[Dreamation] [Unistat] Knights of the Living Dead

[Andrew Morris]

Here's the quick and dirty write-up of my Friday night game at Dreamation.

Player (Character/Trait)
Emily Care-Boss (Jennifer the Zombie/Who am I?)
Mike Miller (Mayor Zane VanFoil/Self-Important)
Ralph Mazza (Sir Roderick de Gaul/Really, really old veteran)
Frank Hablawi (Pastor Lawrence/Fearful)
Krista Evanouskas (Sir Gareth/I'm in love with a zombie)

In-Game Summary
Roderick and Zane argue over funding the Shield Knights. Zombie attacks cause Roderick to press for full pay and an increase in the Knights. Lawrence uses fear to increase church attendance. Gareth had killed the zombie, Lawrence put it up on a cross to scare folks, and Jennifer had snacked on it when no one was paying attention.

Much discussion ensues. No one notices that Jennifer has been rotting lately. She gets put into Shield Knight training, to help defend the village. Gareth doesn't know where his loyalties lie.

Fast forward a year or so.  The Shield Knights are up to strength. Lawrence has been breeding zombies and releasing them to enhance fear and increase church power. A nearby zombie community has been discovered. Jennifer attempts to free the humans held captive by the zombies, but infects the prisoners, returning home with a bunch of zombies in tow. The other zombies (the ones Lawrence has been creating) throw off his control and turn him. Zombies escape. Town panics. Zombie Lawrence gets everyone in the church for a "special service." Yay! It's a wedding between Jennifer and Gareth. "I now pronounce you man and zombie. Drink this...uhm...wine." Lawrence preaches that zombie is the way God wants you to go – mass infections occur.

Zane and Roderick put aside their differences and board up the church before setting it on fire. The new zombie religion goes up in flames. The backstabbing pair grab all the loot in town and head off to a beachfront community to retire in luxury. Unfortunately for them, the new village doesn't use the same currency, so they spend the rest of their days miserable and poor.

Flash back to the burnt-out church. A hand thrusts up through the rubble. It's wearing...a wedding band, of course.

Out-of-game Stuff
* I hadn't planned for the Knights of the Living Dead scenario to turn out to be a comedy, but that's what most (if not all) of the players wanted, so consensus ruled the day. This was only the second time that Unistat has been used for comedy.

* I dropped the starting sides from the standard 60 to 20, thinking that would tighten up the game. It didn't work so well, and the game reached a balance (ending) point about halfway through the session because of it. We also did a lot more free narration and negotiation than usual.

* The group rarely stayed together, but I think it still worked out well. About halfway through, I started using the "narrate a cool or crisis-inducing thing, then cut to the others" technique, and then it was really cruising along nicely.

Character Creation
Character creation proceeded in its almost ideal form. The players asked "What kind of characters can we play?" I told them they could be Shield Knights, or villagers, or even zombies, or anything else they could imagine, like the village itself, or the infection. They got excited at the idea of playing zombies, but no one volunteered a character right away.

"Okay," I said, "We've got these cool Shield Knights. I came up with the idea, but I think they're pretty cool...does anyone want to play one of them?" Ralph took up the challenge and created an "older-but-wiser....much older" veteran knight.

Emily was next, saying she wanted to play a zombie, and she wanted to be in love with a human, preferably a Shield Knight. I asked Ralph if he wanted to be the love interest, and he considered, but looked uncomfortable, so I asked if anyone else wanted to do it. Krista jumped in a made up a Shield Knight who was also in love with Jennifer. Nice.

"Now we've got a couple of Shield Knights and a love-struck zombie," I said, "Anyone want to jump in on one of those sides? No? Well, how about someone plays..."

"I want to be the mayor," Mike jumped in, just as I was about to finish, "...the mayor." Sweet.

"To round that off, how about Frank plays..."

"I'll be the religious leader," he said, before I could say, "...a religious leader." Awesome.

The whole process took maybe ten minutes, and we had nicely intertwined characters with conflicting personalities and interests. That's pretty much exactly how I like character creation to go.

