[Kin] Mothers and daughters

[Kirk Mitchell]

Last weekend I got to run a session of Kin, my game in development.

Kin is this game where you play estranged family members called together for a big family event, and everyone that you don't want to see is going to be there. As family ties begin to fray, will you help to keep things together, or be the force that drives everyone apart? We started off with creating the group character sheet: a massive relationship map on which everyone draws their main Family Member, and one Supporting Character, each with a single descriptive line like "Doctor addicted to prescription meds", "Hippie mum re-defining her spirituality (amongst other things)" and "Crusty old matriarch." Everyone connects to a bunch of other characters, and this is how everyone knows each other. Then we draw a bunch more lines away from each Family Member in coloured pencils because coloured pencils are cool, pointing at three other characters. Green for Lover; this is someone you love and gives you intimacy. Blue for Ghost; this is someone you used to know but fell out with. Now they're back with a whole lotta mixed feelings attached. Red for Pariah; this is a person who hurts you, a lot.

We had, I am not shitting you, seven players in this game, so that last step got a bit messy. We ended up with a relationship map that looked like it came out of Days of Our Lives, or my family. We had the crusty old Matriarch (referred to only as 'the Matriarch'), presiding over her family with kindling wit and an iron fist, her daughter 'Moonbeam' the hippie mum, her stockbroker older brother, younger twin brothers (one evil, one an innocent ex-con) and pill-popping ex-husband and his trophy wife. In the youngest generation was Ellis (Moonbeam's daughter), the teenage mother and James, her emotionally abusive slacker boyfriend. Got all that?

Right, moving along!

The game starts off with every Family Member at or making their way to the big family gathering. We decided that everyone had been called back for the funeral of the Patriarch of the family, and set the scene at the reception with everyone milling about, making small talk, getting re-acquainted with the reasons why they had all stayed apart in the first place.

My god this thing just goes.

The way the system works is there is only two resources: Pain and Intimacy, dealt out to other Family Members via character interaction. If ever a point comes up over which characters would come into conflict over, you write it down on a piece of paper and can now deal Pain/Intimacy to the point of conflict like you would a Family Member. This is important because you cannot actually come into direct conflict with another Family Member during regular scenes. You're a family on the brink, but you're still family and there is still a shared sense of decorum. So instead you charge up issues over which conflict would erupt with accumulated Pain/Intimacy, ready to be fought over when someone snaps. Which happens when a Family Member accumulates a total of 20 Pain or Intimacy.

The way this works out in play is an absolute fuckload of backstabbing, veiled threats and a vicious undertone to even the kindest of remarks. It is exactly like every horrible family reunion you have ever had. In the first scene, Chad, the stockbroker was the first to arrive and tried to console his grieving mother only to be eviscerated for his shortcomings both as a son and man. Moonbeam and her ex-husband made snide comments at each other, and Ellis, baby and boyfriend slouched in almost an hour late to become the centre of attention. Pretending to mourn a man whom nobody ever really seemed to love soon became secondary to attempting to wrest control of the situation at hand: the fate of Ellis' baby boy.

Later, at the dinner table, Moonbeam came under fire for her sudden decision to change her name and begin exploring an amusing plethora of hippie cliches. What started off as amusing banter swiftly escalated into more and more dangerous grounds, challenging Moonbeam's validity as a parent and her ex-husband's (whose name I honestly cannot remember) job as her husband. The situation spiraled completely out of control as the Matriarch referred to her by her original name, 'Mary-Ellis', and Moonbeam's Pain and Intimacy both ticked over twenty.

Mary-Ellis burst into tears. She apologized for pushing everyone away, she wished things could've worked out between her and her husband. Halting between tear-stained apologies and accusations, this scene was heartwrenching in its honesty. And in the dead-silence of the aftermath, Moonbeam somehow managed to find something, and didn't correct anyone the next time they called her Mary-Ellis.

That scene ended with fervent, spontaneous applause that stopped the rest of the convention in its tracks.

