The Progression of Animist Sin

In the playtests I ran leading up to and at Dreamation, I found a consistent problem with setting up the situation. We started to get something really good after an hour or two, but I want to get to that from the start, not a few hours in. So, creating a strong situation from the start has become a big concern for me.

Dogs in the Vineyard does this very well with a set town creation system that the GM uses. The system takes Mormon theology as a given: problems always begin with pride, which manifests as injustice, which leads to sin, which manifests as demonic attacks, which leads to false doctrine, which manifests as corrupt religious practices and heresy, which leads to false priesthood, which manifests as sorcery, which leads to hate and murder. You pick the particulars of a pride, the injustice that follows, and so on, following the chain down until you have a pregnant situation for the Dogs to walk into.

While at Dreamation, my mind started spinning around this idea. In Dogs, the GM does this before the game to set up the town, but what if we did this at the table, as a collaborative exercise? We start with one player, and ask them who's pride in the town sets things off. Next player to the left then tells us the injustice that leads to, and so on, until we have a situation ready to burst.

When I mentioned this to Giuli, she said it's a bad idea, because the Dogs come into town and try to figure all this out. Dogs is about coming into town as a stranger and unraveling its secrets. It's probably best for that game that it stay a GM exercise before the game starts.

But The Fifth World isn't about strangers, and animists have their own progression like this. And fortunately for me, it's a progression that works backwards. When a problem besets an animist group, whether bad storms or sickness or bad hunting, they don't chalk it up to chance. A more-than-human world seems densely populated with active persons pursuing various agendas. Nothing "just happens." Everything happens because someone did it. If sickness falls on the people, it happens because someone sent the sickness to them. Misfortune comes from angry people, and people become angry because of insults, offenses, trespasses, injuries or failed obligations.

This could work as a means of generating starting situation. The first player has to come up with a problem the people face; she says, "They're getting sick." Great! Next player: who sent the sickness? "Deer." Great! Do we stop there? Maybe that's all we need—we play a game that revolves around our investigation and our entreaties to Deer, as we try to figure out who offended Deer and how. Maybe we keep going. Why did deer send the sickness? "Deer agreed to give up 10 for our sake; but one hunter took an 11th deer in secret, and hoarded the meat for himself." Awesome. Next player: what does Deer demand in recompense? "The first 10 were given; the 11th was murder. Deer demands the murderer's life in return." Maybe we stop there—and we play out what we do next. Do we give up the hunter? Do we find some other way?

I might use this; I might just as well not. But it seems like no matter what, it could be an interesting exercise in animist thinking for the animists in the audience to work out what the progression of animist sin looks like. I'd love to hear your suggestions!

My Three Insights

Back in December, Vincent Baker wrote a post on his blog, claiming that every RPG says three things simultaneously:

First, you're saying something about the subject matter or genre of your game: something you think about adventure fiction, or swords & sorcery, or transhumanist sf, or whatever. Second, you're saying something about roleplaying as a practice, taking a position on how real people should collaborate under these circumstances. Third, you're sying something about real live human nature.

What does The Fifth World say?

Subject matter: Ecotopian fiction seems like so neglected a genre that simply defending its viability as a genre seems like a statement worth making. If I consider my genre science fiction more generally—and I suppose that I could—my assertion here would largely agree with what Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in the introduction of Future Primitive, or the kind of science fiction that Ursula LeGuin has written, or what Michael Green said of Afterculture; namely, that we desperately need a hopeful vision of a viable future.

Roleplaying as a practice: I have said a good bit on this blog about storyjamming. Storyjamming emphasizes that jamming element, a continuous, fluid exchange of story. You need just enough rules to weave everyone's contributions into a seamless whole, but not so much that they start to call attention to themselves. The rules in an RPG need to knock you out of your head and interrupt your story, so that you can participate in the moment and help us track down our story, together. They also need to stay simple and elegant, but fit together to create emergent experiences. What people take away from your game will come from whatever emerges from that—whether you planned it or not.

Real live human nature: A healthy life as a human requires a strong sense of place. That doesn't need to mean we never leave; it just means we eventually come home. We have obligations to the places that give us life, and when we neglect those obligations, the land starts to die, and we start to die with it. But we also make the world a better, more beautiful place—if we can balance our ambitions and our obligations.

Building Towards an Endgame

At the beginning of the game, you declare your goal, and tell us about the obstacles in your way. When you work towards your goal, you cast coins. Heads advance your goal, so you take some coins away. Tails mean you encounter a setback, some complication that puts a new obstacle in your way, so you put another coin on the stack. While you can get lucky, this system alone doesn't get you anywhere. You have as much a chance to get heads as tails, so you could sit there forever, the stack of coins fluctuating but never reaching zero.

In the episode of Storyjammers that Mike & I published yesterday, I made the claim that you really want your mechanics to do one of two things:

1. Bring the story closer to its conclusion.
2. Introduce a new twist or complication, or, move the story further from its conclusion.

This fits in nicely if you want to drive a story arc by the rules available at any given moment. At the start, you'll have as many setbacks as successes; later on, you introduce rules that can bias play towards success, so only then will you make any real progress. That gives us some satisfying twists, but as we get to the end of the story, we start to get that satisfying rhythm of tying up more threads than we start up.

I have two ideas on rules that might do that, but I'd like some input about them.

1. Helping. Other characters help you by casting their coins when you cast yours, but instead of counting heads and tails normally, the tails cast by people who help you don't do anything, while each head they cast cancels out one of your tails. Basically, this would mean that helping means more that you watch out for a character's mistakes than really push the agenda forward yourself. Does this really fit? Or should people helping just magnify the effect: all the heads count as successes, and all the tails count as setbacks, so you might get closer to your goal, but you'll have more complications, too? Or (this occurs to me as I write), you count up the sum of all the heads cast, but only the largest number of tails cast by any one person?
2. Setbacks. Keep track of how many of the coins on a goal came from setbacks—perhaps by keeping them in a separate pile. You can use each one once to cancel out a setback. So, the more setbacks you suffered early on, the fewer you suffer now—like learning from your mistakes.

