Nicotine Girls--An Odd Proposal

Hi Paul,

This is the first time I've posted in your forum I think, so forgive me if this is a strange first post (as well as a longish one).� Here's the thing: I've actually had in mind to get My Life With Master for a long time now, having heard the great reviews and read some of the wonderful actual play experiences folks have had with the game.� Unfortunately, I have no good excuse for why I haven't gotten off my bleedin' arse and ordered it.� I'm sure I will soon.

But that isn't why I'm posting.� I'm actually writing because I had an idea for Nicotine Girls that I wanted to float your way.� Brace yourself, though, since this might be a bit weird.

I've actually been thinking about what some sort of hybrid of Nicotine Girls and certain elements of Vincent's Kill Puppies for Satan--another game that I don't own but have some familiarity with through some of the AP posts--would be like.� The thing that got me started on this idea was thinking about a surface resemblance between the two: both games feature characters who are on the margins of society, so to speak.� The characters in Nicotine Girls are lower-income girls struggling with all kinds of shit that you might find in a somewhat lurid TV treatment (perhaps one of the more horribly voyeuristic "reality"-TV shows) of low-income girls, while Puppies' characters are pathetic satanic losers with even more pathetic loser friends.

Okay, so now for a brief bit of reminiscence (and I'll try to keep this brief).� When I was a teenager, my friends and I created a game that we played somewhat irregularly called "The Nimrod Game."� It's not a great title, admittedly, but we were kids.� Essentially, it was a very system-lite game in which we all created characters who were late-high school to early-college aged but who all were, to one degree or another, Zeroes, Schmendricks, Schlemiels, Schlimazels etc.� The expectation was always that these guys would get in terrible fucking trouble that would give them endless grief.

Sounds familiar, right?� The thing is--and this probably had something to do with some sort of barely-suppressed class rage many of us felt--in every case that I can recall, these guys were all fairly wealthy entitlement-brats from families that would make Nicky Silver's (he's a contemporary playwright with a really wicked sense of humor in case you're wondering) characters seem like models of psychological function.

So here's me thinking that some kind of horrible love-child produced from the mating of Nicotine Girls and Puppies but where the characters are all from families supposed to represent "success" in contempo-capitalist America might satisfy a certain itch out there.

Whadda ya think?� I would work on this and then turn it over to you and you could post-it or not on the Half Meme website along with Nicotine Girls.

Let me know what you think.

Eric