[Dead of Night] Better without the fangs

[Ron Edwards]

Life has kept me from posting regularly since GenCon, but I've been role-playing when I can. My biggest priority is to get educated in some games which have been around for a few years but I've kept failing to see what they're like in play. So far I've been successful with In a Wicked Age, but more remain. (In case you're interested, my current to-play list is, in no particular order: Ribbon Drive, Burning Empires, BW: Under the Serpent Sun, Center Space, Venus 2141, Bliss Stage, EABA: NeoTerra, Sign in Stranger, and more Ruby. Lots of science fiction in there.) (editing these in as well: Reality Cops, Rats in the Walls, Heroic Do-Gooders & Dastardly Deed-Doers, Silence Keeps Me a Victim, Reign, more Legendary Lives)

On the other hand, there's nothing like a pick-up game of Dead of Night at the end of October. Nathan Paoletta, Tim Koppang, and I got together with the beer & book & dice. It was especially fortuitous because Andrew Kenrick and I had just talked transatlantically for a while, by phone, about all sorts of aspects of the game. And as it turned out, the single most important thing I'd taken from that conversation was exactly the thing I fumbled, almost 100%, in the game. It was just like when people show up at the Forge saying "I tried PTA and it didn't work out," or something similar, and when I post a reply saying, "The thing to remember about playing PTA ..." (or whatever game). Basically, that's what I'd say to myself in response to this post. "You totally forgot or misapplied a key concept in making that particular game reach its higher potential in action."

Not to say that the game wasn't fun. I enjoyed it as a pretty basic and straightforward no-frills Dead of Night session. The Tension rules did their usual thing of permitting me to scene-frame appropriately and to use content in a directed way. Let me explain those two things when they intersected at a critical moment in play. (1) The game does not enter a wrap-up stage until Tension hits 15. Therefore, at one point, the two player-characters had apparently escaped from the sinister sleep-lab in the ever-increasingly creepy hospital, and if it had been up to "GM feels like it," then I might have ended the session there. But no, Tension was only 10 (I think). We had to play more. But I didn't want to simply hurl more foes at them; they had already managed a successful combat scene and as I saw it, "earned" their way out of the monster's territory. What to do? Well, that leads to (2): If Tension is 10 or over, then the content of play needs to be explicitly horrific, to the point of surreal nastiness. Basically, the budget or whatever else makes the story visually or thematically notable must be on full display. Since this was indeed the case at this moment in play, and especially since it was the first moment it was the case, I combined the fact that we must play further and the fact that play must include an obvious and shocking shift in content.

OK, some background: the characters were a post-op surgery patient and a visitor to a patient (her infirm father) who had been shanghai'd by the hospital bureaucracy into the sleep analysis laboratory of the sinister Dr. Dobbs. Neither was particularly happy about being forced into a sleep study and various bad things had already happened. For instance, when Tension was 8 (and hence 13 when Dr. Dobbs was present; monsters boost ambient Tension by 5), one of them woke up to find that Dr. Dobbs was standing there sucking his blood from a long, coiling silastic tube that was inserted into a neat incision on his neck.

Anyway, so later, here they are, coming out of an elevator on the ground floor, with Dr. Dobbs lying back there somewhere with blood splattered in a perfect, widening circle from where her back had struck the floor, and with nothing between them and safety. Game over? Can't be, Tension's not 15 yet. Tension level dictate anything? Yes, for the first time, awful surreal horror must now strike without Dr. Dobbs needing to be present. So I scene-framed to the characters waking up in the morning, still in the sleep lab. The assistant whose neck had appeared horribly broken in the fight seemed fine. The patient who'd apparently died in the night wasn't there; that bed was empty and appeared unused. How much of it was real? How much of it wasn't? It was a nice evil shift in the whole content of the story, grading from a pretty physical breakout situation to start into psychological freakiness. And we kept playing. In this game, I recommend following the rules very exactly, because they put me, at least, in a creative decision-space that pushes my (usually lame) internal sense of what might happen next into a better framework.

