Unknown Armies and No Myth role-playing

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

In the thread A Demoralizing Day, hyphz asked me:

you stated that you think all the UA one-shot scenarios are Illusionist. Do you think that the UA setting, in general and without scenarios, is a good testing ground for 'no myth' play?

I do not. I think UA is a wonderful game which has limitations that force more Myth into successful play. In the absence of Drifting (which is probably quite easy to do without realizing it), here are the limitations:

1. Characters can only do one thing in the long run: degenerate. Either of the madness meter, doesn't matter. He or she is going down. Also, the obsessions are parameters for play, very much like alignments. To compare with Sorcerer: in Sorc, a character's Will score may be described as "arrogant," but in play, any action may demonstrate arrogance or its complete opposite or anything else and still get bonus dice according to certain parameters; in UA, if one's obsession is "I'm better than everyone else," then actions demonstrating this get ~20% bonuses for success.

In other words, the reward system for role-playing Sorcerer is not constrained by descriptors; in UA, it is. These are both valid and powerful designs, but the latter is conducive to Character/Sim play and the former is not. (Riddle of Steel fans should recognize that TROS and Sorcerer are siblings in this regard.)

2. Stories can only do one thing: reveal something that explodes in a burst of violent conflict of interest, whether among player-characters or against NPCs. Unlike The Riddle of Steel and (e.g.) Schism, both the "somethings" and the conflicts are fairly fixed - the former by the GM, and the latter as written on the character sheet. As I wrote in the parent thread, I consider most and possibly all UA published scenarios to be Illusionist in design. In many cases, although not all this is achieved by providing 91% of a story (say, 4.5 acts in a five-act play) through pregenerated character description and introductory framing.

3. There is no shared setting to speak of, not even the "real modern world." It's a mix of real-modern-world (as in Sorcerer and the game Heroic Do-Gooders and Dastardly Deed-Doers) and game-specific concepts (the Avatars, the various conspiracies) which ultimately boils down to "only the GM knows what the setting is." The effect in play is for players to take the cue for what's important, in a given scene, from the GM alone and not from their own sense of values or authorship. This is not No Myth play; it's GM-fiat and scenario-prescribed play.

In combination, these three things militate against the No Myth technique. There has to be a Myth, and it flows from the GM at all times, such that the GM needs to have "what the world is" down pretty solidly prior to each session. I think that No Myth works best when Genre Expectations are so powerful, and so shared, that whatever gets rolled into place during play is wholly acceptable to everyone. In UA, the postmodern content renders that shared-ness pretty hard to establish. If you try to GM it with full No Myth, it'll be hard to do - the degree of effort in the necessary piece-adding might override the effort it would take simply to Myth the setting a little bit.

I'll qualify all of the above by stating that I may be mixing up No Myth with [Narrativist + No Myth]. Those who've presented and refined the term, please correct me if necessary.

Dammit, I just know people are going to interpret this post as Unknown Armies bashing. It's nothing of the sort. UA is quite likely the strongest Sim/Char game around; as such, it's far more coherent than the World of Darkness games and far more hip and pop-culture than Call of Cthulhu. Given the 91% technique in particular, it's probably the strongest game in existence for demo/con play.

See Unknown Armies, the intro adventure in the back of the book for some recent raves - but I think you can see in those very raves the absence of anything but Characters + Situation = explosion, and in long-term play, I think you'll see the single note being rung again and again - unless the GM has a strong Myth-basis for play that offers more variety.

Best,
Ron

[Le Joueur]

Very Powerfully said Ron,

Now I understand.  I'm not versant with Unknown Armies so I couldn't speak to this.  And Ron's very right.  Straight No Myth gamemastering would almost be a guaranteed failure.  I'm not sure anyone could be so convincing that the 'Myth of Reality' is in full force and yet not believe in it.  (Even if you did, I rather think the strain of keeping three worlds separate - real, template, and No Myth gamemastering/'actual' - would upset things sooner or later.)

Transitioning No Myth gamemastering to a node where it becomes significantly more functional, pretty much puts it outside of the borders of what can legitimately be called No Myth gamemastering.

Other than that, I can't comment about the subject of this thread.  It sounds like a fascinating game and I wish I could find a gamemaster to run it as more than a one-shot around my neighborhood; ah well.

Fang Langford

[clehrich]

Do you think that the UA setting, in general and without scenarios, is a good testing ground for 'no myth' play?

