[Defenders of the Union] Ronnies feedback

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I am such a sucker for KGB stuff in role-playing games. Defenders of the Union by Malcolm Craig socks right into the Bake It, Betty category, and I really wish I could get it across to the Forge readership that, in some ways, this is the best category of all. Let's see if this time works.

All right, this is a 2nd Directorate Game, hard-core Soviet Dogs. The Gorky Park RPG, big-time, and as such, long overdue. Derivative? Yes, severely so, which may or may not be a problem. In the case of Contenders, it was not a problem, because Contenders turned My Life with Master inside out and thus the similarities were the result of inspiration, not merely imitation. The issue with Defenders of the Union/Dogs in the Vineyard, though, is that you haven't completed the process of insiding-out.

Here's what I mean. What is a desirable emergence in Dogs is central here - "save town, see if we disagree about it," becomes "resolve our disagreements, see if we (or whoever's left) save town." Therefore, altering one another's beliefs and relationships is what it's all about. Hence, don't back off from that, make it crucial, make it the most important thing.

"This is Jack's wicked grin." My suggestion is to reverse the escalation sequence in Dogs. In this game, anyone can just shoot someone; but it doesn't solve much and doesn't rate many dice ... convincing them is the big-dice thing! See? Guns are piddly-pop-pop details; yeah, you can kill someone, even, with them, but it's not a big-dice thing - you can escalate to talking which is bigger! Now, being able to alter one another's beliefs and relationships becomes HUGE, and given the setting, rather hard-core in terms of the real people around the table.

I have sort of an ulterior motive here, too. As a U.S. citizen, I have grown up in a society without a developed Left. As I see it, in global terms, all U.S. politics are just-right-of-center, regardless of miniscule or local shifts here and there. (If anyone disagrees with me about this, please take it to private email. I'm posting it to explain my thinking, not to debate. Please note I have offered no judgment in this post.) I was hoping to see some nuances within the Left appear, especially through international input, among our shared creative interactions in this round of the Ronnies. So the potential I'd like to see baked further in this game, in particular, is kind of important to me personally.

OK, enough deepness, back to the game. A couple of minor suggestions ...

1. The starting player-characters are too nuanced and detailed. I think you need to let some of that stuff develop, just like unassigned Relationship dice in Dogs, but more so.

2. All guns should have the same score, period. In the current design, it should be 3; in the reversed design I'm recommending, it would be 1.

Best,
Ron

[Malcolm Craig]

Hello,

I am such a sucker for KGB stuff in role-playing games. Defenders of the Union by Malcolm Craig socks right into the Bake It, Betty category, and I really wish I could get it across to the Forge readership that, in some ways, this is the best category of all. Let's see if this time works.

All right, this is a 2nd Directorate Game, hard-core Soviet Dogs. The Gorky Park RPG, big-time, and as such, long overdue. Derivative? Yes, severely so, which may or may not be a problem. In the case of Contenders, it was not a problem, because Contenders turned My Life with Master inside out and thus the similarities were the result of inspiration, not merely imitation. The issue with Defenders of the Union/Dogs in the Vineyard, though, is that you haven't completed the process of insiding-out.

It's very true. The two biggest influences on my thinking as regards games design this year have been (and will most likely continue to be) DitV and Dust Devils. To be honest, they are the first two games that have actually prodded me in other directions (albeit onto paths already trod by others.)

Here's what I mean. What is a desirable emergence in Dogs is central here - "save town, see if we disagree about it," becomes "resolve our disagreements, see if we (or whoever's left) save town." Therefore, altering one another's beliefs and relationships is what it's all about. Hence, don't back off from that, make it crucial, make it the most important thing.

So, if I'm reading you right, it's the belief systems and political ideologies that should be core to the entire way things play out? In a way, this was something that I was initially aiming for, but this could ndeed be made a far more central theme of the game. The one thing that stumped me was familiarity: how many people would be familiar with the various subtle nuances of Soviet communism? I can see that more detail on this would be easier to implement without having to enter into some lengthy discourse about Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist ideology and all the offshoots of these.

"This is Jack's wicked grin." My suggestion is to reverse the escalation sequence in Dogs. In this game, anyone can just shoot someone; but it doesn't solve much and doesn't rate many dice ... convincing them is the big-dice thing! See? Guns are piddly-pop-pop details; yeah, you can kill someone, even, with them, but it's not a big-dice thing - you can escalate to talking which is bigger! Now, being able to alter one another's beliefs and relationships becomes HUGE, and given the setting, rather hard-core in terms of the real people around the table.

