[DexCon] [Unistat] One Wing Dipped in Blood

[TonyLB]

So, final slot of DexCon ... Sunday, 2 - 6.  I know from experience that it's luck of the draw whether people show up for such a thing.  I also know that I've had some really extremely hot roleplaying in that slot, and that people who head out early are missing out.  The combination of having warmed up your roleplaying muscles all weekend and then having your inhibitions clobbered by lack of sleep can be a very good thing.

Andrew ran a slot of Unistat, which he had managed to keep ... well, pretty much entirely secret from me until I saw it on the schedule.  You will be hearing more about this game (though I earnestly hope not under a name that immediately struck me as a cross between "Unisystem" and "Monistat" ... confusion with either of those products strikes me as a bad thing).  It was a spectacular system under which to play.  It's basically The Nighttime Animals Save the World, all grown up and bulletproofed ... it encourages you to lose conflicts that another person really wants to win, by paying you in exactly (and literally!) the dice they rolled to beat you.  The winner just hands them right over to the loser, who then gets to roll them later.  So simple, so immediately obvious ... I'm a little envious.  Okay, a lot.

Andrew used this system to run "One Wing Dipped in Blood."  It's about angels, who suddenly cannot hear the Word of God.  I mean ... damn!  Figuratively and literally.  Andrew was running for me, Kristin, Nick, Shawn and Rob.  Was he a little nervous?  He'll have to say.  He looked nervous, though.  And we're such gentle souls.

Shawn played the saucy Lilith, bitter handmaiden of God, because he had to be special and play a non-angel.  The rest of us played angels.  Rob's angel Tor was dumb.  Nick's, Azaziel, was smart.  Kristin's, Alara, was innocent.  Mine, Saraphel, was fallen (yeah, burning in hell since before time was time, and all that).  And that's pretty much all there was to that.

I suppose we could have had the obligatory "Are we really a party?" jazz, but it would have just wasted time.  I think Azaziel gave Saraphel all of ten seconds of shit about "Should you really be up here in heaven, and not burning in sulphur?" and then we got down to business.  We were not without conflicts as a group (oh, hells, no!) but they never touched on whether we were a group.  We hated each other.  We were bound to each other.  This was our story.  We were family.

We couldn't hear the Word.  Nobody ever doubted (until much later) that this was A Bad Thing.  We got the idea in our heads that God was somewhere on earth, and set out to look for him.  But man ... we couldn't take a step without it being potent imagery.

Rob has Tor dig himself up from underground (doing what?  don't know) to find Lilith.  She insists he needs a bath.  I say "Two words:  Baptismal font," and we were off to the races.  These weren't people.  These were Angels.  They lived in the symbols of our daily world, and nothing that they did could possibly be inconsequential.

Because, and here's the thing:  Questions that are abstract to us weren't abstract to them.  Our first debate (almost immediately we set off as a group) was "What sin does God dislike the most?"  And this wasn't "What sin is worst for the world?" or any of that ivory tower stuff.  We were talking it over as beings who had watched God operate for all of eternity.  We had the first-hand evidence, and the arguments that we mustered through our characters were spectacular and evocative of them and powerful and contradictory and all right.

Tony (immediately):  "Hypocrisy.  Oh wait ... that's just what

I hate."
Nick:  "Well, which one is the first commandment ... was it the Graven Idols one?  Azaziel would know.  That one's clearly the most important."
Rob (very much 'for Tor'):  "God wants people not to be mean to each other."[/list]

... and on and on like that.  And none of us agreed, and every one of us spoke with a sense of celestial certainty that was cool without being creepy the way it would if a human being were saying it.  We weren't delusional:  we actually knew.

Which, I'll mention, we did.  I don't know what the answer to any of the questions that we raised in this game are in the real world.  But I know what the answers to some of them are in the fictional world, because we answered them, and so the world immediately becomes a "What if" thing.  "What if God's most important rule is 'Thou shalt have no other God's before me'?"  That's what this world was about, the same way it would be if you said "What if the world were really a computerized illusion?"  We defined the setting, because it was fiction and it was free for us to define.