I'd like to start off by emphasizing this phrase.  I'm going to take this to mean, "Can No Myth be done smoothly in UA without an extremely practiced group and GM?"  I'm also going to assume some (but limited) familiarity with UA's sources, e.g. Tim Powers, on the part of all participants.  With those caveats, I don't agree with Ron.  In other words, if Ron is reading the question very differently from me, then we're probably in agreement.

1. Characters can only do one thing in the long run: degenerate. Either of the madness meter, doesn't matter. He or she is going down.

But for one-shot or short-term play, this sounds ideal!  You're on a downward-sliding roller-coaster; the mechanics of the game ensure that, as well as the genre feel.  This encourages players to do stupid, insane things that only make sense in a UA context.  In other words, the mechanics encourage something so that the GM does not have to be terribly Illusionist.

2. Stories can only do one thing: reveal something that explodes in a burst of violent conflict of interest, whether among player-characters or against NPCs. ... As I wrote in the parent thread, I consider most and possibly all UA published scenarios to be Illusionist in design.

If hyphz's question here is just whether published, scripted scenarios are bad for No Myth, it seems a silly question.  But he asked about "the UA setting, in general and without scenarios."  So the issue is setting, not published text.  I see the fact that the setting itself encourages this violent conflict of interest as promoting the players' creative activity.  Ideally, each wants the Real Secret to be useful to himself.  That is, when you hear that there's a Magic Goblet out there, the Cliomancer wants it to be the one made from Paracelsus's skull, but the Dipsomancer wants it to be Byron's skull cup.  Meanwhile the Bibliomancer wants this thing somehow to link up to books, like maybe it has an inscription that's the code-word for unlocking John Dee's Libri Mysteriorum.  And we won't talk about what the Pornomancer wants it to be.  The thing is, only one character can get the power from the Magic Goblet.  So the players are going to have to scramble constantly to get the upper hand, and ought to use whatever means are at their disposal in-game to do so.  Furthermore, there's no reason that the GM has to know what the answer is: he just waits for the situation to resolve itself through the PCs fighting over it.

3. There is no shared setting to speak of, not even the "real modern world." It's a mix of real-modern-world ... and game-specific concepts (the Avatars, the various conspiracies) which ultimately boils down to "only the GM knows what the setting is." The effect in play is for players to take the cue for what's important, in a given scene, from the GM alone and not from their own sense of values or authorship. This is not No Myth play; it's GM-fiat and scenario-prescribed play.

I do not agree at all.  To my mind, the whole point of good UA play is that nobody knows the rules.  Not even the GM.  I mean, unless you play Avatar-Level Campaigns (which are really just Fantasy Heartbreakers in a vaguely urban setting), the whole point is that the players and characters really have no idea what's going on.  So everything comes down to Genre expectations.  The GM does indeed give the cue: horrible and sick = powerful.  Off you go, boys, have fun storming the castle!

To restate more carefully:

There has to be a Myth, and it flows from the GM at all times, such that the GM needs to have "what the world is" down pretty solidly prior to each session. I think that No Myth works best when Genre Expectations are so powerful, and so shared, that whatever gets rolled into place during play is wholly acceptable to everyone. In UA, the postmodern content renders that shared-ness pretty hard to establish. If you try to GM it with full No Myth, it'll be hard to do - the degree of effort in the necessary piece-adding might override the effort it would take simply to Myth the setting a little bit.

But the setting is so simple!  I really don't understand this confusion.  You read Tim Powers, for example, or Hellblazer.  Does it really matter what The Real Story is?  Not at all, because all you know is that wallowing in grime, viciousness, and occult weirdness works just dandy.  What's not powerful about Hannibal Lecter the Blood Magician?

See, I think everyone gets all confused about UA because of that crap about Avatars Running the Universe.  Pretend for a minute that you actually did what they told you to, and didn't read any of that because you were going to play this game, Street Level (i.e. you have no idea what's going on except for a precipitating event).  You're working on building some sort of obsession, because you're a sick weirdo: you saw something horrible and bizarre happen, and you want to see more.  So what's your expectation as a player?

Look in dark shadows.  Talk to street people.  Trust nobody.  When sick, bizarre things happen, go toward them and not away.  Be armed if possible.

Now switch gears, and imagine you're going to run this, so you know about the styles of magic, which helps you build up some NPCs that flow smoothly.  So that street person is actually a dipsomancer.  That hooker is a pornomancer.  What do you do as No Myth GM?  Tempt them.  Go ahead and buy that man a drink.  Go ahead and accept that chick's "freebie."  They don't wanna?  Okay, so they go past an alley and see a homeless guy talking to a rat -- and it looks like the rat's paying attention.  What do they do?  They go into the alley, of course.  What happens then?  The homeless guy pretends not to know what they're talking about.  What do they do?  Try to push the situation.