Information Beats

Recently, Robin D. Laws has written about information beats. Reading it gives me the sense of some profound new way of understanding and designing games just on the tip of my tongue. Jason Corley's recent thread on Story Games in defense of the much-maligned "giant, detailed setting" books, seems deeply tied into this. Both, in effect, ask us to see an RPG in terms of pacing and controlling the flow of information. I think they have something there, and I'd really love to see what happens as game designers start thinking of mechanics that really handle questions, reveals and pipes.

This all led me to an idea for the Fifth World; a subtle change, but one that, I think, could make all the difference. Right now, at the beginning of the game, you declare a goal you want to pursue. You place that goal on the map, and then you tell us about the obstacles you face. For each obstacle, you put a coin on the goal. Then, when you set a scene in pursuit of your goal, you cast some coins. Heads reduce the number of coins on the goal, tails put more on. You win when you have removed all the coins on the goal.

The change I have in mind really just involves changing some names; like, instead of "goal," you have a question. Heads don't give you successes, they give you answers; you take one coin away from the stack. Tails don't give you setbacks, they give you more questions; you put another coin on the stack. It doesn't change the mechanic at all, but it feels like a significant shift in the tone. One I feel pretty good about.

Storyjammers

I started a podcast with my brother, called Storyjammers. In the grand tradition of podcasting, our first episode kind of sucks, but I think we've started the upward trend of improvement even with the second episode. You can let me know if you agree on Monday when that episode drops. Even so, I think the first episode will still give you a good idea of the kind of angle we take on gaming. In our discussion of why we play, we go through GNS, Sockets, drama therapy and escapism. Our next episode talks about mechanics and what purpose they serve in the game, and the third one features my rant against games with GM's. So, if that kind of thing interests you, you might want to subscribe. I'll still post notes on how developing the Fifth World goes over here, though naturally, I might post some of that on the podcast, too.

The Fifth World Movies: Avatar

I actually feel very ambivalent about Avatar, so I hesitate to call this an "endorsement." But it sparked some good discussions with the people I went to see it with, which certainly counts for something. Moreover, the points that bother me about Avatar have some significant connections to The Fifth World.

Visually, the movie awes. It even has its moments as a story. I especially liked the part where Neytiri calls Jake a baby. The montage of the outsider learning Na'vi traditions hit the high notes for me, including the language, and even tracking. The intelligent root system—ethernet cords in animals' hair notwithstanding—presents an only slightly more magical version of the mycorrhizal networks that really do knit Earth's continents into enormous organisms (even though the movie's presentation seems to suggest that Earth has nothing like this).

I also liked that the genocide has no real stand-out villains. Even the colonel acts as he does because he has gotten hurt before. He wants to protect his people, and his inability to do so makes him increasingly paranoid. He becomes more and more violent not because of any moral failing, but because of the impact of living in the system he does. The businessman in charge of the whole operation cares about the bottom line; the scientists care, but their arrogance and their need to cast everything in their own terms constantly gets in their way. The genocide doesn't happen because of a villain; he happens because of the systemic problems and relationships between these different people, pushing them forward towards an end that none of them, on their own, particularly wants. Just like real life.

That said, I can hardly deny the deeply disturbing, racist undertones in the movie—once again, the condescending conceit that native people need a big, strong white male to come save them, right down to the "Indian Princess" story. Will Heaven summed this up much better in The Telegraph. Annalee Newitz puts it quite well on io9:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color—their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

I went to see the film with these things in mind. I probably wouldn't have gone on my own because of this, but my brother wanted to see it, and I hadn't passed such absolute judgment based simply on the report of others that I would refuse to see it myself.

First, might it sometimes take a European to fend off other Europeans? After all, consider the depths of sociopathic depravity we see from the humans in Avatar (which only dimly mirrors the sociopathic depravity of Europeans who invaded the Americas, Africa and Australia). They do more than simply "displace" people, they rip them from a rootedness in a particular place that affects them in ways not unlike a collective frontal lobotomy. That takes a kind of bloody-mindedness, a ruthlessness and cruelty—or at the very least, a kind of devastating ignorance—that no healthy person can really understand. To know what they'll do, you might need someone as damaged as they to think in such, frankly, psychotic terms.

Second, it seems to me that Jake Sully's rise to Na'vi savior came from precisely what Neytiri said of him at the start: he acts like a baby. He stumbles about, knowing nothing. He heard the story of Toruk Makto, but he lacks a real feel for it. Most of us have heard the story of Moses, but we wouldn't try parting a sea. Someone else, having heard the story only once, might not know better; and if it worked, well then! Seen in this light, Jake Sully becomes the hero—both when entering Na'vi society, and when becoming the "great white savior"—precisely because of his ignorance, and his willingness to admit his ignorance. He does something amazing not because he is amazing, but because he doesn't know better, so he tries.

I don't think these perspectives absolve Avatar of its faults. I don't see much ground for taking these as authorial intent. They provide what seems to me like the most generous reading possible, and even then, I have to wonder to what degree these serve simply as the rationalizations of another white guy?

I think I liked Avatar most not for the film itself, but for the discussions it sparked—discussions of race, identity, cultural appropriation, imperialism, privilege and white guilt. The Fifth World raises these questions, too. I hope to handle them somewhat more honestly, though.

