Actual Play: A Social Experiment...

[Brian Leybourne]

A couple of my players couldn't make it to yesterdays game, so I decided to try a bit of a "social experiment" with the 3 who made it.

My goals were to find out:

a) After 7 years as a close group of friends and roleplaying group, how well do we really know each other?
b) More specifically, do we know each other well enough to BE each other, and
c) What about when something really bad happens?

So, the three players and I sat down and I explained that they were going to be roleplaying themselves. I was using All Flesh Must Be Eaten (Eden Studios). None of the players are familiar with that game or the UniSystem, and I had carefully chopped the character sheets before photocopying them so that nothing on the character sheet would indicate what the game was going to be.

So, as a group, we went through and wrote up stats for each of the six of us (Glenn, Kurt, Matt, Tony, Franko and me, Brian). Each of us were statted up in the UniSystem, attributes, skills and all. This was a surprisingly smooth process, I had expected some friction when, as a group, we had to decide what Intelligence stat or Willpower stat to give ourselves, etc. Given that most of us are computer geeks, there was also a potential for things to get ugly when talking about relative computer skills and so on. But actually, it went very smoothly and I think everyone was fairly represented. Lucky we're all good mates :-)

Then I mixed up all the character sheets and gave them out randomly, making sure that nobody got to play themselves. From now on, if I use a name I'm talking about the character, not the player (since the players Matt and Franko weren't there).

I started with the pretty thin premise of a long weekend away in a remote cabin to the nmorth of Auckland where the six of us had gone to unwind and (presumably) roleplay. We've never actually done that, but it was important to be fairly remote. I explained that at some point in the weekend, the power had gone off, but given the remoteness that wasn't surprising.

We picked up the roleplaying when the group took off in two cars, to head back to Auckland. After a while, they noticed a lack of other traffic on the roads, and a high number of cars abandoned at the sides of the road. After a few encounters with abandoned cars (some with blood stains and shattered windows) they came across an accident scene, and while trying to help were attacked by one of the victims who had come staggering to the lead car as they pulled up. Trying to get out of his car to help, Matt was attacked by the man, having his throat torn out very quickly and dying. I made it very quick and very brutal for the shock value, to see how it would affect the players and how they would recact as their characters. It was beautiful. OK, I don't really know how I would react at seeing a dead man tear out the throat of a close friend, but the guy roleplaying me did what I thought was a good job of shitting myself and they all panicked somewhat. One of the cars reversed too quickly and crashed into a tree, the other one tried to pick up a couple of the group who were too stunned to do anything but throw up and watch the other zombies approaching and calling for their sweet sweet brains. The triple shock of "Fuck, zombies are attacking us!" and "Fuck, Matt is dead" and shortly afterwards "Fuck, Matt is starting to move again!" was damn interesting and the group appropriately freaked out.

I wont do a blow-by-blow of the entire session, but some of the highlights were:

* The groups agony at having to shoot a 10 year old zombie girl, take in and try to befriend her 5 year old sister, only to have her sister get sicker and sicker and complain of increasing hunger, knowing what was happening (or suspecting) but wanting to be empathic toward the girl, and finally having to face her change into a zombie, then all backing away from her because nobody could bring themselves to shoot a 5 year old girl, zombie or not.

* Arriving at Kurt's house to be attacked by his two dogs, and find his brother (now a zombie) who had killed his mother (his father had avoided that fate by blowing his own head off, they found the body still dripping), and Kurt, mindfucked by all this and unable to shoot his own brother, being killed by him.

* Brian arguing over and over to go to his house to check on his wife, even though the house is in suburbia and most likely crawling with zombies. Getting there to find his parents had gone to the house and been killed and eaten by zombie Mandy, Brian freaked out and just shut down, becomming unresponsive to much, and having to watch Franko (who agonised over it long enough to be bit by Mandy), shoot her four times before painting the wall with her brains.

