Hello,

I've been trying to organize a game of carry for ages, but keep screwing it up or getting blocked by hassles. Finally, last Tuesday night, we sat down to it. I'd hoped to have more people, but ultimately the group was me, Tim A, Tim K, and Chris. With only three players and a GM, I decided to drop Fire Squad Charlie, for a total of 11 characters in the platoon.

We started with a little chat about Vietnam, including a couple of maps I'd printed out and some geography - it surprises me how many Americans with strong opinions about the war don't even know the layout of the Indochina Peninsula and what "south" and "north" Vietnam really meant in that context. Being me, I couldn't help but bring up the earlier history of the war and getting sort of mad. All this chat turned out be useful, though, as it ended with the comment that none of the characters in the platoon knew a single thing about any of the stuff we'd just talked about.19-year old kid from Hoboken or somewhere, some basic training, and wham, you're there.

We made up the burdens and chose Grunts, with the following results (burden entries are listed in order):

Elmo Smith (accuser), played by Chris
- V.C. run ... the ones who don't run are brave V.C.
- shoots out of bloodlust
- the brave V.C. get to die quick

Wendell White (brawler), played by Tim A
- writes letters every day
- has a girlfriend back home
- all of the above is used as a cover to hide his homosexuality

Tommy Bunting (invincible), played by Tim K
- never let buddies die (fear)
- won't form lasting relationships, keeps distance
- paranoid: everyone hates him and will get him

Not a warrior, a soldier, or a companion in sight ... uh oh.

I'd like to play a few more times to be sure, but all of us found the mechanic for initially distributing dice to be pretty fiddly for little perceived gain. On the other hand, there might be some strategy that becomes more evident after you know the game better, and the rules indicate as much too. I mean, not strategizing in the sense of dominating the game, but in the sense of focusing or broadening how you're about to play, relative to your Grunt's profile.

We did the social contract chat as well, discovering that almost all of us had career military family members who'd served in Vietnam, and that none of us saw any reason to restrict content. As you'll see.

What happened in play

I started with a squad scene, when the platoon discovers a weapons cache in a village and the villagers go all sullen and silent. I worked off the descriptions of other squad members (Fodder) and presented a situation which was mostly defined by lack of communication - the commanding officer's few memorized, mispronounced phrases were not generating any results, and it was damned hot and sticky. The upshot of the scene, as it turned out, was that Smith instigated a massacre.

As we worked through the mechanics of a squad scene, it was immediately obvious that having two physical knuckle-draggers be privates with a lance corporal accuser would bode no good. There was no mechanical effect that subordinated them to him (as in an action scene), but still - predictably and appropriately, the other two characters started off pretty submissive, in not directly opposing Smith. And as it turned out, Chris won the roll, in trying to goad the higher-ranking officers into extreme action, including his very nasty abuse of some of the women (a rifle butt to the face).

I confess that I waffled about narrating this resolution, being squeamish. But then I sucked it up and accepted that Chris had won - OK, the intra-squad conflict is resolved: the Americans start using force, including shooting. Once having committed to it, I didn't want to walk the story away from the situation, and decided that we could move straight into the consequences as an action scene.

So, we went into an action scene in the middle of said massacre. I found my stride in this one, as I learned quickly to narrate results of stated actions and sub-frame each one to put tremendous pressure on the CO. The more I could stress out Chris' character (Elmo) with immediate crises, the more likely he'd give orders that the other Grunts would be disinclined to follow, or at least would have to grapple with. This is Sorcerer territory, as well as Dust Devils and Trollbabe - my kind of GMing.

The scene went through a couple of rounds of narration, with the final one being one of the Fodder (Steinbeck, Smith's fire squad commander) actually confronting him at gunpoint as the bloody-faced woman armed a grenade and flung herself at both of them.

Chris won the roll again, and instantly found out how much fun it was to spread destruction throughout the squad. He was perfectly happy to wound his own Grunt from the fringe of the grenade blast, to hurt another Grunt, and to lose a couple of guys from the platoon. He ruled that the Fallout made the Grunts' burdens increase.

By the way, regarding Fallout, we used a rules modification that Nathan had suggested: Grunts whose burden die had been contributed, in the winning pool, take Fallout as the narrator sees fit without spending Fallout points. It means the Fodder really get ripped by the Fallout points, and that burdens guarantee Fallout for their users, but without those two effects diminishing one another. I like it.

We all observed that the role of narration per round is absolutely crucial. Even though it's not significant in terms of points or dice, it has everything to do with each person's stated actions and responses for the next round. This is an effect that we don't have a jargon term for - the pure impact of narration on the SIS at a small action-by-action scale, which is a key element in Sorcerer, Trollbabe, Dogs, Dust Devils, Shadow of Yesterday, and HeroQuest (extended conflict) play that is very very hard to explain to a person who has only experienced (a) highly traditional Fortune-at-the-End or (b) wide-open scene-level narration of the My Life with Master or Primetime Adventures sort. It is the single weakest element of design in most of the games that I brought home from GenCon, but it is beautiful and shining in carry.