Cool Ideas

In my last post, Willem suggested something really cool. In Dogs in the Vineyard, you create towns ripe with moral quandaries for the Dogs to judge (and thus, suck them into one moral dilemma after another). You do this by using a step-by-step template that plays along with the Christian view of sin: all sin begins with Pride, Pride leads to Injustice, etc. For each step, you introduce the problem. So, what Pride lies at the root of this problem? What Injustice did it lead to? And so on.

You have an animist equivalent: all problems begin with unmet obligations. Unmet obligations lead to people feeling taken advantage of. People feeling taken advantage of leads to withdrawing their help. Withdrawing help leads to mutual resentment, and mutual resentment might lead to violence. So, for example, some hunters take 21 deer, when they agreed to only take 20. The deer feel taken advantage of, so they withdraw their help. The people go hungry, so they begin to resent the deer. How long will this go before the humans and the deer start escalating their resentment to violence?

The poem offers a really good framework for this, too. What obligation has someone failed to meet? An obligation between persons? Between families? Between villages? Between peoples (as in the preceding example, between the human people and the deer people)? Then, just like Dogs, we escalate: how does the other group feel taken advantage of? What help do they withdraw? We can do this around the table, so we all have a hand in escalating the situation.

Now, I think players only have so much patience for "set up" time, so I think this option might mean eliminating the cycles by which we'd previously created characters from places. But we could introduce characters quickly, who we flesh out in play, and they get to unravel this whole mess. Just like Dogs, you've escalated past the point where simple measures would solve the problem. You've got mutual resentment and all kinds of unrecognized obligations. How do you fix that situation?

I also looked at John Harper's Lady Blackbird again recently. My brother ran Spirit of the Season last week, and it has me really excited about FATE. It reminded me of how simple and fun the game played. Lady Blackbird seems even faster and simpler. It made me wonder about simply designing The Fifth World as a simplified FATE game. I've heard good things about Chronica Feudalis lately, too, and it does much the same thing. That idea especially appealed; perhaps, instead of my misunderstanding of the term "roleplaying poem," I could follow John Harper's lead, and simply design a single-page, front and back, beautifully laid-out game.

And yet, I ultimately came back around to the ideas I'd started with, with coins for power and players pursuing their ambitions. I share these as unequivocally cool ideas—but I think this will work better. I told myself years ago that I'd know I finally had a good system when I stopped bouncing around all the time, and when the ideas I came up with started to focus on details instead of the most basic elements of gameplay. Dare I hope that I've finally reached that point?

Putting Debt in the Fruitful Void

A lot of Story Games got started with disaffected World of Darkness players. They loved what the "Storyteller" games promised: games about story and character, and all those things. But they didn't really get that. The Storyteller System just provided another game about combat. That disappointment led to some of the first indie games, which began with ideas like "system matters," that stressed designing a game to fulfill a goal.

In that context, the idea that Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker started working towards back in 2005 seemed revolutionary: the Fruitful Void. Ron Edwards said, "Without such 'fruitful voids,' perhaps envisioned as what you get when you show a person seven of the eight corners of a cube, a rules-set is no fun. It's just a full cube; you can look at it, pick it up, mess with it, and nothing happens except it stays a cube." Vincent Baker said, "There's a trick to designing games, which I'm trying to tell. Ron says it's to leave the eighth corner of the cube unmade. I say it's to make a whirlwind."

In short, what you leave out matters just as much as what you put in. Most often, people use Dogs in the Vineyard as the example, I think in part because it does provide an excellent example, and probably in part just because Vincent used it in his post. You'll note that Dogs doesn't have any kind of "Judgment" or "Faith" mechanic. Yet, everything in the game—town creation, stakes, raising and seeing, escalation, fallout—it all points towards that. The game centers on judgment and faith. It doesn't need to address them directly—in fact, it makes the game more strongly focused by not addressing them directly, because everything else in the game already pushes you in that direction.

Yesterday, I worried about what role debt should play in the game, now that it no longer makes sense as a mechanic. Willem Larsen commented, stressing the importance of debt, and saying, "I would rather play archipelago-style and just presence the debt relationship in my story through setting."

I started to wonder how I could point players in that direction without preaching or mechanics—because, without something pointing them in that direction, what would make it come up more often than anything else?

And then I remembered the Fruitful Void.

The Fruitful Void of the Fifth World, the undefined center, should deal with Debt and Obligation.

I talked to Giuli about this earlier, and realized that I had to make the challenges harder, so that you need help. I thought of a new twist: you don't get to reduce obstacles by how many heads you get, but by how many heads you get over the obstacle. So, if you want to try to earn an Achievement with six coins on it, and you get seven heads, you can take one coin off the top. That would make it very hard to get started on an Achievement, but each success makes the next success easier. You might get the final, winning blow by yourself, but you'll know that in the beginning, you needed help.

I thought about a mechanic about people you owe, like if you help someone, they owe you, so you can force them to help you at some point later on. But I hate rules that force you to do something. In fact, I wonder now if this works better by leaving it undefined: if you get a reputation for not helping others in return, maybe they won't help you, which will make it awfully hard to earn the Achievements you want. Just like cooperation in the real world.

I don't know if this whirlwind has really built up enough force, though. Do you have any ideas of how other ideas could push play towards debt and obligation? I'd love to hear them!

Rethinking Debt

Since introducing the concept of Debt, it has gotten a very mixed reception. I think the narrative economy works, but I don't know if it really works to think of it as Debt.

At first, I enjoyed challenging the conventional notions of debt, and moving players more towards a feral conception of debt—as something ambivalent, rather than negative, as something that creates relationships and obligations and thus ties the world together, rather than simply a burden. But I haven't gotten that reaction; more often, I've simply gotten confusion.

