Zero at the Bone

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I read Zero at the Bone tonight, and was very impressed. This is quality game material, and very complete for a sample game. I had a bunch of thoughts about it, though, that I wanted to share. I wish I had more questions, but as I mentioned, it's very complete. These notes are out of order in terms of the game text, but are in the order that makes most sense to read them.

The Wrongdoing
I dig this idea, but it seems like it wouldn't work. Everyone at the table's made up one of the Wrongdoings. They're either going to guess it very easily, or always guess the same thing until they get it right. This may be one of those things where you worry about bad gamer behavior when you shouldn't, though.

Flashpoint resolution
I have to admit a bias against Drama resolution. I find it to be immensely frustrating as a player and as a GM. (Actually, especially as a GM.) The flashpoint section needs to make one thing clear that I don't think is in the text: when proposed actions are stated. For something with very clear IIEE, this is necessary. (It might be there, and I'm missing it. That says something in itself, though.) If proposed actions are stated after the card-play, well, I have to be critical. There's one thing that works less than Drama resolution for me, and it's Fortune at the Beginning.

I think proposed actions are supposed to be before the card-play, and that's interesting. I can see the tenseness of stating what you want your character to do, and seeing the cards play out, to the point of kicking ass or having a "no shot." This, combined with the ability to re-define an action to help or hinder another character if covering them (with your card), is cool. I would make covering someone the only way to change your action. Covered characters most certainly could not change their action. This is a part of IIEE I've been fascinated with here lately - the stating and changing of intention, with very fixed ways to change intention once it's stated. (To see some of my thoughts in action, read the "Bringing down the Pain" section of The Shadow of Yesterday.)

Character creation
Good stuff here. I see a little of My Life with Master. As for that - the way in which a character is especially dangerous seems to have no mechanical benefit later in the text. I see a place for it, and imagine you meant for it to be there: in flashpoint resolution, this sort of action preempts the rules about "two hits = down". (That is, a change must be injured to die; a character must have a previous scene that makes him sympathetic in order to have his loyalties permanently changed; etc. It's a standard normal -> bloodied -> collapsed progression, a la Trollbabe - and not to pimp too hard, but liberally stolen for TSOY.)

The reward system
God, it's so good. It hurts, it's so good. I'm digging for problems here, though, and I've got one: you want characters to have their Wrongdoing revealed. Not only is it possibly mechanically better, but it's much more interesting to have NPCs involved. However, it's more interesting the longer it takes to get your secret out. Hmm... writing it down, it seems like a better idea than it did when I first started thinking about it. Still, it nags at me. It seems to say, "keep away from the interesting part of the game as long as possible, or it'll be less interesting."

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Clinton,

I think that a lot of people are going to have to take time to process the whole Wrongdoing thing.

1. Game-play has nothing to do with concealing your Wrongdoing. There is no benefit to doing so, aside from whatever dramatic tension about it that a player may desire to generate regarding a character.

2. However, revealing one's character's Wrongdoing is work, even if you are going for full disclosure - you need to get your character into scenes with everyone else's character, and you need to generate plausibe trust among those characters for them to listen to yours.

3. Guessing is not intended to be challenging. What matters is the judgments people make of the characters based on what they learn about them. The guessing (i.e. why disclosure doesn't happen right away) is to generate identification with the characters prior to knowing their Wrongdoings, which is a very, very important part of play.

So lose the whole Soap concept of "guess the Secret" and "hint at but hide my Secret." The default Zero at the Bone play would include everyone striving for full disclosure, and any lack of effort on that part only increases tension. The system merely provides everyone with the tools to increase that dial as they individually see fit.

Regarding the flashpoint and IIEE, the only thing everyone knows before the cards hit the table is what the characters want when the conflict reaches crisis-point, and what constitutes the crisis. Unlike Sorcerer and Trollbabe, the individualized goals within the conflicts are not fixed prior to the system kicking in.

Boris is trying to get his wife onto the train with forged papers. He is faced by his rival in his cell-group, who sees him on the platform, grins menacingly toward his wife, and steps onto the train with her. Boris chooses to jump onto the train (without papers of his own) as it leaves the platform.

(Come up with a similar situation in your mind for everyone else's flashpoint; some are violent and some aren't, but they are all irreconcilable conflicts with well-defined threats.)

