Happy New Year! I’ll get right to it: we’re launching another Kickstarter for this year’s ZineQuest in February: Back Again from the Broken Land. It’s a game of small adventurers sharing stories on the long walk home from a calamitous war. Sign up here to make sure you don’t miss the Kickstarter’s launch.
Now for our normal monthly business: some discussion of games I’ve run, games I’ve played, and thoughts on game design.
Played: Hit the Nazi: Retrieve the Ark
In December I played a two-shot with Alun Rees of his hack Hit the Nazi: Retrieve the Ark. It’s a pulpy riff on Rich Rogers’ street-level supers game Hit the Streets: Defend the Block. We played 1930’s do-gooders battling Nazis à la Indiana Jones. For an extra dose of fun, the game was set in the Gauntlet Comics universe.
Highlights: Everyone was on board with the aim of these sessions: to make sure we hit all the pulp tropes we were most excited by. Our party was an ace reporter, a stage hypnotist, a socialite/masked vigilante—and me, a big-hearted bruiser/mechanic who loved his family, America, and his souped-up bright red 1933 Dodge pickup. When it came time to take a zeppelin to Mongolia to thwart a Nazi plot, I agreed on the condition that I could bring the pickup and and find a use for it in our grand finale.
A fascinating little mechanic: characters can recover "Spark” (a resource that doubles as hit points and something you can spend for extra dice on important rolls) in a number of different ways, including asking probing questions of your teammates or “being plain old nice to people” (I hit this one by giving a working toy model of my cool car to a starstruck child). But the most dramatic way to recover spark is to “fraternize with a villain”—and you could force the GM’s hand a little by fraternizing with a non-villain NPC and triggering that Spark refresh. (See more about this below in our design discussion: Incentives and Alibis for In-Character “Misbehavior.”)
Musings: The game’s mechanical basis is a system about street-level superheroes, that draws a distinction between when you’re “being normal” and “being super.” We discovered that this distinction doesn’t hold as much in a pulp context. When I’m racing my souped-up truck over the high deserts of Mongolia against an arrogant British motorist to win information on a Nazi hideout, is that “being normal” because a car-race is something a normal person can do, or “being super” because of the heightened context? I think we were all comfortable with the judgment calls that got made along the way, but it did feel like a place where the genre expectations pushed in a different direction than the mechanics.
Ran: Girl Underground
I ran a two-shot of Girl Underground, a game about a curious girl in a wondrous world by Jesse Ross and Lauren McManamon. Players collaboratively play a Girl who’s wandered into another world, and also each play one of her loyal but strange Companions. Check out the videos here.
Highlights: It was so fun to indulge in a whimsical game in the vein of Labyrinth, Wizard of Oz, or Alice in Wonderland. I had a great table of players, too. Our Girl was Kat, an aspiring archeologist whose home had love but no curiosity. For Companions, we had the purple-plumed and two-headed Druthi the Mythic, the rambunctious Runaway Captain Max Awesome (with the shadow of an old man), the pointy metal Construct Pierce, and the self-conscious Ogre Lumba.
Over the course of the two sessions, we leaned hard into Kat refusing to mind her manners and thereby developing her Beliefs. She confronted Francis Lightfeather and his rapacious Adventurer’s Tomb (a perfect foil for a Girl interested in archeology) to reclaim a lost crown. The crown was found serving as a candy bowl on Lightfeather’s desk, the candy hoard guarded by a very small but very ferocious dragon. The Girl opted to convince a talking statue head to serve as the new candy bowl and befriend the dragon, so that she could take the crown.
Musings: There is some brilliant game design here, including in the deceptively punishing dice mechanics. Like most PbtA games, you’re rolling 2d6 by default. But you have no stats, so most rolls are simply flat. 10+ successes are rare, save in two circumstances. Companions each have a way to advise or comfort the Girl so she can re-roll with a +1 after a miss. And when the Girl stands strong in her convictions, she builds a dice pool by invoking different Beliefs, then rolls and takes the top two dice.
The smart part is that this means the gameplay tracks closely with theme and genre. Companions will mostly cause trouble, until they back up the Girl as she solves the trouble. The high-stakes rolls will almost certainly be ones where the Girl stands strong in her convictions—and with enough Beliefs, she can overcome big challenges. The Story Guide moves keep failures within the stakes of the source material: moves include “threaten (but never kill) them” and the go-to “make the world even weirder.”
Design Discussion: Incentives and Alibis for In-Character “Misbehavior”
Games often provide mechanical incentives or excuses for characters “acting out.” By this I mean, sometimes the game wants to encourage objectively counter-productive but in-genre or in-character behavior. A few easy examples I can cite here are the ways you can clear Conditions in Masks (e.g. clear Angry by hurting someone or breaking something important) or some of the character Keys in Lady Blackbird (e.g. "You like the shiny things. Hit your key when you steal something cool or score a big payoff").