And I do not believe that the real world works the way we made this fictional world work.  There are questions that we answered, and I'm fine with the answers in fiction, but I don't think they're the real-world answers in the same way that I don't think a person can say certain magic words and turn another person into a marmoset.  But it was our world to make out of raw fiction, however we chose to make it for that one session ... and man, we did it hardball.  I'm going to give you three examples that stick out like high peaks in a mountain range, but we were in pretty rarified air the whole time.  We were doing something I don't even really have words for yet. 

Example #1:  I threw a quandary straight at Rob, for Tor (an actual Angel) to solve:  a girl was miserable, undecided, because her boyfriend wanted her to abort their newly conceived child, and she didn't know what to do.  She said "But ... it's murder.  It's killing a tiny, defenseless little baby."

And Rob immediately said "No it isn't.  There is no soul there yet."

I was the first one to recover my voice (and I didn't do it quickly).  All I could get out was "Oh WOW."  I was awed that he had the raw chutzpah to grab that question and (within the fiction, people!  Don't flame me!) to answer it and move on.  I'd have been totally just as awed if he'd said "Yes, it is."  Either way ... it's an answer.  The power of it at the table was absolutely palpable.  It was (to steal from Pratchett) like dropping a slab of lead onto a marble floor.  It was heavy.

I really want to know what he was thinking, right then.

Example #2:  We found God in the form of a homeless man.  By the way, at this point Andrew said "I don't think I'm prepared to play God."  He did fine.  God was being turned away from the Salvation Army because they didn't have enough food for everyone.  Saraphel went ballistic.  She was all over the soup-kitchen people, saying "You do the right thing, and if you don't have enough resources then you do the right thing anyway!" and all that.  Andrew had God tell Saraphel to stop.  "They're right," He said, "They can only do so much."

I just replied "Shut up."  To God.  When this whole thing was touched off by our not hearing Him.

In analyzing this since, I think I've twigged out some of why I said that.  The whole "You cannot hear the voice of God" thing was running on so many different levels for us.  First, it's an assault on our very identities:  as Angels, hearing that voice is who we are.  Second, it puts us in fear for the cosmos.  When you know that God has suddenly decided to change everything, it's important that you're on top of that change ... a sort of Celestial-Punk imperative to be part of the formation of that new world.  Third, it is the ultimate Event, even bigger than Woodstock ... some of us (I think particularly Lilith, but I'd be interested to hear Shawn's thoughts about that) went simply because when something like that's happening you can't not be there.

But Saraphel went searching for God because she needed to know that He was alright.  He'd disappeared from her life and she was worried.

Unistat has only one character element: the Trait ... something like PTA's Issue, but with mechanical teeth.  It is what drives you, what gives you power, what makes you vulnerable, what your story revolves around, all in one.  Even before I had decided that Saraphel was a fallen angel, I wrote down "Doubts God's love" as her trait.

Remember when I was talking about how we were interacting with these cosmic abstracts on a purely personal level?  Yes, Saraphel's question was about the global "Do forgiveness and love touch even the most sinful of souls?"  But for her that was the same question as "Does this person, whom I've treated badly, still love me anyway?  Did he ever?"

I'm not trying to create any sort of competition but ... I think of all of them, she loved Him the most.  It felt like the others (to varying degrees) thought of him as "The Father."  Saraphel thought of him as "my father."

Example #3:  Now I've been glossing over the powerful impact that the simple rules had upon what was going on, not because the rules weren't important in this, but just because it's hard to tease out their importance.  But this one was so clear-cut.

I was getting into emotionally vulnerable territory (see above) and we were heading for the end of the time-slot, and Andrew still had like six twenty sided dice to my ... well, none.  I was really, really eyeing those dice, and I wanted to create a conflict that would draw Andrew to beat me and give them to me.

