[Dead of Night] Nice Mr. Fitzgerald

[Ron Edwards]

This was my third full non-demo time for this game. As part of my GenCon prep in case we had a chance to devote an evening to it, I'd decided upon a fully suburban game, with Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Lost Boys as more-or-less setting models. The monster would be a Witch by the rules, but appearing as a single man recently moved to area, very evil, appearing to be the perfect neighbor and neighborhood participant. Sort of Fright Night without the final hour of makeup and action. (Does anyone ever remember the first hour of that movie? I kind of like that part a lot.)

Mr. Fitzgerald
Identify 5 / Obscure 3 / Impersonate 8*
Persuade 3 / Dissuade 5 / Sorcery 9*
Pursue 5 / Escape 5
Assault 3 / Protect 5 / Evil Eye 7
3 Survival Points

I had a couple of ideas, including how smarmy and supportive he'd be at a kid's funeral, or perhaps hosting a fun Halloween party at his house, or stuff like that. But I also knew that he'd be generally reactive, as opposed to, for instance, stalking out into the night and killing people in alleys like a werewolf might. I wanted most of the clues and confrontations to be player-driven, with me playing this awful villain mainly as trying to live his life and causing maximum misery and evil without much ruckus.

Anyway, other games intruded at GenCon, and I didn't get around to it. So last month, some of us got together and we made up the characters but didn't play. More delay, curses.

Mariana, Mexican cleaning lady, played by Maura
Identify 3 / Obscure 5 / Invisible 7
Persuade 5 / Dissuade 5
Pursue 2 / Escape 6 / Side Streets 8
Assault 1 / Protect 7 / Cleaning Products 9
5 Survival Points

If you've ever role-played with Maura, that fighting specialty is probably sending a chill down your spine. Mariana's Survival Points dropped, then fluctuated 1-2-1-0-1-0-1-2 for most of the story. She squeaked through the ending by a very narrow streak of luck.

Tom, neighborhood kid (about 12), played by Tod
Identify 6 / Obscure 4
Persuade 6 / Dissuade 2 / Fast Talker 9
Pursue 6 / Escape 2 / Knows the Neighborhood 8
Assault 4 / Protect 6
5 Survival Points

This kid turned out to be the ultimate protagonist, as Tod rolled crazy-well and got lots of doubles, ramping the Survival Points way up. The final scene jacked them down fast, but he had enough to live through the final explosions and hellfire and stuff.

Mrs. Bernice Florin, elderly lady, played by Julie
Identify 3 / Obscure 5 / Distract 8
Persuade 4 / Dissuade 4 / Heavy cane 8
Pursue 3 / Escape 5 / Always around 7
Assault 4 / Protect 6
5 Survival Points

Poor Mrs. Florin sort of turned out the opposite from Tom, as her Survival Points decreased steadily, and she was the player-character to meet her end at Mr. Fitzgerald's hands. Actually, he said "boo!" and her stout heart finally seized.

We finally, finally got a chance to play last weekend. We set our Tension rules as follows: no spending in fights; 3 max for spending at any time. I liked these parameters, as I wanted to see a steady build rather than the up-down up-down of our previous game, which had created a kind of European horror-calm, not bad but not entirely satisfying at times. Curiously, they are very similar to the guidelines Eero's group used in his [Dead of Night] Hair game (except that they only spent Tension during fights), which I only realized while prepping this post.

Early in play, the players didn't spend many Survival Points, but after the first couple of scenes they started spending them like crazy - for all kinds of things, to my delight. Often for Look What I Found (because I learned long ago not to give characters anything useful in scene framing when they can spend resources to create it themselves), for flipping the numbers of a given pair (something I hadn't seen in play before, so that was cool), and sometimes re-rolls. 5 Survival Points is a lot, and even Mrs. Florin's demise took a long time. It's really hard to knock down a player-character into the potential death zone unless you optimize the monsters for it. If you want your character to live, and if he or she is not actually being eviscerated by multiple opponents, then there are several ways to gain instant Survival Point during the vulnerable 0-left stage.