All right, looking back over those first two scenes, I developed Fodder as characters to varying degrees, with good effects. However, in the remaining scenes of the session, I didn't really live up to that, with one exception, with the result that their deaths or other fates weren't as strongly imagined. So, note to self, when playing carry, take the time to give lines and a brief visual bit to as many Fodder as possible.

The next squad scene concerned the three Grunts hanging out at night, smokin' dope, and getting into an argument with Steinbeck, who was still pissed off at Elmo and wanted to make an issue of it by telling him to get rid of his stash. It was basically Smith vs. Steinbeck in a pissing match, including a couple of punches, and Chris ended up losing this one since the other two Grunts backed off from siding with him, and Wendell stood up to everyone to settle the fight down. It also led to our first Profile change, as Wendell shifted from brawler to invincible.

Well, that just led to the perfect setup for me, a bit that had lurked in my mind as soon as I'd read Wendell's complete burden. It's another squad scene: late at night, Wendell and Tommy are sacked out in their tent. (I had Chris sit this one out, as all three scenes so far had mainly been about Elmo.) Wendell wakes up to realize that Tommy has chosen this private moment to jerk off. And Wendell's lonely, latent as latent can get, and he's shifted to invincible, and hey, maybe what happens in Vietnam stays in Vietnam.

Tim A nodded. Yup, it was time for Wendell to see if maybe Tommy might, you know, want company in the activity. Through three rounds, the conflict saw fantastic system use, because Tim A's dice pool had refreshed to capacity due to his profile change, and Tim K's pool was occupied only by high dice. That meant that as Tommy resisted, he was forced to use higher dice - i.e., a Violent approach given his profile. The horrible thing about it, dramatically, and you should have been there to see all four of us groan out loud with sympathy, was that Wendell switched to Honorable for his last roll in trying to acknowledge that he'd made a mistake ... and Tommy's only mechanically available approach was Violent. Tim K won that roll, and thus an outraged and embarassed Tommy beat the crap out of Wendell, who didn't even put up his hands to resist.

So next, it was time for another action scene, and I decided to follow up on the whole weapons cache idea to have the platoon detailed to creep through some VC tunnels to an arsenal that had been located, and destroy it. We probably butchered about 100 things about actual combat and layout for the historical period, but to make a several-round story short, it was totally disastrous for the platoon. Wendell made another Profile shift to warrior. As it turned out, I won the roll this time, and killed off or otherwise eliminated every remaining Fodder character except for Steinbeck ... and also ruled that the four of them were 100% captured by the Viet Cong. I used Fallout (both free and points) to raise burdens left and right.

Well, the four of us are all working stiffs, and at this point we'd hit nearly three hours of play after starting a bit late. We called play for the evening and will pick it up from there next time. I think we've got about one squad scene and one action scene left before endgame.

Rules questions

Our main questions pertain to orders during action scenes.

1. As we currently understand it, it seems like the high-ranking Grunt will never lose more than one die during these scenes. Is that correct?

2. Can the Grunt CO use his burden die in action scenes? If so, does it add, or is it his single die that he can use?

3. Increasing one's burden die means trading it with a die from the un-owned dice pool, right? What if the right size isn't there?

And finally, more generally and most importantly, is it absolutely set in concrete throughout play that the highest-ranking Grunt is giving orders to the other Grunts in these scenes? I know the rules say that that player can take over the fodder-CO's role, but in doing so, is his burden die for his Grunt still available? (which doesn't seem to make sense) What about situations in which the Grunts are extremely widely separated?

Comments and praise

This is a great game. I see it as the powerful offspring of Dust Devils, not necessarily in terms of what Nathan has played and what inspired him, more in the sense of looking at the families of techniques in modern Narrativist design.

I partticularly like the real-life timing and fictional scope of play, as the game is eminently playable in a solid evening. This really qualifies as a short-term power-puncher. I also like the fact that you can play it many, many times and it will always be very different based on which Grunts are chosen and what burdens are generated.

The system shows the strength of some kickass playtesting. The incredibly solid and powerful system is integrated with solid and powerful issue, and that issue is partly generated by the play group rather than simply shoved at them up-front.

As for the direct resolution system, I suggest that it really shines in how narration interacts with the SIS, influenced by (as in totally requiring) the dice, but still highly organic and creative. It's very much like Nine Worlds and Sorcerer in this feature. It also leads to me reiterating everything I've said about stakes in the past year, which fortunately Nathan has heard first-hand and thus I will not bang on about it here.

Nathan, I know you acknowledged it on your blog, but I'm gonna repeat and extend it ... I think all the text examples need re-writing, big-time.

Best, Ron

I got to finally read carry a couple of weeks ago, after we got it for our web store and it found it's way from Helsinki up here. No play yet, but I'm very excited by the game and pleased at the positive surprise of discovering it: it's very much in the Dust Devils vein of doing things, with a firm system. I've been saying that it's either carry or 1001 Nights that is my immediate favourite from the Gencon batch of games we received at the end of the year. I'm more of a WWII kind of guy myself (and, therefore, telling everybody how I'm going to soon convert carry to play in the Winter War), but there's some teenagers here in Upper Savo who dig American Vietnam stuff; it was very gratifying to be in a small local convention this weekend, selling carry to one guy who's been playing Vietnam stories with Dust Devils rules on and off for a year and a half now, and who hasn't bought anything else from us yet. He's totally not the GM type normally, but I'd like it if I got to play the game with him in the GM seat.

