So my brother wrote a bunch of stories, and I wrote a game inspired by them. The game is called "The Drifter's Escape." Since I'm home for a bit, and so is he, he wanted to play it together. So I got together some of my friends and he some of his and away we went.

Jake and his friend are basically "non-gamers." They played D&D in middle school and high school.

We decided we were in a border town in Arizona, modern day. Jake goes "hey, what if the drifter was an illegal alien?" So yeah. We start the game with him walking across the border, shoes shot, dying of thirst.

I'm not going to try to recount the game blow by blow. It ended up with him working as a coyote, trying to smuggle a retarded (probably autistic?) pregnant girl across the border so her gringo lover didn't have to deal with her destroying his marriage and such. But someone had tipped off the sheriff, and there was a skirmish at the border, leaving the sheriff and deputy dead and one of the members of crime organization that employed him crawling off to die after getting shot in the head.

That was the moment: He's just killed the sheriff by running him over in a truck, gotten shot in the thigh by the deputy but got his gun from him. The deputy is begging for his life, saying he'll arrange for lots of money for the Drifter. He leaves the organized crime guy to watch the deputy and goes behind the truck to pray to God. *bang* No more deputy.

What struck me about the gae was how the Mexicans were all people -- they were sympathetic, they took actions, they demanded things and had passions and reason. The white people were all taking the roles of cannon fodder in movies: cowards, corrupt, given over to money, and irresponsible.

Drifter's is crazy. I'm bouncing up and down with energy, this is after talking with Jake about it for almost two hours. Watching the game, your attention is caught up and riveted to the moral world of the character, which is invariably torn up and fucked up by all the bad people he's surrounded with.

Right before I came up here to write this I looked at Jake and said "that poor girl..."

Fire away with questions. The details of the game were way too much to report step-by-step.

yrs--
--Ben

Ben,

This seems like a fiddly and over-specific question, but: how was it determined that the drifter killed the sheriff? I mean, what was the mechanical process that resulted in that outcome?

This game sounds very good, and the themes and concepts of it match up with some of my favorite things, so it excites me. I asked the above question because I think it will give me a much better understanding of how the game looks in play.

Clinton wrote:
Ben,

This seems like a fiddly and over-specific question, but: how was it determined that the drifter killed the sheriff? I mean, what was the mechanical process that resulted in that outcome?

This game sounds very good, and the themes and concepts of it match up with some of my favorite things, so it excites me. I asked the above question because I think it will give me a much better understanding of how the game looks in play.

Hey, this is Ben's brother. I played the drifter in this game last night. I'm not sure if it's the way Drifter's Escape works, or the people we were playing with, or the adult role-playing experience in general, but the intensity of the fiction was uncanny. I dreamed about it all night, and woke up this morning with sore muscles, a parched tounge, and a head full or worries about the imaginary people I'd killed, wounded and betrayed.

I want to say that I'm glad I gave my character a clear, rigid code of behavior out of the Mexican traditions of Catholicism and machismo. Even with the ready-made ethics, there were so many times when the right thing to do was just . . . beyond me, beyond my ability to imagine it. I think if I had played a more free spirited character, the game might have resulted in the complete destruction of my mind.

The game was like some strange, bitter root that we swallowed without knowing whether it will cure us or pioson us. It was fun, too. The kind of fun that gives you the shakes after.

Hello Ben's brother, nice to hear your side of the story as well. And welcome to the Forge, too!

Jake also said to me, verbally, that I should say that the game was not an escalating cycle of violence: It started out without violence, then got violent, then became less violent. But the violence changed the game. Suddenly, the Drifter had serious power. He had a gun (gotten from the deputy.)

Guns totally change the dynamic of the game.

yrs--
--Ben

Ben,

Where can I find out more about this game?  I think that American mythology is almost totally untapped in RPGs, which dismays me to no end, but this game seems to be just dripping with it.  I must know more :)

-Marshall

Hey, Marshall:

The Drifter's Escape is a game I wrote (for a contest here) based on my brother's fiction. So playing it with my bro is totally the beginning of fulfilling the game's goals. (the beginning, not the end, for several reasons.)

The only way you can find out more right now is by asking me or someone else who has played. So what do you want to know?

yrs--
--Ben

Thanks for the welcome, Eero!

Well, my brother asked me to write about the connection between the Drifter's short stories and the game. It's a difficult question, and I'm not sure I'll be able to get to the heart of it. The two media are certainly very different, and result in different kinds of narrative.

But both kinds of story seem to me to revolve, like old blues and country songs, around moral choices. The short stories are more about the ways moral courage can be found, and the game tests moral courage with a series of relentless decisions. I know that characters in role-playing games are supposed to be seperate from the people who play them, but I don't see how the player can succeed in Drifter's Escape except on the strength of their own moral compass, becuase that is what gives you the capacity to invent just outcomes to the situations that the evil forces played by the GMs throw you into, despite having to comprimise with evil to acheive them.

I've asked my brother to put a warning label on the game, because it goes directly to some deeply personal realms where many of us, if not all, fall short of our own expectations for ourselves and humanity. Played hapazardly, this game could easily ruin a casual friendship or scar the psyche.

The American and travelling themes are well suited to this type of exploration.