Thats very interesting, the ultimate escalation being the use of belief and political argument, rather than violence. The endpoint perhaps being change in beliefs, denunciation ("...and it's off to the gulag with you, comrade!") and so forth. This is something that I will take forward, as the politcal/belief aspect is far more interesting to me, personally, than the violence aspect.

I have sort of an ulterior motive here, too. As a U.S. citizen, I have grown up in a society without a developed Left. As I see it, in global terms, all U.S. politics are just-right-of-center, regardless of miniscule or local shifts here and there. (If anyone disagrees with me about this, please take it to private email. I'm posting it to explain my thinking, not to debate. Please note I have offered no judgment in this post.) I was hoping to see some nuances within the Left appear, especially through international input, among our shared creative interactions in this round of the Ronnies. So the potential I'd like to see baked further in this game, in particular, is kind of important to me personally.

Agreed. It's something that is important to me as well. As per my comment above, I think the game deserves and needs further detail and guidance as to the various strands of Soviet Communism, if only to assist those who are perhaps not so familiar with that particular ideology.

OK, enough deepness, back to the game. A couple of minor suggestions ...

1. The starting player-characters are too nuanced and detailed. I think you need to let some of that stuff develop, just like unassigned Relationship dice in Dogs, but more so.

So, could this perhaps be a case of starting the characters with their ideology in place and letting the rest of it develop through play? I can see arguments for both sides of this.

2. All guns should have the same score, period. In the current design, it should be 3; in the reversed design I'm recommending, it would be 1.

Yes, if the game is reversed to make ideological argument the ultimate escalation, then this would be a solid way of bringing that front and centre. This would, to my mind, have the effect of making the 'gun' element less cenral to the game, but as it's now in development, rather than an entry using a defined set of criteria, there shouldn't be any problems with this.

Thanks for the feedback, Ron. It's quite thought provoking and interesting to toy with the concept of flipping the game on its head and and producing something where physical violence is not the ultimate escaltion, but actually a fairly low level of escalation. Violence may solve the issue at hand, but not in any kind of substantive way. On the other hand, argument and debate would result in actual substantive changes (potentially) for the characters involved in the game.

Cheers
Malcolm

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Malcolm,

It seems like we agree about most of this stuff. Here's my answer to your question ...

I wrote,

1. The starting player-characters are too nuanced and detailed. I think you need to let some of that stuff develop, just like unassigned Relationship dice in Dogs, but more so.

You asked,

So, could this perhaps be a case of starting the characters with their ideology in place and letting the rest of it develop through play? I can see arguments for both sides of this.

I think that suggestion is too extreme. I suggest that a starting character should have a few strong "grounding points" to start, giving a good visual image. I'd suggest getting away from Dogs as a model, so that one doesn't need to choose among options of different kinds of pools of dice. Simplify it extensively - as it stands, there are tons of layers one works through from (e.g.) Young Pioneer eventually to some particular Secret or whatever. Strip that process down.

One of these grounding-points is of course basic ideology, but make it very clear that ideology is subject to "damage" or transformation, as are relationships.

Best,
Ron

[Rob MacDougall]

Hi Malcolm, hi Ron, hi everyone.

My suggestion is to reverse the escalation sequence in Dogs. In this game, anyone can just shoot someone; but it doesn't solve much and doesn't rate many dice ... convincing them is the big-dice thing! See?

Wow. I liked this game already when I read it back in November (Dogs in the Vinyard influences, Soviet/KGB setting, what's not to like?) but this would make it really cool. Grim thought police in greatcoats - not just snitches but genuine ideological warriors - in a frozen land where violence is cheap and easy, but true belief is all. Hell yeah.

If you moved in this direction, Malcolm, what would you think of splitting the Attribute "Belief" into something like "Theory" and "Will"? It seemed to me on reading that the Belief attribute was doing double duty and carried much more mechanical bang for your char gen buck than Form or Judgment. And that would be even more true if you flipped the escalation sequence as Ron suggests. But you could split Belief into two attributes like Theory and Will, or Theory and Belief, where the first attribute represents Soviet political correctness, agility with political theory, maybe also general bureaucratic savvy; and the second represents the intensity of your genuine belief in whatever ideology you hold. This would also allow you to distinguish between different classic "types": the zealous true believer, the opportunistic politico, the jaded cynic who knows the right things to say but has lost his faith...