Ron wrote:
We all observed that the role of narration per round is absolutely crucial. Even though it's not significant in terms of points or dice, it has everything to do with each person's stated actions and responses for the next round. This is an effect that we don't have a jargon term for - the pure impact of narration on the SIS at a small action-by-action scale, which is a key element in Sorcerer, Trollbabe, Dogs, Dust Devils, Shadow of Yesterday, and HeroQuest (extended conflict) play that is very very hard to explain to a person who has only experienced (a) highly traditional Fortune-at-the-End or (b) wide-open scene-level narration of the My Life with Master or Primetime Adventures sort. It is the single weakest element of design in most of the games that I brought home from GenCon, but it is beautiful and shining in carry.

Something that Ron mentioned, but I think is deserving of further discussion is the way in which carry supports an evolving conflict resolution. To use an example, I'll point to the scene wherein Tommy beat the shit out of Wendell for coming on to him.

I think that most of us have seen a movie or read a book wherein a latent homosexual is beat up for what he is. Looking at my dice and the type of action that I was going to have to take with my character, Tommy, I was half a step away from groaning at the simple cliche of it all. However, the way in which carry handles conflict made the scene something else entirely. But let me begin with a more detailed recap...

After Ron rather aggressively framed Tommy into a masturbation scene, Tim A immediately knew what Wendell was to do. Well, Tommy's first reaction wasn't violence, but instead simply to attempt to extract himself from what was up to this point nothing more than an awkward situation. Swinging the tent door open, however, he realized that the camp was anything but deserted, and with his pants unzipped he could hardly walk around casually -- especially because he was already paranoid and generally freaked out about Wendell. So he turned back into the tent and towards an inevitable conclusion.

Somewhere around this time we had begun to use the actual conflict resolution mechanics. As Ron said, I looked at my dice and realized that they were all high -- meaning that I would be forced to act violently in the end. But my dice weren't all d12s (I think there was a d10 or something similar in the mix). This meant that I could attempt to escape and attempt to badger Wendell verbally before moving to physical confrontation. But I knew that I only had a chance or two before violence. Not only did this mechanic heighten the overall tension, but also gave me room to embellish on Tommy's character to make the scene a bit more interesting and powerful.

Now, I always had the option, the choice, of moving straight to violence, but by pushing the game mechanics, I think the scene really came alive. We were able to make it unique to the story we were all telling. And I while I always knew in the back of my mind that Tommy would end up pummeling Wendell (I was dreading it for the entire exchange), using the mechanics to draw out the scene organically created something more than any simple single dice roll ever could have implied.

Hey Ron,

I'm really pleased right now, thank you for posting this. It sounds like the game performed exactly as it's supposed too, which is always good to hear! I like how the creating-Burdens-to-character-choosing process worked to create immediate tension, which can sometimes take awhile to build up with three players.

Anyway, the game sounds like its humming along, so let that be a blanket "hell yah" response for all of your post, and I'll respond to specific issues individually.

As for the initial dice selection being fiddly: it is, a bit. But it gives a dice distribution among the table that I have observed over a number of sessions of play to work how I want it to; it may be that there's a less fiddly way to achieve the same result, but looking for it hasn't been worth it to me, thus far.

Ron wrote:
1. As we currently understand it, it seems like the high-ranking Grunt will never lose more than one die during these scenes. Is that correct?

2. Can the Grunt CO use his burden die in action scenes? If so, does it add, or is it his single die that he can use?

3. Increasing one's burden die means trading it with a die from the un-owned dice pool, right? What if the right size isn't there?

And finally, more generally and most importantly, is it absolutely set in concrete throughout play that the highest-ranking Grunt is giving orders to the other Grunts in these scenes? I know the rules say that that player can take over the fodder-CO's role, but in doing so, is his burden die for his Grunt still available? (which doesn't seem to make sense) What about situations in which the Grunts are extremely widely separated?

As for the direct resolution system, I suggest that it really shines in how narration interacts with the SIS, influenced by (as in totally requiring) the dice, but still highly organic and creative. It's very much like Nine Worlds and Sorcerer in this feature. It also leads to me reiterating everything I've said about stakes in the past year, which fortunately Nathan has heard first-hand and thus I will not bang on about it here.

Nathan, I know you acknowledged it on your blog, but I'm gonna repeat and extend it ... I think all the text examples need re-writing, big-time.

Hi Eero!

We are definitely discussing the same thing. My slight adjustment to your term would be "narrational" rather than "narrative," because the latter term often carries implications about scene and story structure at a larger scale, and we really are talking about, well, about talking.

I think my most recent discussion of the issue is in [Sorcerer] Orthogonal and oppositional conflicts, although it's pretty central to my points about narration in [Dead of Night] Werewolves! Men with guns! Mom! too.

