[The End of the World] Ronnies feedback

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Wow - Nick Wedig's The End of the World is a fantastic blend of Dead Meat, Otherkind, and The Mountain Witch - neat! It speaks directly to a lot of my thinking and writing about zombie movies. From this game:

You have all congregated together for mutual protection, but as the stress increases, the internal tensions of your compatriots may be more dangerous to you than the undead outside the window.

Thematically, the game is about the breakdown of social taboos and mores. Once these outside limitations are removed, the hatred that usually bubbles beneath the surface comes forth. Zombies are only in the game peripherally as a way of addressing these themes, really. ... The nice suburb that the PCs lived in has been disrupted, for some reason, and now they have to band together and deal with that. More frightening, though, is that they need to deal with each other as their own sense of morality breaks down.

From my review of Dead Meat:

It all comes down to the fact that The Night of the Living Dead is not about zombies. It, like many horror and horror-SF flicks, presents the classic "isolated small group under stress" situation. We get to see people cope with one another, to see the conflicts among them fracture into unexpected alliances and antagonisms, such that the Real Person emerges in each character.

So clearly this is right on one of my fave wavelengths.

Here are a few critical points.

1. Player-characters are too densely constructed: you hate one guy, you get one fact from each of the other players, you have something that pisses you off, you fear something beyond all reason, and you've committed a monstrous act? Geez, that's like ten zombies right there in one character. I strongly suggest slicing it down, both reducing the facts you get from others (great system for that, though) and picking one from among fear/hate/anger/act. That'll produce a nice solid niche for each character, and promote working toward one's narrational strengths during play.

2. If I'm reading right, the overall system is basically a race between the Trust you amass and the ever-escalating universal difficulty. I wonder whether Trust-manipulation isn't too nuanced, too character-specific. I'm also not sure about that "Trust in self" score, which seems like too much of a buffer, reducing inter-dependency. It's pretty fundamental that the protagonists in a zombie story must rely on one another.

But that's it! I really like that Difficulty Pool, by the way, sort of a bit of Primetime Adventures in there.

If it weren't for the very weak treatment of Hatred and Suburb, this would have been a winner. It might not get a Ronny, but that aside, it's a already a great-looking game. With Dead Meat apparently having fallen by the wayside, a real zombie role-playing game is long past due.

Best,
Ron

[mrteapot]

The quote you give about zombie movies is exactly what I wanted out of the game.  I don't even particularly like zombie movies, but thought that the subtext of zombie movies was interesting: zombies themselves are never the threat, the other human beings you are forced to deal with to survive are.  If everyone works together, then the party should be able to survive, but internal tensions make this unlikely.  I hope this would work out something like that in play.

1. Player-characters are too densely constructed: you hate one guy, you get one fact from each of the other players, you have something that pisses you off, you fear something beyond all reason, and you've committed a monstrous act? Geez, that's like ten zombies right there in one character. I strongly suggest slicing it down, both reducing the facts you get from others (great system for that, though) and picking one from among fear/hate/anger/act. That'll produce a nice solid niche for each character, and promote working toward one's narrational strengths during play.

This indeed sounds like a good idea.  I had not considered making character too dense.  I more feared the opposite.

2. If I'm reading right, the overall system is basically a race between the Trust you amass and the ever-escalating universal difficulty. I wonder whether Trust-manipulation isn't too nuanced, too character-specific. I'm also not sure about that "Trust in self" score, which seems like too much of a buffer, reducing inter-dependency. It's pretty fundamental that the protagonists in a zombie story must rely on one another.

I tried to make Trust put in yourself limited in use and easy to lose, but am uncertain how successful this was.  I considered not allowing it at all, and may revert to that method, depending on playtesting, if that ever occurs.

If it weren't for the very weak treatment of Hatred and Suburb, this would have been a winner. It might not get a Ronny, but that aside, it's a already a great-looking game.

I was uncertain how to address Suburb as a term, and recognized that the connection was weak.  In general, the suburbs represented a society that kept all this animosity and distrust in check.  Now that's gone, which leads to the situation of the PCs.  Which is not really a direct examination of Suburbs, but a somewhat indirect and (as I said) weak one.  Of course, outside of the contest's limits, I don't think that this is a huge problem.


--Nick Wedig

[Marc Majcher]

So, here's a question for you.  In the last few weeks, I've been working on a game ("The Dead Walk!") that's unnervingly similar to The End of the World.  Almost precisely the same Premise and setting (not focusing on the horror of the undead, but on the horror of what people will do to each other in the face of a stressful and seemingly hopeless situation, etc, etc), explicit mechanics for specific antagonisms and alliances between player characters, a steadily increasing stress pool that makes actions more difficult as time goes on, simple dice pool conflict resolution, bringing dead PCs back into play as zombies, and so on.  My question is, should I continue work on my game?  I've been working with the intention to present the game for comments and feedback here on the Forge when I'd banged it into some kind of shape, but is it worthwhile at all to submit something so close to a concept that's just been done?  (And quite well, I might add...)  It seems silly, but I almost feel like a plagiarist now, even though I've just now read Nick's game (and now, Ron's review of Dead Meat).  Stupid collective unconscious...

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Marc,

Parallelism isn't plagiarism, and one of the features of the Forge is that we all recognize that there's going to be a lot of cross-influencing.

A lot of people have good ideas, and a lot of them (not all) put them into some game design. But only some of them will push the process through actually to publishing a game. One of them is bound to get there first. The others will be divided into those who say, "Well, he did it, so I'm not going to finish," and those who say, "Mine's good too." They publish as well. What's really important about all this is that it happens most effectively when there's a lot of "simmering" and cross-communicating going on the whole time.