Thoughts and Questions
Is there any way to encourage that sort of character creation process? Techniques I might not have thought of, specific key phrases or actions to bring it about, anything? Or is it really just up to the GM to stimulate it and the players to run with it?

As always, I'd like to hear from any of the players with positive or negative comments. Both are useful, especially the negative ones.

[Emily Care]

Hey Andrew,

I really enjoyed this game. I'm glad you caught Ralph's implicit "nuh-uh" about being the Shield Knight in question for my Zombie girl--it would have been better to chuck that element than to make somebody run with it who wasn't into it.  As it turned out, Krista and I had a lot of fun with that.

I was really surprised by how much we got out of the simple setting you started us off with. A human world beseiged by ravening zombies has a ton of conflict intrinsic to it, but some of the aspects of it were gruesomely appropriate and sardonically funny in a surprising way: Ralph's defense-budget pushing Shield Knight as a send up of W., Michael's money and status grubbing Mayor along with Frank's power-hungry preacher created a crackling triangle of manipulation and double-crossing that carried us far. 

I must admit that I was a bit at a loss as to how to insert myself in the game at first.  Not that there weren't ways I could get involved, but I didn't see an obvious point of leverage until later. My failing definitely, but it was what I would point to as far as weaknesses of the game--when players get the direction they can push the other characters via their own then there will be conflict aplenty like we saw. But if that's lacking, or the players look for external conflict, then it would be the gms job to give it to them.  So its good that you have a gm role, even though it is sort of a safety blanket.

The game is so elegant and clean, it would seem strange to introduce more elements into the characters, but if you did, what I would look for would be the kinds of things that the other players hooked into in this game: cross-purpose motivations and cues for ways they can be effective in carrying them out. But given how successful this game has been, it may be that I'm looking to give people training wheels when people are innately more apt at creating story than I give them credit for.

Hope that is useful!

best,
Emily

[Valamir]

Yeah, the session was too much fun.

The scariest thing about it for me...was how easy and obvious it seemed that a Shield Knight...defender of the people against zombies...would conspire to rig a few zombie attacks in order to justify his job and get a budget increase.  I mean...of COURSE he'd do that...which is way scarier than slavering hordes of zombies...

In terms of techniques, as I noted at the table, I think all you really need to do is encode what YOU actually do to get from a mostly blank slate to an interesting charged situation.

Here's an example:

1) GM gives the rough sketch of the background...(for us that was the Shield Knights with flaming swords and shields and the village under siege bit.)

2) GM says "Someone is going to be a Shield Knight, who is it going to be?", if nobody volunteers (for us it was me) then switch to "Ok, then, Someone is going be a zombie, who is it going to be?".  If still no one volunteers than perhaps the sketch in #1 wasn't grabby enough.

3) Then when you have your initial character (say a Shield Knight) you walk just that player through making his character...encourage kibitzing from other players. 

4) Then you say, "Ok we have our first character, who is going to be his rival?" Then when somebody volunteers you say "Ok, how are you on the same side, why are you rivals, and does he know you're his rival?". That player then proceeds to "make" their character.  If no one volunteers you can skip to #5 or change the question "Ok, then who wants to be his best friend", or "Who wants to be the guy he just betrayed" etc.

5) Then you say "Ok we have two characters on one side, does someone want to explicitly play their enemy, if not then I will play all of the enemies".  If only one player is the enemy then they become something of the villain, although whether the boss or a lonely henchmen depends on the character.  If more then one player decides to be the enemy then they can have their own rivalries and alliances.  An interesting question here is to ask "Which one of you has family on the other side".

6) And so on.  Often during the kibitzing other characters will suggest themselves...for instance if the first character and the rival are rivals because they're after the same girl...then the obvious next question is "Who wants to play the girl".  If their rivals for a promotion...then the next question becomes "Who wants to play their boss?"

