[Misery Bubblegum] If you REALLY loved me ....

[Josh Roby]

Emma starts of rather selfishly dabbling in others' lives, has some life experiences, and afterwards connects herself to others' lives.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Agreed with Joshua. It's harder to reflect mechanically, but I'd argue that Emma does not start out with any Emotional Commitment Points (or whatever) invested in the people she's trying to "help." She does come to care about them later, though.

Hmm. Perhaps the crucial factor is investing yourself in (i.e. caring about) others enough to (a) make yourself vulnerable and (b) make yourself powerful?

[Mark Woodhouse]

I think the reverse arc is pretty well-represented, too - particularly in girls' stories. The character who is completed dominated and shaped by the expectations of others, who must rebel against the people whose approval she craves in order to find herself as an independent person. It is only by departing from the comfortable and safe confines of peer group and family that the character becomes a whole person.

[Josh Roby]

I'll play devil's advocate, Mark.  I know the stories that you're talking about, but the lead character doesn't start the story connected to the world; she starts by being dictated to by the world.  She does not have a relationship with the greater world any greater than a puppet on strings.  The progress of the story has the character cut those strings, yes, but she usually does it by making real connections to other people, as opposed to the superficial and false connections she had before.  The story climaxes and ends with the character taking her place in the world, rather than being told her place.  The character still takes an active stance in saying, "This is who I am, this is what I do, this is how I fit in to the community."

That said, I think you've got an important insight.  I think these stories are about finding where you fit -- whether the character starts as a selfish outsider loner or as a member of a popular clique, they are not self-actualized, and they are not an active participant in their community.  These stories tell how the character actualizes herself and takes up that active place in society.  It is a fictional rite of passage.

And 'finding where you fit' when applied to a social group is all about your identity and what others think your identity is -- so assuming that sort of play is still what Misery Bubblegum's about, I think that could work really well.

[Mark Woodhouse]

I'll play devil's advocate, Mark.  I know the stories that you're talking about, but the lead character doesn't start the story connected to the world; she starts by being dictated to by the world.  She does not have a relationship with the greater world any greater than a puppet on strings.  The progress of the story has the character cut those strings, yes, but she usually does it by making real connections to other people, as opposed to the superficial and false connections she had before.  The story climaxes and ends with the character taking her place in the world, rather than being told her place.  The character still takes an active stance in saying, "This is who I am, this is what I do, this is how I fit in to the community."

Sure, we, as outside observers, see it that way. But that's one of those tricky transition-points between mediums - if we're to make an engaging role-playing game about this story, the character's subjective position needs to have weight and meaning.

From the position of authors or readers, we see that her relationships and persona are dysfunctional, inauthentic. We're rooting for her to change. But from the position of playing her role, we need to feel the gravity of that choice. "Why doesn't she just tell him how she feels?" Well, because treasuring her misery is way easier than risking rejection. Think about a DitV Initiation scene - the player takes the part of the character as they are - adversity is what is trying to change them.

I think that's one of the real challenges of getting rewarding play out of these kinds of stories - we players so easily trivialize the emotional intensity that characterises them.

[Josh Roby]

100% agreement, Mark.

Alrighty, then, how does Tony make the decision to change not one with a 'bunk' choice?

[Sydney Freedberg]

I'm not Mark, but this is a stab at an answer...

I think the reverse arc is pretty well-represented, too - particularly in girls' stories. The character who is completed dominated and shaped by the expectations of others, who must rebel against the people whose approval she craves in order to find herself as an independent person....

Dead-on, I think. A thought, in pseudo-mechanical terms:
a) If the classic callow, self-absorbed adolescent is expressed as a character with no emotional resources invested in others; and
b) matured and triumphant protagonist is a character who has made emotional investments in others (which are high-risk, high-return);
c) then perhaps Marks's protagonist "shaped by the expectations of others" is a character whom other people have made emotional investments in. Such a character has to "rebel against the people whose approval she craves" by someone getting those characters' investments off her character sheet, or at least make them less dominant and defining elements of it; then she can maybe start investing in others (and over towards being (b)).

In other words, (a) is emotionally autarchic, isolated, and impoverished; (b) has an emotional trade surplus; and (c) has an emotional trade deficit.

[TonyLB]

Okay, I'm digging back into my notebook of disconnected thoughts (yes, I actually have a notebook of disconnected thoughts).  This one seems relevant to the topic at hand:

Defeat and pain are the player's friends.  The character has defenses that must be battered down before they can make the important choices.

The character isn't strong enough to break these defenses from the inside.  They must be weakened from without before there can be any growth.

I think that Mark, here,

"Why doesn't she just tell him how she feels?" Well, because treasuring her misery is way easier than risking rejection.

