scene or situation begins, and open role-playing starts. The scene or situation may resolve through the role-playing itself, subject to the authority of either the Devil or the Man, whichever framed the scene in the first place. In other words, the Drifter player may choose to simply get stuck and pummeled through the story by adverse interests. Or more pointedly, the Drifter character will perform constant acts of evil and treachery as narrated by these adverse factors (the Man and Devil players), probably losing all Drives and Dream, and thus eventually dying.*

2. However, should the Drifter player decide to take a more proactive approach, which is likely considering that all you'd do otherwise is sit there and watch your character self-destruct, then he or she can engage the card-based resolution system:

Whenever the Drifter wants something to happen or wants something not to happen, he can pick up the deck of cards, begin to shuffle it and says "Let's make a deal." He then explains what he wants. As long as it is at all possible, and doesn't trivially accomplish one of the Drifter's drives, the Man and the Devil cannot refuse it. This is called making a deal.

(Interruption: there are some helping rules which can be very interesting, but I'm skimming over them for my present purposes. Suffice to say that as a non-Drifter player, I might have some NPCs who are opposing the Drifter, mechanically, but others who are helping him or her.)

(Interruption 2: Drives and Demands modify the card draw slightly. Not too important for my present point.)

The Drifter then deals a five-card poker hand to the Man and also to the Devil.

Both sides look at their hands, and make offers of help to the Drifter. Offers of help are phrased like this: "I'll help you if you..." and explains what the Drifter must do for their help. The Man and the Devil can revise their offers of help as many times as they like, and they can ask anything from nothing at all ("helping for free") up to and including the Drifter's own death, as long as the Drifter is immediately capable of fulfilling his end of the bargain. No deals can be long-term or long-reaching.

The Drifter now has four options:

He may accept the Man's hand, agreeing to do what the Man asks of him. He takes the cards from the Man and gives the Man a chip of white debt. If any of the Man's demands apply to the deal, he need not give a chip of debt.

He may accept the Devil's hand, agreeing to do what the Devil asks of him. He takes the cards from the Devil and gives the Devil a chip of red debt. If any of the Devil's demands apply to the deal, he need not give a chip of debt. [snipping a bit here about when the Drifter player has his own hand, something that can happen later in play – RE]

He may back out of the deal. He fails to accomplish what he wanted to, but gives no one any debt. In this case, go back to playing out the scene, or start a new scene.

My point is that there's an existing bedrock of adverse situations with adverse solutions, guaranteed to send the Drifter into disaster eventually, which the Drifter player then converts into slightly-less likely disasters and possible triumphs by entering into Deals, hence being able to use the cards.
(continued into second post)

[Ron Edwards]

(continued post)

What do the cards do?

... if the Drifter didn't back down, the Drifter should have a hand of cards, and the Man, the Devil, or both should have a hand of cards. [snipping out a bit about the helping mechanics – RE]

Next the Drifter and any other player with a hand of cards reveal their cards. The highest poker hand wins the deal. If the Drifter won, he accomplishes what he wanted out of the deal. Put a check mark next to each drive that applies to the deal. If the Drifter did not win, he does not accomplish what he wanted from the deal, and no check marks are given.

Once the deal is concluded, continue with play as normal or start a new scene.

You rack up Debt by entering Deals, but you also have a chance to do anything besides simply get killed, become depraved, or become entrenched in terrible normality, probably badly,** By winning hands, you can accomplish your Drives. Mechanically, by accomplishing your Drives, you acquire Dream, and my diagram shows how much narrational and systemic power this affords to the Drifter player. Basically, with Dream, you make the immediate situation and arguably the world itself a better place. Significantly, you can convert characters into, or invent them as, Decent Folk.

Therefore, the next scene or immediate situation may be highly transformed, and the general power of The Man and the Devil may be diminished in terms of the active fictional content – who the NPCs are, what they want, and what they might do.

(Ben, in my chart, there's discussion of redemption bought with Dream. I'm not seeing it in the current draft. Is that merely a term for turning an already-present character, associated with either the Devil or The Man, into Decent Folk?)

Given what I just said, one of the biggest gears in the system is what kinds of offers are made by The Man and the Devil. Basically, they have to be attractive to the Drifter player, albeit not idealistic. The Devil player and the collective players of The Man must be able to flirt with the Drifter's Drives and possibly with more general thematic content without actually fulfilling them. You see, the Drifter player is choosing which hand to take (if he or she is not using his own, bought with Dream), based strictly on the offers, because he or she doesn't see the actual cards!