That's all anyone knows going into the cards-based resolution.

When the cards have hit the table and all the accordionizing is done, here's what Boris' player (and everyone else) knows.

- Who is acting before Boris can, most especially the GM
- How many times Boris can have a decisive impact on the scene
- Whether Boris can help or hinder someone else's action(s)
- Whether anyone can help or hinder Boris' action(s)

Does Boris face his rival, to kill him before he gets to Boris' wife? Does Boris have to deal with police agents on the train who will probably shoot him or incarcerate him for having no papers? Does Boris intend to mercy-kill his wife because he knows her escape has been compromised and he wants to preserve his position in the spy network?

("No shot," incidentally, probably means that Boris doesn't know what happens to his wife and also that he is able to escape the train.)

Any of these, or anything else that copes with the conflict decisively, is fine. We won't found out until Boris' player's turn comes up, or more accurately, until everything up to and including that turn has occurred. And Boris' player doesn't know whether a player whose card covers his action is going to help or hinder ... and that player isn't going to know until he knows what Boris does.

So as you can see, the system does not use the Sorcerer or Trollbabe "known action" method at all. It's grayer and scarier and (when you get down to it) Drama-based. I dislike Fortune-at-the-Beginning too. But I think the degree of judgmental uncertainty that this system includes is just what the concept needs to make it fun for me.

And yes, when you processed the reward system a little better as you typed your post, I could see the lights going on in your final paragraph. "This typically doesn't work ... hey, wait a minute, if that's how it gets rewarded, it might work!" That's the idea.

Finally, that's a good point about the role of the "very deadly" feature of character creation. I think I'd make it a little different, in that the character simply can't be killed by that particular means, perhaps. Dunno, actually - definitely a playtesting thing.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

By the way, I have a sneaking suspicion that none of the rest of you have read Zero at the Bone yet.

That's the link. All feedback and comments are greatly appreciated.

Best,
Ron

[jburneko]

Hello,

Here's something about Flashpoints I don't understand.  The text lists these as examples:

"As one character is desperately jumping from the top of one train passenger-car to another,another character might be sweating it out at a checkpoint,hoping his forged papers will get him through,
and yet another might be trying to convince his not-too-bright friend to flee the country."

These all seem like points at which dice would be rolled in a standard fortune-driven conflict resolution system.  In which case I'm not sure how the helping/hindering thing works since the character actually engaged in the conflict narrates first (his card will be at the top of the column).

Take the fellow sweating it out at the checkpoint.  That player's turn comes around he narrates successfully (or maybe failing if he so chooses) getting through the checkpoint.  Then the covering players card happens... but then what?  The conflict is over.  How can the player help or hinder?

Which brings up another question does the help/hinder thing apply to the player or the character?  If one guy is jumping from car-to-car on a train and other is sweating is out at a checkpoint what does it mean if the player jumping from car-to-car covers they guy sweating it out at the checkpoint?  If that's the player's only card how and when does the jumping from car-to-car get resolved?

Or perhaps I'm not understanding "how resolution is decided."  I understand it's drama but if player's can add help or complications to the conflict AFTER the player who's primary conflict it is goes, then when does resolution get decided and by whom?

Jesse

[Clinton R. Nixon]

These all seem like points at which dice would be rolled in a standard fortune-driven conflict resolution system.  In which case I'm not sure how the helping/hindering thing works since the character actually engaged in the conflict narrates first (his card will be at the top of the column).

I think there's some text confusion there. The actual text:

... narration of actions proceeds left to right, with covered cards preceeding their coverers (i.e. top-down per column.)

"Top-down" reads like the opposite of covered preceeding coverer, so I'm not sure. I agree with you, though, that covered preceeding coverer doesn't seem to work that well.

Ron - what's the right way to read this text?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

The scene in question is resolved only by doing the whole column. It's not such a big deal when helping is involved, but hindering has an "interrupt" or "cancel" power - mainly by altering the scope of the effect.

Let's say the Jack is second in line from the left, after an uncovered King. got covered by an Ace, and the Ace got covered by the Queen.

The King player goes first: no problem.

Then the Jack player goes, and since he's covered, his narration is only conditional on the narrations of the covering cards.