Tor prevailed upon Saraphel to apologize for snapping at God.  And she did, although ... yeah ... really hard for her.  I don't think anyone missed that she was apologizing for this incident not ... ahem ... any earlier events.  She totally wasn't over the whole "exile to hell" thing.

Andrew asked me what her motives for acting as she did were, citing "Because, y'know, He'd know."  I don't exactly remember what I said, but it was a tangle of emotion and theology and rebel morality.  The personal is cosmic.

So, anyway, he had God say "Your intentions were good, but you were also motivated by Pride."  I felt a sting there because ... y'know ... I didn't really think she was motivated by pride, though I could see the arguments both ways.  I was about to let it pass when I glanced at those dice again.  Something clicked, and we had the following conversation:

Tony: "Dude ... he's

wrong."
Andrew: "God is wrong?"
Tony: "I've got dice!"[/list]

It was great to know what I was saying, and to know that Andrew knew.  I wasn't saying "You, Andrew, are wrong about this, and therefore God wouldn't say it."  If I'd wanted to say that, Andrew knows I'd have said it that way.  I was saying "God did say that, and unless you win this conflict I will prove that Saraphel was not motivated by Pride, that God is fallible, and (connected) that He doesn't really understand her."

Oh, he totally trounced me, and I went into the finale of the game with a security blanket of five d20's.  A very satisfying exchange on all sides, I think.

[John Harper]

Whoa. Amazing. I want everything there is involving Unistat. Give me linky things.

[Andrew Morris]

Tony, thanks so much for writing this up. I think if I'd done so, it wouldn't have been nearly as...well...good. I loved that game. I loved all the PCs. And, just a bit, I think I loved every one of the players. I had a real emotional response and connection. That's not something I'm used to in RPGs.

Whoa. Okay, touchy-feelie mode securely off.

On the name...yeah, it kinda sucks. Problem is, I've got nothing better, and it says what it is: one statistic. One of the Burning Wheel crew (sorry, I don't remember who) jokingly proposed Ein Staat as a cooler name, but for the moment, I'm sticking with Unistat. If anyone's got a better idea, I'm wide open to suggestions.

And yes, it owes much to Nighttime Animals. I love that game, and it's what got me thinking about resource-exchange mechanics, which is my current...uhm...thing. Vincent gets props in the acknowledgements section. Tony, I could tell that you "got it" right away. When I explained that high dice let you win conflicts, and low dice let you narrate, you immediately began grabbing up all the d4s on the table. Some of the other players took a while to latch onto the fact that dice were just props to represent narrative power. Nick in particular has told me that it took him an hour or two to get into the swing of it.

Was he a little nervous?  He'll have to say.  He looked nervous, though.

Nah, just tired. You guys are all great.

I think the most memorable bits of narration were both with Saraphel. The first was when the other angels floated down from heaven to see what was going on down back on earth, and Saraphel just plummeted. The other was in the conclusion narration, where Saraphel realized that God wasn't going to tell her what to do, and so she chose to return to hell.

Whoa. Amazing. I want everything there is involving Unistat. Give me linky things.

No linky things at the moment. The game is in layout at the moment, so that it will look nice on a single sheet of paper. Once that's done, I'll post a link to the PDF. It'll be nice and easy to print out and keep in your pocket in case you need to run an RPG on a moment's notice. It'll also be nice and free.

[Robert Bohl]

This was a really fun game, and I truly enjoyed setting stakes that answered all the big questions of the world.  I'm an athiest, and I found myself with a profound respect for the god Andrew played.

Tor was under the earth because he fell asleep a few million years ago.

What was I thinking when I declared that there was no soul in the fetus yet?  At first I thought, "The stereotypical answer is to save the baby, but screw that."  Then I thought about it some more, reflected that this character was very much not the rebellious Kewl Guy type, and then decided, "This is a hippy roleplaying game, I get to decide what's real and what isn't, not just what My Guy does," so I decided I would set stakes that God was OK with abortion and decided (though I didn't get to say it) that the soul is grown like any other part of the body.