The next scene featured a very small cast, a sharp departure from the other very large family scenes. It was set upstairs in the room that Ellis, James and the baby were to share, which nobody was very happy with. We opened to Ellis on the phone to an unidentified caller who demanded to be allowed to see the baby. Frustrated and emotional, Ellis slammed down the phone, just as the man on the other end said "I'm going to tell him". And then James walks in, demanding to know who she was talking to on the phone. Ellis dodged his questioning, handing the baby off to James and asking him to take him to the other room.

The ex-con uncle (whose name I have also forgotten) knocked on the door, to check in on his little niece and the baby. They were close before he was sent off to prison, and she opened right up, collapsing into his shoulder and asking leading, hesitant questions about how to deal with complicated situations. She was told to 'simplify everything', just as James walked back in with the baby. As soon as James saw her uncle, his face went cold and ordered him out. It was incredible to watch as James laid hands on her muscular, tattooed, prison hardened uncle, slowly pushing him out of the door while his hands were up, saying "Okay, okay. I'm going. Ellis, if you ever need to talk, I'm always here..." before the door was slammed in his face.

That was when Ellis ticked over twenty. She paused for a moment, and everything started to rush out. But just before she could tell James the whole story, the phone rang. He picked it up and snapped "Hello?"
"Listen, bitch, you don't just hang up..."
"Who is this?"
-Click-
And then Ellis confessed. "The baby isn't yours".
"What do you mean, isn't mine?"
"It isn't yours."
"What do you mean, isn't mine?"
She points at the phone. "It's his."
That was when James put the phone through the wall.

The final scene was the next morning, with the doctor and the evil twin brother coming back after some very obviously illicit dealings after everyone else had gone to bed. This scene was very rushed, but featured the family chewing itself out more, some overt monetary threats and overtures made by the evil twin brother as he attempted to sway the family to his as yet ambiguous ends. The final narration of the scene was that everyone suddenly noticed that Ellis was missing, and then the sound of James slamming the door on a car and driving off. With the baby. Without Ellis.

Observations

Life is a soap opera. Holy fuck, the number of fucked up family stories I get from people whenever I pitch the game to them is insane. I probably don't need to explain this to any of you, but life is filled with so many weird relationships and interactions that it makes The Bold and the Beautiful seem almost plausible.

Everyone likes to talk over each other. This doesn't work in most other games, but somehow it does in Kin. This is probably only a symptom of having so many bloody players (seven! I still can't get over that!), but we had so many back-deals and side-conversations going on at the same time that it was like sitting down at a dinner table with one great big family. So long as everyone re-caps what happened so everyone is up to speed, it works just fine, and adds so much nuance to the experience of the individual.

Ellis dominated. In any given scene, she was invariably the hub of attention, directly or by proxy. Her point of conflict was easily the most charged, and thus was more intense and had greater repercussions. She dominated because points of conflict are confusing. The whole game is geared towards character interaction, and once you have to switch out of that mindset and have to start thinking in terms of 'issues', everyone falters. Ellis was such a successful character because she had a point of conflict implicitly embedded in her character: her motherhood. Does she deserve to be a mother? Is she a good mother? How will she deal with being a mother? It was so incredibly easy to associate her with that issue, and that spilled over into the amount of Pain and Intimacy dealt to her.

All in all, I'm really pleased with how the playtest went, and the response I got from the players.

Cheers!
- Kirk

[joepub]

My earlier contribution got eaten by the internet, apparently. Version two:

The way the system works is there is only two resources: Pain and Intimacy, dealt out to other Family Members via character interaction. If ever a point comes up over which characters would come into conflict over, you write it down on a piece of paper and can now deal Pain/Intimacy to the point of conflict like you would a Family Member. This is important because you cannot actually come into direct conflict with another Family Member during regular scenes. You're a family on the brink, but you're still family and there is still a shared sense of decorum. So instead you charge up issues over which conflict would erupt with accumulated Pain/Intimacy, ready to be fought over when someone snaps. Which happens when a Family Member accumulates a total of 20 Pain or Intimacy.

If any of you following along at home are confused by this, here's another way of looking at it:

-Players are each dealt seven cards, at the beginning of a scene. Red cards are intimacy, and black cards are pain. If Ellis turns to her mother and says, "Oh, so NOW you want to share your wisdom with me?! It's a bit late for that," then she deals her mother's player a black card (for the pain expressed).

