[MLwM] The Kindest Torch-Wielding Mob Ever

[james_west]

We played My Life with Master yesterday. Four players (two men, two women) plus me, over a course of about six hours play time. Our game centered around the mind-bogglingly dysfunctional family of a the owner of a munitions plant, during the Napoleonics. Lots of soot, and blood-hungry machinery.

I laughed so hard at times, it broke capillaries in my throat. Not that it wasn't also by turns horrific and pathetic, and always desperately dysfunctional, but in that context, when it was funny, it was very, very funny. I shan't give a description of the characters, or how the game went - but it also succeeded, on occasion, in really creeping the lot of us out. I do want to focus on interesting things about game play itself.

First, the resolution system combined with aggressive scene framing means that in -every- scene, and for us a scene was usually no more than three or four minutes, things were forced to change. This means that there was as much plot resolution in one evening as there are in four or five sessions of a normal game. There are pros and cons to this, but it's mostly good; I don't think anyone was ever bored, and there was always something that the player -really- wanted to get done in his next scene.

Next, while the characters started off being willing tools of the master, as their self-loathing and the fear level rose, they became extremely aware of how much they were shooting themselves in the foot. The resolution system made them very aware, in a strictly gamist sense, of the negative effects of their villainy. I thought this was interesting. Players also became very good at framing their scenes and establishing their actions so they could use intimacy, desperation, and sincerity.

One thing I did notice; there's an upper limit to self-loathing, but no equivalent mechanism to The Horror Revealed for weariness. One character in the game wound up with a runaway weariness; we stopped having him literally captured because it was repetitive. In one instance, his 'capture' was that the little girl he was intending to kidnap and throw into the machine coerced him into spending a very long time playing tea party. The player did a wonderful job of seeming shell-shocked.

A positive effect; one of the regular players in my group has tended to be uninvolved in the past; this game really seemed to bring out a lot of role-playing creativity in dealing with her horrific family life, and when we were both in the kitchen for more drinks, she'd give me more interesting and usable details she'd thought of on the broken relationships she had with her kin. In general, this game seemed to make all of the players much more aggressively involved than they usually are (and they're usually a pretty involved group in any case.)

In all, this was one of my favorite experiences role-playing in, at least, many months; I think that My Life with Master is one of those games that every group ought to try out. It'd make a terrific convention game, too, I think, if you gave out a lot of hard liquor to the participants (hey - the convention game where I met my wife did that ...)

I can't imagine playing this game more than once a year, or so, but even so, for six hours of fun for four or five people, it's a bargain at twice the price.

[Mike Holmes]

The laughter is because it's so pathetic. That is, you're laughing that your player thought up the totally degrading thing that he just thought up, right?

"Perhaps I know why it is man alone who laughs: He alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter." - Neitzsche

Mike