* The group having to stop at a jeep dealership to find replacement cars as theirs had become too damaged from running down zombies, and three of the group having to hold off the hordes with shotguns and rifles while the fourth ransaked the place looking for keys etc.

* Tony very surprisingly turning suddenly (he had been splattered with the blood and brains of a zombie and had contracted the sickness, but nobody noticed) finally turn and attack Franko while they were the only two in one of the cars and Franko was asleep in the back for the first time in 4 days.

In the end, the only two survivors were Franko and Glenn (played by Glenn and Tony), Brian having been killed very close to the end sequence and having risen as a zombie but one that couldn't move much due to a shattered spine.

All in all, it weas a very interesting session. This group are damn excellent roleplayers, but roleplaying a friend who is sitting across the table watching you has to be a lot harder than roleplaying Zorg the slayer of Dragons, and I think they did very well. Most reactions and experiences seemed to be in line with what we all knew of each other (and those who were actually there confirmed or denied how they thought they might have reacted in those situations). It was very interesting to see how others see you and how they think you would react to certain things. I don't think I would do this again, but if I could do it over, I think I would have swapped characters around every hour or so rather than only giving someone a new character when an old one died, so we could have seen how more people see each other person and roleplayed them.

In the final analysis, damn interesting, and an exercise I recommend to other groups. I think it's given us nifty insights into each other's psyche's, and our own as seen by others.

Footnote: My wife is pissed off at me because I had her become a zombie and eat my parents. Most folk would be happy to kill their mother-in-law, you just can't please some people :-)

Brian.

[Mike Holmes]

As relates to a previous discussion, did the players know that they wouldn't be playing themselves? That is, was it a surprise when you told them that you'd be mixing the characters up? How did they react?

Mike

[Brian Leybourne]

I started out by letting them think they would be roleplaying themselves. I don't know if that might have affected character creation, although probably not by much since each character was created by the whole group rather than by the individual in question.

There were some uncertain looks around the table when I finally revealed they would be playing each other though. They took it pretty much in their stride, but it certainly threw them for six. Quite amusing. As I say though, any uncertainty didn't last for long, they stuck with it and roleplayed each other very well.

I didn't realise this kind of thing had been discussed before (and I thought I was being so original and interesting). I'll have to do a search.

Brian.

[Ron Edwards]

Interesting possible generalization ...

- Our fantasies about ourselves concern power-tripping and gaining control, or at the very least, being revered for holding back when we could, you know, just kick everyone's ass.

- Our fantasies about others concern how noble they can be under duress.

Conclusion ...

Never never never play your romantic partner as a PC in her presence. You're braver than I am, Brian.

Best,
Ron

[Brian Leybourne]

Our fantasies about ourselves concern power-tripping and gaining control, or at the very least, being revered for holding back when we could, you know, just kick everyone's ass.

Our fantasies about others concern how noble they can be under duress.

So, you're suggesting that, really, we're all bastards but we all think everyone else is noble (or, at least, nobler than ourselves).

That's an interesting theory that scares the hell out of me :-) It's scary because it kind of makes a sick sense.

E.G. Why do we obey laws? Well, because it's right of course. But if we look deep down, is there an element of "because I might get caught"? I'm not saying that many of us would be capable of murdering or raping someone, but if you were walking along the street and you found a bag of money, do you turn it in because that's the right thing to do, or because you're afraid someone saw you pick it up... hmm...

Conclusion ...

Never never never play your romantic partner as a PC in her presence. You're braver than I am, Brian.

Best,
Ron

She wasn't actually there, she got told about it later. I'm not that brave. :-)

Or, in other words: to portray my wife as a homicidal patricidal flesh eating rotting corpse in her presense and expect to get sex again, ever, is something I'm not willing to risk ;-).

Brian.

[Mike Holmes]

I didn't realise this kind of thing had been discussed before (and I thought I was being so original and interesting). I'll have to do a search.