Regular scenes work like this, with people spending the cards in their hand to have characters inflict pain and intimacy to others.

A note: For scenes not involving all characters, the players should also be able to narrate Scene Elements to give out pain and intimacy. So someone could toss Ellis a pain and say, "At that point the phone starts ringing again", or they could have dealt out an intimacy and said "the baby wakes up, and you're glad to be able to divert your attention back to someone you care about". Or something.

You can also hand unplayed cards to other players, as fanmail. So if Moonbeam is just hurling the abuse at people, and she's almost out of cards... I can give her a pain from my hand to fuel her fires further.

My god this thing just goes.

Well... the regular scenes do. The final Threshold scenes are currently really clunky.

First of all, the whole 1/5/10 thing needs to go. (You can spend 1 point, 5 points, or 10 points to affect the Threshold scenes) You need to just say "spend between 1 and 10 points, with impact and timeline being incremental on your spending" or something.

The next scene featured a very small cast, a sharp departure from the other very large family scenes. It was set upstairs in the room that Ellis, James and the baby were to share, which nobody was very happy with. We opened to Ellis on the phone to an unidentified caller who demanded to be allowed to see the baby. Frustrated and emotional, Ellis slammed down the phone, just as the man on the other end said "I'm going to tell him". And then James walks in, demanding to know who she was talking to on the phone. Ellis dodged his questioning, handing the baby off to James and asking him to take him to the other room.

The ex-con uncle (whose name I have also forgotten) knocked on the door, to check in on his little niece and the baby. They were close before he was sent off to prison, and she opened right up, collapsing into his shoulder and asking leading, hesitant questions about how to deal with complicated situations. She was told to 'simplify everything', just as James walked back in with the baby. As soon as James saw her uncle, his face went cold and ordered him out. It was incredible to watch as James laid hands on her muscular, tattooed, prison hardened uncle, slowly pushing him out of the door while his hands were up, saying "Okay, okay. I'm going. Ellis, if you ever need to talk, I'm always here..." before the door was slammed in his face.

That was when Ellis ticked over twenty.

You need to be REALLY clear about how to handle reduced cast scenes. I think they should be a staple.

Players not in the scene can spend fanmail, do Scene Elements, and introduce their characters (maybe with Scene Framer's permission or something).

I really disliked having my scene hijacked near the end by several people who hadn't been involved at all in the scene, just beacuse they had cards. You need to stress that it's OK to be removed from a scene.

[J B Bell]

A few other mechanical notes: one thing that cropped up (and contributed to Ellis's powerful presence) was how players should treat cards given to them when they're playing a secondary character. During play, we had it that you just got the cards; as Joe ended up doing a decent bit of playing secondary characters, he (and his primary character, Ellis) got bunches of cards. Partway through the game we decided it made more sense to require that cards going to a secondary character should be required to go onto an issue, instead.

In general, the issues seemed to get less love than Kirk's design intentions, and as such when a player "popped," the selection of issues was lower intensity than seemed to make sense, and wasn't as juicy as it could have been. I think the psychology here is that there's inherent fun in being snarky to someone, or finding ways to be nice (interesting that this was what people tended to find challenging!), but deciding what issue to nail was trickier.

I think these are tuning issues, though, and as Kirk's enthusiasm illustrates, people were really into it. I was nervous about the "character generation" part of things & thought it might not have much appeal for relatively non-hippie gamers. Ha! People fell on that thing like a pack of starving dogs, inventing ways for the characters to be twistedly entangled with abandon. And far from the usual stereotype about how "making games about relationship will bring teh chixx0rz", the gentlemen at the table showed clear skill with understanding how relationships could function (and dysfunction). It's perhaps stating the obvious, but managing relationships is a fundamental survival trait for us monkeys. Mayhap a lot of RPGs could benefit from doing the r-map first, then picking one's PCs out of the crowd (doesn't Alyria do this?).

It's a pity that cards make production so very expensive; I think this could be a great "parlour game" with a set of pre-gen characters and issues to deal out, leaving the connections up to the players.