Americans, whether the decendants or themselves immagrants, refugees, "freed" slaves, ripped-off natives or any combination thereof, share this common legacy: we have fewer living, effective traditions than perhaps any other people at any other time. Each of our generations has faced a profoundly different physical, economic and social landscape than the one before. Personal choice and personal responsiblity are the foundation of our ethics. This is both a terrible poverty and an exhilarating freedom. Very often, we don't know what to do with ourselves, and shiftless people profit from it. But whatever mess we make of our lives, in the end, at least it belongs to us. Our king isn't Arthur, who united the Round Table; our king is Elvis, who dared to stand on stage alone and shake his hips. Many of our old songs are about choices and consequences, love, violence, sin and redemption, how and why and when to do the right thing.  They form a kind of moral folk calculus in the vaccum of strong traditions. The Drifter's short stories were based on those songs, and the game on the stories.   

Then, there's a kind of travelling that Americans like to sing and write about that puts the traveller in direct connection with the landscape. Walking, hitchhiking and trainhopping are associated with poverty but also, since the begining of the nation, with a spiritual abandonment of the self. There's an intamacy sometimes between the hitchhiker and his driver that exceedes all the intamacy of settled life. They can laugh and cry together, reveal their deepest secrets, or lie, and the knowledge they will never see each other again frees them to be exactly what they are or want to be. Poverty itself is also revealing. To a person outside the social web of a town, people are free to be as kind or rude as they want, without the ordinary veil of manners. The "beholden" NPCs in the game draw the drifter into their schemes becuase they think that as a poor outsider he can be easily used. In their haste and greed, they reval far more of themselves to the Drifter than they would to their fellow townspeople. 

I'm not sure if that clears anything up. And my brother may have a completley different take on it.

Hi Jacob,

What you wrote certainly matches to my understanding and experiences with the game. I really like it and am proud that I had a little hand in helping it see light, with my Ronnies contest.

Best, Ron

Right on!

I'm proud of my contribution to it, too.

Hey, Jake: That's a good explanation. Might have to put that in the book.

yrs--
--Ben

Book's gettin' long.

Jacob,
Reading that description, I could only nod my head enthusiastically.  You've just confirmed that the game is indeed about what I thought it was about.

Ben,
Aside from what Jacob's already covered, what I'd like to know about the game is how, in general, it works.  For a specific thing, I'm wondering what mechanical effect the cards have.  It seems that the Devil and the Man play poker against eachother, with the Drifter's fate as the stakes; is this accurate?  I love that image.

-Marshall

Hey Marshall,

Run a Forge search using Ben's handle and the word "Drifter," specifying Indie Design - you'll find out a lot about the game's origin as well as its first draft. It's changed a certain amount since then, but the basics are all there. Something tells me you might like researching the Ronnies contests in general (September, October, November 2005).

Ben will probably reply too, but I'll jump in on your question to him. As far as playing poker against one another is involved ... well, poker is involved, but it's not really playing the actual game. The cards are used for a lot of things, including some randomized characterization of people in the scenario, and since a few of them are taken out of play at start-up, classic card-counting-to-win is impossible. It's an excellent example of distilling out a useful feature of the card game for role-playing/authoring purposes, and "winning" in the card game sense (i.e. Gamism, in RPG terms) doesn't quite apply.

Best, Ron

Hey Ben,

Awesome.

I think the violence/non-violence split may also mirror things you see in stuff like Falling Leaves or Polaris and other "but only if" kind of games- when the threat of violence works to push player decisions, you find it gets used, if it doesn't, people either have to ramp it up until it does, or find some other button to push.

So, in your game, perhaps it was a combination of that, plus, man, after letting the Sherriff get shot?  What more could the GMs push that would both a) ramp past that level of intensity, using violence and b) be in line with what everyone feels is part of the Drifter's character?

Also, how do you think the whole roles of real characters vs. furniture would have split differently if the Drifter was white?

Chris

Here's how it works:
The Drifter says what he does, the Devil says what people beholden to him do, the Man says what people beholden to him do. Someone (the Man or the Devil) has control over the scene, that means that they have final say over the result.

If the Drifter wants to get final say they go "Let's make a deal," and pick up the cards. They explain what they want final say over, and what that say is. "I want to hit him with the truck so he'll stop shooting me." The Devil and the Man look at their cards and offer the Drifter help in exchange for the Drifter doing something. Like the example above.

The Drifter choose to accept help from one of them, or backs down, or gets a new hand. If the Drifter takes a hand from the Man or the Devil, he agrees to do as they say (regardless of the outcome of the deal), and also gives them a chip of debt (Their currency for later). The Drifter then redraws one card for each person helping him (up to five, natch), and we show. Highest hand gets final say.

yrs--
--Ben

Chris_Chinn wrote:
I think the violence/non-violence split may also mirror things you see in stuff like Falling Leaves or Polaris and other "but only if" kind of games- when the threat of violence works to push player decisions, you find it gets used, if it doesn't, people either have to ramp it up until it does, or find some other button to push.

Also, how do you think the whole roles of real characters vs. furniture would have split differently if the Drifter was white?

So, yeah, I'm now officially excited about this project in general.

As a side note, I also wish that I had been here for the Ronnies.  I have a fantastic idea for Rat + Suburbs.  Which I will probably write up anyway.

-Marshall