J: "I find my rival on the train and shoot him in the head."
A: "You're hindered, because he ambushes you and shoots you first."

[The GM has control of the rival. Note that he could just as easily have had the train police catch the character, thus negating the action. As soon as the player saw that he was covered by the Ace, he knew that he was probably fucked. His only hope is that the Queen player is sympathetic toward his character.]

Q: "Nope, he doesn't, because he gets rousted by the train cops and dragged off."

[One thing I should lay out more clearly is how you can help or hinder if your character isn't in the same scene. In these circumstances, you have a modicum of Director stance privilege which isn't otherwise available. Note that the train cops were not invented by the Queen player; they had been established into existence by the GM prior to the flashpoint.]

Effect? Our hero does manage to track down the rival. The rival does manage to get the drop on him. But our hero doesn't get shot, because the train cops catch the rival and our hero can duck back into (say) a private compartment just in time not to get spotted.

Final effect? Up to the GM, but either the wife escapes, or later events on the train or at the destination can be developed into a crisis. After all, our hero is still on the train illegally.

If the Ace hadn't come up at all, the GM would have had "no shot" and the player could have ruled the roost for the scene.

If the Queen player had decided to help the Ace instead of the Jack, then the Jack player is truly screwed, because that's two injuries - death. This is why that "deadly when" part of character creation might be important, because the Jack player would have made sure to use his specialty so as to survive what looked to be impending fatality.

Finally, if the Ace had come up before the Jack (without either covering), then the rival might have gotten to the wife before the Jack character did, and then the Jack player would have had to suffer whatever that entailed. For instance, "He shoots your wife," and the Jack player says, "All right, I escape the train" or "All right, I take him down."

So the moral of the story is that the scene is resolved only by playing the full column, with all actions/outcomes being provisional until the column is done.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Oh yeah! Good question, Jesse, and this is something I'd figured out previously but forgot to put into the text.

If you use your only card in the layout to cover someone else's card, and your character is in a totally different scene from that someone else ... then you just lost your action in your own scene, and have "no shot" there. Or worse, if the GM has an Ace showing somewhere and decides to apply it to your scene, you could be badly hosed.

That's right. Covering someone else's card often entails losing your own scene. That's another reason why it's good for players to get their characters into the same scenes, so they can help/hinder and still get what they want. That's also another reason why having two or more cards show up in one layout is a wonderful thing.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Clinton,

Let me see ... Jesse is reading correctly.

This would be much easier with actual diagrams. The top card of a column is covered. Then if someone pops a card onto the two of them, the covering card is considered covered.

That's how it's supposed to work, and I hope my text above makes the whole thing more clear.

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

Haven't had time to dig too deeply into it to evaluate it on its own merits yet.

I'm a little disappointed that the game isn't more vanilla.  One of the areas we have to constantly repeat is that narrativist play doesn't require extremist game mechanics or loads of metagame.  

As an example in the narrativist essay which is going to get interpreted as an example of an iconic narrativist game, I'd rather have had a game that didn't rely on such extremist mechanics and loads of metagame.

But that's not important to evaluating the game itself, which I'll get around to some time soon I hope.

[jburneko]

Okay, all of that makes more sense.  I think I get it now.  I think this is the first time I've ever seen controlled composit drama resolution.

Another question,

"Every player writes down the worst thing someone whom he or she knows has really done on a slip of paper,and all the slips go into a hat."

I've read this game more than once and I think I only understood what this is saying recently.  When you say, "whom he or she knows", do you mean REALLY knows as in I, Jesse Burneko, pick something out of an aquiantances past to put out there on the game table?

And what do you mean by "know"?  I've read a shit load about Ted Bundy?  Does that count?  What about those of us who have lived squeeky clean lives and have only associated with similarly clean individuals?  I can IMAGINE a lot of real world fucked up human situations drawing from stuff I've seen in movies or read about in newspapers or heard about from a friend of a friend of a friend but very few have I experienced first hand or even second hand.

I'm not saying I or all of my friends have lived the morally high road but I don't think any of our transgressions qualify for central story worthiness.  For instance, I'm amazed when I read the tangency forum of RPG.net how many people have been in a fight or spent the night in jail.  I, nor any of my friends have ever been in a fight or gone to jail.

