on transparency

This meta-problem is a juicy one. It’s about rules or systems that are designed around you and me – the players – getting more into character but in the process do the exact opposite. It also is about the connection between a game’s transparency and the player’s ability to get an immersive experience out of it.

I’ll start off with two simple examples to give you an impression of the situation before I get into detail. The first one is from a pretty free atmospheric evening of Shadowrun – the second one from a session of The Shadow of Yesterday.

One evening a few years ago I sat down with four people, the GM and myself included, from my SR group for some casual role-playing. Two other players of our group weren’t present and we didn’t want anything big to happen without them so our decker did a cyber-run-thingy with the GM to gather information. We were kind of inbetween jobs and the other guy’s and my character didn’t have much to do except for staying with the decker in order to keep him save in case of a security breach or other complications. My character and my friend’s character didn’t know each other very well at that point so what we basically did was sitting around for about two or three hours and talk while the decker worked. We realized later that the cyber-run took our decker about 5 minutes so there wouldn’t have been much time for talk but we didn’t mind.

Over this evening our characters more or less bonded and became friends (they would later actually become lovers, ex-lovers and some other things – but that’s another story) while in concerns of the actual rules nothing much happened. We did our occasional check to make sure everything was alright, do a patrol and such things. It was a pretty great session of roleplaying from my perspective and close to what I expect out of a role-playing game: in-character immersion, character development, no big pauses and stretches of boredom caused by the game’s rules.

Of course, it wasn’t much of a game you might say but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The second example is a session of The Shadow of Yesterday from about a year ago. It was my group’s third session back when we gave tSoY a try. The characters had been captured by a tribe of ratkin down in the buried bellows of an old city. They were asked to cook the tribe a meal in order to show the ratkin’s superiority over the characters. Among them was the son of a Khaldorite baron, an Ammenite assassin in disguise send there to «solve» a problem involving said Khaldorite baron and a scavanger that had sneaked into the tribe’s settlement because he wanted to rescue the girl. Ah yes, the girl. There was an Ammenite poison-maker NPC. She had been abducted by the Khaldorite baron-son because her poison slowly killed his father. The session’s main conflict took place around the cooking pot while the baron-son and the assassin tried to get the young girl onto their side in separate discussions while the scavanger in disguise as a ratkin tried to.. well.. save the girl. Key of Damsel in Distress. Loved that one to pieces.

We rolled quite a lot pretty entangled and complex checks. One of them was a Bring Down The Pain of the assassin’s interests VS. the baron-son’s interests. A lot of stuff happened in concerns of questioning people’s loyalties and intentions. From my perspective as the GM it was a lot of fun and an incredible amount of character development but also really confusing because tSoY pretty much tells you to figure out how to handle a situation like that for yourself. In the end the scavanger ran away with the girl which had a major crush on him. It was great. The only problem: after the session everyone felt that lots of stuff had happened but barely anything of it had happened to «them». One of the players said he felt more like debating than role-playing. The way he said it is pretty much etched into my mind.

So what happened here? On one hand there is a system, Shadowrun, that doesn’t say anything about character development and being your character and it just happened. The experience was more rewarding than any experience points that could have been given as reward. On the other hand there is a system, The Shadow of Yesterday, that (in my opinion) is about the individual development of characters and being rewarded for being yourself, doing what you (the character) would do. But when the rules actually come into play it feels shallow and distanced.

There is a nice little complementary pair of words called transparency and opacity. It’s used in philosophy quite a lot these days to describe how we experience certain things or how they come into mind. When something is transparent we just experience or perceive something without the possibility of consciously experiencing the medium or the system of how we experience or perceive. When something is opaque it’s obviously to us how the thing in concern is brought to our experience or perception.

For example, I can’t see the process of me seeing things. I might know how the nerves of my eye work and how the information is processed into seeing by my brain but I could never see that, even if I wanted. There are no glitches or malfunctions that show me that all this is a processed information and not just the image that is out there. But if I look at a computer screen I get a pretty good idea of how it feels to see an image but blatantly see how it is produced and how it works. Or rather doesn’t work from time to time and in that way is opaque to me. I get a look behind the curtains constantly.