What's hard about this?  It's just like any other game, really.  You just keep hinting that there's some Big Mystery out there, but you know what?  The NPCs have no idea what it is, either.  That's why they're torturing the PCs for information.  Would they bother if they actually knew what was going on?

This is the problem with UA: everybody, including the designers, seems to get caught in the Big Famous NPCs Duking It Out At The Cosmic Level nonsense.  As an example, the freebie scenario (3 Bills) throws in le Comte de Saint-Germain for no reason at all.  Why does it have to be him?  That gives all of this a reason for happening.  Why?  It happens because it's freaky shit, that's all.  The sheriff who stops?  Is the sheriff.  Here's another example: why does The Freak keep showing up in descriptions and stuff?  Who cares?

Keep the power level low.  Torture, maim, and traumatize the PCs.

And most of all, for realizing that this is perfect for No Myth:

There don't have to be reasons.[/b]

See, the PCs (and the players) are going to assume there are reasons.  They'll start looking at everything they see as a Clue to the Mystery.  So you just make up a lot of weirdness and let them interpret it.  Eventually, they'll start discovering that when they dropped their bowl of Raisin Bran on the floor, there were 13 raisins left in the bowl.  Aha!  This is called obsession, and your object is to get the players to be obsessed.  This is what UA is all about.  It doesn't really make sense.  There are no real reasons, just sorta kinda almost-like reasons that mostly work except on Tuesdays.  But I can figure out the real reason, I just have to work at it, and that guy over there, he knows something, I know he does, look at his eyes, and he doesn't want to tell me, so I'll have to hit him a few times, and he's still not telling me, and maybe if I cut him he'll see reason.

If the only secrets in UA are the ones provided in the Avatars thing, or some Big Famous NPCs that aren't a secret to anyone, then this isn't going to work.  In other words, if you plan to stick to the absolute letter of the law, every scenario and every bit of the setting, then yes, it's not going to be No Myth.  Surely that's a tautology?  

Hell, it's supposed to be postmodern or something, so make it so.  Let's actually put it in pomo terms: it's all about the deferral of meaning, and the logocentric obsession with finding presence and truth where there is only absence.  That help?  Okay, so let's put it differently.  Pomo doesn't mean grimy or weird.  In this sort of context, it's about the absence of reason and meaning and truth and all that.  It's about everybody being totally nuts because they're convinced that there are True Secrets, and getting so obsessed that they lose sight of everything except those elusive True Secrets -- like morals, hygiene, social skills, etc.  So if UA wants to be pomo, it wants to be No Myth.

Personally I find the mechanics clunky, and would run it rather more freeform, but the setting is gold for No Myth.

[Enoch]

I've been seeing the term No Myth being thrown around a lot in the actual play forum, but my search through threads and the like have been fruitless for an actual definition or explanation.

Can anyone point me to a thread which explains it?  Or even just briefly explain what it is?

Thanks,
-Joshua

[Le Joueur]

...The [are] mechanics clunky, and would run it rather more freeform, but the setting is gold for No Myth.

I think this is precisely what Ron's saying.  If you dump the mechanics, would it still be Unknown Armies or would it be little more than 'Unknown Armies' the setting?  I believe it makes sense that the mechanics make it too complicated to run No Myth style, not the setting.

Besides, can't anyone say, for any game, 'without the mechanics I could run that [insert style here]?'

Fang Langford

[clehrich]

...The [are] mechanics clunky, and would run it rather more freeform, but the setting is gold for No Myth.

I think this is precisely what Ron's saying.  If you dump the mechanics, would it still be Unknown Armies or would it be little more than 'Unknown Armies' the setting?  I believe it makes sense that the mechanics make it too complicated to run No Myth style, not the setting.

First,

you stated that you think all the UA one-shot scenarios are Illusionist. Do you think that the UA setting, in general and without scenarios, is a good testing ground for 'no myth' play?

So my understanding was that it was precisely the setting, and not so much the mechanics, that were at issue.

But regardless, I don't see that the mechanics make No Myth hard, particularly.  I don't love them, myself, but that doesn't make them Myth-ful, as it were.  Seems to me that so long as the participants in the game are reasonably fluent with the crunchy bits, so they're not always looking at charts or something, the main points of the mechanics are:

1. Combat is a big deal in this game (lots of detail), and it's really vicious and brutal.  Okay, so GenEx is built-in here.