Hi Tim!

I agree. The really hard-hitting system element of the scene relied on the fact that Tommy did have a chance, although small, of resolving the scene quickly and relatively neutrally ... because we all knew that if that didn't work, the remaining options were all very grim, as Tommy's burden was kicking in just as hard as Wendell's.

Just in case some folks aren't seeing it, when Tim K says he knew the scene would end in violence, he's speaking in terms of looking at the dice when there was still a chance it wouldn't, and realizing the chance was pretty small. My point here is that the existence of that chance was key to how we responded to the scene. Fortune is a good thing in RPG design, properly placed and integrated into resolution. That means not merely managing conch-style speaking rights, and not in the currently widely-repeated sense of explicit pre-roll stakes which amount to pre-roll narration.

Hi Nathan!

You've answered my questions very well, and yes, now I understand the rules for action scenes better. We didn't violate them, in our session, but now we can use the real rules to cover a variety of possible ways to parse the options.

Best, Ron

Hi Eero,

I forgot to mention that I completely and totally agree with the term "leverage," especially if we focus our attention on the fictional characters' relationships to the conflict, rather than on players' input or any sense of advantage at the real-person level.

Best, Ron

I enjoyed the write-up and was pretty much nodding my head based on my limited experience with carry.  One question/comment - you saw more profile switching than I did.  In fact, I don't recall any in a four hour game. 

Nathan, your suggested fallout mod sounds fantastic.  That alone seems guaranteed to amp up and focus a session in a horrible way. 

We had three Profile switches, each one dictated by a dice pool being emptied. I'm pretty sure this was facilitated by having multiple rounds in action scenes, such that the lower-ranking characters lost a lot of dice in them. (Note that the ranking Grunt is the one who didn't have a Profile change, which is why I asked Nathan about that feature of action scenes - whether he could only lose one die).

Another detail is that each squad scene had a lot of rounds as well, with Approach switching, and in them, dice didn't necessarily get given to other individuals in such a way that everyone ended up with the same number of dice he started with. I think that Tim A may have given away more dice than he received, for instance. I like this feature of the system.

And on a minor but related note, when assigning Fallout, both Chris and I chose to increase Grunts' burdens rather than to diminish their dice pools. So that's an avenue of emptying pools which we did not see in our session, but which would have forced Profile changes even faster if we had.

I guess I'm having a hard time seeing how a group could play for several hours without a single person emptying his or her dice pool. The only way I could imagine it is if action and squad scenes were typically resolved by single-round rolls, i.e., no Pushing in the squad scenes and no "OK, this happens, now what" from the GM to require more rolls in the action scenes. I think we had as many as four rounds in our first action scene, three at the least.

I assume no one assigned Fallout such that dice were taken out of players' pools?

Also, perhaps players decreased their Burden dice size in order to resist a Profile change? Did that happen at all when you played? In our group, no one did that even though they knew they could - apparently we like the heavy Burdens.

Best, Ron

As I recall (and I hope Jeff, who GM'd for me at NC GameDay, will jump in) the majority of our conflicts were resolved in a single round of die rolling.  I didn't empty my die pool during the game, and I do recall increasing my Burden die size steadily, so that wasn't a factor. 

The frequency of Profile change is dependent on a lot of factors:

*The Grunts chosen (smaller dice pools mean more frequent Profile changing)
*How "intense" action scenes are, as measured by number of rounds of orders
*How long squad-scene conflicts go, and the relation of the dice-swapping to:
*The at-the-table chemistry of the group, and the amount of dice that move to the GM as opposed to the other players, which tends to correspond with the relative adversity being put forth by each, but not always

The last one bears a little bit of explanation. The overall intent of the system is that dice will be going to "reward" other players and the GM, either for entertaining play, providing adversity for your character that you appreciate, or both. It is designed with the assumption that the GM will be receiving dice at a similar rate to the other players, but this isn't always the case. I have observed that, with some groups, the players shy away from giving dice to the GM, regardless of the events of play (this has a slight, slight correspondence with player who come from a fairly traditional play background).

Now, this isn't really a problem, but it does mean that in those groups that don't "support" the GM, player dice pools are larger and Profile change is infrequent, especially if people aren't pushing as hard in conflicts.

A general observation that I've made is that you can really tell how well a group is engaging with the fiction of their game by looking at things in the system, like frequency of Profile change, the progression of Burden dice, and the general movement of dice around the table. Which is pretty cool.

(Oh, and Ron, the design choice behind the ranking officer losing less dice in Action scenes is precisely that it means that he's less prone to Profile change, putting him in at least some kind of tension with the other characters. As other characters go through all these changes and see the ranking officer maintain, it creates another fictional vector for inter-squad tension.)

Anyway, I hope this sheds some light on the matter.

Hi there,

Nathan,

... the design choice behind the ranking officer losing less dice in Action scenes is precisely that it means that he's less prone to Profile change, putting him in at least some kind of tension with the other characters. As other characters go through all these changes and see the ranking officer maintain, it creates another fictional vector for inter-squad tension.