With Debt and Trouble, the economy had a nice balance: causing trouble got you into more debt, and you could reduce your debt by solving troubles. It worked nicely. Trying to Achieve something, though, makes that pool look less like debt, and more like strength, ability—I keep coming back to the oft-abused "mana" as the best term, in its original Maori sense, as "impact-ful," or efficacious.

I've often thought about representing strength in games, and I think I've put my best ideas into the Fifth World already, even before I started thinking of the economy in this fashion. On the one hand, you have your pool of strength; on the other, you have your "bandwidth," or how much you can pull from that at once. So, you have weight lifters who can tap all their strength at once; you also have endurance athletes who can tap their strength continuously. You also have other kinds of strength, like willpower. You might have an impressive ability to resist a single temptation (high "bandwidth"), but if you've used up your reserves by resisting many different things all day long, you might succumb to something you'd otherwise resist easily. This allows both for the possibility of getting overwhelmed, and getting worn down.

In the Fifth World, you have your pool of coins, and you can use as many coins as you have words in your Name. I like that, because it gives you a lot of complexity with very simple rules.

But it doesn't really have much to do with debt at this point. I see three alternatives here. First, I could abandon the whole idea of Achievements, and go back to debts and obligations, and try to find better ways of fleshing those out. I fear what that might mean for the feel of the game, though. As I said, I didn't change people's conceptions nearly so much as I sowed confusion. Would a game all about debts and obligations make the Fifth World feel like a terrible place to live?

Second, I could scale up. Instead of dying when you pass an arbitrary threshold (which I never felt entirely good about), you die when your Debt surpasses your "Mana" (I don't feel entirely comfortable with that term because of its specificity to a single tradition and how much games, anthropologists and pop culture has abused it, but I'll use it provisionally for the moment for convenience's sake). You reduce your Debt by fulfilling your obligations, and gain Debt when you get the help you need to earn your Achievements. Those Achievements give you more "Mana," and take time away from your obligations. Those details may need more work, but you get the idea: your character has two pools, and you have to worry about the balance between them.

I worry that this makes the game too complex. In his design notes, included as an appendix in Ganakagok, Bill White talks about earlier versions of the game that had complex mechanics for determining what the people needed, meant to urge players to do things like go hunting, or acquire other provisions. That complexity didn't help the game. The current game relies on a tarot deck that originally came out of that problem, but the game now doesn't really deal with that kind of resource management. Instead, it creates the space for mythopoiec roleplaying. I worry that doubling the complexity of the game like this could have the same impact on the Fifth World, as the early resource management mini-game had on Ganakagok.

Third, I could let go of the whole concept of Debt. Yes, it plays a crucial role in tribal life, but does the Fifth World really want to get into the details of day-to-day tribal life, or does it want to present bioregional epics? Does it want to provide a taste of bioregional animism, does it want to excite you with visions of the future? To quote Michael Green in Afterculture, "It's about opening up a whole new category of solutions, about finding another way of being: evolved, simpler, deeper, even more elegant. Even more cool. Even very cool."

Maybe I can afford to let go of the notion of Debt in the game itself. An obsession with realism all too often leads to clunky, difficult games. The Fifth World doesn't necessarily aim to realistically simulate day-to-day life in the feral future, it aims to excite us today with visions of the kind of future we could have. So, the game should focus on that kind of story. Dropping debt doesn't imply that it doesn't matter to the people of the Fifth World, it just means that it doesn't relate to the bioregional epics that this game tells.

I often worry that I worry too much, that I analyze until I paralyze myself, that I spend so much time thinking about these problems that I never get around to sitting down and solving them. Then I worry that I haven't thought it through enough. In this case, does Debt represent something so important that I can't abandon it? Or has it become more a distraction than a goal, and so, something that I really need to leave behind? I don't know; I've gotten too close to it to really tell. What do you think?

Trouble or Obstacles?

I started thinking tonight about the wider implications of my "Causing Trouble" idea. I think it works well as a mechanic, but what does it say about the Fifth World? It seems to present the world as a place filled with trouble, trouble that our heroes must go out and answer. That can work, but it certainly doesn't jive with the pseudo-utopian feel I want to convey. It seems to lead me straight into the trap I've feared most: designing a game that inadvertently undermines the point of the setting.

It seems to me that the twist that separates a utopian setting from a gritty one might ultimately come down to something as simple as whether your characters reactively face problems that someone else created, or whether your characters proactively pursue ambitions that they themselves have set.

The rest needn't change that much. Achievements count more, based on how many Obstacles you put in your way. For each coin, you narrate one more obstacle you face, and you can reduce those obstacles just like you might have faced Trouble before: invoke your Name, cast your coins, and reduce by one for each one that comes up heads.

This would also make for characters with lists of achievements of varying strengths, which reminds me somewhat of Gifts in Ganakagok. Those Achievements should replace Memories, in that case, and their value tells you how many coins you can re-cast when you invoke it.

I started thinking about the ways you might use this, and the versatility made me feel good about the idea. For example:

• Achievement: Slay the ogre! Six obstacles:
  1. In one bitter winter, my desperate uncle ate his child, my cousin.
  2. He became an ogre, a cannibal addicted to human flesh.
  3. Human flesh gives him supernatural strength.
  4. When they discovered his crime, the family tried to kill him.
  5. He got away.
  6. He has lived on his own ever since.
• Achievement: Marry the beautiful maiden. Five obstacles:
  1. Her father hates me.
  2. Her mother doesn't mind me, but she won't stand up to her husband for me.
  3. She loves me, but I can't bear to make her choose between me and her father.
  4. Her father discovered our secret love, and forbade me from seeing her anymore.
  5. Now, her father has started trying to arrange a marriage for her to someone else!
• Achievement: Restore the irradiated lake. Five obstacles:
  1. In ancient days, our ancestors created light from glowing rods.
  2. You cannot see the magic fire in those rods, but it burns forever, and it boils the skin away with a magical disease.
  3. Our ancestors knew how to start those fires, but not how to put them out.
  4. In desperation, they sank those rods in the lake.
  5. Their magic fire continues to burn, though, and it has turned the lake and everything around it into poison.

