The conversation about safewords reminded me of this story.

Here's some safeword-relevant context: I've run like a million demos of kill puppies for satan. What I do when I run a puppies demo, I use all kinds of "stop" signals in such a way that the group takes 'em as provocation. Like this:

Me: And ... I mean ... what do you do with the (flinch) sweet little kitten?

Player: I put the blender on 'whip'...

Me: (covering my face)

Player: ...I drop the kitten in.

Me: Ugh, can you imagine the sound that must make? And the sound the kitten must make? I can't believe you just did that, that's just sick, I changed my mind about playing this game with you. You don't, y'know, drink it, do you?

Player: And I drink it!

Thusly.

So here it's Friday morning at GenCon and first of all I'm not at my peak. (I figured out later that it was my first ever hangover, from one beer plus dehydration - a milestone! I thought I was dying!) But even so, I've run a puppies demo or two already this con and I've noticed something lacking. Some measure of the thrill, maybe, is gone? I'm musing and looking warily at the customers in the booth. No, don't pick up that game... Dammit. Okay, look through it and laugh, that's fine, but don't ... Andy, please don't point to me... Dammit. Okay, wave, that's fine, but don't come over here... Dammit. With that gleam in your eyes. God damn it anyway.

So five minutes later they've fed the seeing eye dogs doggie aphrodesiacs and are leading them into the nursing home or some shit. I'm not giving them my usual provocation signals. I'm rolling my eyes a little, looking sideways, going "yeah, yeah, kitten in the blender, seen it." In my head I'm like, guys, I know this is news to you, but Jesus. How many kitten frappes am I supposed to be grossed out by? How much pointless atrocity and dog rape before it's all the same?

And damn if I don't cut the game short. They're in mid-sentence about the nursing home patients' nighties and I'm like "Yeah. We could keep playing for another twenty minutes and it'd just be twenty minutes more of this."

They're startled. They look at each other. They look back at me. One of 'em still has his mouth open from me interrupting him in the middle of his sentence.

"So you wanna talk about what this game is like over time instead? Or maybe I can show you some other games?"

They've kind of gotten into puppies' groove, so we end up talking a bit about lines and veils, in a nice casual conversation-about-roleplaying way. I say my piece about how there's "the line" out there somewhere, and even with the dog rape we weren't anywhere near it, but the game gets extremely fucking cool when you get close to it. They're receptive and they even buy the game.

But, if they'd stood right up and left in a huff, they'd'a been justified. When I broke off the game it was abrupt and inconsiderate. I did it anyway.

-Vincent
who maybe was lying about the dog rape not being anywhere near the line, or maybe was just genuinely made bored and impatient by it. It's kind of hard to tell.

Interesting. Sounds like the "insensitivity to violence" thing that people are always going on about with pop culture entertainment. kpfs is way beyond what you normally see in mainstream entertainment, but from massive repeated exposure you are starting to find it all rather dull.

Does this mean you need to keep escalating to continue to reach the line you are talking about? I wonder if anyone else who has played this game multiple times has reached the same state.

Does this mean you need to keep escalating to continue to reach the line you are talking about? I wonder if anyone else who has played this game multiple times has reached the same state.

Uh...

No, I'd say instead that you reach the line by targeting, not by escalating. It's hitting on the right atrocity that makes the game interesting, not the most atrocity.

Escalation of atrocity that's not directed toward the line is fun the first few (dozen) times, but eventually tiresome. That's my thinking, anyhow.

edit: Or else I've just already said what I want to say with the puppies demos, and I'm not getting the fulfillment out of 'em I used to. I've proved my point and now I'm just repeating myself, like. Atrocity quite aside.

-Vincent

Isn't KPfS "targeting", in terms of the atrocities, the sense of "why, God, why?" in the ordinary people? I mean, rather than just going with escalating disgustingness, which I saw once in a Warhammer RPG game where we all played servants of Chaos Lords, might it be effective to cut to pet-owners' reactions or something? I don't know; I'm sort of struggling with Vincent's point -- apart from the "I shouldn't have done this", which I totally got.