As we found, this extraordinarily productive feature became the heart of the whole story as we created it. More about this in a minute.

Ben, I want to offer my only major point of criticism here. You phrase the circumstances of going to the Deal in terms of player dispute, which I think is inaccurate. Our hobby is still struggling with the right phrasing for the moment best described as "let's roll the dice!", which obviously applies to any techniques-based, ritualized, and above-all fiction-constraining or fiction-shaping routine. Therefore I don't have any particular suggestion except that this word choice:

If the Man or the Devil wants something to happen or not happen in the scene, they simply say that it happens, and it does (pending the final say or a deal.) The only thing that they can't insist on is the death of the Drifter. If the Drifter wants something to happen or not happen in a scene, he has to make a deal.

... has, as I see it, caused more trouble than it's solved over the past few years. Again, identifying exactly why is tricky. But empirically, I see that people playing Trollbabe have little or no trouble "knowing when to roll," whereas people playing The Shadow of Yesterday or In A Wicked Age have a harder time. I figure as the author of Polaris, you'd be a good candidate to experiment with new phrasing for exactly this issue, rather than fall back on a particular phrasing that implies using randomized methods to determine "who controls what happens."

The story as it developed in play didn't end up going toward "Myra killed Hector with her gun," which at first glance seems where the prep was pointing. Myra barely showed up at all, in fact, although I think we did establish some irregularities about Hector's death. I wish I could remember more about the ins and outs and sequence of the various scenes; I recall that Ben was especially chilling in his portrayal of Abe, because he made his loser-ness/scariness believable and human. The guy was simultaneously totally toxic and totally understandable. I also remember that Maura had her Drifter bond with a local mechanic, and she clashed with Edward Lacey a lot. She spent a lot of Dream on inventing Decent Folk, so the town became less of a Man's World or Devil's Realm (to coin some terms) by the time the mechanics began bringing things to a close.

The whole story had developed its focus on Stephen and his young friends, to some extent in opposition with the youth minister leader, Edward Lacey. I can't remember the precise details, but effectively, it was more of an emotional and social conflict concerning how these young folks were to manage their daily lives, than anything so drastic as bringing a murderer to justice or escaping a mob, or stuff like that. This might have happened partly because Julie had a certain flair for portraying Lacey. Eventually, mechanically, there came the point when Maura's Drifter's Debt and Dream were high enough when one more conflict or deal might establish the ending of the story, and it so happened that this occurred when the scenes were focusing on this set of characters. I should also mention that lately, I'm enjoying systems in which ending mechanics are not sharply bordered, but play enters a phase when an ending is possible depending on how things go.

There came a scene in which the Drifter was hanging out with the group of teens, and I can't really recall just when Maura decided to go for a deal rather than let (I think) The Man turn them into a bunch of conformist obedient youth-group types. Nor do I remember whose hand she chose, although I would not be surprised if at this point she spent Dream to draw her own hand. That would match with the narrated event, when the Drifter pulled out some peyote and basically lit the kids up.

Tod, Julie, and I especially liked that scene. We liked the decision, the action, the images, the interactions, and the outcomes. The impact in terms of both system and player-on-player influence was huge: we simply could not bring ourselves to hit her with any adversity worth the name from that point onwards. In other words, freaking Maura seduced The Man with her peyote!

Furthermore, Maura pulled another rabbit from the hat in one of the next scenes, in which she spent Dream to redeem Abe, turning him from Devil-spawn (basically) into Decent Folk. The Drifter got her car fixed, piled Abe into the car with her, and got out of town, drifting along to whatever she found next.

Since Abe was the only Devil character, basically, Maura de-Deviled the whole scenario, right after she thematically neutralized The Man. This story was totally the triumph of the Drifter.

Question #1: Ben, did Maura break the game? Does having only one Devil character make the scenario too easy? I'm especially interested in whether one can redeem Devil characters; that definitely seemed too easy somehow. Or perhaps, can the Devil player 'claim' a current character if he or she currently has none? That seems to fit pretty well, thematically.***

Question #2: Ben, did Maura win? Or "win," by some specific definition of the term? Clearly the Drifter triumphed as a character. But although the Devil player and aggregate The Man players are responsible for introducing adversity, I have a hard time envisioning their role as "losing" if the Drifter overcomes it. Much in the same way as I don't see a Sorcerer GM as "losing" if a character makes it through Kicker resolution without his or her Humanity dropping to 0.

Another thing I want to discuss later in the thread, and am including here so I won't forget it, is the basic thematic challenge of the game. I think it may well belong in a particular 'zone' with Grey Ranks, Steal Away Jordan, carry, and Spione.