This is normal. It is exactly what you find in any artistic community, including basic scientific research if you can believe that. The widely-accepted image of the isolated geniuses of art and science is 100% mistaken. There is nothing wrong, weird, or unethical about seeing a few zombie games come out which share some ideas, especially since there are probably going to be some useful differences as well.

Role-playing publishing conformed to this approach in its early days, from the early 1970s until the middle-late 1980s. After that, a rather disgusting "race to the center" effect took over, in which everyone strove to publish the most gaudy, text-heavy game which conformed exactly to what they thought of as "mainstream gamer" desires. Only the independents, ranging from a few isolated cases for a ten-year period to today's current explosion, represent a real artistic process and market.

My hope, although I cannot make anyone do this, is that we all provide references, acknowledgments, and advertising that help one another out. You can find extensive lists in my game texts about where some of the influences came from, and I don't mean "Gee, that Cars song sure inspires me," I mean, "I learned that re-roll mechanics can be central from Robin Laws' work in The Dying Earth." A lot of us have found that this practice is very, very profitable for everyone.

We should probably take further discussion of this topic over to the Publishing forum, though. Many threads there provide information that should reassure you.

Best,
Ron

[Jason Petrasko]

Nick,

The game reads great. It seems solid (best I can say without a playtest) and well thought out. I particularly like the way the conflicts are handled, in specific the way the trust points are allocated from the other players. My only negative comment is that right off-hand I can't think of a good way to start the game (as a GM). I would like to see some examples in the text for starting conflicts, just some ideas to break through the mental block of someone like me :)

Additionally, I was thinking about Aliens (the movie) while I read the part about betrayal. I (and many of my friends) really liked the way that Paul Riser's snivelling corporate worm gets killed by the Alien right after his betrayal is exposed. This just makes me question the whole 'Betrayal = Protection' idea.

Excellent work!,
Jason

[mrteapot]

My question is, should I continue work on my game? 

I certainly would like to see what you would have done differently.  Finish your game, and then we can compare them and see which works better (or which works better at different things).  I would like to see other, similar games and what works in them and what works in ways I hadn't thought about.  I'm happy to give you permission to use as much of my game in yours as you wish.

One option might be to combine the games and collaborate on developing the hybrid game into something playable.

[mrteapot]

Nick,

The game reads great. It seems solid (best I can say without a playtest) and well thought out. I particularly like the way the conflicts are handled, in specific the way the trust points are allocated from the other players. My only negative comment is that right off-hand I can't think of a good way to start the game (as a GM). I would like to see some examples in the text for starting conflicts, just some ideas to break through the mental block of someone like me :)

Thank you for the positive feedback.  Rereading the game, I notice that I need better examples and advice for a lot of places I didn't give any.  This is largely a result of it being a 24-hour game, and I was running short on time.  Some rules or advice on setting up conflicts may be one of the most needed parts.  I put a lot of though into what the players do, but the GM side went largely untouched.

If you need guidelines on what sort of conflicts to set up, let your players do the work for you: note down each PC's fear, what pisses them off and the horrific thing they haven't done.  Use these as a checklist, putting one or more in each scene.  Start with the fears, probably, then work into whichever naturally flows from there (or go back to a different fear).  Imagine a situation that invokes that fear or anger, and frame the scene so that is the conflict.  Physical fears, like spiders or fire or high speed car chases, are easy to do: they're in a building on fire, or attacked my mutant zombie spiders or whatever.  Abstract fears are harder, but more rewarding.  So if their fear is that they are an ignoble human being, create situation that tempt them into doing horrible things to their companions (possibly offering more Trust Points for their pool). 

If you can't imagine how to invoke a fear or other stimuli, point this out to the player during character creation and have them clarify or change it until you can frame a scene that involves it somehow.  I hope that helps.  At this point, it's fairly theoretical, as the scheduled playtest didn't happen.

Additionally, I was thinking about Aliens (the movie) while I read the part about betrayal. I (and many of my friends) really liked the way that Paul Riser's snivelling corporate worm gets killed by the Alien right after his betrayal is exposed. This just makes me question the whole 'Betrayal = Protection' idea.

It's been too long since I saw Aliens, but that comment raises a point I'm considering: you could use the game for a variety of other genres, so long as you have a small group facing external danger and internal tenions.  Aliens would work, or a Jurassic Park like game, or other genres.  Perhaps a spy game where each other player is or might be a double agent, or a reality TV rpg.

But I think maybe you could subdivide Paul Reiser's death into a separate conflict, though likely within the same scene.  Perhaps his death is because the other players saw the betrayal and revoked their trust in him, leaving Paul without much support when he needs to face the aliens.  (Though you'd need the option to remove trust in the middle of a scene to make this work, perhaps you can take back any trust you put in a betrayer when they betray someone).

Here's why it works the way it does right now: betrayal needs to be tempting, to increase the internal tension.  And in the conflict, each player distributes Effectiveness based on the trust they gave the active PC.  The betrayer just took back the trust he gave the active PC, so if he were in danger in the conflict, he'd still have no way of influencing the conflict.  The other players are unlikely to protect the betrayer, which means betrayal likely leads to the betrayer being injured (nonactive PCs put in just enough points in Companion's Safety to protect themselves, the active PC chooses the betrayer as the hurt character).  Which makes betrayal an unappealing situation.  Being protected instead makes the betrayal a valuable proposition even if the betrayer doesn't get a lot of trust.

[Marc Majcher]

I certainly would like to see what you would have done differently.  Finish your game, and then we can compare them and see which works better (or which works better at different things).  I would like to see other, similar games and what works in them and what works in ways I hadn't thought about.  I'm happy to give you permission to use as much of my game in yours as you wish.

You've got yourself a deal.  I'll polish what I've got in my next block of free time, and send you a copy when it's presentable.

Thanks for the encouragement!