Hi Ron,

I'd like to know how the scene between Tommy and Wendell was framed without being deprotagonizing for Tommy or "against what Tim K pictured his character to be". Or better yet, how did you as players manage the framing?

I could see all kinds of players who would never let me frame such an embarrassing scene for their characters, but I must say, I find the technique most intriguing. Any recommended reads to the topic?

Thanks!

But that's the definition of framing, Christoph; you only ever set up a situation that the pertinent players agree to. So the answer is that you can frame a masturbation scene if and only if the player agrees. So you ask the player (or rather, everybody understands that your frame is subject to group approval) and then set it up. Can't be deprotagonizing if you as the player agree that it's a reasonable situation for your character to end up in.

As to how to get players to agree to potentially embarrassing scenes... you can't, it's not up to you to try to convince them. If a player doesn't want to go into something he feels uncomfortable, it's not going to happen in any good way. Stick to material the group can get behind.

Ron wrote:
I'm really liking the current game, but now I also want to play again with higher-ranking characters, with more months in, and more noble-type profiles.

My thoughts were exactly the same, Jason! Not one warrior? Geez!

Your other comments lead perfectly into my response to Christoph and Eero. Here goes ...

Eero's right. I'd like to extend his points into actual moment-to-moment play issues.

1. We had agreed to no restrictions on content, in terms of comfort or discomfort. That means the only restriction is plausibility (more on that in a minute).

I'd like to dwell on the comfort/discomfort point for a minute. I think that many such agreements are false - people say they have no restrictions or are willing to play anything in a Vietnam setting, but they are merely tuning their dial to familiar semi-macho, sadistic content, or maybe lots and lots of blood which might as well be ketchup in their minds.

But the issue isn't just grossness or extremity in terms of violence. It's really about emotional honesty, both regarding the internal features of the fiction and to addressing those features with future announcements and actions. This group has played what might be called Primal Sorcerer, and we are now literally fearless with one another, emotionally.

When we said, "no restrictions," we were really saying, in Meg's terminology, I Will Not Abandon You. Let me know if you're familiar with her breakdown of this aspect of Social Contract (and the alternative, contrasting option); if not, I'll post the links.

2. We had all read Wendell's burden. We knew that male-male sexual contact or its possibility is there to be used in this game. It could go one of two ways. (a) It remains as subtext, the kind of thing in which a knowing audience member could spot the signs even though none of the characters really act upon them directly, and Wendell's conflicts become weird and tortured because of it, but explained explicitly. (b) It emerges as direct conflict based on provocation. Both are great things.

3. It all goes back to the techniques-issue of authority: this is about situational authority, and in the case of carry, the system relies on centralized situational authority. "Relies on" does not mean everyone else has to sit there glumly while the GM says "And now we begin a scene in which all of you are smeared with Vaseline ..." It means that the GM holds the rubber stamp and his or her judgment is trusted. It's a responsibility. In this case, given the harshly violent action scene and the also-violent squad scene, I opted for an intimate squad scene next as a contrast, and Wendell's burden was sitting there with all its agonizing tensions, just perfect toward that end.

That leads me back to the single constraint I mentioned in #1, plausibility. There's Tommy, in the tent at night in the jungle, with his tentmate snoring away. He's a young guy far from home, and he lives in a world of adrenalized terror contrasted with astounding boredom and discomfort. All four of us at the table knew in one microsecond of reflection that to say "But he wouldn't do that!!" is ludicrous. Of course he would. Men would. Any of us would.

Such a response leads to protagonization, rather than its opposite. This is not a superhero comic and Tommy is not Wolverine. Wolverine is an adolescent fantasy character, and first and foremost in adolescent fantasy is that a hero does not jerk off, and hence identifying with him means that the reader does not either, at least for a while in his own mind. Tommy, however, is a young guy, far from home, subjected to shocks, tasks, and conflicting messages that I for one can only shudder at. This is not an adolescent fantasy story (or for that matter, game). When Tommy acts like a human, it humanizes him.

Now it just so happens that Tim K is the youngest among our group, and (forgive me Tim) he is right at that point, mid-20s, in which his entire relationship to other men at large is undergoing radical change. Christoph, you referred to masturbation as embarassing ... well, for many men past that age, it's not. It's private in the specific personal sense, but highly public in the general sense of familiarity, reference, and humor (not the distancing sort, but the farcical or all-too-familiar sort).

I saw Tim K blink when I started the scene. I saw his wheels spin for the microsecond: plausibility, check; relevance to Wendell's character, check; comfort zone with the rest of us, check (note that the three of us were not speaking in mocking terms, but rather, the two other men delivered guttural grunts, rueful smiles, and short nods).

All of this is intended to reinforce and to explain Eero's point. Tommy is Tim K's character, not mine. Although I had framing responsibility, it's still a responsibility and not a whip. By framing that scene, I was asking him if this works for him as Tommy's primary author. If Tim K had seen any objection which worked, and if he chose to exercise that objection, it was well within our social contract to do so. I think it was interesting for him to discover that he had no objection.

