[Misery Bubblegum] I love you the way you are, now change!

[Larry L.]

But there's one important point: The spirit doesn't just die. People kill it. And not (always) out of malice, either. So I've got a topic for discussion: What type of need do I serve, for myself, by changing another person?

Tony: Battle Royale! Now!

Basically, I think the whole concept of the game is a novelty... unless it successfully manages to convey that sense that, all these routine social stresses and worries which we as adults have (hopefully) learned how to cope with and put in perspective, these are LIFE and DEATH.

Takami accomplishes this through ultraviolent metaphor. If you can pull it off straight (i.e. no guns or fascists), more power to ya! If this ends up being The Breakfast Club Role-Playing Game, I'll be a sad panda.


On a slightly different note, I'm curious if there's anything in the game to specifically handle cliquishness, or if this will somehow magically work out through the greater social mechanic.

[TonyLB]

That is some extremely cool stuff, and I have taken several hours contemplating.  Let me see if I can weave things together.

Because the situation is NOT

Before: I have no girlfriend
After: I have a girlfriend OR I have no girlfriend

The situation is really

Before: She has power over me, but she doesn't know it
After: She has power over me, and she knows it

I love the purity of this, but I worry that it is, ever so subtly, mistaken.  Specifically, the situation is really

Before:  She has power over me, and I don't know whether she knows it
After:  She has power over me, and I know she knows it.

What you're really doing there is forcing the issue.  You're making it more and more difficult for her to avoid a choice.  And I think that the choice (if they care about you) is either (a) Hurt you (i.e. apply their Fallout to you), or (b) Give you power over her in return.

Yes, people will try to dodge that choice.  And yes, they should often be able to succeed.  But there should be a dollar-auction escalation where you can easily end up causing yourself 2X trouble in order to dodge X original trouble.  I mean, that's high school.

The trick is that sometimes it's not clear what's hurting someone and what's helping them.  If you give them a trait "Frigid Bitch", what are you doing?  Helping or hurting?

Which is where Doug comes to the rescue (again!) with the simple point that players should be modifying each other's reward mechanisms.  So really, fallout means giving them traits in antipathy to the goals you're prescribing for them (or, conversely, give them goals antithetical to the traits you've created).  Or, of course, you could always just reduce either the goals or traits you've already assigned.  That'll be tricky to quantify, and if anyone's got ideas how I'm all ears.

In the meantime, back in the Lisa and Becky example (remember Lisa and Becky?) Lisa's player is sitting there thinking as follows:

[*]We're probably going to fail at this task, and if we do we're going to take Fallout.
[*]By trying to work on this with me, Becky is forcing the issue of whether we can be partners.
[*]If I can't dodge the choice then I have to choose whether to reject her as a partner, or to put myself somewhat in her power.
[*]If I put myself in her power, and we fail, then she might dump her Fallout onto me.  Let's say that she has a history of that (like, say, she was put on the spot in the cafeteria, and made a snide comment about me in order to shift attention away from her, to my detriment, when all I wanted was for us to be friends).  So my perception is that she's likely to dump on me if I give her the chance.
[*]That would mean that I get both my Fallout and hers.  Frankly, I'd rather take just mine.  So screw letting her try to help!
[*]I'll use my "I'm horribly overworked" trait to maintain my authority and try to dodge the issue entirely.
[*]If that doesn't work, I'll flat out tell her that she's a skanky little bitch and I don't want her help.  It's not true, really, I actually wish we could work together... but it's a heck of a lot better than opening myself up to get dumped on again.[/list:u]How close does that sound to the dynamic we've been talking about?

Larry:  Somewhat of a side-note, but I'm more of a Heathers and Pump up the Volume guy than Breakfast Club.  I'm sure you'll be pleased to note that both of those are teen movies with a body count.  These issues aren't as important as life and death... they are more important than life and death.

EDIT:  Re: Cliques... cliques aren't in-built, but I expect them to emerge naturally from the finished dynamic.  Allan's doing some interesting things with in-built identity cliques over in Sweet Dreams though.

[hix]

Hey Tony,

I've only been following this and Dulcimer Hall casually, so excuse if it's repetitious, but when I read this:

# If I put myself in her power, and we fail, then she might dump her Fallout onto me. <snip> So my perception is that she's likely to dump on me if I give her the chance.
# That would mean that I get both my Fallout and hers. Frankly, I'd rather take just mine. So screw letting her try to help!

... I couldn't help thinking Prisoner's Dilemma.

Are you envisioning / feeling like the moment where traits & fallout are assigned will all be out in the open and on the table, or is it more of a hidden thing where you don't know which way the other players are going to jump?

[TonyLB]

You give people the power over you... then, once they have it and they know they have it, they decide how to use it.  It's all out in the open, but because the decisions aren't simultaneous, the first person is still acting in the absence of information.

I see the similarities.  It's more like iterative Prisoner's Dilemma, actually... which, sadly, is a theory-construct I haven't really gotten my head around fully.

[hix]

Followup questions:

So really, fallout means giving them traits in antipathy to the goals you're prescribing for them

I had some trouble with the pronouns here. Does

Fallout = Traits that are opposed to the goals the player wants for their own character?
… or …
Fallout = Traits that are opposed to the goals the player wants for another player’s character?


I’m also trying to wrap my head around why (mechanically) players would choose the ‘cruel’ option. At the moment, I read the logic as: if a PC fails at (a task) and takes Fallout, they can either accept it (which compromises their ability to live up to who they want to be) ... or ... they can pass the Fallout on to a PC they care about.

[Callan S.]

Hi Tony,

Ooops, I thought I was so off topic in the previous post, I didn't check back until now.

So I want to identify what the actual risk factor is, to the characters, so that I can match it with a risk factor to the players.

The most simple one I can think of: Seth loves Ginny. Seth tells Ginny that he loves her. Right there, that's that Gamble. His initial situation is "Ginny is not my girlfriend", value 0. His hoped for outcome is "Ginny is my girlfriend", value 100. His feared outcome is "Ginny rejects me", value -100. But how is that -100 arrived at? How is having been rejected tangibly worse than his starting position? He still has no girlfriend.

I get the misery-power issue. Cluelessness is also power, and a whole host of other things that are usually thought of as ineffective are actually very effective because they draw reactions from people indirectly.

I think you may be having trouble identifying the risk, because misery and cluelessness are about risking nothing!

I mean "Seth TELLS Ginny?" that he loves her? BS! That's being far too straight! What Seth does is tease, bully, harrass and annoy Ginny, cause he just doesn't have the guts to tell her he loves her. He does everything he can to show affection, without actually risking a single thing.

But actually this makes identifying the risk easier. Ginny thinks Seth must hate her guts, is out to get her and trying to get her life away from him. But this is school. You never get away. So that'll rend some changes on her.

It's Ginny/her player who takes the fallout, not Seth/his player. Then as Ginny changes under the pressure, Seth will suffer. Some sort of points economy where the less you risk now, the more you suffer latter by another players hand. Then have some fear mechanic that stops you from doing high risk actions whenever you want. Well, possibly.