Debt

So, Bill said something pretty smart yesterday (he does that a lot). He said:

...make the mechanics instantiate setting, so that the rules of the game are the rules of the world. Then players will make sure that character behavior reinforces the intended social dynamics of the "setting." Where did we have the conversation about making the mechanics mirror a gift economy? *Do that*; that's awesome.

I can't find that discussion, either, but it sent me back to some of my old notes. In an earlier version, I tried to break everything into relationships, but that became too much book-keeping. But luckily enough, the very defining characteristic of a gift economy lies in not keeping such records. You don't have a quid pro quo arrangement. You just have your generalized debt.

According to Martín Prechtel, the Mayan word for "human" means "person in debt," as in, indebted to the land and your parents and your community and the other-than-human persons who give up their lives so that you can keep on living. In Soul Hunters, Rane Willerslev talks a great deal about the balance of debt that Yukaghir hunters incur when they go hunting, and the attendant fear that if they become too much in debt, someone may come to collect on that—making them or their families sick, or possibly even dying.

I think the gift economy itself could pull in that tension of trust that Ingold wrote about, that I've referred to before. You have to contribute what you can, and just trust that the rest of the world will do its part and give back to you. Nerve-wracking? Absolutely. Which also makes it great for the kind of tension that a fun game comes from.

Debt in this sense has the nice aspect of forcing you to balance. Too much debt, and you risk losing what you hold dear. But without any debt at all, you lose your connection to the rest of the world, your agency. This could bring the game back around to something played with coins (and I do really appreciate the twist of coins representing debt). Players can stack up adversity from a central pool of coins, and it takes that many encounters to resolve that adversity. Those coins go into a different pool, from which players can reward each other for "selling" their issue, like I'd worked out before...

...except that totally does not work with debt. Why do I have more debt from making you look good? Shouldn't you get debt from that? You owe me for making you look good? I "sell" your issue, and you acknowledge it by ... taking some debt for yourself? It all seems terribly backwards.

I thought about making characters spell out what they fear losing. Maybe you have to put "My life" somewhere on the list (and how much you value your life could say a lot about you: two coins? Five?). If you have that much debt, someone can take that many coins away from you by making you lose something at that level. I like keeping the game very simple to play, so I don't know if that adds up to too much book-keeping again.

More importantly, what does debt do for you? Why would you want debt? I guess I've come back around to the question of the resolution mechanic (argh!).

I don't want randomizers because animists don't consider the world a random place. They consider the world full of persons who respond to our pleas and our requests. I wonder if I've hit upon a fundamental contradiction here. On the one hand, if you build that into mechanics, you strip players of any choices they can make. On the other hand, if you leave it entirely up to the players, then your characters have no impact on what happens. I think I've playtested both extremes, and I didn't like either one.

I feel like I've run around in circles here. I think I need to hear other people's ideas to clear my head here. Sometimes the strangest thing, just a little phrase, unplugs something. It's happened often enough with this project! What do you think of this debt concept? Does it prompt any ideas for you?