In every instance of functional scene framing, there's a moment of confirmation, what some people call buy-in to the scene itself. We looked around the table, and after that visible microsecond of processing, Tim K said, "OK."

Best, Ron

Yes, Ron, I read that post Meguey wrote about I will not abandon you and Nobody gets hurt, but I suspect I only understand it on an superficial level, I need to work through some play still.

I'm the oldest of our group of twenties to mid-twenties aged guys, so your comments are square on. We're only beginning to address such stuff in our roleplaying.

It's not the sexual content that was my concern about deprotagonization though, it's rather framing the character into a problematic situation without the player's input. You perfectly addressed this concern though.

I especially buy into your comment about plausibility: I was mentally comparing with a scene we recently played in Polaris about a protagonist bedding his mother (without knowing it) as proposed by the Mistaken, which is quite "embarrassing" too, but perfectly suits the themes of tragedy and decadence.
The Heart had the same split-second hesitation before running with the scene without even trying to tone it down. I mean, after killing one's father, one ends up sleeping with their mom, right?
Jerking off behind an icy boulder beside the Mistake would have been a harder fit...

Your explanation helps me get at the things that worked in our Polaris scene and hopefully we'll get more used to such material cropping up in our play. Not only sex-oriented of course, just any zone of discomfort.

Thanks for the help, Eero and Ron!

Christoph wrote:
I could see all kinds of players who would never let me frame such an embarrassing scene for their characters

Hi Ron,

Ron wrote: The really hard-hitting system element of the scene relied on the fact that Tommy did have a chance, although small, of resolving the scene quickly and relatively neutrally ... because we all knew that if that didn't work, the remaining options were all very grim, as Tommy's burden was kicking in just as hard as Wendell's.

Hello,

Chris, this will be difficult, because to answer those questions directly, I may come off as dismissive toward you. For example:

"How did you create this level of trust in your group?" The answer is, I didn't, and it's not "my" group, and trust is not the issue. This probably looks like a brush-off answer, or perhaps one intended to promote the image of a mysterious sage, but it is neither. The problem is that the angle your questions are arriving from isn't relevant to how play proceeds in my experience these days. And unfortunately, to communicate to you how it does proceed would require ten years, exactly ten in fact.

In 1996, I embarked on an attempt to see whether role-playing was fun for real. Not fun because it reminded me of being 14, not fun because it was better than sitting around lonely, not fun because it reinforced my position in a subculture, not fun because it was a way to get laid, not fun because it celebrated something else like movies or comics, and not fun because I'd bought books and hence it must be. I wanted to see whether it was fun in the sense that doing something uniquely rewarding with people I liked being with is fun. The answer turned out to be "yes," but for that to be reliably the case, a whole lot of subcultural, economic, and procedural aspects of role-playing had to be abandoned.

By abandoning those aspects, then issues of trust, for instance, became irrelevant, because trust (and friendship) are not at risk during play. This means the question is not "how can you build that sort of trust," but rather, "why are most role-playing groups characterized by lack of basic trust?" We addressed that question here at the Forge during the Infamous Five threads, with the issue of Social Context. Once that was established, Meg could arrive at her two constructions of I Will Not Abandon You vs. No One Gets Hurt (basically two kinds of trust, and about what), and I could lay out, and distinguish between, roles of leadership and roles of authority, as I did last summer.

Another issue is content. If you track my actual play posts and related articles from the beginning of the Forge, you'll find an ongoing process* which puts [identification with characters] at the service of, or subordinate to, or derived from [identification with conflicts]. It also places single-individual imagining at the service of group-level communication. During this process, incredibly explicit material suddenly became ... no big deal, across several different groups at once. The point is that explicit content is not a difficult issue after all, and although Lines and Veils (my terms) are a reality, they are easily observed in all media and therefore easily established in play. The real issue is relevant content.

Bluntly, Chris, your reaction to the use of masturbation as a framing scene for a conflict for a latent, conflicted, violent gay guy is an imagined mountain regarding a molehill. The question is not why I and my group are comfortable with the mountain, but why you and yours are frightened and disoriented by a molehill.

But in saying that, I bet a reader or two is thinking that I'm talking about masturbation's sexual content. I'm not. The reason this scene functioned in our game is the same reason it would function in any story media. (1) The situation is familiar - non-controversially familiar. (2) The situation raises a unique crisis for the character in question, as we know from his Burden (go back and read it, please). The key point here is that the situation did not raise a unique crisis for any of us, the real people, because of point #1.

That's why Christoph's comparison with incest in Polaris is actually off the mark. This isn't about sex, or graphic-ness, or transgression. This isn't Legend of the Overfiend, in which a woman performs a blowjob on a demon and when he comes, her head explodes. That movie relies on going over the line. Our scene during play relies on staying inside the lines and seeing what's there. The reason the masturbation stuff disturbs gamers is not because it's so edgy and so freaky and so wild, but rather the opposite.