As to who loved Him most, I think it was different kinds of love.  It reminds me of how Al Franken compared political parties.  One loves the nation with the unquestioning fervor of a 6 year old for his parents.  The other loves it with the maturity of an adult, who can see the fallability and humanness of the parent.  Tor was a 6 year old, unquestioning and purely loving.  To me, Saraphel was a teenager or young adult, loving in a more mature and complicated way.

A few times we said, did, established things that were kind of bold (in the vein of the abortion thing, or God being wrong).  Often, these were things we as players believed in in the real world, yet it still produced choruses of "woooooooooaaaaaaaaah!"  I know that in terms of religious belief, we had the entire gamut, from me--the lapsed Catholic and Secular Fundamentalist--to someone who stepped out of the con that morning to go to church.  Yet--and this may have to do with the fact that we all liked each other or that no one was being a dick or that everyone grokked that this was fiction--there was no unpleasantness, nastiness, or hurt feelings.

On the name, Andrew, what about One Stat?  Or The One Stat (a la The Ring )?  Yeah, those suck too.  I dunno.  I'm just waiting for the 256 page hardback suppliment.

[Robert Bohl]

One other thing I meant to mention:  We decided in the end that God stopped speaking to us because he'd decided to give us free will.  Furthermore, after discovering this we had to deal with Archangel Michael slaughtering hundreds of people in Israel.  I went there to fight him and kept trying to subdue him but he wouldn't go down easily.  Eventually, I wound up having to kill him.  Really killed.  Dead.  Permanently.  Someone mentioned--and we all agreed--this was the new Original Sin.

[Andrew Morris]

Oh man, Rob. The scene with Michael was also one of the most potent images from the game. How could I neglect to mention that?

I keep thinking back to the game, and every time I remember another detail, I think, "Oh, man...that was so cool." I think that's one of the hallmarks of a good game -- all the awesome moments just blend together because they came in such rapidfire successession.

[Rob Donoghue]

I ended up watching a little bit of this game play out while I was waiting for Fred on Sunday, and just from the small bits i saw, I was impressed.  People were clearly deeply into their roles, and watching things like the abortion exchange unfold was spectacular, but what struck me most was that even thouhg I had no idea about the specifics of the rules, it was very easy to understand their ebb and flow of play as the dice moved around and people really set out to milk that.

One notable exchange that was both very cool and slightly worrisome(or maybe not) regarding the mechanics was actually the abortion roll itself.  Andrew seemed impressed with Rob's declaration, and tossed a handful of bonus dice at him, enough so that Rob didn't need to put forward any of his own dice.  Shawn put forward the opposition, but (as I interpreted) everyone was pretty strongly on board with Rob's declaration, and the oppostion was most for form and to try to poach that fat handful of dice (because, after all, the loser would get it).  As such, Shawn put forward a single die, a d6 maybe.  Of course Tony, bastard that he is, piped in with a third side and put forward a d4 (I think) and ended up undercutting Shawn and stealing the stack for himself.

Now, I'm really of two minds about this.  On one hand, since Shawn and Tony are both solid, creative players, the stakes they put forward were fun and interesting, so that's a cool example of rules producing play, and that rocks.  On the other hand, it was kind of shameless in a meta-sense, which is not so bad, but more tellingly, I looked at that exchange and realized that it basically amounted in someone else getting rewarded for Rob being awesome, and that doesn't sit entirely well with me.

Anyway, this is a snapshot perspective from watching maybe 15-20 minutes of play, and it's honestly a fairly minor point, so salt copiously.

Very cool to watch, all in all.

-Rob D.

[Robert Bohl]

Rob, this is a very good commentary on the rules system.  Don't forget though that the person getting all those dice is definitely winning narration and probably winning stakes, so he or she doesn't go utterly unrewarded.