The game was definitely a hit, drawing more than its share of spectators; I look forward to seeing the next iteration.

--JB

[joepub]

Other thought: Once in Threshold, there should (read: it might be interesting to try) be a Revert mechanic.

So you can hit Threshold, but have a player [do X] and brush the issue right back under the table and return order. Just a way to automatically re-rail the train, for the moment. Doing so would just make that issue all the more powerful for when it again broke. Or something.

Just a thought, if it makes sense.

[Ice Cream Emperor]

So, I played Frank -- the twin brother who had gone to jail (for something his brother did, as it turned out) and then more or less disappeared to South America, etc. He came to the funeral with reconciliation and good intentions on his mind, and that mostly worked out -- though the only person I managed to help turned out to be my Pariah (Moonchild/Mary Alice, the hippie much-younger sister.)

It's definitely worth restating how well the basic premise and the basic resource-distribution mechanic performed. Everyone knows about dysfunctional families and usually it's from personal experience. Everyone else has watched daytime television.

Mechanically, the idea that when you say something mean or painful to someone you hand out a black card -- and a red card, if you say something nice or loving -- was dead-simple to grasp, and fit seamlessly into free play. In fact I would say that it made roleplaying easier, because you could use the cards to emphasize emotional distinctions and subtle implications that may not be immediately obvious based just on dialogue, etc. For example, when I was playing the Matriarch, Moonchild's player made a mostly-loving comment to her mom and then handed me one red and one black card, concretely emphasizing the bitterness implicit in the original remark.

However, as everyone has mentioned, the gameplay really suffered once we entered a Threshhold scene -- in theory, the place where the real emotion and consequences should be coming out, in practice they tended to get bogged down in uncertainty about rules and (for myself, at least) some disappointment about how the fallout... uh, fell.

There are two separate but connected issues that seemed to contribute to this slowdown:

1. Points of Conflict (to use Kirk's term) were not getting enough cards. For the game to operate properly with the current rules, it's important that by the time somebody hits a Threshhold, there be at least one and preferably several issues on the table that have enough cards on them to cause serious consequences. Otherwise you get characters freaking out and snapping over nothing, which isn't very satisfying for the players.

Several things seemed to be contributing to players not putting cards on PoCs. First off, it's way easier and more satisfying to give those cards to other players, as described above. The first option for distributing cards is so fun that it is overshadowing the second option -- even though mechanically they are of roughly equal importance. Secondly, players were often unaware of what PoCs were in play, so even if their roleplay might be pointing towards spending cards on a PoC, they were again more likely to default to giving cards to other players -- because the other characters were far more present in the SiS for them than the issues were. Thirdly, it was not obvious to the players what role the PoCs were going to play in the game until we had our first Threshhold scene, and even then the confusion around how buying consequences and everything worked meant that the need to prime the PoCs remained kind of theoretical.

Possible solutions:

* Create several PoC issues during character generation. I would say one per character minimum, and possibly all the way up to one per Bond (eg. Ghost, Pariah, Lover). However, it's important to create PoCs that everyone in the family is going to have an opinion about, and which are interesting to all the players. So no PoCs about secrets or private relationships -- rather, secrets and private relationships should be motivating characters when they contribute to PoCs.

The most successful PoC in the playtest session was 'Should Ellis be a parent', which I initiated between the first and second scenes (along with a bunch of other less popular ones.) I would suggest that between scenes is another good place to poll the players for new PoCs.

* Add mechanics that encourage people to play cards to PoCs. The idea we came up with for players who received cards as secondary characters is a good example, though I'm not sure it's the best way to deal with secondary characters & cards. Another possibility is to force players to redistribute a portion of the cards they receive to PoCs at the end of every scene, but that seems clumsy and not very fitting with the premise.

* Make the PoCs more 'visible' somehow. Like, read them out at the beginning of every scene, or encourage players to focus scenes around a particular issue (mechanically or otherwise).