I think these three quick examples show some of the strengths of this idea. Firstly, it can cover everything from a good old-fashioned monster-slaying quest, to a romance story, to trying to restore an irradiated lake. Secondly, the obstacles can provide so much more context and depth to these challenges.

I can also see different ways of apportioning the value of such achievements. Perhaps you want to get a new Name from it, or perhaps some special effect. Set aside one point for the Name, and one point for the effect. If you had a five-point Achievement, you could turn it into a three-point Achievement, with a Name and an effect.

You could also have an overall "Prestige" score, totaling all of your Achievements and Names. Age should count somehow, as well. I don't know what I might want to do with this yet—perhaps nothing at all. The idea of competing for Prestige occurred to me—you could even give extra Prestige for helping others gain their Achievements, which would make the optimal strategy one of cooperation—but even then, I think that might undermine the tone of the game.

The idea of "Prestige" did remind me of Flow in FreeMarket. I despise transhumanism passionately, but despite that, I can't help but notice that the more basic premise of a utopian setting pushes me into a space somehow both similar and opposite to that game. In FreeMarket, "Flow" essentially means prestige—what the more technologically-intoxicated call things like "social capital." You use Flow to create things, which in turn gives you more Flow. The similarity makes me think I've hit upon something. Despite our almost totally opposite settings, we both face the basic question of how to tell stories in a more-or-less utopian future, and that might ultimately come down to something as simple as whether your characters reactively face problems that someone else created, or whether your characters proactively pursue ambitions that they themselves have set.

In Media Res

A thread started on Story Games about starting games in media res, or, "in the middle of things." This has particular interest for me, because I've tried to design the Fifth World to tell bioregional epics. The Wikipedia entry on "epic poetry" provides a list of criteria you'll find, more or less, in any discussion of what an epic means. I have my praepositio and invocation at the beginning. Like John Milton in Paradise Lost who turned the Greek Muse into the Christian Holy Spirit, I use the invocation to ground the epic by identifying the muse as the Spirit of the Place. The use of epithets requires a little more thought, but at present, I think having to invoke your name to start using the mechanics helps bring that element in. I'll admit, I still don't have a good idea on how to bring in more enumeratio. But for the moment, I have the problem of starting in media res more in mind.

From the playtests so far, I feel confident that the basic approach to story structure does work. Fluency play means introducing each rules element, one at a time. As an extension of that, you can control the pacing of the story by introducing rules elements in a deliberate order. I definitely need to tweak that order, but I feel confident now in the basic premise. Specifically, we consistently found that the coin-flipping mechanics came up too late in play. Many of the ritual phrases and so forth refer to that implicitly by costing coins, but without the coins in use early on, you have little idea of what kind of price you pay.

What if the very first scene had you confronting Trouble and flipping coins? You could begin in media res. Later, when we introduce the Memory mechanics, you can use those to establish how we got to this point. This would introduce the coin-flipping mechanics at the very beginning, and add the other ritual phrases later on.

I think this would definitely change the tone of the stories, too. It would make the stories fundamentally about confronting Trouble. I think I like that emphasis, since it also gives more room for players to cooperate. The current framework sometimes allows for the game to end in some clever consensus, which works especially well when characters end up with what they wanted, but not in the way they expected to get it. This approach, though, does seem to give gameplay an essentially player-versus-player quality. I think beginning in media res, with Trouble mechanics, would make gameplay essentially cooperative, about our heroes working together to solve the Trouble facing their people. I think that dynamic could work very well. I'll need to whip up a version of the poem that does that, and see how it plays.

Wrap It Up

In improv theater, knowing when and how to end a scene often poses a problem. Often, a show has an emcee who solves this problem by simply deciding when a scene ends. In traditional RPGs, GM's control all aspects of pacing: they frame every scene and determine when every scene ends. Collaborative storytelling means liberating players from GM's and GM's from their obligations—and that means exploring other ways of figuring out when a scene ends.

This came up in playtesting. We had some scenes that had a hard time finding their focus, and as a result, would ramble on for far too long. We need some way to signal when to wrap it up.

In literature, every scene has a specific purpose, and the scene ends when it has fulfilled that purpose. In a story game, though, we may not know a scene's purpose until we've finished playing it, so how can we know when it has fulfilled that purpose? More importantly, how can we know in that moment, that a scene has finished, with all the other things we have to keep in mind in play?

I've decided to take a page from a Norwegian game called "Until We Sink," which itself seems to follow the model of most plays. In "Until We Sink," a scene ends when two characters have left. This means that one character can't arbitrarily end the scene prematurely, but by the same token, one character can't keep the scene going, either. When the first person leaves, it probably signals to the others that this scene should end soon, sending that "wrap it up" message to everyone playing. As with so many other parts of the game, I'll have a ritual phrase to indicate this, which should help to give it some additional weight.

Rules Are Made To Be Broken

I try to keep this blog in E-Prime, so writing that title pains me. Yet, that old slogan fits my topic today too perfectly to pass up. It seems to me that one of the primary functions of a rule in any RPG lies in the opportunity to break it. Who can break it, and when, becomes one of the primary means of defining a character.

I considered adding an idea to the playtests at GASPcon, but decided to try the simpler version without it first. I considered making several cards, allowing each player to choose one for his or her character. Each would announce a particular character trait, and with it, a specific rule that the trait allowed the character to break. So, for instance:

• Ungrateful. You can have 12 Debt before you die, instead of just 10.
• Contrary. Using the ritual phrase, "I have never heard of such a thing" costs you no Debt.
• Wistful. Choose a Memory. You can use it twice in this game.
• Famous. You have a bonus Name.

