Serious warning: Seriously, if you're easily upset or offended about modern-day events, especially those involving Islamic jihad and September 11, this isn't the thread for you.

I've been running my new game, The Face of Angels, a lot recently, testing out the rules. If you're not up on the game, it's a story-telling game where all characters begin on their graduation night from high school and gain supernatural powers. There's a slight hint of divinity implied. It's highly structured, and you play through certain acts where you are limited as to what you can do and what you must do.

In the latest series, I'm playing with two guys, Remi and Jason. Their characters are:

- Graham Williams III, a WASP footballer with a Jewish arch-enemy
- Raed Jamil, a Chaldean (Arabic Christian)

Graham's a King (a leader) while Raed's an Ace (a freak and loner.)

After a brief prologue of Ultimate Foreshadowing (that is, the two protagonists fought in a parking lot), the two were struck by lightning and they got powers. What were these powers? They both chose to have the ability to turn into a eight-foot-tall version of the Prophet Mohammed. Which is insane, and sets the game to be all about this. Graham turns into the Red Prophet and Raed turns into the Black Prophet.

I am not going to recount all the events in the game so far, as fun as they might be. Suffice it to say Remi and Jason are highly inventive guys who can find a lot of wicked humor in the interactions of middle-manager white conservative Christians and Islam. I want to talk about Act 2 and what happened there. Getting there real quick:

The prologue was set in 1989 in Groton, Connecticut.

Act 1 was set in 1999 in Groton. Raed was in town from Chicago, where he'd moved. He was there for a software conference and his sister still lived in Groton. He witnessed Graham's first transformation (at a software conference! pure fucking comedy gold, I say!) into Mohammed and we took off from there. The act climaxed with the two of them playing Action Prophet all over a group of terrorists. Strangely, Tomar Avraham, a Jewish kid who Graham fought with in high school, is one of the terrorists, as he's the leader of a radical group called Jews for a Free Palestine.

Act 2 is set - you guessed it - in 2001. We start in spring and the pair of Prophets have established a mosque in New York City and have been converting old Spanish Harlem into Little Mecca. Raed is getting ready to get married to the princess of Oman, which is home to a really interesting version of Islam. There's some initial conflict with Nation of Islam dudes, but the real conflict is now between the two Prophets. Graham doesn't want Raed to get married and they throw down and Graham ends up being exiled. He moves to Jersey and starts training terrorists after being approached by an Afghani investor.

The act climaxes on September 11. Not only is Graham involved in training, but his best friend, and high school linebacker, and convert, is the 20th hijacker, slamming a plane with Raed's sister on it into the Pentagon. Raed and Graham fight at the WTC as Raed tries to empty a tower of people. Graham ends up dragging him through the ruins and Raed's left to be arrested and blamed. The CIA comes for Graham later, planning to use him as a tool in the upcoming global war on Islam and they get spanked by the now discredited Raed, who turns over his organization to Graham and moves to Oman.

Oh, and the act ends with Graham forcing the mayor of New York to apologize on national television to the world for his role in the continued U.S. subjugation of the rest of the world, especially the Muslim world. Within two months, he converts and Graham ends up taking over NYC, turning it into a Muslim enclave. We fully expect Act 3 to quickly establish the northeast US as a new Muslim state.

What we're really talking about
We're talking about using high-octane, very touchy subjects as fodder for RPGs, and whether that's even morally acceptable. We obviously decided yes, but all of us were somewhat uncomfortable. Jason, who for Pete's sake wrote a game about roaches in your nasal cavity that cause you to commit anal rape (well, that happened in our game), said he felt sick before we actually did the Ground Zero scene.

This isn't a "here's what I've found" post. I'm not sure what I've found. This is more a "provoke a discussion" post. Has this bothered you, knowing people are playing this? Are we being disrespectful to the victims of that day? Is our glorification and simultaneous skewering of liberal givens just too over the top?

Jason and Remi, I really want to hear what you've got to say.

Hey, Clinton --

Sounds cool.  What liberal preconceptions did you see yourself skewering?

How was the main characters' relationships to religion changed over the course of the game?  Do they see themselves as above other Muslims?  Do they see themselves as slaves to God, or are they more using the fact that they have this incarnation to manipulate the faith?  Or some other thing?

yrs--
--Ben

Hi,

Have you done much exploration of why it makes you feel uncomfortable and it's a touchy subject? Those feelings are coming up as you play through various issues. But has it become the thing to stop and examine, rather than to just go on to playing through further issues?