2. The rules for using Points of Conflict during a Threshhold scene need a lot of work. They also need to be explained better, which was more of an issue with the session (and maybe the current state of the rules document) than the game. As it is, it was really unclear what players were supposed to do with the PoCs -- what it meant to buy consequences, what those consequences could actually be, who was allowed to buy them when, and what the effect was on the PoC's place in the story afterwards.

I think it's particularly important to focus on the nature of the consequences. We were buying a lot of consequences which very clearly infringed on a traditional mode of 'everyone plays their own character' -- eg. at some point I spent 5 Intimacy to say that Moonbeam had now changed as a person with regards to her mother and her relationship with her mother. Several other similar consequences were purchased, and in fact I think the group kind of latched on to this kind of consequence because we didn't understand what other options were available. And because of how the PoCs were framed, maybe.

I agree with Joe that the current scale-of-costs for Consequences is frustrating, and should either be replaced with a more flexible scale or just a more complete scale (if there were options at 1, 3, 5, 7 and 10 there would be less annoyance, I'd say.) But it also needs to be really clear what we're paying for, and what the effects are in the SiS. Some people suggested mechanical consequences -- I think that's a fairly labour-intensive route, and probably a bad idea, since so far the places this game is really working are the places where things are simplest. I think Consequences should remain entirely about the SiS, but I think there needs to be a much clearer direction for what sort of things are appropriate, whether anyone gets veto, etc. The single set of examples in the current rules seem very focused on "concrete things happening", but our session was leaning strongly towards "changes of emotional relationships" in most cases.

Possible solutions:

* Way more examples in the rules.

* Maybe think about 'categories' of consequence, to help players be clear about what sort of change they are trying to effect. Just because I describe a consequence in terms of some emotional reactions on the part of different characters, does not necessarily mean those reactions are the consequence -- there's a difference between "Mary-Alice realises she's been wrong all along about her parenting style, and stops giving Ellis money -- and so Ellis turns to prostitution to help feed her baby" and "Mary-Alice realises she's been wrong all along about her parenting style, and will now try and force Ellis to become self-sufficient." The first one is just using Mary-Alice's change of heart as a reason that Ellis is now a prostitute -- the second one is focused on the change of heart and is not worried about what will or will not happen as a result. (Consequently, in the first case, there is room for negotiation about how Ellis becomes a prostitute, and possibly Mary-Alice's player should have a veto.)

* I would like to see some limitations and direction regarding who can spend on what part of the PoC. The idea of someone going over their Pain Threshold and then spending all their Intimacy to fix the family's problems seems really backwards to me. Limits on everyone's spending may also be appropriate (eg. you can only spend from your highest pool), but probably are too much. Also there was occasionally some uncertainty about who got to spend first -- in this case we were usually able to resolve it informally based on who thought they had a cooler idea, but I don't think that's necessarily gonna work for all groups over time.

There were also issues in the game with a long chain of Threshold scenes in a row, and in general with the effects of Threshold scenes on player resources:

* Michelle mentioned that since she hit her Threshold first, and consequently zeroed both her resources, she had very little input into subsequent Threshold scenes.
* This was exaggerated because everyone basically got to their Thresholds at the same time, which is to be expected. So we had something like 4 players hit a Threshold within the space of a single scene -- with no regular scenes in between Threshold scenes, there is no way for the zeroed players to get any cards to spend during the additional Threshold scenes. While this actually adds a tactical element to resolving PoCs, the way it works currently seems a bit too extreme.
* Part of this was because of the issues with PoCs not having a ton of cards on them. I spent enough Intimacy on a Consequence at one point to lower myself below the Threshold, which is cool -- but with less cards on the PoCs being resolved, that sort of resource movement is less likely to occur.
* The prevalence of big group scenes contributed to everyone hitting Thresholds at approximately the same time.

Anyways, that's all I got for now.

[joepub]

Daniel speaks in gold and precious gems.

Except that one PoC per player is too many to start with, in my opinion. I think starting the game with 3 is a good number.

[Ice Cream Emperor]

Most likely the number of PoC should depend on the number of players in some straightforward way that would be revealed by playtesting & fiddling with numbers.