I don't know if it would fit into the poem, and part of me worries about including a list like this. On the other hand, it offers so much more room for people to define unique characters that I keep coming back to the idea.

When combined with an idea like Trouble, it presents even more opportunities. For instance, you could incur one more Debt to attach one of these to a Trouble. So, you take on four Debt. You take three coins of Trouble, and put them on a new Trouble called "Wandering Mercenary," with "Famous" attached to it. The person who eliminates that Trouble becomes "Famous," so he can gain another Name because of that victory.

I don't know if this idea will work, but it seems to open up enough opportunities to warrant playing around with it to see where it might go.

Causing Trouble

Consistently, the playtests so far have revealed a dearth of situation. People complain that they don't know where to take their characters. I included a step in character creation where, after you introduce your character, we go around the table, and each person tells you something that you want from their character, that their character won't give you. I thought this might provide some good opening tension—even if it might wind up pointing play into a player-versus-player mode—but that just didn't happen.

So, I find myself going back to an older idea, and finding a better place for it now than it had when I first conceived of it.

Right now, you start with some amount of Debt, based on your age. This reflects what the Land and the People have provided to you over your life. Older characters have lots of Debt; younger characters, much less. You use your Debt to accomplish things, so young characters may need to get more Debt. Thematically, it seems to make perfect sense that you'd get more Debt by causing Trouble. So, you can take as many coins of Debt as you like, if you put an equal number of coins into Trouble. Older characters, with plenty of Debt already, could get rid of their Debt by settling Trouble. Which also happens to present precisely the dynamic I'd like to see: older characters cleaning up the messes that younger characters start.

When adding Trouble, you write down something that Troubles the People in a central area, perhaps a sheet of paper in the middle of the play area. You put at least one coin on it. You can put more coins on it, to make that Trouble more troublesome. In play, characters can confront that Trouble. They invoke their Names, which lets them throw coins from their Debt equal to the words in that Name. For each head, they can return that coin, and one coin from the Trouble, to the bowl. So, you can work off your Debt by solving Troubles.

Yet, you can only get more Debt by causing Trouble somewhere else. When you start the game, you get a starting Debt based on your age. I think you should probably introduce some starting Troubles, too, with coins equal to your starting Debt. Since zero Debt makes you ineffective and cut off from the world, you can't really ever solve all the Trouble in the world: you can only solve some Troubles, some of the time, and try to arrange your Troubles in a way you can live with. I think that in itself says something powerful, especially in a pseudo-utopian game.

This has the added benefit of letting players guide the game in a direction they want. Giuli and I have both noticed, with some irritation, that a disproportionate number of our playtests involve cannibals, for instance. It makes sense: they fit so well into the tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction. They violate the positive vision of the future that the Fifth World drives towards, though, and that really gets at the heart of the design problem the game needs to solve. We don't want to lecture people about why the Fifth World won't involve short lifespans, raging cannibals, or high infant mortality, but how do you get people to move past those stereotypes otherwise? A Trouble mechanic allows us to define the problems we face. With it, I can introduce my missing brother, who went hunting and never returned, but instead became a wild man (see the part about "Bigfoot" in this blog entry from April). Or we can add the curse sent upon us by Deer, because someone killed a deer violently.

Conflicts between characters lead us into player-versus-player games. Conflicts left to emerge collaboratively may trend towards stereotypes. But letting people establish Troubles may mean that we can guide a game in a specific direction, with the kinds of conflicts that we at the table find interesting and meaningful.

It also has the added benefit that we can actually play a cooperative, GM-less game. Everyone at the table can work together to eliminate the Trouble.

Ganakagok

I've taken lessons from Ganakagok already, but only on Saturday did I get to play it. Bill came to GASPcon 10 to run it, and I made a point of getting into his game. I walked away with a book and a card deck; I hope to run it this weekend, and at the next regular GASP Games Day.

Something kind of magical happens in a game of Ganakagok, it seems. Bill's designed the cards so well that you could really believe in their divinatory power. So often, you get just the right card, that you might swear that someone rigged the deck. I think this involves more than just a common Barnum effect, where people naturally interpret a vague, general statement as something eerily specific, though that no doubt plays a part. Rather, Bill's designed the deck so well that the kinds of situations that the Nitu face come up in it regularly. More than just sufficiently ambiguous meanings, these cards have just the right punch and context to really make them matter.

Much of the game revolves around the interpretation of those cards. When we roll dice, we roll to see who will get to interpret the cards, and what consequences will follow from that struggle. That gives the game a definite momentum. Each interpretation builds on the last; the game gains a forward motion as we rush towards its climax.

Bill's called this the "Mythopoietic Edition," and I think he has picked just the right word for it. He's designed a game that really does seem to create myths, consistently and reliably. He calls it "a quasi-Inuit Silmarillion" (referring to the poetic elven mythology that J.R.R. Tolkien invented).

Issues of cultural appropriation do arise out of this, and while I, too, cringed at phrases like, "primitive and icy," overall, I admire how Bill has handled the situation—particularly upon reading his most recent blog entry, where he advised people who have enjoyed the game to donate to the Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association.