Best, Ron

* Huh. I can't believe I never thought about this before, but Mona, in Vagabond, loses all her Drive first, then her Dream, and eventually succumbs to The Man and dies in the context of the lonely, pointless stereotype of a homeless person. I'm not giving away the ending because the film starts with this scene.

** Which suddenly strikes me as what happens to the main characters in Requiem for a Dream, especially Harry and Tyrone.

*** My favorite dialogue from O Brother, Where Art Thou?:
Tommy: I had to be up at that there crossroads last midnight, to sell my soul to the devil.
Everett: Well, ain't it a small world, spiritually speaking. Pete and Delmar just been baptized and saved. I guess I'm the only one that remains unaffiliated!

[Ron Edwards]

A quick revision, given that I'm now holding the published game in my hands. I had my ending-rules messed up a bit.

In Vagabond, Mona lost all her Drives.
In Requiem for a Dream, the protagonists all end up under the sway of the Devil.

I'm trying to think of examples in which the main character ends up under the thumb of the Man.

Best, Ron

[Ben Lehman]

In One More Dollar the Man wins. There are actually a fair number of country songs where the Man wins: Mama Tried comes to immediately mind.

(Aside: I really want to now delve into a whole lecture about the problem of "country" as a genre label: In short, the ethnic music of rural white America vs. suburban right-wing identity rock, but that's a serious digression. It was a big part of the motivation to refine and finish the game, though.)

--

On the time period
So there's a rule in the book, about when to set the game, which I'll summarize "Set the game in the present day, unless playing with someone who has a close emotional attachment to a different period of American history. Avoid the great depression" We (Alexis and I) sit down at the table with Ron's bunch of hippies and say this.
"The Sixties."
"The '60s"
"The sixties."

Okay. So we're playing in the 60s. I really think that the early sixties (which, by setting our game in a rural area, we were effectively playing during) are a much more fruitful time for the game than the early seventies (which contains much of what people associated with "the sixties"). So that was good.

Of course, I'm up to being proved wrong about the later period.

--

On situation generation
There was only one Devil character because that's what the cards showed. Basically, you have your three initial characters and amongst those there's necessarily a 2:1 split, which is semi-random. There is also the possibility for additional characters to be beholden to the devil or the man, but in our case there really wasn't another devil character anywhere close to our game. (Compare to two dead cops and a pregnant girl which, because it had an organized crime group, was flooded with Devil characters.)

I'm really enthused by the capacity of random generation for situation. It's an old technique (random encounter tables are effectively the same thing in a Gamist context, and in the context of supplements like Oriental Adventures we see them remade in a Narrativist fashion) which was ironically largely abandoned in the "story-focused" 90s. I'm glad that it has a resurgence. I'm particularly happy with the Drifter's version of it, because it locks down much of the game's theme and situation without really locking down anything else, including characters, (indeed, the characters we generate as our initial three may not ever see play: as I recall ours were, with the exception of Abe, decidedly background-y.) I've been disappointed to see that a lot of it consists of remakes of In A Wicked Age, because there's rather a lot of design space out there (in short: what is randomized, how it is randomized, what is interpreted from randomization, and how the randomized elements inter-relate.)

--

Redemption.
Redemption is just a specialized case of introducing a Decent character (rules note: Decent characters are beholden to neither the Devil nor the Man and, instead of acting in their own perceived interest, do the right thing. "The right thing" here is not what the character perceives to be right, but what the player sees as right.) Basically, instead of authoring a new character, you redeem a pre-existing character. In practice, this is the way that maybe %95 of Decent characters are introduced (I'm wracking my brains to recall if I've ever seen the Drifter author a new character ... I think once a sheriff's deputy but maybe he had been established beforehand.)

Here's the text:
As the game plays, the Drifter's player can spend one chip of dream to either redeem any existing character in the story, turning them decent, or to introduce a new character into the story who is decent.

Absolutely any character is up for redemption. In order to redeem a character, however, the player has to *want* to redeem that character, though, with all that implies.

--

Do we want to get into the resolution thing? The purpose of a deal is not to get say over "what happens" but to cause through action something to happen or not happen (which is pretty much explicit in the phrasing). As I see it, this is a pretty major difference, but to each their own.