It's important to have player buy-in, and I think some kind of round-table approach to generating them could work out nicely. It might also be good if every player gives their character's 'initial opinion' on the conflict -- if people can't come up with an opinion, that suggests the PoC might not be grabby enough.

[Kirk Mitchell]

Still taking everything in, and destracted by school. All of your suggestions are awesome, and I'll work on the next iteration ASAP.

Joe, what about your scene made you feel like it was being hijacked? I was pretty happy with how it turned out, so I might not have been seeing the same thing as you.

Cheers,
- Kirk

[Meguey]

Just read this on a lark, and I so want to play! I'll be watching for more info on this game.

[Josh Roby]

Ellis was such a successful character because she had a point of conflict implicitly embedded in her character: her motherhood. Does she deserve to be a mother? Is she a good mother? How will she deal with being a mother? It was so incredibly easy to associate her with that issue, and that spilled over into the amount of Pain and Intimacy dealt to her.

Kirk, you identify one rocking character by something that's pretty easy to replicate procedurally.  What would you think of having each character begin play with a 'starter issue' or something similar?  If "one per character" is too many, perhaps steal a trick from SotC chargen and have each player draw another player's name and have them collaborate on an issue, thus creating half as many issues as characters.

[joepub]

JBR,

That's kinda already hardwired into the game in a different way: Lovers, Pariahs and Ghosts. Every PC has one of each, and they are, respectively, someone you draw love from, someone who is constantly ruining your life, and someone from your past.

They are essentially issues waiting to emerge. Ellis's baby's actual daddy was the Ghost, Ellis' boyfriend was the Pariah, and Ellis' mom was the Lover. It worked as a nice way of wiring the issue into the game and giving us a really straightforward way of bringing up the issues in a lot of contexts: if the boyfriend (pariah) enters the scene, Ellis and him fight for control over the kid. if mom enters the scene, she is supportive of her daughter and granddaughter.

I feel like hard-coding issues in such a way might be WAY too much for players... creating primary characters, secondary characters, establishing connections and establishing Lover/Pariah/Ghost is already a LOT to do at the start. Our 5-foot-diamater R-map was already filled edge to edge by the time we started play.

I could be wrong though.

[Kirk Mitchell]

Meg, thanks! Hopefully I'll have something to show in the next few weeks.

Josh and Joe, I've got some ideas on how to make this work. At the very beginning of the game, I made sure to establish a pretty solid step-by-step process by which you create the relationship map and your characters. Making and using the relationship map was super easy! I didn't establish a solid step-by-step process by which you create Issues for your characters. Making and using Issues was not super easy!

Here's what the process for Issues is going to address:
* How to recognize what a good Issue is, and where to draw it from (eg, relationships, situations personality traits)
* How to declare an Issue
* How to frame a scene around an Issue

They are also going to be brought to the fore in two other ways a) Scenes will be framed around a particular Issue with the implicit intent of exploring and "charging up" that Issue. I say implicit because I'd like  b) Issues will break the Threshold at 30, not characters (thanks Joe!).

Here's what the process for Thresholds is going to address:
* What a threshold does
* How to frame a Threshold scene
* What pools you can spend from
* How much you can spend
* How to buy and narrate Consequences
* What a good Consequence is

I intend for the text to be full of examples, processes and recommended techniques for play, from improv to story structure. Its going to require a lot of playtesting to really nail down, but I'm so stoked about it.

What do you guys think?

- Kirk

[joepub]

They are also going to be brought to the fore in two other ways a) Scenes will be framed around a particular Issue with the implicit intent of exploring and "charging up" that Issue. I say implicit because I'd like  b) Issues will break the Threshold at 30, not characters (thanks Joe!).

Bam-O. BAM-O.

Kirk, this is a great solution. I'd also suggest, with this: don't start the game with issues on the board. Whoever frames the first scene will be in charge of introducing the first Issue, which will be that scene's focus. You can introduce a new Issue at the start of a scene.

I think this is all really cool.

I also want to suggest, off topic: the family dinner as a mandatory first scene feels forced. I want to see more limited cast scenes.

[Kirk Mitchell]

New Kin rules are up. Whee, fun!

Cheers,
- Kirk