The rules also displayed an interesting outcome I hadn't seen before: what happens to characters whose points are maxed toward Escape and Protection. It's reeeeeally hard to hurt such characters with monster Assault! That led to a certain lack of Survival Point loss, and a consequential slow-creep of Tension increase rather than a good solid jump that I would have preferred. But on the plus side, and unexpectedly on my part, it meant that the characters were in a lot of trouble at the very end if they wanted to take the fight to the monster. Which, given the events I just described, they pretty much "had to do" from the players' perspective - or to put it differently, Tim and Nathan very greatly hated Dr. Dobbs and her assistant, Christine, and felt a reasonably intense urge to make the world monster-freer by a unit of one, if at all possible.

By the rules, you can flip one of your dichotomous scores' values, so say if you have Protect 8 and Assault 2, then you can reverse them for a scene by spending a Survival Point (and raising Tension). And also by the rules, if you fail an attack roll, then you lose a Survival Point. And finally, as it happens, even a successful roll can come to naught if you roll a 13, which gives the monster a free Survival Point recovery. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that when the characters built like this got mad and got aggressive, they were forced to bring themselves to lower Survival Point values and also helped raise Tension by doing so. So things were automatically brought to a final-battle context which was quite chancy for everyone, and if Nathan hadn't rolled that 13, I think that the story might have gone quite differently. As it turned out, the patients eventually succumbed to the "treatment" and became more fodder for Dr. Dobbs' hunger.

I especially liked the way that Dr. Dobbs had no dialogue except for clinical diagnostic jargon, and also how a few of the NPCs became quite sympathetically lively, such as Harlan, the burly but gentle-hearted intern.

So, given all this fun and all this perfectly sound application of the rules, which basically combined to help generate the kind of story which all that 1990s railroading was supposed to deliver consistently but never did, what did I do wrong?

I already mentioned that Tension crept up a little too slowly, and it did. The problem wasn't the character construction, though, it was that I wasn't awarding Survival Points generously enough. Basically, if you don't hand'em out, people won't spend'em, and spending'em is the way Tension builds. I did extract spending pretty well, especially since I'd decided that to find anything helpful in a hospital environment, you had to pay for it. But it would have gone much faster, and with much more content, if I'd not failed to give them more 'money' to work with. Looking back, I can see at least three times I should have awarded a Survival Point to Nathan during the first few scenes, given the rules for doing so.

And even that wasn't the big thing I hinted at earlier in the post. The big thing, the exact thing Andrew and I talked about, and which I totally didn't do in a game barely two days later, was to give a specific and immediate purpose to the monster. The way we did it, the characters were just more fodder for the vampire doctor. The monster took no specific or personal actions toward them; there was no content of that kind at all. The result? A nice little B flip-side kind of horror/terror story, with some fun twists and (if I say so myself) some good imagery born from my personal, semi-irrational hatred of hospitals. But a gasp-inducing, initiative-stealing, 100% memorable and to-be-repeated experience? Not enough so. The game can provide that, no problem, but not if the monster's actions and those particular player-characters' presence merely happen to intersect. It's when you finally know why the vampire wants your blood, and it's genuinely personal and not because you have some weird condition, that a scenario like this one would reach its real potential.

When I look back at, for instance, [Dead of Night] Nice Mr. Fitzgerald, that's what I see, that the monster had a genuine and personal goal for each player-character which originated from the first scenes of play (in that case). It was just screaming to be done again in this case, probably in a totally different way in terms of details and theme, but entirely the same in terms of the relevant content-based protagonism for the player-characters. I really liked this particular manifestation of the vampire and wish I'd used it better.

So I'm going to remember this game as an object lesson for me.

Tim and Nathan, please chime in if you'd like. This game deserves extensive discussion; every time I play it, I learn more about role-playing itself at a very practical level.

Best, Ron
edited to add some more to-play titles I should have remembered in the first place

[Tim C Koppang]

Ron,

A couple quick comments.  I've always found Dead of Night to be a good time.  To me, the game is all about the balance of tension.

First, the fact that my character's survival points are tied to the overall tension rating makes the game into something suspenseful.  But I don't think that Nathan and I were really feeling that push and pull until the later stages of the game when we started to run low on survival points.  I find that interesting because you're saying you weren't generous enough in awarding extra survival points.  I was spending like crazy.  Having more would have allowed me to survive longer, sure, but I'm not sure it would have added to the suspense of the game.