And Sydney when he spoke about an arc of vulnerability are both onto different, better, versions of that unformed thought.  People build a structure of truths, lies, success and failure and the purpose of that structure is to protect them from unwanted change.  It keeps them from being hurt by accusations like "You are a loser" or "You are selfish."  But the structure of defenses isn't selective.  There isn't a gate that you can just choose to open to let in notions like "You are a good person," or "You are loved."  The defenses keep those out as well.

Poisonous notions like "I'm worthless," or "I don't deserve happiness" are, in fact, the best defenses.  Somebody argues that you're worthless and you already know?  That doesn't hurt.  In fact, the only thing that can hurt you is somebody who sees worth in you.  They can break down your defenses.

So the arc that I begin to see in these stories is like this:

• We see the person in their native habitat, with their defenses functioning perfectly.  Veronica being Heather's lackey.  Miyazawa being the perfect student to get praise.  Emma matching people to avoid thinking about romance herself.
• Something (in all these cases, someone) intrudes, and those defenses start to be chipped away.  JD, Arima, Knightley.  We see that the defenses don't make the protagonist happy.  As we see this, they realize it as well, though often in an incohate, unspoken fashion.
• For a satisfying ending, the defenses get totally removed, and the protagonist makes themselves utterly vulnerable.
• For a satisfying and sad ending, the ones they make themselves vulnerable to hurt them, and the character grows stronger.
• For a satisfying and happy ending, the ones they make themselves vulnerable to help them, and the character grows stronger.

And the answer to questions like "Why doesn't Emma just confess her love to Knightley in the early acts?" is "She can't."  She's too hemmed in by her own defenses to be capable of such an admission.

Does that match with what you folks are thinking?

[Mark Woodhouse]

First off, Tony & Sydney are indeed on the same wavelength I'm on.

1Alrighty, then, how does Tony make the decision to change not one with a 'bunk' choice?

My hunch is - big, ugly Gamble. In order to move from the 'shields up' position into the vulnerable position, there ought to be a significant risk of a setback which redoubles the strength of the shields and/or makes rejection more likely. You can sit in the initial position and build up resources, OR you can gamble a significant portion of those resources to move on into the next stage, where you have no defenses and few resources. From that stage, somebody else has to loan you the resources to make the next bet and move on to the endgame... I'm feeling vague here, but basically an escalating investment along the lines of poker.

[Josh Roby]

Mark n Tony, that all sounds very cool.  I'm thinking this also all but requires some heavy disassociation between player agenda and character agenda -- the player is all about hacking away the character's defenses, while the character very much wants to keep them!

[Josh Roby]

Hit Post too soon.

Tony, are the defenses composed out of "truths" about the character?  "I'm worthless 2d6" and "Others' happiness is more important than mine d10"?

Would play be a process of whittling down the stats in the "Defenses" part of the character sheet and building them up on the... I dunno, "Self-Actualization" side?  If so, somehow there needs to be a mechanic for moving a Defense into a Self-Actualization (not without some roleplay and manipulation, of course) for those instances where the character does the same thing at the start and finish but succeeds at the finish.

Note: I'm not seeing a lot of replay value -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[Sydney Freedberg]

[li]For a satisfying ending, the defenses get totally removed, and the protagonist makes themselves utterly vulnerable.[/li]
[li]For a satisfying and sad ending, the ones they make themselves vulnerable to hurt them, and the character grows stronger.[/li]
[li]For a satisfying and happy ending, the ones they make themselves vulnerable to help them, and the character grows stronger.[/li][/list]

And the answer to questions like "Why doesn't Emma just confess her love to Knightley in the early acts?" is "She can't."  She's too hemmed in by her own defenses to be capable of such an admission.

This is very cool. And it fits beautifully with the mechanics you were struggling with in earlier versions where (as I recall) you can't change (i.e. add traits to/remove traits from) your own character; you can only change your character by trusting another player with power to change you.

And here we have Mark's "big, ugly Gamble" -- it's not a gamble on the mechanics, it's a gamble that the other player is gonna do something you can live with.

The tricky bit is that all of this is about inter-player relationships, now. It's very easy for people to fall into predictability - either cooperating all the time because they're "playing nice," or being jerks all the time because "it's just a game" -- so you need an system that rewards never being completely reliable and cooperative. Presumably that can come from the temptation to use the power you've been handed over someone else to change them in ways that serve your agenda -- but what's your agenda, apart from being changed yourself? (Thinking out loud a bit, here).

What you really need are short-term and long-term goals to trade off against each other. If Sorcerer were all about keeping your Humanity and the GM never threw you up against eyeball-eating cultists, no one would ever do any dangerous sorcery; if Capes were all about accumulating Story Tokens and there was no point in spending Debt, no one would ever do anything heroic. Now of course high school is full of short-term goals in whose name you can sacrifice long-term personal growth -- but how do you make those valuable to the players?