This game, carry, concerns young and (despite their weaponry) desperate American men in the worst jungle fighting during the Vietnam War. There are no zombies or androids. There are no super-powers. There are no other dimensions. There are no angels wandering through the scenario. There are no fantasy elements at all. In gamer/fandom culture and in most role-playing design, such fantasy elements are a safety feature, to a numbing extent which renders most role-playing content of no conceivable interest to an adult human.**

So in playing this game, if these guys are to be facing conflicts, and with these rules my job as GM is to present situations which do so, we as a group must rely not upon the gaudy and fantastical, but rather upon the human and upon the familiar. We not only must rely upon it, we must commit to it.

Now, all that said, I'm going to hit you guys with a question to consider, although I'm not calling for answers. I described our first action scene in the scenario. In that scene, Chris Weil described his character's action - striking an unarmed Vietnamese woman in the face with his rifle butt.

No one posting seems to have reacted to that detail of our game-play to any extent of all. A young man taking a private moment to jerk off late at night, Oh My God. Another young man breaking a woman's face with his gun butt because it's hot and he'd rather see all these people shot rather than concern himself over who hid these weapons ...nothing. My question is, what is wrong with you, or rather with us as gamers, such that this is the case?

I'll also anticipate a possible answer that I do not accept as valid: "oh, see, our puritanical culture says violence is OK but sex isn't." My response to that is, bullshit, or rather, partly. I agree that we trivialize violence in many of our stories in a variety of ways. However, I'm claiming that it is not the larger culture at issue here, but rather gamer/fandom culture, which amplifies that trivialization to an astounding degree. This subculture is arrested at age 15: it equates sadistic violence with personal power, greatly desires sex but only experiences it as masturbation or experimentation, would go to any extreme to protect self-esteem from imagined slights, and utilizes fantasy elements to numb or distract from relevant conflicts rather than for highlighting them.

When I deliberately asked myself whether role-playing would continue to be fun for me as an adult, I had to abandon its adolescent trappings and habits of presentation. I had to recognize that avoiding familiar conflicts and recognizable situations for framing them is a defense mechanism, not a maturation. I am not recommending suddenly inserting explicit sex into your games or throwing out all fantastic elements. I am suggesting focusing on relevant and familiar conflict, and to utilize content, of any kind that works, to accentuate and dramatize the familiarity of the conflict. Without doing so, gaming becomes one of two things - nostalgically recapturing what was fun back when we were 14 or 19, or neurotically revisiting what wasn't fun at all in the hopes that maybe it'll work this time.

Best, Ron

* Search for my and others' threads on playing Hero Wars (including my Daedalus article), Violence Future, le mon mouri, kill puppies for satan, Sorcerer, and Bacchanal. See also all my threads regarding Sex & Sorcery, and It Was a Mutual Decision.

** Side point, not for discussion here. In the kind of science fiction I like most, the fantasy elements highlight and productively distort the relevant political and personal conflicts, rather than water them down into safety. But that perspective is vanishingly rare in published role-playing games, nor have I ever seen it acknowledged in any kind of SF fandom.

Hi Ron,

I actually agree with you in a general way about the psychodynamics of role-playing, but I question (as in, I'm mulling it over for myself) whether the kind of wish-fulfillment play you currently eschew, divested perhaps of the 'gamer culture' elements you so detest, must be nostalgic or self-infantilizing for the adult gamer, or whether it merely often is, especially in the context of gamer culture as it is currently (or, perhaps, was ten years ago currently - the demographics of mainstream gaming are changing) constituted.

I guess I don't exactly see what's wrong in an absolute sense with spending an afternoon with friends, fantasizing about, say, fucking your way through the Sultan's harem, getting a magic scimitar, and slaying the Undead Vizier and a Big Fucking Snake, mostly as a way of just pretending to be something you're not and enjoy the sheer wildness of it all. Playing this way compulsively is not healthy, I suppose I'd grant that; and I suppose I'd grant too that there have been times and places in my life when I used this kind of power-fantasy as a sort of escape valve from personal problems. On the other hand, I don't necessarily fault people for enjoying mass media entertainment, action movies, romance novels, etc. that mostly gratify this kind of fantasy, as an occasional escape; a lot of us seem to need that from time to time.

I can understand why a person who had done a lot of that might get tired of it and even sick of it, of course, but I'm not sure that the urge is inevitably pathological, even in role-playing. On the other hand, it's really better for many recovering alcoholics never to take a drink again, even if others might enjoy a tipple or three without particular adverse consequences. (Whether I belong in that group is part of what I'm mulling over.)

Hi Callan,

In that passage, I am discussing the role of Fortune. It will also help to understand the rules for squad scenes in this game. One must choose an "approach" and roll a die. Victory goes to the high value, unless someone wants to choose another approach ("push") and roll again; one's character's Profile is cross-referenced with a given Approach for each roll, to see what size of die is rolled. One is limited in die sizes (and thus in available Approaches) by the contents of one's current dice pool, because you can't utilize a certain Approach unless you have a die of the required size or less.

The character Tommy had the Profile "invincible." He gets higher dice for more violent Approaches (not as much as the "brawler" Profile, but similar). If I remember correctly, Tim K had one d12 and one d6 die in his pool. Therefore, he had only one single chance to utilize a non-confrontational Approach, and that chance was small because it relied upon a small-sized die.