7) Finally there will be players who just have an idea pop in their head on their own without a leading question, like Emily who wanted to play a zombie who still lived among the humans.  Unless you are structuring the opening scenario pretty tightly in Step 1, you probably don't have a "Ok who wants to play a zombie who lives among the humans still trying to fit in without anyone realizing you're a zombie" question prepped.  That's cool.  In that case you just have to follow up with a generic question or two like "who's your best friend", "who's your love interest", "who's your hated enemy", or "who are you related to"...and require the player to answer one or more of those.  If there are still alot of players without characters the answer to the above will kick off a #6 follow up for a player to play that character.  If there aren't then the player can be encouraged to name an existing character in answer to the question.

When everybody has a character the last step is just to make sure everyone is tied to at least one if not 2 other characters at the table and potentially some additional number of NPCs run by the GM.  If there are any characters who are only tied to NPCs, the GM must step in and get them tied perhaps by asking some leading questions like "Which one of the other characters do you hate and why?" or alternatively throw it open to the other players "Which one of you does this character hate and why?"

In the text I'd outline a selection of ways to get the character tied in complete with a fairly extensive list of questions the GM can fire out to start drawing the lines.

You can draw from a variety of sources for inspiration:
Best Friends with its  "I hate X because..." questions.
Polaris with its division of "Professional" vs. "Personal" relationships
Sorcerer with its "Who are you related to", "Who have you had sex with" questions.

Scenario design then becomes an exercise in setting up a point where sides come into conflict (like villagers and zombies) adding a bit of color or a unique twist (like Shield Knights who set themselves on fire) and then prepping a variety of questions...possibly just choosing a selection from a list..or heck, have the list in the rules be numbered from random rolling..."aha a 17 so..."Who just committed a murder?". 

In some cases you might even Spike it further with a preselected loaded question.

For instance, scenario instructions to the GM "After all characters are made, ask the player sitting second from your left the following: 'which of these other characters have you had sex with most recently?', followed by 'how do you feel about that'.  Then ask the player of whichever character they identified 'how do you feel about that?'.  Then open it up to the group in general "anyone else have an opinion on that?"

Each time you play the same scenario you could ask a different player or ask a different question, or keep the same question and see how it plays out differently.


That sort of "on the fly" hook-everyone-together, build your own R-Map design I think would work perfectly for a game meant to be picked up and played like Unistat...in fact...it makes a heck of a good variant Tenet Phase in Universalis...I may just write this up for the web site...heh...

But in just a couple of pages and maybe a couple pages more of sample questions and follow ups you could capture essentially the exact process that you use to make these games run awesome (or at least used at our session) and outline how to do it for the benefit of those for whom it isn't automatic (like it was for everyone at our session).

[Emily Care]

I am agreed. Ralph's suggestions would do exactly what I'd be looking for.

best,
Em

[Andrew Morris]

I'm glad you guys had fun. With a free game, that's really the only reward I have as a designer, so I'm happy  to see it.

I must admit that I was a bit at a loss as to how to insert myself in the game at first.

My fault entirely. It's important for the GM to bring all the characters in on the first scene, toss some conflict at em, and then watch them go.

In terms of techniques, as I noted at the table, I think all you really need to do is encode what YOU actually do to get from a mostly blank slate to an interesting charged situation.

I agree. My only real question is whether to put that sort of stuff in the actual rules, or simply include it as advice. My inclination is toward the latter, although your eighth step is pretty tempting to have right on the character sheet -- Name, Trait, Postive Relationship With _____, Negative Relationship With ____.  If I do that, though, the Unistat name starts to lose what little relevance it currently has. Ahh, well, I was thinking about renaming the darn thing, anyway.

[Valamir]

Yeah, I could see how you could use the relationships as Traits themselves just as you use your trait currently.  I kind of like the idea that of all of the Traits that would then be on your sheet, only one of them would be unique to you.  The rest would involve someone else.  That's a telling game design feature in and of itself.

But you probably wouldn't NEED to do that.  Simply having said them is often enough to motivate roleplaying accordingly.  But the game system is easy enough that givng them a mechanical impact wouldn't be that hard or unwelcome.