Or another way to put it is, if you want lots of player-character fatality in Dead of Night, then (a) use really horrible monsters like the Lone Killer or werewolves,* and (b) construct Tension rules that favor characters taking damage rapidly. In this case, we were going for fear rather than mayhem, and for violence with uncertain results rather than insta-lethal violence.

As with most Dead of Night play, Tension began at 5 (the slight creepiness of having an old neighbor die recently and be found in her home). It dropped to 2 or 3 as I messed with some rolls, and then it started building, building, building. I spent it when I could, but my opportunities were actually pretty limited given the way the dice were falling. I bet I missed some moments, though, as I'm generally bad at remembering and using all the mechanics available to me to screw player-characters' effectiveness. So I had the fun of living up to the ever-increasing, but not jumpy or over-rapidly increasing Tension.

In GM terms, I busted out some truly nasty horror, surprising myself really, and the players got really into it. Often when I have a notion (as in my first Dead of Night game, "werewolves, family, war zone, soldiers") I don't dress it up in prep, hoping that the engine catches in play itself, and that's what certainly happened here. I don't take the credit; that rightly belongs to the rules for how to introduce and describe things based on current Tension levels. The benchmarks are 5 (vaguely creepy), 10 (outright grim and shocking), and 15 (over the top). When a monster is in a scene, it hops up by 5, but those extra are "ambient" only and cannot be spent like regular Tension; plus, they go away when the monster's not there. You still use total ambient Tension for descriptions, though.

That was all I needed, given my starting concept and some player-characters who were pretty much defined by their nosiness. At first, Mr. Fitzgerald's arrival was associated with nothing more than missing cats, and when Tom spied on him (so ambient Tension hopped up to , I could show him dragging something with a long, floppy, wrapped item in his basement. That +5 helped when he was active, observed, or spied upon, so some scary details could be found in the house or in his words. But it was also cool in his absence, as the lower-Tension feel of "normal life" created an alienated feeling among the player-characters - you know, "Why doesn't anyone else believe that this guy is obviously crazy and evil?"

At Tension 10, a neighborhood kid dies, the external house becomes grim and scary to the protagonists (moving lights, a bloody hand slapped against a window pane); and with the +5, I could do the church scene. Oh man, the church scene. Mrs. Florin went through much trauma, including the Evil Eye and a car accident, to try to get Mr. Fitzgerald to come to her church, and then she reeeeally wished she hadn't. At that point, I could also go all-out in a series of events that left Tom's mother badly impaired. After that, it was full-scale psychedelic horror as the protagonists went Rambo and tried to burn down the house, twice actually. Tension racked up so high during the climax that I was forced to multiply my personal concept of this film's budget by a big number.

Tod gets huge credit for using a Survival Point to say Tom found a spooky ceramic cat in the display case (which had its own history in play so far), which he smashed, calling it an Assault roll. Cats had become a weird motif, playing on the whole notion of the witch's familiar without having any such explicit being in the story. It resulted through unplanned, minor contributions without much acknowledgment, and Tod really exposed how strongly it was working with this sequence.

The Witch is a tricky monster, because ultimately, she (or he in this case) is not quantitatively very powerful compared to most monsters in the book. Evil Eye is really the only damage, and it's indirect, only penalizing a character's next roll, so you have to think carefully about how to do it (Mr. Fitzgerald got aerosol spray in his face when he tried it on Mariana!). Impersonation is a key ability, especially for my suburban-normal-guy witch, it costs Survival Points, and you're only starting with 3 as opposed to a player-character's 5. Sorcery costs Survival Points and doesn't do damage. I figured out fast that I needed to use the Evil Eye a lot. I was relieved that the characters' tactics to confront the witch were pretty explosive, which meant they had to make some protective rolls too. Since I wasn't allowed to spend Tension in combat, it was really up for grabs whether Mr. Fitzgerald would be taken down early in the final fight.

It was scary. That guy was really evil. What happened to Tom's mother by the end pushed the story into old-school King and Bava territory, rather than slick A-level faux-fear. I liked that a lot.