Funny, but I thought that you were in the discussion. It was, IIRC, in the TROS, forum. It wasn't about doing this as an "I" game (where you play yourself), but making up completely fictional characters and then exchanging them.

I thought that you had come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of players not wanting others to play characters that they had created.

Also, I was a little hazy on the whole group design thing as you described it above. I thought that each created themselves with just some input from others (wasn't reading close enough). The group creation idea certainly makes the swapping idea more tennable.

Oh, also, it was either MJ Young or Seth Ben-Ezra (both of whom play a lot with their families, IIRC), who posted that their family had played each other. Might be a data point against your generalization, Ron; as I remembered it went well.

Mike

[Brian Leybourne]

Funny, but I thought that you were in the discussion. It was, IIRC, in the TROS, forum. It wasn't about doing this as an "I" game (where you play yourself), but making up completely fictional characters and then exchanging them.

I thought that you had come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of players not wanting others to play characters that they had created.

Ah, that discussion. Yes, I recall it.

Maybe I've proven here that such an idea (creating fictional characters and then swapping them) would not necessarily be such anathema to players. After all, you can't get much more "ownership" of a character than when that character is you yourself, and they got over that OK :-)

Also, I was a little hazy on the whole group design thing as you described it above. I thought that each created themselves with just some input from others (wasn't reading close enough). The group creation idea certainly makes the swapping idea more tennable.

It might have been interesting to let everyone create themselves, and then remake each person through group creation and see how close the two were. If Ron's theory is correct, the group created character should be a lot "better" than the self-created character (in terms of higher stats, more skilled, etc) in each case, although there would be more likely to be holes in places (nobody else in my gaming group knew that I was a claybird shooter and thus know how to use a shotgun, for example).

Brian.

[Mike Holmes]

Maybe I've proven here that such an idea (creating fictional characters and then swapping them) would not necessarily be such anathema to players. After all, you can't get much more "ownership" of a character than when that character is you yourself, and they got over that OK :-)

I was thinking the opposite. Since the character in an "I" game is not one "created" by the player, but merely a description of the real person, that would mean that the player would have less attachment to it than if they had invested themselves into making up a fictional character.

Mike

[Brian Leybourne]

So, you would be quite happy for a Mike Holmes character to be made up (thus is a group of people who know you, not strangers) and then someone else play "you". That wouldn't bother you at all?

Interesting. I watched someone be me for an almost an entire session (until I died, came back as a zombie and died again) and it was fine, but I was assuming that "most" people would have a problem with it. That was my assumption going in, anyway. The reactions of my players (and your comments) are forcing a review of that assumption.

Brian.

[Valamir]

One possibility is that the character based on ones self is easily replicable.  An original PC that someone has sweated blood over is unique...while some people play carbon copies over and over, IME most people who are very character centric tend to make each an original work of art.  When that art gets smashed, a new one must be crafted.

When playing oneself...the concept (usually Part A of the fun part) is already done...its me.  The mechanical design (usually Part B of the fun part) is also already done...except for convincing the fellow players that I really do have an Intelligence of 18 ;-)

Much less effort goes in, and if I die...well next time we play self based characters I can recreate me just as easily.


That said it can be a little unnerving.  My only experience at playing myself was for a Price of Freedom campaign set (in very Red Dawn fashion) in my home town.  The unnerving part was not so much that most of us and many people we knew (as NPCs) died...but that we turned into such vicious little terrorists.

[Brian Leybourne]

except for convincing the fellow players that I really do have an Intelligence of 18 ;-)

Eighteen percent? Oh, come on Ralph, I would give you at least 22%... :-)

It's funny, I was actually expecting the Intelligence thing to be a bit awkward, but it wasn't. It probably helps that everyone in the group is easily above average intelligence (as, I suspect, are a large percentage of roleplayers, IME anyway) and we were only rating on an out-of-5 scale with human average being a 2, but still, I thought someone would get offended (seeing if that happened was part of the experiment, to be honest *grin*).