Second, compared to the first time we played ([Dead of Night] Werewolves! Men with guns! Mom!), I didn't feel the same sense of out and out fear.  Now it could have been the minor real-life distractions, but I think more likely it was that lack of a focused or mounting "evil."  You narrated all sorts of spooky atmospherics.  The hospital thing isn't intrinsically scary for me (as I gathered it was for you), but the sleep doctor was definitely freaky.  What we lacked was a sense of purpose.  Nathan and I were trying to win our way out of the hospital, but I didn't get the sense that the walls were closing in on us.  The monster would chase us, we'd escape, and then the monster would find us again.  I would have preferred a sense of fear that built slowly.  Perhaps your comment about a monster that wanted us, specifically, for something would have helped.

I think what Dead of Night really does for me is to help deconstruct what causes that feeling of fear.  It's a great game, but you do have to be careful how you balance the tension (both the mechanical tension points and the subjective narrative tension).

[Jaakko Koivula]

Damn you Forge.

Spent most of this morning at work reading up Dead of Night APs and now I got to order this one too.

All I had to say.

[Callan S.]

Hi Ron,

I already mentioned that Tension crept up a little too slowly, and it did. The problem wasn't the character construction, though, it was that I wasn't awarding Survival Points generously enough.

Well, is it staying within the games procedure to give survival points as you did? From the sounds of it it sounds like it's valid, procedurally. So I'm kinda sensing some blurring of what play you wanted to make with the game and what play is perfectly valid in relation to following procedure, to the point your telling yourself off for not playing the game, rather than telling yourself off for not playing the game in the particular way you wanted?

And similar with the monster and immediate purpose. This is a bit less of a concrete area in terms of procedure, as it doesn't perhaps deal with points and numbers, but is it valid within the procedure to not add any immediate purpose to the monster? You'd spoken with Andrew, but I think I've said this before about a 'master/apprentice' model as it might be called - on the actual game night, the master was not there. That's why it all needs to be packed into procedure, because procedure is actually the only thing there with the person who is on the front line, so to speak. Or I guess you can blame yourself for not forfilling the vision of an author/master who, when it came to the crunch time, wasn't actually there and will never be. I'm not knocking that absence or giving it some negative quality - I'm just trying to talk about how much you were really on your own. Why blame yourself for not meeting the vision of someone who wasn't there at the time to help at all in forfilling it? Though if you've invented the play you wanted to make within the framework, but missed it, fair enough. Mind you, in groping around for an end point and looking at what I wrote, I realise I wasn't there to help, either, so what can I say about what to do at the crunch point, eh?

[Ron Edwards]

Hello Callan,

The problem with your questions is that I don't especially agree with your premise in either case. First, I do not think that raw procedure is wholly obliged to produce the experience one is seeking. That's like saying a musical instrument does all the work of making the music. One may certainly reflect on one's performance with a musical instrument in a particular moment in a way which lays no ultimate responsibility upon the instrument's physical design.

Second, the point I talked about with Andrew did not emerge in that conversation as instructions from him to me. I raised the issue myself to see what he thought. Your master-apprentice model doesn't apply to that conversation.

Best, Ron

[JoyWriter]

Some of the things I picked up in terms of creepyness were the dehumanisation of professionalism (sort of acting like "the foreigner" in terms of making his behaviour alien) and the subtle of collapse of independence without a growth of trust.

I.E. this incomprehensible guy is misusing the position we've given him and we can't quite find a way out of it.

Now that doesn't quite sync up for me with a chase, nor with some kind of mundane vampirism: The creepy thing about the alien abduction of cattle as opposed to some "beast" doing it is that there's a sort of non-biological cruelty there, it's not linked to straightforward stuff like sustenance or resources, but curiosity.

Who knows, maybe the difference I notice there actually helped, shifted people off their normal expectations, but I wonder whether it would have been possible to make it seem more "unnecessary", or make more of their adversity legal or procedural, so some polite but tired hospital attendant gently takes them back into the lab, having dealt with "crazy sleep deprived people" before, and the doctor thanks him for his help, with a dodgy look in his eye.

Basically pulling back on the classic horror staple "people start running, weapons are improvised, and it all goes bloody" and meaning that if any actual killing is going to happen, the players will be the ones starting it.

Phoo, pretty nasty, even if it is impersonal; because it draws part of it's horror from the impersonal nature.

[Callan S.]

The problem with your questions is that I don't especially agree with your premise in either case. First, I do not think that raw procedure is wholly obliged to produce the experience one is seeking. That's like saying a musical instrument does all the work of making the music.