2. Personality mechanics (obsessions and the like) give you power to achieve immediate goals.  Okay, so again, GenEx is built-in here.

I just don't like crunchy game systems, that's all.  I know System Matters, but No Myth is a technique, not a GNS choice, so the only way system could interfere that I can think of is if a player were so rules-lawyer nuts that he wants everything to be rolled.  Apart from that, why can't you do AD&D2 No Myth?  I just don't get how the system is going to make this Technique impossible.

[Le Joueur]

Hey Joshua,

Where does No Myth gamemastering come from?  Well, aside from anything you can find by doing an all-words-search with "Myth of Reality" and "Le Joueur" as the author, pretty much comes from the following:

Once upon a time, I thought I had figured out how to describe it, I also mistook it for "The Impossible Thing to Believe Before Breakfast" and then mislabeled it

El Dorado in this thread.  I learned a lot about what I think it is and how I apply it, but failed to explain it very well there.

Later that month, I tried again, using my learning of object-oriented thought and summoned up an explanation of it as "Symbolic-Language Gamemastering."  I still didn't have much luck communicating what it was.

A coupla months later, I stuck gold with an example using Star Wars: A New Hope.  I was really finding my audience then.  However, I still struggled to put it into a form direct.  (We also tried to work that out a bit more later that month, with mixed results.)

I forget when, but along the way I became convinced that too many gamemasters have come to care for what they've created even though it hasn't been used with the players.  I started categorizing this as the "Myth of Reality" and spoke very negatively about letting that mess up your gamemastering.  This all pretty much came to a head recently in Actual Play where I began to refer to gamemastering without the "Myth of Reality" as No Myth gamemastering.

Since then it has touched off a firestorm of new threads, all of which I am finding more and more educational about the elusive quest to describe this beast.  One of the most instructive threads on it has been No Myth playing over in Game Theory.[/list:u]I hope this history lesson helps.  It's giving me all kindsa ideas.  Thanks for asking.

Fang Langford

[Ian Charvill]

Contrary to Ron, I don't think that there is anything innate to UA that resists No Myth play - although there may be elements that resist narrativist play.  Obsessions may give a descriptor linked bonus (stick to this carrot would be Self checks for ignoring ones Obsession) but none of this prevents No Myth, provided the player is free to make up their obsession.

Also, Hyphz has the advantage of living in England, an ocean away from the vast majority of UA canon. There is precious little exposition about what England is like. He's free to create a great deal here, in play.

Going from memory, Pinfeathers (2nd Ed rulebook, also available as a free download here), and a couple of the adventures from Weep (Swap Meat and Garden Full of Weeds?) could be used as less illusionist examples of UA adventures, though YMMV.

Tilts (2nd ed and Statosphere - again going from memory) represent more a free-form magic system, susceptible to player originated imagery and so on.

[Ron Edwards]

There y'go, Hyphz, lots of different viewpoints to pull from. Let us know what you think.

Best,
Ron

[hyphz]

THanks for all your replies.

One thing I will note here is that a lot of people here seem to consider UA a pure horror game, which is odd, because I've never thought of UA like that myself.  Perhaps I'm just twisted, but it always seemed to me like more of a "weird but cool conspiracy" game except that, once the conspiracy is discovered, the players have the opportunity to participate in it.  I mean, there isn't really anything particularly sick or twisted about (say) Videomancy - ok, there are some sick things that CAN be done with it (Live On Tape (gulp)) but some things that don't strike me as sick/scary at all (Laff Riot - c'mon, that's NOT a horror effect)).  Yes, there ARE the grim ones (like Epideromancy), but dealing with them's a choice.

Yes, characters degenerate, but once they're hardened to a certain point the rot can be held back significantly.  Alternatively, if the character really wants to wallow in the nasty stuff, then once they've found out about Adepts they can just arrange it so than when they hit their fifth failed notch, it's a -mancy.  Heck, one of the sample adventures (the airplane crash one) suggests that, if you can actually get near enough ascension, the Madness Meter shuts down completely.

Have a got completely the wrong end of the stick here or have I applied some bizarre drift?  The description of adventures as being "about maiming and torturing PCs" seemed utterly alien to me.  Honestly.

[Drastic]

Have a got completely the wrong end of the stick here or have I applied some bizarre drift? The description of adventures as being "about maiming and torturing PCs" seemed utterly alien to me. Honestly.