Ben wrote:
Hey, Clinton --

Sounds cool.  What liberal preconceptions did you see yourself skewering?

How was the main characters' relationships to religion changed over the course of the game?  Do they see themselves as above other Muslims?  Do they see themselves as slaves to God, or are they more using the fact that they have this incarnation to manipulate the faith?  Or some other thing?

Callan wrote:
Have you done much exploration of why it makes you feel uncomfortable and it's a touchy subject? Those feelings are coming up as you play through various issues. But has it become the thing to stop and examine, rather than to just go on to playing through further issues?

Ben wrote:
How was the main characters' relationships to religion changed over the course of the game?  Do they see themselves as above other Muslims?  Do they see themselves as slaves to God, or are they more using the fact that they have this incarnation to manipulate the faith?  Or some other thing?

Clinton wrote:
This isn't a "here's what I've found" post. I'm not sure what I've found. This is more a "provoke a discussion" post. Has this bothered you, knowing people are playing this? Are we being disrespectful to the victims of that day? Is our glorification and simultaneous skewering of liberal givens just too over the top?

Clinton wrote: This isn't a "here's what I've found" post. I'm not sure what I've found. This is more a "provoke a discussion" post. Has this bothered you, knowing people are playing this? Are we being disrespectful to the victims of that day? Is our glorification and simultaneous skewering of liberal givens just too over the top?

Jason wrote:
The whole session, a heady mix of trivializing a massive terrorist attack and debasing a major world religion, was a tiny bit transgressive.  It was unlike anything I've ever done at a game table and I really enjoyed it.   

Callan wrote:
Have you done much exploration of why it makes you feel uncomfortable and it's a touchy subject? Those feelings are coming up as you play through various issues. But has it become the thing to stop and examine, rather than to just go on to playing through further issues?

Clinton wrote:
Something really cool here - I didn't see us as either trivializing the attack or debasing Islam.

Clinton wrote: This isn't a "here's what I've found" post. I'm not sure what I've found. This is more a "provoke a discussion" post. Has this bothered you, knowing people are playing this? Are we being disrespectful to the victims of that day? Is our glorification and simultaneous skewering of liberal givens just too over the top?

Ben wrote: How was the main characters' relationships to religion changed over the course of the game?  Do they see themselves as above other Muslims?  Do they see themselves as slaves to God, or are they more using the fact that they have this incarnation to manipulate the faith?  Or some other thing?

I'd say as long as you gave fair warning that's what you were playing, it's fine.

It would be harsh to sit someone into such a directly emotional media relating to something they weren't comfortable with.  Just as it's harsh to force someone to watch a film about gladiators in Rome if they find that part of history distressing, or to read a book about trench warfare if they really don't want to.

Personally 9/11 is less distressing than WW2.  But I'm not morally averse to telling a story about anything.  It's a story.  If things are trivial enough that you can belittle them by storytelling, they aren't worth keeping important.

Importantly I think that only you can know if you trivialise something in a roleplaying game you run.  If playing the game made you discount the importance of what happened on that day to our understanding of the world both before and after, or care less for the familys and friends of victims, then yes, it was probably a bad thing.

Clinton wrote:
I did see us as showing how the attack had personal repercussions for our characters, and yeah, we totally gave the TV version of it, but it wasn't like we were all "I fly my black horse into the skies to prevent the plane!" Instead, we made it inevitable and personal.

I've always seen my roleplaying as an attempt at catharsis. A way to imagine how I would confront terrible things, or a metaphoric way to explore my feelings about things that are happening. My players sometimes share that yearning, and sometimes want complete escapism, so I try to mix it up a bit.

These days I'm running a Mage game for an old friend. He is viewing the game as totally escapist, being a way to balance out the powerlessness in his life. He's recently learned that his father will die of cancer within the next year. After he suggested we play he went on to talk about how he wished he had more sick days from work to spend with his father since time is running out. That conversation has been the secret inspiration for the game, with an atagonist in the last year of his life trying to do all the things he ever wanted to accomplish before dying (and with magic users, that's dangerous for everyone else.) I haven't told Chris about this yet. And I'm not sure I will.