I don't find this "wrong and dangerous" I find it limiting since I can think of things WAY worse than anyone I "know" has ever done.

Jesse

[John Harper]

Ron, I read Zero at the Bone as soon as the Nar essay was out. I haven't said anything yet because I still don't really get it. At first glance, it's very interesting. Spies and their secret dealings and paranoia and tough choices = Cool. But the system text just leaves me cold. It's very dense and I haven't had much success puzzling it out yet.

This is my standard reaction to your rules writing, though. I usually have to let it sit for a while and then re-read it and then try to actually play it before it clicks. I'm not sure why that is. In hindsight (after I understand it), your writing seems perfectly clear and I can't remember why it was confusing the first time around.

So, um.... I don't have anything useful to say yet. Re-reading is required.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

John, you wrote,

This is my standard reaction to your rules writing, though. I usually have to let it sit for a while and then re-read it and then try to actually play it before it clicks. I'm not sure why that is. In hindsight (after I understand it), your writing seems perfectly clear and I can't remember why it was confusing the first time around.

Yeah, this is a weird process - we call it "learning," and it's kind of a lost art among this bright but perhaps too-confident group of hobbyists. I do my best to foster it, when I'm paid enough (hence, Adept Press and my real job too).

What I'm saying is, "yes." And seriously rather than snottily, it is a great source of pride to me that you, and others, trust that I'm providing something worth spending the effort and willingness on.

Jesse, it's not the extremity of the Wrongdoing that matters, it's its reality. I'm talking about something that someone you know personally has really done. Have you really thought about it? The very worst thing?

Never mind chopping people up and putting the parts in garbage cans, or other gaudy psycho bullshit. I'm talking about the worst thing that someone you know has really done. Now put four or five of them in a hat.

That's scary, if you ask me.

Ralph, I suffered greatly over the vanilla vs. not-vanilla issue. The trouble is, we have the Great Vanilla breakthroughs already, in the form mainly of Dust Devils and (humbly) Trollbabe (as I see it, anyway). We also have the great pervo-devo not-Vanilla all-GM-all-the-time game in Universalis. Bluntly, if we're talking about theory-driven design, there wasn't anywhere else to go.

And besides, I felt bad for all those people out there who keep pleading for "diceless" this-and-that, and who keep walking into IIEE problems like pies in the face. I wanted to come up with a game for someone who'd really decided that they hated Fortune and Karma resolution of actions and even of "what my guy does." My bet is that the IIEE structure will help them get what they want.

Best,
Ron

[John Harper]

Ah yes. Learning. That must be it. No doubt my over-confidence (as a rather bright member of this hobby) was the source of my confusion.

I tell you what, let's just agree that I need to read your text several times to make sense of it. Perhaps I'm struggling to learn difficult concepts, like how one playing card might cover another. Or perhaps the writing is a little murky. Who can say?

There's a grin in there, Ron... but it's a wry one. Your stuff is indeed worth some extra trouble to figure out.  I often feel like I'm a student in Prof. Edwards's seminar, and it's been a doozy.

[jburneko]

Hello,

Well, I KNOW you weren't talking about psycho-nightmarish stuff.  I was being a bit extreme with the Ted Bundy reference.  I was thinking more along the lines of someone who euthenizes his wife because she has a terminal illness, perhaps without her consent and then covers it up.  That's not really psycho, and even understandable.  Or maybe the person abandoned a baby to an orphanage but told the mother the child died.  I've never known anyone personally who did any of these things but I'd be interested in watching a fellow player struggle with it.

I'll continue to think it over but honestly if I were a player and you gave me that constraint I'd have NO idea what to write down.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

You're going to hate this.

honestly if I were a player and you gave me that constraint I'd have NO idea what to write down.

... which leads me to smile in that infuriating fashion and say, "And whose problem is that?"

C'mon, Jesse, when's the last time I gave you an out-and-out bad suggestion for role-playing? <cute voice>Work with me, ducky.</voice>

More generally, one thing I thought I'd cut from the first draft of the game was the line "The GM reads all of them." When I cut the GM into the guessing process, that line should have been cut as well ... or maybe I thought of something that made me leave it in, then forgot the something? I don't know.

Best,
Ron