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.

Characters with Personality

The very first version of The Fifth World, the version we do not speak of, included MBTI types as part of character creation. Now, coming back to the medicine wheel and using Carl Jung's psychological types as the most stripped-down and generic of wise compasses, I can't help but feel like everything old has become new again. I don't know if the game has room for the extra dimensions of the full MBTI, but I've always thought that the emphasis on balancing opposites in Jungian psychology gave it a good ecological tone. Daniel Noel points to Jung as a valuable starting point for an authentic Western shamanism.

In the last version of the game, with the Prisoner's Dilemma, we wound up with a system that left little room for your character to influence it. My brother once despaired how the game left no place for the fearsomeness of his fearsome warlock to effect the outcome. The color beads mechanic offers several different ways to influence that. Now, I wonder about ways to keep track of that with a minimum of bookkeeping.

Jung's compass plots personality against two axes: one representing how you perceive the world (ranging from sensing to intuiting), the other how you make decisions (ranging from thinking to feeling). You'll always dominate in one; perhaps you perceive more than you judge, or vice versa. So your favored mode of perception (or judgment) would dominate. Jung called this your superior function. Then, you have your favored mode on the other axis: your secondary function. Your tertiary function sits on the other end of that same compass, and opposite your superior function, you'll find your inferior function.

So, someone who senses most of all could have thinking as a secondary function. She'd have a little harder time feeling, and a much harder time intuiting. Jung would represent this with a compass tilted slightly off-center, so the superior function points up, and the secondary function rises a little higher than the tertiary function. What an elegantly simple design for a character sheet!

I haven't decided entirely what to do with it, though. I see three possibilities: really, one of two options, and then the possibility of combining them.

• Fill your bag with beads according to your functions. So, you get 12 beads colored for your superior function, ten for your secondary, eight for your tertiary, and six for your inferior function.
• Add two successes for your superior function. Add one success for your secondary function. Subtract one success for your tertiary function, and subtract two successes for your inferior function.

The first means that most of the time, you'll pull your superior function most, and your inferior function least. The second means that you can always count on your superior function, and you'll always know that your inferior function will pose a challenge. The combination would really emphasize your choice: it would make your superior function very superior, and your inferior function very inferior. I think the combination might push it too far, losing that balance I like so much in Jungian psychology.

The last version had names and deeds that you would add up to make a reputation. Reputation never amounted to much in play, perhaps because counting up names and deeds required so much bookkeeping, but I liked the idea of names having mechanical significance. I still like it. I've taken great inspiration from Unconquered [PDF], Jonathan Walton's excellent hack of Exalted. There, the number of words in your name matches your Essence. I wonder if that could make a useful way of keeping track of something like "level"? Maybe, whenever you pull beads from your bag, you can pull a number equal to the capitalized words in your name?

I've also decided that this version needs to move more of the interesting parts of the game from setup to play. So, this version will have more character and setting creation as part of play, rather than something done before play. I have in mind a mechanic where players can add a story about the place where a scene takes place, perhaps something like the "flashback" mechanic in 3:16. That story would work like free-form traits in some other story games; it could give you more beads to pull, or additional successes. To emphasize the locality of these stories, perhaps you can use them once per story, and once additionally in a scene set in that place. Or, perhaps taking part in a scene set in that place recharges it. Perhaps you write down these stories on your medicine wheel, putting them in one of your four quadrants. Maybe, like the "weaknesses" in 3:16, a story associated with your inferior function has to feature your weakness, failure, or humiliation; maybe it works as something that others use against you, rather than something you use yourself.

We also had a problem finding motivations for characters. A lot of that probably comes from the as-yet largely undetermined setting. With an open source setting, I expect motivations to proliferate as the setting gets filled in more and more. But even so, that problem still reveals a weakness in the system. So one part of character creation that I plan to keep in the "warm-up" phase puts a spin on "see-me." After a brief introduction giving us a very rough outline of your character (since we'll really define these characters in play), we take a round around the table, and each player will put out something that your character wants to get from their character: love, respect, acknowledgment, forgiveness, apology, etc. So right from the beginning, we'll have player characters who all want something from everyone else. That seems like a great way to start the story!

All that, and a final game that only uses pieces you could quickly and easily gather, with things you could already have at home, and play effectively around a campfire.

Yes, I realize this has gotten a bit rambly, but I have a lot of ideas pouring out now, so please excuse the lack of structure here. I'd love to hear what you think.

What's in a Name?

You would think that I'd have at least a few simple tasks; like names. Just a line on the character sheet and you're done, right? I wish! This is what E. Richard Sorensen wrote about names in "Preconquest Consciousness":

In these preconquest regions of New Guinea names were rarely binding. What one was called varied according to time, place, mood, and setting. Names were improvised, not formally bestowed, and naming (much like local language flexibility) was often a kind of humorous exploratory play. New names could be quickly coined, often whimsically from events and situations, with a new one coming up at any time. One young boy running in a peculiar way was affectionately dubbed ‘Grasshopper' It stuck. Another was called ‘Kaba’ (short for the prized embokaba beetle) because, during an episode of biting-mouthing play, a friend proclaimed his skin was as delicious as that savory beetle’s flesh. One girl was called 'Aidpost’ following her excitement about the first one in the region; another was called ‘Sleepgood’ by a new friend who liked sleeping with her. A boy from a distant hamlet in the south who tagged along when I went north to the new Australian Patrol Post fled into the jungle in crouched, zigzagging panic when an object he believed to be a metal house abruptly growled and moved. His name became ‘Land Rover’

Names were nicknames. They stuck for a while, then a new one came along. Only when the new (Australian) government began insisting that they use the same name for official dealings, especially in the annual census soon instituted, did formal names emerge. Otherwise, individuals responded to whatever name they knew they might be called.

But even this doesn't go quite far enough, because those informal names come and go so easily because they don't act like nouns at all: they're really verbs. As Willem Larsen wrote:

Because animist languages base themselves in movement/activity, you’ll commonly see the world in terms of verbs, and rarely (or not at all, depending on the particular language) in noun-entities. In Mohawk green also means herbs/greenery/grass; it describes a pattern of appearance, not an entity. In Mohawk, one points out a "hunter" by saying "ratorats," literally "he-hunts." Civilized languages innovated the professional class, thus labels like "Hunt-er," "plumb-er," "farm-er," etc. "He-hunts," "he-plumbs," "she-farms," etc. Notice the difference between calling someone an "artist" and saying that "they create art." Many of us can finally let go of civilized conceptions of success once we click into this thinking—"one day, I’ll be an artist/writer/tracker/hunter-gatherer." Do you make art? Do you write? Do you track? Do you hunt and gather? Only that can we honestly describe. "When will I grow up? When will I feel like an adult?" Do you do adult things? Do you do activity associated with "grown-ups"?

One famous Iroquois speaker, whose name we mistranslate as "Cornplanter," would correctly require us to call him in his native language "He-plants-corn." Your ear has probably picked up on all the Native American names that fit this model, and the few that don’t, which we can easily explain as a similar mistranslation.

In playtests, we ran into a problem where all the names led to confusion. In the new versions, names become boons. You have them in the context of relationships--the name your mother calls you, the name you hold in the tribe, the name you have in dreams, and so on. Hopefully, making names mechanically significant, making them speak to the kind of character you make and the relationships that character has, will both put names more in line with that traditional line of thinking, and make it easier to remember all the different ones you might have.