I want to work these things out for us, the whole "what would you do if you knew your life was ending" spiel, but in a more delicate way than say, the new movie starring Queen Latifah. These questions are in the game, but not on the surface because it's definitely too close for Chris' comfort. Definitely bad for the social contract, but I can't turn away from these issues myself.

So, that gets to my question. Does veiling the experience by seeing the events through a character's eyes make it easier? Is that trivialising the concept? Or is it just evil of me to be doing this at all?

gains wrote:
So, that gets to my question. Does veiling the experience by seeing the events through a character's eyes make it easier? Is that trivialising the concept? Or is it just evil of me to be doing this at all?

gains wrote: So, that gets to my question. Does veiling the experience by seeing the events through a character's eyes make it easier? Is that trivialising the concept? Or is it just evil of me to be doing this at all?

LeSingeSavant wrote:
Face of Angels as a relatively low-fidelity game

Clinton wrote:
Our game, by the way, isn't really doing that like I normally would, with true metaphor. Instead, we're approaching the real problem through character, which is kind of an unintentional experiment for me.

LeSingeSavant wrote:
I'm still a little mixed on the session as a whole. It was incredibly intense, and I believe it was the right thing to do, but I'm still a little uncomfortable even a couple days later. It's like the game was a direct tap into my feelings at that time.

Clinton wrote:

LeSingeSavant wrote:
I'm still a little mixed on the session as a whole. It was incredibly intense, and I believe it was the right thing to do, but I'm still a little uncomfortable even a couple days later. It's like the game was a direct tap into my feelings at that time.

Well, I think the final two sessions will be easier, as we extrapolate a lot more. We'll see - they could get intense as we tap into our darkest fears of global religious war, but I think that it'll be a lot less personally anchored.

I actually didn't find it intense per se.  I felt pretty mellow throughout, and I think a lot of that is the result of the specific techniques in play - using cards in a tactical way breaks up the narrative tension.  There's no opportunity for a big emotional build; you have to consider your next play. 

There was a really powerful moment when (in preparation for a conflict that we later avoided)  I tried to put myself in the place of Raeda, my sister on flight 77, and had this strong, terrifying moment of empathy with the people who actually died.  And that was horrible but instructive.  I did have some back-of-my-mind questions about whether it was appropriate to be doing what we were doing, or if it was ultimately respectful, and I decided it was. 

Empathy, there we go. That's what makes these kind of conflicts worth having! And it's easier to pull from our first hand history to get people wondering about how both sides felt than to try to get a band of adventurers to feel for a mythical beast.

This however has opened other doors in my games. A player I will refer to as Jerk, began suggesting historical events that our Technocrat group could have been responsible for after my "recent history" game led to them setting off the bomb at the Atlanta Olympics to hide evidence. He went so far as to suggest the Oklahoma bombing of McVey before his girlfriend actually hit him to shut him up. For him it was about having power over these events, not exploring them from unusual angles.

In reflection, I think that's what can trivialize the use of current events.

Clinton wrote:

LeSingeSavant wrote:
I'm still a little mixed on the session as a whole. It was incredibly intense, and I believe it was the right thing to do, but I'm still a little uncomfortable even a couple days later. It's like the game was a direct tap into my feelings at that time.

Well, I think the final two sessions will be easier, as we extrapolate a lot more. We'll see - they could get intense as we tap into our darkest fears of global religious war, but I think that it'll be a lot less personally anchored.

TheTris wrote:
It seems to me it would be a shame to drop what emotional involvement you have so far with the situation.  Global war is a cheap way out if it steps away from the empathy and horror the players have experienced in the build up.  I think the challenge is to play the global war as if it were as real as the rest of the story, and avoid an anticlimax when global war feels much less meaningful than your gaming of the more immediate events surrounding 9/11.

Jason wrote:
I actually didn't find it intense per se.  I felt pretty mellow throughout, and I think a lot of that is the result of the specific techniques in play - using cards in a tactical way breaks up the narrative tension.  There's no opportunity for a big emotional build; you have to consider your next play. 

Hi!

I'm Tristan, but please call me Tris, everyone does.  I can see I might get asked that question a lot, so I'd better go about making some kind of sig to let people know.

Tris