[Krista E]

One other scene that was not mentioned that had an effect on our characters (though not as much, as we didn't get to play with it too much) was when our group went to visit an office of angels working in Las Vegas. We had gone there for help, just to discover that these angels, who were supposed to be working for God, had stopped listening to his word long ago and did not even realize he had stopped talking to them. It was almost a shock to realize "Oh man! You mean angels can choose not to listen to the word of God?"  At least my character, Alara, was shocked by this - she was completely devoted to God and could not fathom not listening to what God had to say.

I was also entranced by the way Shawn played Lilith - sharp-witted, and a bit devilish, almost complaining about how God did things - but in the end, she was right by his side; God was her lover - her love.

[Sydney Freedberg]

It sounds like a beautifully streamlined and brutally straightforward system.

I'd suggest you steal from the steaming wreckage of my apocalypse girl design and call the single defining stat the character's "Core" -- in which case possible titles for the game suggest themselves: "The Core System," for example. Although I'm also tempted by the title "The One Thing That Matters."

[Robert Bohl]

"The Core System" has a very nice FU vibe to it.  And as a stat name, Core is much more flavorful.

[Andrew Morris]

Rob D., the multiway conflict rules have been changed, thanks to some excellent feedback at the game from Tony. It's not so easy to jump in with token resistence in order to grab the dice of two players who are really working out a conflict, now. But as RobNJ points out, the real reward is gaining narration rights and/or winning the conflict right then, when it matters to you. I could just as easily have given dice to Rob to do with as he wished, but instead, I decided to back his narration.

Krista, yes, there were definitely some cool images with that scene. I like that Alara and Azazel were sitting patiently in the waiting room, while the others hit the "den of iniquity."

Ooh, name stuff. Cool. Thanks Sydney and Rob. Keep up with the suggestions. Feel free to use email or PM if you don't feel comfortable posting here -- that goes for anyone with an idea, not just those two.

[Shawn De Arment]

Tony, we were supposed to play angels? Weren't you playing an adolescent who could only relate to her father by acting out? I know I was playing the bitter divorcée.

Lilith's starting motivation was simple. Now that mister high and mighty had abandoned his radio show (The Word), I was going to use my step children to track him down and give him a piece of my mind.

Andrew had us start after being asleep for centuries. I realized about half way through the game, that we were now Awake, as in self aware for the first time. The angels in Las Vegas were still asleep, mindlessly going about our duties. Tor was probably in charge of something like plate tectonics before he Awakened, and I don't have to spell out what Lilith's duties were.

Rob D, on the dice exchange, RobNJ as well as Tony and I could change what dice we were going to roll until everyone was happy. Sure RobNJ had a bunch of dice for his pro-choice counseling, but he could have just as easily rolled one. Although Lilith took the pro-life stance, I (Shawn) didn't think it was worth putting too much of my dwindling supply of dice against him (Tony owned the system, I just wasn't keeping up).

The game was a blast to play in what ended up as cross between the Prophecy movies and Dogma. I got to play out a nice little story arc. Going from a Catholic schoolgirl Lolita to a bag lady, from sex focused to Love focused, from bitter to hopeful.

[Robert Bohl]

Rob D, on the dice exchange, RobNJ as well as Tony and I could change what dice we were going to roll until everyone was happy. Sure RobNJ had a bunch of dice for his pro-choice counseling, but he could have just as easily rolled one.

That's actually not true.  The rules as written that we were playing with only allowed one to hand off dice dedicated to a specific roll.  Andrew and others handed me the dice for that roll.  Tony improvised the "here have this die" rule outside of a roll, which Andrew liked and is going to put in, but my understanding is you can give it generally or you can give it dedicated to a roll, and what I got was dedicated to a roll.

[TonyLB]

Tony, we were supposed to play angels? Weren't you playing an adolescent who could only relate to her father by acting out? I know I was playing the bitter divorcée.

It's not an either-or thing.  That's what rocked.  I was playing a rebellious teen whose every facet was an eternal representation of divine truth.