My point in the post was composed of two concepts. Tommy was not initially constrained to act violently, but if he failed in his attempt to act non-violently, he would be so constrained. He had a chance to resolve the situation in his favor, but it was a single chance, and not a good one. This is the source of the productive tension we all experienced as soon as the scene was framed.

If I recall correctly, the scene took three rolls. I'm trying to remember all the Approaches taken by each character, and I'm mixing myself up. I am not sure, but I think Wendell started Subversively and ended Peaceably. I also think that Tommy's first or second Approach was Honorable (trying to leave the tent, blocked by other guys walking by) and I know his last was Violent, the only mechanical option left to him, because to go Peaceable required a small die that he did not have.

It so happened that although Wendell was winning through the first two rolls, Tommy won the round by rolling and adding in the high value on the d12. I keep confusing myself about the details ... maybe it was just two rounds, not three. I think it might have been two.

Best, Ron

Thank you Ron for a very thoughtful answer.

You're progression in role playing has lead you to make a mental shift in regards to game content. I can freely admit to not having made that mental shift. I'm sure part of that is personal defensiveness (I do subscribe to a pretty puritanical religion being Muslim) and all that cultural stuff but I'm not uncomfortable talking about such issues in my work as a therapist (having treated child molesters, sex addicts, etc.) A big part of it is where I want to mentally go. I did find the massacre scene disturbing to and would also not want to have personally played it.

This highlights the social contract part of play. Clearly you all have discussed wanting to do narrativist games that grapple with compelling social issues in a story now manner. You also had the discussion about what was allowed in the game - everything as long as it was plausible. The character problems clearly indicated a high potential for violence and gay content. Your players know from past play that there is not "nudge nudge wink wink" unspoken limit on sex in play. A player would have to be pretty clueless to not see where this was going - I believe that you communicate clearly. If a player started shuffling their feet uncomfortably during the SC negotiation phase I can see that you and others would pick up on that and take that into account in the contract.

Let me know if I got that sequence of steps right.

Those are what a therapy group would call trust building steps. You were able to run through them quickly because you know one another while a new group (gaming or otherwise) would have to take more time to clarify and feel one another out.

Once play has started you have the understanding that play will not always feel comfortable but that it will be intense and exciting. It will also be very direct, with people giving clear interpersonal feedback to one another (with a small distance in that it is about "my character" rather than about "my self".) This happens in group therapy, when the ingredients are right, after around four sessions. I've grow to trust that in therapy the process won't go farther than people can handle because people just won't go there but in games I guess I'm just not there.

Way back in the social contract phase I would have given off signs that I want more emotional space and less emotional intensity than you do. I've played in some cool intense games but in general the fun I get from games is a problem to solve and the non-game related banter that orbits play. I'd characterize it as a light social game. Komradbob described a game a while back called "Hungry Hungry Dragon" which sounded real fun to me. Sure there would be violence but in the end the good guys would likely win. I can see that "pulling back from extremes" in all games I write. I set up situations that could spiral out of control but when I play my actions are to not do that. Instead I seem to act out issues from my present life - staying calm, forming plans, persistently carrying them out, and building up colleague relationships.

Thanks again for your reply. I think it might be a concise overview of your gaming ideas that you can refer people to in the future.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

Hi Chris,

It may interest you to know that one of the rules of the game is to explicitly talk about two things during/after Burden creation; whether you have any military experience (or any family members, and so on), and if there's anything you don't want to see come up in play. This is very blunt Line/Veil-setting, but I've found that it's useful not only for everyone to get on the same page about the tone of the game, but also as a reminder that "hey, we should be thinking about this stuff."

Hi Chris,

You've just about nailed it. As far as I can tell, you've described us. Also, and this may or may not be directly related, in both of the groups I'm in right now, we usually have a discussion before or after play about real-life issues of the day. I don't want to get into politics at the Forge, but it so happens that all of us, in both groups, have generated an atmosphere of processing about those issues which also relies on a lot of trust.

One small quibble or clarification is that in the current group, only two of us knew one another well prior to our regular play. Tim A and Chris are long-term friends, and I'd met them briefly; Tim K and I knew all of the others only through the Forge and brief con meetings. All of us, especially the two Tims had played a hell of a lot of Story Now and both of them are Trollbabe nuts. We jumped into play together quite far along the steps you've described. The lesson I take from that is that the trust-building steps can occur in part at a level of community and role-playing experience, rather than specific to the interactions of a set group of people, for that group.

Here's what I see in your post - that as a person, you do recognize and are concerned with serious things and approach them as an adult, and where appropriate professionally. (One might call it "life now," I guess, but that sounds like EST ...) Whereas in your games, as a role-playing guy, you don't typically do the fictional equivalent. This can be a matter of preference, or as you point out, perhaps a matter of faith/conviction, as opposed to the flat defensiveness that I described as a feature of gamer subculture. I stand by my points about that (this, our, whatever) subculture, but I want to be absolutely clear that I do not accuse you, specifically, of representing those points as a person.

Best, Ron

Bravo! An excellent thread.

Chris Engle