--

As I recall, Stephen and Myra did not actually enter our play, directly, at all. Stephen's wealth and prestige was Edward's power-base, but I don't even know if they were mentioned in play. My recollection is that we pretty clearly implied that Edward used some of Stephen's money to hire Abe to kill Daniel, who died in the beginning of the game before actually showing up during a scene. Which Abe did, dumping the body in a car "down by the river" and was feeling really mixed up about, and was trying to convince himself that the Drifter was "just the same as him" to give himself some sort of moral absolution. (see how our initial characters are not actually the central characters of the story?)

The Drifter meanwhile is entering this murderous viper-pit as an outsider, a possible scape-goat, but also a means of Edward shoring up his fragile ego and power-base (see, I can even convert this weirdo outsider!) with a few basic needs (fix her car) and a few basic resources (the local mechanic with a crush on her, access to the drugs and rock n' roll that the local teens see in the outside world, yearn for, but can't access.)

And, yeah, the crux of play became "can these teenagers define themselves or are they stuck in the world made for them by the adults in their lives" with the murder, power politics, and assorted evil as more representative of the of that world's corruption and stakes of the conflict (in a literary, not DitV, sense) than any sort of murder mystery, uncover the plot, fix the town's problems plot. And the answer (with the help of drugs and a Doors record) was a resounding "yes" with an assist from the murderer's guilt (Abe provided the missing car part from the car of the man he murdered, allowing them to skip town before the Edward could use another murder to firm up his power base.)

Winning the game is an interesting case. At the time, according to the rules, Maura won (although I'll note that her win specifically prevented her from just "keeping on Drifting." Instead, she ended up settling in Kitchener after finding her boyfriend and breaking up with him and ... I think ... being an artist?)

The present rules for the game are that the old winning conditions (basically accumulating three more of your "resources" [Dream or Debt] than both the other sides) not as "winning" but as "control over the Drifter's future." Basically, that player gets to determine what happens to the Drifter for the rest of their life, writing an epilogue to play.

The winning condition is slightly more nebulous "control over the Drifter's soul." The Drifter wins if she controls her own soul, the Devil or the Man win if they have gained control over it. The players are asked "is this the same as controlling the future? Or not?" and that's really up to them to decide. I like this winning condition because it engenders reflection on the meaning of the game. I know that at a recent con game the Man was mechanically behind but there was a general consensus among the players that we had won the game.

Maura won under this condition as well.

Maura's winning point was not redeeming Abe, but neutering the Man by selling you all on her character as a person. That's intentional. The Devil and the Man win in the same way (by selling the Drifter on their vision of her character as a person.)

yrs--
--Ben

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Ben!

1. Country music or not - agreed. But that conversation would get us into talking about too many things, so we can do that not-at-the-Forge. My only point here, because I think it'd be a good inspiration for Drifter's play, is to mention the scene in the movie Matewan, when all the various different groups involved in the miners' strike are playing their respective music simultaneously in the night, physically separated, and as they listen to one another, evolve bluegrass.

2. Your hippies comment makes me laugh. I saw the acknowledgments in you mention the "old hippies" game set in Oklahoma, and I thought, "Gee, who else did he play with, in an Oklahoma setting?" It took me a minute to realize you were talking about us. More specifically, as you know, the distinction between the sixties and the seventies is important to me, but we've talked about that already. Anyway, though, I think a 1970s game would have lots of potential of its own - the novel First Blood seems like a shoo-in, actually.

3. Full understanding and agreement regarding the Devil, the cards, and the generation of situation. I really like the difference having only one Devil character makes, but I'll keep it in mind that new ones might be generated in play itself, to keep Redemption from simply cleaning the Devil out of play.

Your Drifter's tables, in combination with Grey Ranks, had a huge influence on my current design of Shahida. So full agreement there about the tables.

4.

Do we want to get into the resolution thing? The purpose of a deal is not to get say over "what happens" but to cause through action something to happen or not happen (which is pretty much explicit in the phrasing). As I see it, this is a pretty major difference, but to each their own.

I see it as a major difference too, but I think I agree with you so much that there's nothing to discuss.

5.

As I recall, Stephen and Myra did not actually enter our play, directly, at all. ...

You're right, they didn't. The story was all about consequences, and those characters became back-story rather than players. I'm a big advocate of what you're implying, I think. It's sometimes hard to convince people that using a relationship map method based on, say, a published story, does not mean that the role-playing characters must enter that map at the same time and place that the protagonist of the book does.

Your general summary of our story jibes with my memories in full. The game serves wonderfully well as a Rorschach experience for the group concerning what they value in America. (I find myself using the inaccurate term "America" in this thread's posts because I'm referencing what citizens of the U.S. mean by that exact term and no other.)

Best, Ron