Chris, did you read this unbelievably cool kpfs writeup of Claire's? In that game, the PC's bestiality was atrocity in good fun, but the suggestion that the sheep enjoyed it was over the line. When I say targeted atrocity, I mean targeted at the individual play group at that moment. Something is gonna touch the players, what is it?

-Vincent

When I say targeted atrocity, I mean targeted at the individual play group at that moment. Something is gonna touch the players, what is it?

Nicely put. And this is why I really want to play kpfs again, to the mystification of some of my gaming group. We had a good time when we played, but in retrospect, I think one of the things I said I enjoyed about that session--the presence of a non-playing, somewhere between mock-horrified and real-horrified spectator--actually interfered with getting to that place where, according to Vincent and many others, the game gets "extremely fucking cool." line. Because it was easy to come up with ways to mock-horrify Michelle (our bystander), but what I really want to do is horrify myself a little.

lumpley wrote: Chris, did you read this unbelievably cool kpfs writeup of Claire's? In that game, the PC's bestiality was atrocity in good fun, but the suggestion that the sheep enjoyed it was over the line. When I say targeted atrocity, I mean targeted at the individual play group at that moment. Something is gonna touch the players, what is it?

Do you think this is because risk needs to be rewarded for the dynamic to work? Or because people feel better able to deal with atrocity when they feel like they're dealing with it better than someone else?

Perhaps it gives a feeling of safety that lets them get to the targetted atrocity, the thing that they really can't deal with, that they'd never have got to otherwise because they'd have believed themselves unable to deal with stuff earlier?

Don't know, just speculating aloud.

I do know that when I ran kpfs I also had a very strong sense of daring the players to come up with more and more shocking stuff, but I did so differently. There was no point in pretending that they were horrifying me with what they were inventing, because my players expect me to come up with way worse ideas than them in normal game play, so it instead became 'come up with something really good, or I'll get creative myself, and you don't know what it will be but you know you won't like it' all communicated with an evil smile. That was enough to get them competing against each other.

But I imagine that it's a game that gets tricky after a while as one level is exhausted. Is there another? Needs long term play, to find out, perhaps?

Hello,

I dunno, Vincent, none of this thread is working for me - most especially the assumption that the in-game atrocities are what eventually jar the participants.

In-game atrocities are already a big deal from the first moment of play. Killing puppies? Eww! I was already there. (Check out my old KPFS threads if ya don't recall.) I don't care what anyone did to a critter during play; it was usually Veiled and it was all bad, from the start.

Another way of looking at it, which might give the wrong message if folks don't stick with me here, is that a lot of the games I play go damned far in terms of player-character actions. We were played Le Mon Mouri concurrently with KPFS, and it was a brutal and appalling experience. Same goes for Violence Future, with another group, earlier that year.

All this is not to say that I'm hardened to atrocity, but rather that its perpetration by characters in KPFS is not a novel thing, and as such, does not itself constitute any threshold of self-realization.

Nope - the point of KPFS as I see it is much different, and also as Vincent, Paul, and I discussed last year: it is pity. Pity for the player-characters, who are these utter feebs with their crusty underwear and their dead-end jobs or grubby little apartments. They are not Ee-Vil ... they are losers. They're even losers at being bad.

The atrocity-stuff plays into this only insofar as it does not really get them anything. That's the insight over time: no matter how badly you kill a puppy or whatever, it's just spinning the player-character's hamster-wheel. However, the immediate story works out, the feeb isn't anything but.

Typically, the pity is expressed through the players not wanting the characters to be so badly hosed after all, and maybe letting the poor squalid group of'em get a glimmer of friendship in the middle of all this. It's expressed through Mercy, speaking as authors, toward our hopelessly-incompetent, hopelessly-rebellious, utterly-uncool creations.

Convention play can't do that, I think. Convention play showcases the atrocities and essentially gives the players the thrill of "doing bad," much like the characters. It's the adolescent thrill that people got from seeing Charles Manson's crew with the swastikas carved in their foreheads - shocking, terrible, awful, but the fourteen-year-old smirks a little to think about how his or her parents would be so freaked out.

If I'm not mistaken, Vincent, the weariness or impatience you're talking about comes from knowing that convention play simply will not do what the game does. And further, that playing it with people who really get into that adolescent thrill is wearying on its own.