Over in "Sandbox" adventures, I wrote about a play-issue or perhaps Technique that I've taken to calling the Screwdown, which is to say, how significant crises and climactic resolutions can be brought to arise by working with the current fiction. Now, in Dead of Night, climactic and finalizing events are pretty much mechanically mandated through the Tension 15 rule. However, as I've found anyway, by the time you get to Tension 15, things are so under way and there's so much to work with, that the fiction is pretty much straining at the bit already. I'd like to muse more about how that happened, especially because in this case we're talking about hard-and-overt Simulationist play, not Narrativism.

I've raved about it before, and lots of others have too, but I'll say it again - this game provides one of the finest combinations of thoughtful design and in-play emotional spiking (of a particular kind) in role-playing history.

Best, Ron

* [Dead of Night] Werewolves! Men with guns! Mom!; also, Eero's thread, linked to above, also includes a brief account of my second game of Dead of Night

[Eero Tuovinen]

This is a fortuitous coincidence! I'm going to Oulu tomorrow for a game convention, and you're reminding me of the great DoN session we played there a year ago with largely the same people I'm going to be seeing now. Perhaps it's time for Hair II, the sequel I already know is going to be set somewhere in the great plains, with long highways, lonely trucker bars and biker gangs...

Man, that's not a bad idea at all. I have a huge bunch of new indie in my bag from Gencon, but there's practically nothing that does this GM-controlled sim storytelling thing.

[Graham W]

Ron, how do you handle awarding Survival Points for horror cliches with this sort of game? It seems you're at a level slightly above B-Movie Horror, so there's little chance to award Survival Points for, say, running in high heels.

This rule is the bit I don't quite understand about Dead of Night.

Graham

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Actually we talked a little bit about this in play. If I can remember it well enough to phrase correctly, we hit upon a construction that worked very well.

The idea was that a stated cliche had to arise from what was already happening, so the effect would hit as a cliche only after it happened, not as an inserted self-referential bit. If characters were in a house and one of them decided to go down to the basement alone with no discernible point - not even saying "Gee, the laundry should be done, think I'll get my socks," then it wasn't worth a point. The best way would be to go down to the basement alone to fix the fuse box after the electricity cut out.

I think Tom got a Survival Point for spying in the basement window just because nosy kids do this,* and Mariana got one for ripping out curses in Spanish ... although now that I think of it, she should have received one later on as well, when after many scenes of feigning lousy English, and after having been arrested basically for being Mexican, she spoke in perfect (annoyed) English to the cops. There might have been a few others too.

So it really wasn't much different from what a director decides in making a horror movie. Do you have the cliche induce a roar of laughter because it's been inserted in an incongruous way? Or does it fit in just right because we'd seen her spend time buying those heels in the first scene, then she's wearing them for her date, and now she's running from the demon dog in them? The unstated goal, now that I think of it, was for cliches to generate a certain sympathetic pain or sudden chill of danger. No one in our story had sex, but I think if they had, we'd have aimed for the original reason why it became a cliche: to sympathize however briefly with the couple, or in the case of the cheerleader and jock, to be irked  (still at a human level) at their selfishness.

My call is that we did not avoid cliches but rather embraced them if they arose, again, rather than pasting them on with self-referential grins.

Best, Ron

* As I see it, Tom was played by both Coreys at once.

[andrew_kenrick]

I agree with Ron's handling of cliches - it's the way I handle them too. I give them out for sensible and appropriate inclusion of cliches, not for throwing them in just to get a survival point with no bearing on the story.

The purpose of giving survival points out for cliches is to encourage players to act in a way befitting a horror movie, rather than "turtling up" and going into PC survival mode (as in, I won't go into the woods as OOC I know that something bad will happen to my character).

[Callan S.]

Ron and Andrew, is that an addition to the dead of night rules? Something other groups would have to reinvent for themselves?

[andrew_kenrick]

Nope, cliches are right there in the book as part of the situations Survival Points are given out.

[Callan S.]