While the cards you draw will create a different world with each game, you can never get very far from the stars disappearing from the night sky, and the inevitability of the morning. Though the world you've known differs from one game to the next, that world always comes to an end. Your character stands out as a protagonist because you recognize this earlier than most others. You have your hope for what the change could mean, and your fear for what it might mean. You have the balance of Good and Bad Medicine in the world, amongst the People, and for yourself. Ultimately, this game really digs into how we cope with inevitable disaster. The real world lets you take your pick:—global warming, peak oil, mass extinction, et cetera ad nauseam. In this game, the coming change—the Morning—has definite positive aspects, as well as negative. You almost certainly won't succeed in having more Good Medicine than Bad for the world, the people, and all of your characters. Even one will give you a challenge. So this change will include some amount of tragedy. Yet it doesn't need to mean unmitigated tragedy. As much as this game deals with fear and resistance to change, it also deals with embracing change, and finding hope in it. For that, I think Ganakagok has some pretty powerful, good medicine for us all. It leads you through a myth all about how the world will change, and how we deal with the need to face that reality—pretty much exactly what we all need right about now.

GASPcon Playtests

GASPcon 10 expanded to three days, adding two RPG slots on Friday. I ran one of the two Fifth World playtests of the convention on Friday night. I wound up with a bit of an "all star" playtest group, including Jenn from the Trapcast, and "Mr. Teapot" Nick Wedig, designer of House of Masks, which won Game Chef last year. Ironically enough, the fourth fellow at the table—the one I didn't know—gave some of the best performances.

We returned to the Point. I must assume the Ferryman met a cruel end, since we now had a tribe living there who thought that the portal to the Underworld there required human sacrifice. They had taken Jossiah the Healer, and wanted to learn his secrets. So their chief assigned a teenager named Hawk Necklace to become his apprentice. My character, Sleepy Watch, had failed to protect Jossiah, so he enlisted Paws, who took the blame for that because of their uncanny physical similarity, to help him rescue Jossiah. Paws lived in exile in the ruins of Oakland. The panthers had returned there, and allowed no one to approach, but Paws had become kin to them.

Paws and Watch received the help of the people just for trying to fight the other tribe off. They even gave them their magical weapons (the last remaining weapons made of metal). Hawk Necklace met them while looking for someone his people could sacrifice in Jossiah's place, and hatched a plan to sneak Paws and Watch in as prisoners. Watch challenged the chief, and managed to kill him. Watch considered the tribe cannibals, so he ate the chief's ear; but, they didn't actually practice cannibalism, so the gruesome scene simply had the effect of frightening them with his apparent madness.

The slaying of their chief put their village into chaos. A new chief arose, concerned primarily with saving his people. He considered a war on the People of Watcher, Paws and Jossiah a task that could give them the purpose they needed. They looked for ancient propane tanks in Oakland, with which to burn the forests there to the ground and send the panthers back into the Underworld.

After slaying the assassins sent after them and learning of this plot, Jossiah enlisted the aid of the whole village in retrieving these tanks from the old tunnels. Watch kept solitary guard against their enemies, now overconfident with pride. When the enemies came, the panthers fell upon them, but Watcher made a sudden movement against one of the attackers, provoking a panther who scarred his face.

In the tunnels, the enemies swarmed the people. Paws stabbed his spear through one of them, and into a propane tank behind him. They all exploded, consuming most of their enemies. Those that remained mistook Paws for Watch, and began to scream, because the boy who had killed their chief could unleash a firestorm with the strike of his spear.

In the end, Paws returned to the village, and Watcher went into self-imposed exile among the panthers. Just as they had both initially desired, they switched places. Their appearance spread a legend about a boy with magical powers and incredible strength, who could even appear in two places at once. Hawk Necklace left his old people and joined a new people, and Jossiah found hope that the next generation might not always seem less wise and less strong than their ancestors.

The second playtest on Sunday afternoon I played with some of the folks responsible for GASPcon. That one I'd have a harder time recapping from a fiction angle. We had a lot of interruptions, and because it involved some of the folks responsible for GASPcon, exhaustion overtook the game and we ended early. But I still got a lot out of this game especially because of Todd. Todd has taken a real interest in the setting, and he's given me a huge number of really great ideas. Possibly more important than anything, with a project like this, you can easily lose your bearings, and you end up with very little sense of the quality of what you've come up with. Todd gave me a much-needed touchstone to gauge where I stand with this.

In previous iterations, at this point in the playtesting, I'd start to re-evaluate the most basic parts of gameplay. Now, not so much. The poem seems to work for getting into play immediately, helping keep the story's progression on track, and setting a different mood for each round by controlling which rules everyone has access to at that moment. I need to work on the progression of those rules, and as I'll write in some upcoming articles here, I've come up with some different rules to try out. But right now, I expect to bring a game to Dreamation that will look a lot like the game I ran this weekend, and right now, that alone feels like a triumph.

Playtest Report #2

I got to playtest the Fifth World for the first time around a table on Saturday. My brother, Giuli and I played. I felt really good about the story that came out. I played a football star who wanted to live forever; Mike played the Ferryman, the heir of the character I played in the previous playtest; and Giuli played a character inspired by Nausicaä, who wanted to restore the toxic forest growing up out of the ruins of the Waterfront in Homestead. Actually, that location requires some elaboration, actually. A steel mill once sat down there. The Battle of Homestead happened near there, where Pinkerton soldiers attacked striking steel workers. Today, a large shopping complex sits on the site. The appropriation of so much of the world's biomass to build places like that, and the sprawling suburbs around them, have concentrated much of the world's biological wealth in those areas. In the Fifth World, once all that material finally gets to rot, some of the most vibrant forests grow up out of the cellars, washing machines and cars of suburbia. In this case, it sets its roots into soil filled with heavy metals from the old steelworks. I suggested a story of domination: domination of the steel workers, domination of the earth by the steel mill itself, domination through consumerism, and in the Fifth World, a place angry at humans because it has seen so much of humanity's worst qualities. Mike went for the complete opposite story: freedom bought with great sacrifice, like the labor movement bought with in the Battle of Homestead, or the life of the forest bought despite the heavy metals in the soil. Giuli went with that, and her character tied into that story because she wanted to heal the land.