Here's a suggestion: the minute someone does something that involves people really getting hurt or abused (e.g. the old people that those players brought in), a demon oughta show up and warn off the player-characters, as they're scabbing on unionized work. That way, maybe the con scenario can hint at the point, that the players will never really cross a line except for the one they already crossed by writing the first line at the top of the character sheet.

They can't cross any more lines. They're feebs. The line we cross is when we take pity on them.

Best,
Ron

The atrocity-stuff plays into this only insofar as it does not really get them anything. That's the insight over time: no matter how badly you kill a puppy or whatever, it's just spinning the player-character's hamster-wheel. However, the immediate story works out, the feeb isn't anything but.

Vincent wrote: How much pointless atrocity and dog rape before it's all the same?

Oh, I dunno, Luke. I don't think Evil in KPFS functions like reward systems in other games at all, especially over several cycles. The very observation that you grew tired of it supports this point.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Oh, I dunno, Luke. I don't think Evil in KPFS functions like reward systems in other games at all, especially over several cycles. The very observation that you grew tired of it supports this point.

Best,
Ron

Ah! Here I agree with you, in full. You can see in my review where I criticize the game for relying too much on Social Contract with no System beef underlying it. The main effect lies in IIEE, which is the crucial part of System in which who says what, and which which character goes when, are organized.

As you know from BW, if there weren't combat scripting or any other organizing factor, results of fights would devolve to GM fiat because the context for each strike would be his to control. That's why the game is improved so much by the scripted repartee rules now, for exactly the same reason.

Therefore in KPFS the GM must shoulder the burden of all three: delivering the adversity, administering it, and resolving it. All the dice rolling and actions-announcing by the players are just coloring his paint-by-numbers picture.

To me, that is a serious mechanics flaw in the game, for exactly as you state, the GM is more likely to Get It before the players and enter a weary phase, wondering when they will get it. Here is where your post, mine, and Vincent's are all in accord.

I was able to dodge this in my game for two reasons: (1) I was very up-front during play in pointing out when I was simply driving things my way, to change the Railroading into Participationism; (2) we concentrated greatly on the point that play produced an endless spiral of zaniness, cruelty, and risk, via our dialogue as we went along.

Best,
Ron

You'll understand that I'm not defending puppies, I'm agreeing with you, when I say: when I wrote it, I had never seen a functional set of game rules.

Puppies was my "fuck you" to the hobby as I experienced it in the late 90s. The further I, and you, and roleplaying itself are from that wad of grief, the less clever puppies is gonna be. That's my prediction.

(And I'm glad that nobody's clamoring for a redesigned kill puppies for satan that actually delivers on its promises. Because no way on earth.)

-Vincent

Dammit, I wanted to mention there seems to be no mechanical support for GM and players hitting the pity mark at the same time! And dammit, I was going to suggest additions to the mechanics!


Ah screw it, I will anyway for my own mental puzzle amusement. It looks like you get points for doing evil crap. I think you could have some sort of pity meter, and these points also add pity points to this meter. It's clearly marked at various numbers with highly descriptive text about how pathetic someone would have to be to reach this mark.

Also I'd have a slight plus/minus to each batch of points added from a horrid act, determined by the GM. That way he can speed it up or slow it down somewhat, depending on how close to the line he feels he is.

Basically the chart has some point where it says 'Just stop for a moment and think about what you've done, dammit'. At this point play is stopped for some reflection.

Then I'd recommend starting play again because it'll be weak and crappy. Everyone will see the chart ends here, they've thought about their characters actions and a malaise will set in which they will associate with their characters. Everyone will just sort of want to wrap it up now and get away from their disgusting character.


Anyway, that's what I think. But since the author isn't interested, I doubt anyone is. Which means the biggest result I can get from this is if anyone heaviliy disagrees with it enough to respond. Great, why did I type this? ;)

Edit: Ohh, and I just remembered Vincent mentioned that he wasn't doing 'come on, do something evil signs'. This means a game signal was lacking...normally if he were giving these signs in game, but then stopped the players would think 'if were not supposed to do that, what are we supposed to do' and might hit the pity line. Without out any signal to do something (and its subsequent removal), there is no trigger for a change of behaviour.