I don't think you've done either.  UA lends itself easily enough to horror, but motly of a more surreal variety of it--ultimately, I think games of it actually become an exploration of, well, what do the characters want, and how far will they go to get it.  Only in its case, how far they go is a more crunchy sanity-mechanic.

The degeneration is overstated, IMO.  The different rankings of stress-levels, combined with Hardened notches, tend to increasingly flatten out the descent unless game events get truly apocalyptic; and even maxing out the Failed notches is cautioned against as being read as incapacitating--it's not like running out of Sanity in other games.  Permanent mental affilctions that arise are certianly not healthy, but a character can remain generally functional with them under a certain level of stress.  Granted, pure bad fortune may max out a Failed meter before any Hardening happens at all, but that goes back to the "if things get apocalyptic" element.

[GreatWolf]

No, I don't think that you're crazy, either.  Part of what you're seeing is actually a result of the game design.  UA allows for a lot of options in how you approach the basic premise.  You *can* do the "degenerating character".  You can also do the *truly heroic* character, who has sacrificed much for his beliefs and principles.  My games of UA has demonstrated incredible heroism of this type, particularly because of the intensity of the setting and rules, particularly the Madness Meters.

I *do* agree, though, that UA is best run as Sim/Char.  My best campaign was my first, where I focused on providing episodes and events which reinforced developing in-character concerns.  My players were not interested in telling a story with me.  Rather, they wanted to develop the psyches of their characters against the backdrop of the events that I was providing.  So, for instance, when one of the characters was captured by an insane torture artist (think of Jude Law's character in Road to Perdition), it was intended as an opportunity for the two players to develop their respective character's understanding of their relationship, as well as test the physical, emotional, and spiritual fiber of the characters.  Gabrielle (the player running Una, the captured character) wasn't telling a story; she was interested in playing out the conflict between Una's terror of being left alone (her Fear stimulus) with her fear of this psycho artist who was torturing her on videotape.  One memory of that session that sticks in my head is when the artist has again left Una in the basement, strapped into a chair, in the dark, after having tortured her.  She is bleeding from the cuts that he made, and she is crying, "Please come back."  She doesn't want to be tortured, but she is oh so scared of being alone.  She is so scared that even the company of this twisted psycho is preferable to the gnawing emptiness.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[Bruce Baugh]

Well, this thread has indeed led to a fresh gaming prospect for me. I'm going to try running Unknown Armies with...maybe no myth, but fairy tales? :) clehrich's post on reasons and their place in the game was particularly helpful. So I'm rounding up a few friends to make drifters in the occult underground of 1982 willing (for reasons of their own, which will of course come out in play) to take a shadow patron's contract to perform a hit on some obscure writer in Anaheim, California. "The reasons do not concern you. What matters is that it must be today, and it must look like an accident or natural causes. You must bring me proof. Bring me the crown chakra of Philip K. Dick."

I figure that I know more than enough about Dick (whose work I love, and I can always use it as an excuse to visit with K.W. Jeter again, since he's local) and about Southern California in the '80s, since I grew up there. Who's the patron? I have no idea. Might be some early cyberpunk enthusiast trying to remove those who advocate a philosophy that interferes with rampant cyborging. Might be another manifestation of Dick that didn't make it into VALIS. Might be the Roman governor of the province, remembering that on one level it's really 78 AD. I've seen the neighborhood where Dick lives and have a source for floorplans of typical houses there, so I can use that as a basis for riffing. Mostly, it'll depend on what the players decide to do. And of course killing Mr. Dick may be harder than they think....

I will, of course, keep a log and discuss the experience of running UA this way.

[clehrich]

Sounds great, but why do you have to know who the shadowy patron is?  What difference does it make?  I mean, suppose they go off and encounter extreme weirdness, and this makes them think about their patron, and they realize they have no idea who this dude is.  I mean, Dick was deeply paranoid; could it have been him, himself?  Sure it could!   Let it ride, and see what they come up with.  Dollars to donuts theyll come up with something seriously sick and weird that makes your silly conspiracies look like nothing.   Let them, and let them prove themselves right (or partly so).  And if they don't kill Dick?  Okay, so what now?  Keep it open.  There's plenty of opportunity in UA for weirdness; let them gnerate it, and make it not terribly coherent, and they'll solve your problems for you.

[Bruce Baugh]

Um, the point is that I know I don't need to know. I think it's appropriately Dickian to multiply possibilities in my mind without commiting myself to any of them. And if the players don't wish to investigate, then it needn't come up.

It hasn't been that long since I re-read Ubik and The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch. I know that nothing ever ends. :)