Mike made the Point more of a sacred garden, as opposed to the terrifying otherworld from our last game. In the fountain, an abnormally large oak tree grows, with its roots reaching down into the secret fourth river that flows underground. When my character, the football star, wanted to live forever, the Ferryman told him to swallow an acorn from the tree whole.

Through the various rounds, my football star became more belligerent, since he thought he'd become immortal. He got married to Giuli's character, and the Ferryman told him he could cleanse the forest so important to his new bride by eating the poisoned fruit there. Since he would live forever, he had nothing to fear.

He died, right there.

The elders of my character's village accused Giuli's character of assassinating their star player; she submitted herself to their judgment to keep the villages from going to war. They executed her, and buried her next to my character, in the toxic forest she loved so much.

Next came the rounds with the memories, which worked out perfectly. The action had reached its climax, so now we went back, before, to see why it had all happened. The real climax of the story came later, even though, chronologically, it had happened before. My character remembered his grandfather dying, and telling him a story that I took from Paul Radin's Primitive Man as Philosopher, about a Ho-Chunk boy who wanted to live forever. He died, and grew into a tree—because only trees live forever. That acorn I had eaten before, what the Ferryman promised would give me eternal life? It sprouted. Its roots went deep, deeper than all the other plants, and sucked up more of those heavy metals than any of them could. So, I lived forever—and cleansed the forest.

Giuli asked why her character had to die, too. My character had wanted her admiration; despite all the women who fawned over me, I wanted her to notice me. In her epilogue, we found out why: I had sacrificed my human life to cleanse her forest, so she became a tree, too, so that my sacrifice wouldn't mean spending eternity alone.

The poem's structure paced it out perfectly, even when the other players worried that we'd reached the climax too soon. It created a beautiful, moving, poetic, mythic story really anchored in the land. I felt very good about that.

Like the playtest before, players raised some concerns about not having enough material to start with. I wanted to make character creation a part of play, rather than something that happens before play. I still suspect that I just need to press for stronger desires, but I'll definitely have to keep in mind that it may need some way of generating more pregnant starting situation.

In both games, the mechanics didn't kick in very often. That may also need some more work; or, it might work just fine right now. Who says that the mechanics need to kick in all the time? Maybe "leave them there unless you need them" makes for a perfectly viable strategy.

Another interesting thing to note: in both games, we had three players, and it took just over two hours, making for just over 40 minutes per player (I've measured time per player because I think, with the rounds, that how long a game takes will work as a function of number of players). If that continues to hold, then a game with six players would take four hours—one standard convention slot, precisely. Of course, I'll need to test other size games to see how that ratio holds up. I'll also need a much larger data set to say anything with confidence.

I haven't playtested nearly as much as I would like so far, but I think I can take this to GASPcon without too much worry. I've billed it as a playtest, so nobody should expect a finished game. All the same, the problems don't seem to break it entirely, either, and playtesters have even had fun with it.

Playtest Report #1

I just finished the first playtest of the new rules, with Dan Maruschak and my wife, Giuli. It had all the roughness you'd expect of a first playtest, but the momentum I'd hoped seemed to work out. The second hour of our two-hour game got into pretty fun stuff; I got to play a hermit, Chiron-like ferryman, alongside a traveling trickster figure and a woman from a tribe beginning to encroach on forbidden, sacred areas. It ended quite satisfactorily, with my ferryman falling prey to one of the trickster's ruses in the Land of the Dead.

So, the momentum of the game seemed to work out well. We had some rough spots getting started, especially establishing motivations and figuring out what people wanted to do. We had some speculation that the game might have a little too much structure right now, and that the game mechanics might undercut the goals in some ways.

I can't say that any of this makes me want to immediately rewrite the game (though Giuli had some really scathing things to say about it after we finished the call). I want to playtest it a few more times to control for some other possible factors, so I can make sure what arose tonight from the game, and what arose from other factors in play. As rough as it seemed in play, I still feel rather optimistic about it all, because I had braced myself for much worse. They call it "playtesting" and not "playing" for a reason, after all!

Web Inspiration

I hope to relaunch thefifthworld.com on December 21, along with making the first rough draft of the rules available for public playtesting. For the website, I want to set up a wiki/forum/blog site, with those three aspects operating seamlessly with one another. Thing is&mdfash;and I admit to this with some shame, as a professional web designer—I feel completely lost as to the direction to take it. What should it look like? Feel like?

So, I'll ask you. What would you like a Fifth World site to look like? Do you have any examples of sites you like that you think I should take inspiration from? Let me know soon; December 21 only seems far away if you don't have to start blocking out how the work will have to happen to meet it as a deadline!

RIP, Claude Levi-Strauss

The name "Claude Levi-Strauss" haunted my college years. I majored in anthropology and computer science, and for the former half of my time, it seemed that no matter where I went, the Frenchman's name followed me. You simply cannot talk about anthropology in the later half of the twentieth century without talking about Claude Levi-Strauss. He died on October 31; they buried him earlier today. He would have turned 101 at the end of the month.

I don't always agree with everything he wrote, of course, but Levi-Strauss had an immense impact on our appreciation of native traditions. People like me, who look to those traditions for examples of a human life well-lived, owe a great debt to Levi-Strauss. Like so many, I devoured science fiction in my youth; really, I loved the stories of wise aliens, whether benevolent or horrifying, who nonetheless had mastered that seemingly arcane secret of how to make a living in this world without destroying themselves. Without Levi-Strauss's influence, even before I ever learned his name, I might never have realized that such examples literally surround us, right here on earth.

I finished my rough draft the same day he died, and I cannot deny the influence his life and work had on this project.