I don't think I said what your disagreeing with? I was asking are you kicking yourself for not meeting the experience you were seeking, or are you kicking yourself for not playing the game right?

If you play baa baa black sheep on a guitar, it's correct and valid use of the guitar and it's procedures, even if what you wanted to do was rock out some nirvana and shit. What you did looks like correct use of the instrument.

One may certainly reflect on one's performance with a musical instrument in a particular moment in a way which lays no ultimate responsibility upon the instrument's physical design.

In that moment, perhaps, but it's after that moment now? We could now link the two together. Don't have to of course.

Second, the point I talked about with Andrew did not emerge in that conversation as instructions from him to me. I raised the issue myself to see what he thought. Your master-apprentice model doesn't apply to that conversation.

I don't understand - in my experience, teachers rarely try and find students. Usually the other way around. And I dunno, I just read it that the conversation was along the lines of how the game is properly played, rather than just discussing how he played it just out of interest and you might take that on board in part or whole or chuck it out the window. Again it was just along the lines of asking are you kicking yourself for not meeting the experience you were seeking, or are you kicking yourself for not playing the game right?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Callan,

If I understand your question correctly, and I might not, then my concern is not playing the game as well as I would have liked. I don't think we played it poorly. Nor do I think we "played it wrong," but that phrase is so problematic and loaded that I think it impedes the discussion.

I hope that answers your question.

Hi Josh,

That's a good point. I think the big deal for me is that I see hospital culture and the doctor mystique as having that impersonal horrific quality in reality, and so simply "monsterizing" it felt quite fitted at the time. I think that I might have done a bit better to personalize the direct threat in some way, but the tricky part is to keep the personalization from softening the fear rather than accentuating it. Perhaps, to use your cow example, the aliens have only just decided to upgrade from cows to people, and your character is the first one they've got. That kind of context doesn't illuminate or humanize the aliens, but it does "make it personal" in the context of decisions the aliens are making. That's what I think might have brought enough power to the scenario to rev up the fear-factor.

Your point about the hospital attendant is nicely confirmed by one of my NPCs, who played that exact role during play. In fact, I bet threatening him would have been a good move on my part, because the players liked him so much.

Best, Ron

[andrew_kenrick]

The game does not enter a wrap-up stage until Tension hits 15. Therefore, at one point, the two player-characters had apparently escaped from the sinister sleep-lab in the ever-increasingly creepy hospital, and if it had been up to "GM feels like it," then I might have ended the session there. But no, Tension was only 10 (I think). We had to play more.

Did this work for you Ron? Did you begrudge the rules for forcing you to play on when you thought you'd finish, or did it encourage you to push the horror up a notch?

The rules also displayed an interesting outcome I hadn't seen before: what happens to characters whose points are maxed toward Escape and Protection. It's reeeeeally hard to hurt such characters with monster Assault!

One of the few rules alts I'm making for the 2nd ed is a change to how you lose survival points from checks. There's now something called a "Risky" check - any check can be risky, and if it is the loser loses a survival point. So in most circumstances combat is risky, but in certain circumstances Escape checks might be (if the capture of the escapee leads to a diminishing of their chances of survival), as might Identify checks (dabbling into dark tomes or finding something that helps you defeat a demon). What counts as risky is left to the GM, although when prepping Tension circumstances I suggest the GM considers what sort of checks might be risky.

As a side note on Tension, I've been posting my thoughts on how you might tweak Tension to use DoN for different games here.

[Callan S.]

Hi Callan,

If I understand your question correctly, and I might not, then my concern is not playing the game as well as I would have liked. I don't think we played it poorly. Nor do I think we "played it wrong," but that phrase is so problematic and loaded that I think it impedes the discussion.

I hope that answers your question.

Thanks. And you can see what I'm getting at, even if it doesn't happen to apply here - if someone plays baa baa black sheep on a guitar I don't think that's them not playing the guitar as well as they would have liked? Or atleast it doesn't seem a productive perspective.

Also I'll stretch the music analogy in how many musicians, even the one guy, often record one instrument playing, then...dunno the right word...play it's recording and overlap it with another instrument they are playing themselves. So sure, the instrument doesn't do all the work for you, but at the same time that doesn't mean the only music playing has to be only the stuff your making then and there. Me looking at what procedure provides is looking for that first recording, which is kind of like back up vocals and...now the analogies have put you to sleep, I'll just grab your wallet and run!