And then the escalation sequence might look something like this:

violence (includes guns but also threats) --> political rhetoric --> true belief

So there's a realm of political talk and quoting chapter and verse from the KGB manuals and Stalin's 3rd October Address to the Party and so on, and that's dangerous, because politics are deadly serious business, but then there's another level that's even more serious - the realm of sincere beliefs. And escalating into the realm of true belief is very powerful, but its dangerous too, because that's where people's true hearts get exposed... with all the fallout that implies. Fun!

I have sort of an ulterior motive here, too. ... I was hoping to see some nuances within the Left appear, especially through international input, among our shared creative interactions in this round of the Ronnies. So the potential I'd like to see baked further in this game, in particular, is kind of important to me personally.

Agreed. It's something that is important to me as well. As per my comment above, I think the game deserves and needs further detail and guidance as to the various strands of Soviet Communism, if only to assist those who are perhaps not so familiar with that particular ideology.

A little more description wouldn't hurt, but I for one don't think you need to work a course in Marxist-Leninist theory into the rules. I know this isn't meant to be a straight Dogs in Siberia conversion, but it does seems to me that Soviet politics and ideology in this game take much the same place as the Faith in Dogs. You can sketch the outlines of the ideology, but the meaningful decisions about what is correct socialist practice and what is counter-revolutionary backsliding will be made by the players through play - really that can be, or has to be, the Fruitful Void for this game.

So, yeah, like I said, wow. Now I'm jonesing to play this. I hope you'll keep developing it.

Rob

[Rob MacDougall]

Oh, I almost forgot, I had a fiction recommendation and two specific questions, one for Malcolm, one for Ron:

Ron, you say you were hoping to see some nuances within the Left appear in this round's games - and I remember you saying back while the contest was still on that you wondered if the entries would support some dialogue as it relates to gaming and Left politics. So can I ask, did you see what you expected? Any thoughts on the treatment of Soviet politics in the games of this round in general? (I can take the question elsewhere if this is the wrong place for it.)

Malcolm, is there a specific reason you set this game in an alternate-history Communism-wins kind of world rather than in real life Russian history? I'm not really criticizing - I dig the vibe. (I always wanted to run a Hellboy game about the Soviet counterparts of the BPRD.) But a real world Gorky Park RPG would be pretty cool too.

The fiction rec is Alan Furst's novel Night Soldiers. Furst has written a bunch of novels about WW2 spies, but this one, about a Bulgarian partisan who gets shanghaied into the NKVD, is probably my favorite. Chilling and cool.

[Malcolm Craig]

You asked,

So, could this perhaps be a case of starting the characters with their ideology in place and letting the rest of it develop through play? I can see arguments for both sides of this.

I think that suggestion is too extreme. I suggest that a starting character should have a few strong "grounding points" to start, giving a good visual image. I'd suggest getting away from Dogs as a model, so that one doesn't need to choose among options of different kinds of pools of dice. Simplify it extensively - as it stands, there are tons of layers one works through from (e.g.) Young Pioneer eventually to some particular Secret or whatever. Strip that process down.

One of these grounding-points is of course basic ideology, but make it very clear that ideology is subject to "damage" or transformation, as are relationships.

Right, I see what you are getting it here.

Ultimate escalation of 'force' within the game = ideological change: You can change the ideologies of others but conversely, your ideology can also be subject to change, extreme or otherwise. And this ideology should be central to the entire character creation process.

In essence, Ideology would be the core 'attribute' of the character, the most important factor in the game. So why not make it the attribute (although Rob does make an excellent suggestion which I have addressed below)?

So, 'strong grounding points' for the character to start with? I'd see it like this:

Ideology
Relations with the other characters
Secrets (or secret, singular)
A sprinkling of Traits

The thoughts regarding guns only having a score of 1 also leads me to this:

Guns kill, plain and simple. You can use your gun to kill someone at any time. However, this serves no real object in the (revised) game. The objective in this new version would be to change the ideological outlook of the opposition. Killing people removes them from the pool of labour, they are no longer valued workers within the Soviet system, just rapidly cooling, useless corpses. I can see that this would require an additional re-working of the text to make it explicit that ideological change, rather than death, is the ultimate goal for the characters. The member of the PAIC are explicitly detailed to make these changes happen through discourse, rather than violence. A step away, perhaps, from the traditional image of citizens repenting their bourgeois ideals from within the torture chambers of the Lubyanka. The endgame essentially becoming an ideological debate, where each character attempts to maintain their position, enforce their version of correct thought and reach their desired outcome.

Hi Malcolm, hi Ron, hi everyone.