Brian.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Brian,

I was wondering whether the comfort factor of making up a game-version of one's friend in their presence would go up or down depending on the paradigm of character creation being used.

In a traditional six-ish attribute system, no matter what, the attributes are very abstract. What is a "16 Intelligence" in D&D, anyway? All the adjectives in the text end up saying, really, nothing - what it does indicate is how many spells you can cram into your head, which again, in real-world terms, means nothing. I even remember in 1st edition where you multiplied the character's Intelligence by 10 to find his or her I.Q. ... which again, means nothing.

So given a group of gamers 'round the table, it seems to me that the "Intelligence" issue is merely a matter of everyone being assigned values (a) higher than the middle and (b) close together. This is strictly a social phenomenon; everyone wants to be smarter than most people, and no one wants to look like they think they're notably smarter than their friends. Hence (in a 3-18 scale) a bunch of 15-16's, I'd predict.

Side note: I consider the widely-stated claim that gamers are smart to be very dubious, mainly that neither "gamer" nor "smart" is a defined term.

Now for my real point ... let's take a system like Hero Wars or The Pool, in which one writes a paragraph about the character, and plucks traits or abilities from the prose. No superlatives are allowed; you can have "trains in karate," but not "expert karateka" or "best karate-master."

It seems to me that such a method - because it removes verbal comparisons - would be more revealing, not less, about what's important to the person. Granted, you then go on to quantify them, but the numerical means to do so in these games are far less granular than they are in more common designs.

Best,
Ron

[Brian Leybourne]

Hey Ron,

I see where you're coming from, but I'm not really sure if I agree with you.

The thing with the attribute system (or the thing that I was expecting conflict with, anyway) wasn't so much the scores themselves, but the "rankings" of those scores. If we, as a group, determine that Dick has an intelligence of 16 and Jane has an intelligence of 15 then we're expressly stating that we think Dick is more intelligent than Jane. Wouldn't you expect Jane to be a little offended (even if just quietly to herself) at that? OK, as you say there's probably not much difference between the two scores, but one is still lower than the other, right?

On the other hand, in a system like The Pool, there's far less chance that this kind of conflict would occur at all, because Dick's paragraph might mention "Good at puzzles", while Jane's might say "quick decision maker" and there's no possibility of comparing the two because they're apples and oranges.

This is, of course, more useful than a base "intelligence" score, of course. Who cares about IQ, we know that Dick is good at puzzles (and because it was mentioned, probably more so than Jane) while Jane is seemingly a quicker thinker than Dick because we bothered to mention it. You're right in that it's telling that we all thought Jane was a quick thinker and didn't mention her puzzle solving ability, but of course in that kind of system you can't possibly cover everything (50 words or less, is it?) so you're only going to dwell on the good points anyway.

The may be some nice surprises (Jane is pleased everyone thinks she's a quick thinker), but there is less chance of conflict or accidental insult since only good points tend to get brought up rather than "we have to decide Jane's intelligence (or whatever) and then Dicks, which means deciding which is higher" etc.

Brian.

(edit: I should mention that I wasn't setting out to insult my friends, but was interested to see if there might possibly be some conflict. I know, I'm a bastard).

[arxhon]

Wow, that sounds like a really cool concept for a game.

I'm gonna steal it for a future session of D02 (not d20) :-)

[Brian Leybourne]

Wow, that sounds like a really cool concept for a game.

I'm gonna steal it for a future session of D02 (not d20) :-)

Can I suggest that whatever it is, you make it seem like it's going to be real-world for a while, and then really suddenly throw a left curve at them, as I did with the zombies and the sudden death of one character. They had gotten nicely into character (/themselves) by the time it happened, and they were relaxed and comfortable and really were each other (so to speak) such that the sudden shock really was a shock, unlike in any other roleplaying game where they're playing made up characters and they're just roleplaying being shocked.

Brian.