This is pretty interesting! I’ve called these incentives or alibis because sometimes they’re about “giving permission” for players to do something they wanted to do anyway. Now, if the table is full of people who love drama, the permission may not be necessary. But for other tables, that little mechanical bonus (Do the thing! You’ll get an XP! Do the thing! You can clear a Stress!) helps players overcome their reluctance to rock the boat and unlocks messy character beats.
Sometimes a mechanic like this puts plot hooks right into the GM’s hands. I mentioned above that you can refill your Spark in Hit the Nazi: Retrieve the Ark by “fraternizing with a villain.” So when our masked vigilante/socialite triggered that mechanic by means of an ill-advised liaison with the super-scientist’s beautiful daughter, she was essentially telling the GM “I want this person to prove to be a villain and betray me!” The GM was happy to oblige.
When I asked around for other examples of this type of mechanic, people had some interesting responses. I heard about player character Beliefs in Burning Wheel—the GM is enjoined to make the characters’ Beliefs into problems by putting them in circumstances that challenge their Beliefs. I heard about the Stress mechanics in Cartel, where a huge part of the system is about characters racking up Stress and then trying to clear by engaging in coping behaviors (sometimes involving dice rolls that get them into further trouble). And notably, Monsterhearts essentially requires misbehavior by having every basic move be somewhat toxic, to represent the immaturity and volatility of your teenage monster characters.
One GM I asked about this sounded a note of caution: you want these mechanics incentivize productive misbehavior, but not to break the game. He says he’s sometimes found the Delinquent playbook in Masks to be too disruptive, because it gave a player too much permission to fight the premises of the game (including that you’re a team and you’re trying to be the good guys!). And that’s a real concern! Sometimes misbehavior is very clearly in service of the type of story you want to tell… but how do you distinguish between that, and a player messing with the game’s premise or other players’ fun at the table?
So I want to open this up to discussion. What do you like (or not like) about misbehavior mechanics as a player? As a GM? How do you think about them as a piece of game design? How do you make them a positive force at the table? Are there examples out there you want to highlight for one reason or another? Let me hear in the comments! I’ll do a second part of this discussion in a month or two.
Elsewhere
—On Twitter I posted a year-end round-up of my proudest gaming milestones of 2020. It was a good year (in this specific domain)! I contributed to two big-time Kickstarters (Urban Shadows and Trophy) and ran one of my own. Check out the whole thread here.
—I’ll be running several games for Gauntlet Community Open Gaming at the end of February. There will be a one-shot of Back Again from the Broken Land. And a two-shot of Hearts of Wulin set on a world from the Multiverse of Magic: The Gathering, where players are warrior-lovers in the shadows of the Dragons of Tarkir! Should be a great time. The convention is completely free and open to new gamers. Learn more here.
—The Gauntlet has also added designs to its Redbubble store based on games created by community members. So if you’ve ever wanted Secret Science Sewer Siblings-branded swag, you can find it there! I personally think it looks pretty good on a drawstring bag. But there’s plenty of options, including t-shirts!
I’ll be back in touch next month with more games played, games run, and design discussion. Till then: may your misbehavior be productive, and may you learn to stand strong in your convictions.
Gamefully Yours,
Alexi
So you probably won't be too surprised to discover that I don't love the framing of these mechanics as "misbehavior" or "alibi" mechanics. If they're done well, they're the exact opposite, they encourage the specific behaviors that the designer is hoping players will look for in their game. It's important to distinguish between player goals and character goals, what might be misbehavior from the perspective of the latter can be desired behavior from the perspective of the former. And in Monsterhearts, for example, I'm not even sure the mechanics create misbehavior from a character perspective. There's nothing in the premise of the game that requires the player characters to all work together, or be friends. Maybe the game everybody wants to play is Cruel Intentions inspired, full of over privileged teens out for themselves, where love is a tragic flaw. Monsterhearts fully supports that game. (Now I'm considering running that game... Maybe for Gauntlet: Empire City?). Obviously, the line is harder to walk in a game like Masks, where on the one hand, players are fashioned as a team, but on the other, the genre inspirations all contain a great deal of intra-team conflict (conflict that isn't always resolved! In any given run of X-Men, Cyclops and Wolverine probably don't end up as friends. Sometimes it goes even further, Angel does become Archangel, after all. Though of course that would require a PC to be handed over to the GM and so necessitate a larger conversation. That might have been a cool option to put in front of the disruptive delinquent character, if the table and specific player were into it.). And of course all of that is mostly about character conflict, and not other sorts of "trouble causing" stuff, like marking XP for getting into trouble with your vice or Trauma in Blades in the Dark, or using Traits against yourself in Torchbearer to earn checks (and potentially fail important rolls, which is necessary for advancement!).
At the end, as always, the key thing is to communicate openly at the table about what your goals are for your game, and how you want these moves to play out. Are they core to the kind of story you want to tell, both for your table as whole and for your character specifically if you're a PC? What does "optimal play" mean for you? Is it about always seeing your character, or the team succeed? Is it about limited struggle that ultimately leads to success? Is it about potential failure, loss, hardship and tragedy? Obviously, these moves are 100% misbehavior if you're in the first camp, but there are dials you can set between the second and third, even at the same table for different characters, if you're deliberate about it.