My suggestion is to reverse the escalation sequence in Dogs. In this game, anyone can just shoot someone; but it doesn't solve much and doesn't rate many dice ... convincing them is the big-dice thing! See?

Wow. I liked this game already when I read it back in November (Dogs in the Vinyard influences, Soviet/KGB setting, what's not to like?) but this would make it really cool. Grim thought police in greatcoats - not just snitches but genuine ideological warriors - in a frozen land where violence is cheap and easy, but true belief is all. Hell yeah.

Rob,

Thanks very much for the feedback.

If you moved in this direction, Malcolm, what would you think of splitting the Attribute "Belief" into something like "Theory" and "Will"? It seemed to me on reading that the Belief attribute was doing double duty and carried much more mechanical bang for your char gen buck than Form or Judgment. And that would be even more true if you flipped the escalation sequence as Ron suggests. But you could split Belief into two attributes like Theory and Will, or Theory and Belief, where the first attribute represents Soviet political correctness, agility with political theory, maybe also general bureaucratic savvy; and the second represents the intensity of your genuine belief in whatever ideology you hold. This would also allow you to distinguish between different classic "types": the zealous true believer, the opportunistic politico, the jaded cynic who knows the right things to say but has lost his faith...

That's a very intriguing notion and which which I like a lot. As per my point above in response to Ron's post, Ideology would be the very core of the character, but your suggestion would tie very neatly into this, giving strength to the Ideology and also how the character can maintain a 'front' in the face of determined ideological opposition.

So, the ideology ceases to be a numericall based part of the system (as I was envisaging in the light of Ron's comments), but theory/will take over the role within the game mechanics.

And then the escalation sequence might look something like this:

violence (includes guns but also threats) --> political rhetoric --> true belief

So there's a realm of political talk and quoting chapter and verse from the KGB manuals and Stalin's 3rd October Address to the Party and so on, and that's dangerous, because politics are deadly serious business, but then there's another level that's even more serious - the realm of sincere beliefs. And escalating into the realm of true belief is very powerful, but its dangerous too, because that's where people's true hearts get exposed... with all the fallout that implies. Fun!

By George, you're right! As mentioned above, this was the direction I was heading in after the initial feedback, but this does indeed help to clarify how the situation would evolve and resolve.

A little more description wouldn't hurt, but I for one don't think you need to work a course in Marxist-Leninist theory into the rules. I know this isn't meant to be a straight Dogs in Siberia conversion, but it does seems to me that Soviet politics and ideology in this game take much the same place as the Faith in Dogs. You can sketch the outlines of the ideology, but the meaningful decisions about what is correct socialist practice and what is counter-revolutionary backsliding will be made by the players through play - really that can be, or has to be, the Fruitful Void for this game.

So, yeah, like I said, wow. Now I'm jonesing to play this. I hope you'll keep developing it.

I would like to fit in more description and offer, perhaps, a brief phrasebook of ideological wordings and tenets, along with their ascribed meanings within the Soviet system. This might be useful in help the players understand the mode of debate and the usage of language, but would not be a concrete guide in how this should be done. The choices would be up tot he players: what is the prevalent mode of correct thought? How much do they believe in it (both outwardly and inwardly)? What is their own personal mode of correct thought?

I will indeed be developing this further and I'm very keen to see how the revised draft works out.

Cheers
Malcolm

[Malcolm Craig]

Malcolm, is there a specific reason you set this game in an alternate-history Communism-wins kind of world rather than in real life Russian history? I'm not really criticizing - I dig the vibe. (I always wanted to run a Hellboy game about the Soviet counterparts of the BPRD.) But a real world Gorky Park RPG would be pretty cool too.

The fiction rec is Alan Furst's novel Night Soldiers. Furst has written a bunch of novels about WW2 spies, but this one, about a Bulgarian partisan who gets shanghaied into the NKVD, is probably my favorite. Chilling and cool.

Apologies, forgot to respond to this post in my rather lengthy one above.

The alternative-history part of it stemmed from the fact that I have, for quite a long while now, wanted to write and RPG where the USSR was (at least on the surface) the shiningly white workers paradise that it appeared in its propaganda. To a lesser extent, this view was protrayed in many films and SF novels from the USSR. But as always, beneath the pristine surface lies corruption and decay. This was pretty much my reasoning behind it, rather than a desire to shy away from writing something based in the real-life USSR. It would be easily portable to such a setting, it's only a shadow away from it. However, in the revised text I intend to make the alternative-history element slightly clearer and more unambiguous.

And thanks for the book recommendations.

Cheers
Malcolm