[TonyLB]

Would play be a process of whittling down the stats in the "Defenses" part of the character sheet and building them up on the... I dunno, "Self-Actualization" side?  If so, somehow there needs to be a mechanic for moving a Defense into a Self-Actualization (not without some roleplay and manipulation, of course) for those instances where the character does the same thing at the start and finish but succeeds at the finish.

Well, I figure that all of your abilities (Defenses and otherwise) are written on cards (probably 3x5, since they're cheap) and in the course of conflicts those can be controlled and taken by other players.

So, like, Miyazawa:  Her big defense early in Kare Kano is that she is able to put up the front of a "perfect student."  That guarantees that her true self is kept secret ... so, you write, say, "Secret Self" on a card and use it as your defense.  When Arima discovers her secret, then he is holding that card.  It's still (potentially) a defense for her ... but now it's under his control.  He uses it to defend her against others (keeping the secret when he could reveal it) but at the same time uses it against her in private (blackmailing her to do his bidding).  But she can grow with Arima precisely because she has no defenses against him.  She is vulnerable, in the most literal sense of the word.  That vulnerability is to him alone, precisely because he protects her from the rest of the world.  By taking her defenses, he becomes the person responsible for defending her ... and unlike Miyazawa, Arima can choose not to defend her, even when he has the power to do so.

That was rambling ... but my point is that I think the way to turn a Defense into a Self-Actualization is to put it into the hands of another player.  Then you can change under their direction ... which is, as Sydney says, the big Gamble.

Note: I'm not seeing a lot of replay value -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Well, that depends on whether/how you get new defenses.  There is a certain elegance to simply saying "All those important truths you discovered about yourself last session?  Those are your defenses this session.  You can either rest on those laurels, and not risk further growth, or you have to figure out how the revelation you were proud to reach last session isn't the end of the story." 

That's a pretty hard-core approach though.  It's not going to sit well with people who want to build things once and forever, and then sit back and admire their pretty castle.  It's much more of a "I build a tower in order to knock it down and build a new one" approach.  But y'know what?  Those people who want to rest on their laurels?  Screw 'em.  This game is not for them.

[TonyLB]

What you really need are short-term and long-term goals to trade off against each other. If Sorcerer were all about keeping your Humanity and the GM never threw you up against eyeball-eating cultists, no one would ever do any dangerous sorcery; if Capes were all about accumulating Story Tokens and there was no point in spending Debt, no one would ever do anything heroic. Now of course high school is full of short-term goals in whose name you can sacrifice long-term personal growth -- but how do you make those valuable to the players?

I totally agree that this is key ... and furthermore, I have only the vaguest notions of how to make it happen.  I suspect that the "if / then" statements of previous threads will be key, because they can make short-term goals seem like the easiest way to achieve your long-term victory ... as long as no complications occur while pursuing those short-term goals.  After all, who wouldn't pay one, single penny for a crisp new one dollar bill?

[Sydney Freedberg]

Tony, like Socrates, I will point out that you already know the answer to your own question:

Question:

[Opposing short-term vs. long-term goals - ] I have only the vaguest notions of how to make it happen.  I suspect that the "if / then" statements of previous threads will be key, because they can make short-term goals seem like the easiest way to achieve your long-term victory

Answer:

There is a certain elegance to simply saying "All those important truths you discovered about yourself last session?  Those are your defenses this session.  You can either rest on those laurels, and not risk further growth, or you have to figure out how the revelation you were proud to reach last session isn't the end of the story." 

No set of "truths about myself" is privileged, in this set-up -- you don't have one set of things labelled "this is the final answer about who you are" and another set labelled "this shit don't matter, really." You have a whole bunch of "truths" and the game keeps testing you (Dogs in the Vineyard-style) to see which ones are final and which ones aren't. Maybe "I stand up for those weaker than myself" is a permanent truth about your character, or maybe that's just who you were last week. Maybe "I always write a little heart over an 'i'" is an abiding truth of who you are.

And -- heh heh -- here's the really beautifully nasty bit: Since you can't label some truths as "final" and lock them down, who you really are can sneak up on you.

"Oh, I'm really a good guy, honest, and when the chips are really down, I'll take my stand, but, y'know, on this particular occasion, it'd be really awkward for me to tell Tom to stop bullying that skinny kid, and though I might save that kid some embarassment right now, I'd hurt my friendship with Tom forever, and so really the only choice is to say nothing, and -- what do you mean, I make that same choice last week? Really? And the week before that? And all last year? Hmmm, maybe I -- whaddya mean, I'm grown up now?" [looks around, notices self, skinny kid, and Tom are no longer wearing jeans and in high school but wearing ties and in cubicle farm] "Oh, f****, this is who I am?"

Tony, I know you're Jewish, but there's a section of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity that speaks to just this aspect of spiritual development -- I'm gonna find it for you.