Sorry, I'm refering to how the cliche has to be forshadowed in advance, to earn survival points (not the cliche rule in general). Is that forshadowing requirement an addition to the rules that you've both made?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Callan,

Sorry about the delay. It's a good question and if I'm not mistaken part of your ongoing effort to examine texts' teaching content. The answer is, the rules for cliches say exactly this:

Running with cliches - A player who puts their character in perilous or inconvenient circumstances by following horror movie cliches gains a Survival Point for their efforts. Suitable examples include splitting off from the party to search the abandoned house more quickly, and running into the dark forest to escape from the creature. The award is purely at the GM's discretion. Sample cliches are scattered throughout the book and a complete list can be found in the index.

All uses of the word in the rules are spelled correctly, with the accent mark. I'm being lazy.

There's nothing in the text about cliches being silly or not silly, foreshadowed or not foreshadowed, or anything else. The numerous examples are generally descriptive and range from the very familiar to the thought-provoking. Graham's question was the right one - how did I, the GM in this case, organize "my discretion?" When the rules hand me the judgment call like this, I am a big believer in telling people what's on my mind, and finding out what's on theirs, because I don't like to start over case-by-case during play. If that weren't the case, I might have played and answered such that "Ah, whenever I felt like it, and sometimes it was funny and sometimes it was scary." And that too would have been in accord with the rules.

I may be reaching here, but my call is that the game doesn't punt or suffer from vagueness about the cliches, but does the right thing by handing this role (judging cliches) to a living being at the table. The reason is that the group also creates the rules for how the GM may spend Tension Points, and the text explains quite carefully how those on-site rules will define the subgenre of horror (and they do, they do). In other words, since the group has already effectively created their own look & feel & tone of the story with the Tension specifications, the parameters for judging cliches aren't infinite.

This is a good example of a game whose rules about different stuff produce strong, reinforcing interactions when those rules are all applied. In such games, especially when certain rules are left open to customization (not: not invention from nothing, but group-specific customization), then the vectors of reinforcement are shifted. In play, what seem like simplistic instructions in other parts of the rules are then revealed as key directives.

There aren't a lot of game texts I'd defend in this way. Most of them punt way too often or leave key issues in the hands of "how everyone knows it's done, obviously."  More specifically, nearly every movie-horror game out there is actually parody. Dead of Night is something special.

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

Ah, okay! Though I describe that as sympathetic restriction on judging cliches (ie, being sympathetic to the subgenre of horror that was defined), rather than a hard restriction like a rule is. I'd describe it that way since the GM still has absolute control of whether he grants a cliche survival points or not, but also given he has absolute control of it he may also restrict himself in sympathy with the prior established ideas.

Not that any of that contradicts the subtle interplay you describe.


Hey, I was just wondering about something in terms of the art  (this isn't a system design question at all) - Mr Fitzgerald killed a PC by saying or shouting boo to them (and the PC had a heart condition I assume)? In real life, that would be pretty horrible and wrong...but in a horror genre, I almost see it as adding a sympathetic note to the character because he didn't do much more than be himself in that instance. Yes, horrible self, but it's not...that horrible? I don't know if that sort of message was intended as part of it, but it made me think, so I wanted to ask. But it's your art, so you can leave it 'as is' without commentry, of course.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Callan,

I can see how that might seem likely given the written description, but as it happened in our game, Mr. Fitzgerald was supremely evil in how he killed Mrs. Florin. He'd already Evil Eye'd her into a car accident, corrupted her church horribly, and otherwise made her life miserable. Technically, doing damage (using the Assault score) by saying "boo" isn't something that character is capable of by the rules, if it came right out of nowhere or were part of the ordinary-if-evil course of actions he'd conduct casually. However, with Tension racked up to 20+ (well past the threshold which allows, even requires surreal descriptions), with the history between the two characters (as Mrs. Florin had made the awful mistake of trying to engage and challenge him on a moral, community plane), and with the point-by-point history of accumulating physical and psychological damage he'd done to her which placed her at 0 Survival Points,* it was exactly the way to kill her, with color & rules & in-game fiction all firing at once.

Nasty, awful monster-character. One of the worst I think I've ever done, possibly because it's built straight out of my personal fears as a first-time father. I described the setting as being "a couple of blocks south of here," which describes streets and houses and demographics just like my own street.

The more I type this, the more I think you'd like this game. It is physically and textually so practical, and yet all its best properties are emergent.

Best, Ron

* Important rule: your character doesn't die at Survival Points = 0, but taking damage at that time means he or she does die.

[David Berg]

Hi Ron,

From the various Dead of Night threads I've read on the Forge, I've formed this picture of Tension Points as saying, "We're making this session look like one of those movies that gets creepier and more dangerous as it progresses; so, GMs, do that!"  And then they provide useful illustrations of "getting creepier" for the GM to refer to, and mechanical reinforcement of "getting more dangerous" as applied to violence.

So, I feel like I'm probably missing something.  I mean, I feel like, given the same mission statement, I could just sort of GM accordingly, and things would indeed get more creepy and more dangerous.  I'd just describe grosser things and give the badguys more resources.  But your post clearly states that this was not your experience:

I don't take the credit; that rightly belongs to the rules for how to introduce and describe things based on current Tension levels. The benchmarks are 5 (vaguely creepy), 10 (outright grim and shocking), and 15 (over the top). When a monster is in a scene, it hops up by 5, but those extra are "ambient" only and cannot be spent like regular Tension; plus, they go away when the monster's not there. You still use total ambient Tension for descriptions, though.

That was all I needed, given my starting concept and some player-characters who were pretty much defined by their nosiness. At first, Mr. Fitzgerald's arrival was associated with nothing more than missing cats, and when Tom spied on him (so ambient Tension hopped up to , I could show him dragging something with a long, floppy, wrapped item in his basement. That +5 helped when he was active, observed, or spied upon, so some scary details could be found in the house or in his words. But it was also cool in his absence, as the lower-Tension feel of "normal life" created an alienated feeling among the player-characters - you know, "Why doesn't anyone else believe that this guy is obviously crazy and evil?"

Am I underselling the importance of guidelines to the GM?  I can see how some numerical guidelines would help a little, but do you feel they helped a lot in pacing/mood?  Was this difference a huge factor in making play successful, or just a small one?

Was the loss of Survival Points relevant because it made character death more likely?  Or because it signalled to the players "we're gearing up for the climax"?

How much do feel the successful vibe was a result of purely in-fiction developments, and how much of it was a result of direct player contact with mechanics (Tension Points & Survival Points, I guess)?  Was there any, "Uh oh, we know that subtle thing Ron just described is probably very bad news, because we're at Tension 8!"?

This game is interesting to me on two fronts:
1) I have a few overlapping goals and vaguley similar mechanics I'm testing in my own designs
2) I initially had no interest in playing but that is starting to turn into some serious curiosity

Thanks,
-David

[Eero Tuovinen]

That's what I thought about Tension points before I played the game, David! I rarely misread mechanics, but this was just so different from what I'm used to, that I misjudged the effect Tension points would have.

I played another session of DoN last weekend, and the way I explained Tension points to the players was that they have two functions:

• Their number tells the GM when to reveal backstory - it's not just "getting creepier" like the rulebook a bit misleadingly states, it's about whether to hold back or give away stuff. This decision is arbitrary drama-wise, you could do either and get good results in this sort of immersive play, so having the decision taken off your hands makes it easier to GM.
• The Tension points are a resource you use to lock play into a genre mode - the GM spends the points to follow his own, sole aesthetic vision about how individual conflicts "should" go. This means that the naturalism that rules low Tension levels gives way to determinism when you have more points to spend.

Because the latter function interacts with the former by changing the amount of Tension, you get this interesting dynamic zigzag in play that supports GMing really well. The GM actually doesn't need to think about dramatic coordination at all, he just needs to make spot decisions about whether he'd prefer the monster or the player to win a given conflict, and he needs to look at the Tension points to decide whether to delay some (horrific) reveal or not. It's all about GM convenience, not any sort of elaborate guidelines - I could make these choices myself, but with Tension points I don't have to, and can therefore concentrate on other things.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi David,

Although that question isn't unfair or wrong to ask, it puts me in a difficult position: I have to explain the game rules to you, then justify or deeply explain them, but without you having the text there to decide whether that makes sense or not. I never like the way this works out in a discussion, because the other person's point of feedback-reference just isn't there. It's like trying to make out with fog even if the other person is doing their best to try to understand. Well, all that said, I'll do my best - which is also to say that I think I can only give it one good shot.

To review the Tension rules in the most basic play (there are some sophistications, but never mind): it starts at 5, and all Survival Points spent or lost by characters rack it higher, 1:1. It drops when you, the GM, spend it, typically on the monster's special abilities or on modifying dice rolls' outcomes (I am meaner than Eero and typically always spend against the player-characters). That's all of the quantitative side, nothing more tricky involved. I'll try to place that into the larger context of the rules as a whole.

1. In playing Dead of Night, it's not hard to "make a story" in the most basic sense. First, Premise isn't an issue, so decisions of any kind don't relate to heightening it as a question or seeing it turn into theme via results. Also, it literally doesn't matter what anyone does because the basic point is that the characters are in danger of being killed/worse, and that's all. Thirdly, nor does any sort of survivorship really matter in terms of the point of play; although it's important to act as the character's advocate in general, it deeply enriches the basic enjoyment of what's going on when a character dies just as much as when he or she survives. All of this is to say that the GM has a very easy, wave-front sort of job. The rules are built specifically for him or her to consult what's up, and in so doing, to decide what to do quite simply.

2. When I say "what's up," there are three parts. The first is actually the least constraining: what's gone on in the fiction so far. I mean, it's a monster-horror campfire-story movie thing; the characters are wherever they are from last time, and either the monster is present right away in the next scene or it's not, and recent events usually make those pretty easy. The second is Tension Level, which is to say, how horrifying and surreal you describe things. That's rated on a roughly 5-point scale, and the relevant range is 0 to 15, so it's not hard to do either (not many ratings to know). The third is whatever Survival Points get spent for things like clues or other prop-oriented stuff; you as GM don't have to decide whether there's a pickup truck with some gas left or not, because if they want it, they can make it up themselves and pay for it.

So I think you can see that all "what shall happen now" decisions usually left entirely up to GM as uber-powerful plot-go man are simply not there. The neat thing is that even with all three of the points in #2 going on, you still get to play the monster in terms of specific abilities, choosing a target, being up to something else (bad), and moving around stealthily or not-stealthily. GMing Dead of Night is not a wind-up toy, but the framework provided by everything I numbered and listed above makes the "you" part very fun - you can throw your whole weight into how bad the thing is, period.

And if true Tension ever hits 15, start wrapping it up, which pretty much means the monster goes for the total (or specially targeted) kill-or-worse, or that the player-characters are already doing the same toward it and now get a clear shot, or both.

Does that help? I'm especially trying to get across that Tension, played strictly and in full, is a key part of all of the above, but it's neither a boring metronome nor a boring  "the monster does this now" rubric that dictates your GMing as a whole.

Best, Ron

[Joel P. Shempert]

There's nothing in the text about cliches being silly or not silly, foreshadowed or not foreshadowed, or anything else. The numerous examples are generally descriptive and range from the very familiar to the thought-provoking. Graham's question was the right one - how did I, the GM in this case, organize "my discretion?" When the rules hand me the judgment call like this, I am a big believer in telling people what's on my mind, and finding out what's on theirs, because I don't like to start over case-by-case during play.

I just wanted to break in here with a side question: this communication process ("telling people what's on my mind, and finding out what's on theirs") is relevant across game texts, no? Like, it's a technique you employ whenever "the rules hand [you] the judgment call like this", though not the only possible functional technique.

Reason I ask is, group struggle with a shared standard for such judgment calls (in this case assigning bonus Dice) was one of the many mismatches and frustrations that led to the recent demise of my Sorcerer game. Would this be a valuable technique for Sorcerer play, to talk over the aesthetic standard for judgment before play, so all parties have an idea of what to play toward in garnering Bonus Dice? It strikes me that this could be one more thing  that gets formally defined for a particular game, right alongside Humanity and Demons and Ritual. Or is this different somehow from the DoN "Cliche-->Survival Points" thing?

I don't have much more to say about the AP except that every time you post Dead of Night play, it makes me wanna play the game so bad!

Peace,
-Joel