With this nice little excourse I don’t want to show off my knowledge of fancy words. My experience with systems like Shadowrun and systems like The Shadow of Yesterday is similar to transparency and opacity. The first ones don’t give me a chance to take a look behind the curtain and lay my hands on the machine that keeps the whole thing moving. The second ones grants me a good look into the whole show and even offers me the chance to run it. One isn’t better in concerns of the quality of its design; they just do something completely different.

There is just one thing that bugs me though: role-playing games like tSoY know what they’re doing or at least claim to do so while classic role-playing games like SR don’t. A classic role-playing game to my personal knowledge rarely has rules or mechanics that encourage the player to develop and be their characters; most roleplayer just do that or they don’t. It’s nothing the game wishes to change or fix. Games like tSoY, Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard or Don’t Rest Your Head want you to drive your character into a certain direction. They want you to have goals, intentions and believes that will be rewarded in the process. They want you to fuck up, make mistakes and come out stronger on the other side. Well, or don’t. They don’t just want to throw things that could kill you or want the be solved into your direction. The more I play this kind of game (I know, stupid generalization), the more I wonder: do they really accomplish what they intent to do?

Sure, they make it possible for me to be rewarded for developing a character’s personality instead of just his or her abilities but does it really feel any different from being rewarded for my abilities or for just playing the game in general? It might sound stupid but sometimes I feel like the fact that the rules of SR, DSA or D&D are so bad when it comes to story-telling and role-playing and simply focussed on my abilities that I don’t have to care about them when I develop my character.

They don’t fuck around in my territory and I mess up their’s just as much as necessary. How much damage do I have to deal to don’t pull my group down? 1D6+5? Great. Got that. What abilities could come in handy? Survival? Got that, too. Now can I keep on talking and get to know NPCs? Wonderful.

That is not even close to either a solution or a conclusion, of course. It’s just me ignoring my problem with classic role-playing games because I know how to solve the problem for me personally. Do the bare minimum of requirements. Get a better group. Ignore the fact that something else could suit my needs better. It doesn’t even address the meta-problem of a system designed around character development killing the mood for character development.

The meta-problem – I have to admit by now – is most probably false expectations: the possibility to develop a character within a set of rules and be rewarded for it doesn’t automatically mean that it will also make this development an in-character experience. It’s two completely different things when you think about it.

I still haven’t got any good hints on how a set of rules like tSoY’s Bringing Down the Pain and Key system could make for a decent immersive experience of being my character at the same time but I’m getting a general idea of what is not the problem. The problem is not that tSoY or SR are badly designed for the experience of in-character development. The meta-problem is that this wasn’t the intention of their design in the first place. That it worked or didn’t work as well as expected were merely side-effects of the situations at hand.

Late Write-up Friday: Apocalypse World. Distortion. 2nd session.

When I started AW I promised to myself I’d do a proper sum-up of every session and organize the stuff that’s happening afterwards. I’ve been a bit lazy lately but I want to get my work on our 2nd, 3rd and 4th session done before the end of the year (and before more things happen ingame.)

The 2nd session was more or less a wrap-up of what happened in the 1st one. Not the ideal thing because I feel that AW should end with a cliffhanger that basically says «So that is what we are going to do next time. Obviously.»
It started with a bit of a turmoil at the compound’s marketplace (I personally called the compound Starbucks City in my head but I always forget to ask the characters what they actually call it. No one seems to care and maybe that’s fine.) A crowd had around the truck that got Müllermeier, the chopped-up stonecutter from 1st session, into town. The truck’s driver Maestro and Jacques, another stonecutter, told the people about how they got ambushed on the way to town. They’re gathering people to secure the road and make sure the Quarry is safe. Starbucks agrees to send a part of his gang as an escort along with Graywolf (the Gunlugger) and L Carmino (the Battlebabe). They get their bikes and guns and prepare to roll out.
Aeki (the Brainer) meanwhile has caught the attention of the local kids – namely Fuchs, Jameson and Zalando – who seem to see him as their spiritual guide or something. I gave Aeki a loveletter at the beginning of the session telling him that the kids grew fond of him for some reason and, though they despise adult, see him as their equal and want to share their secrets. Apart from that, the pain his old wound is causing him is getting worse and a custom move at the beginning of each session decides how bad it will be. One of the options is to use one of the children as a vessel of pain. Anyways, led by the kids he also arrives at the marketplace and for some reason he tagged along with the escort. I think we decided that they needed his perspective on things to get through the distortion quicker. Tamaris (the Angel) joined the escort as well in case someone would need a medic.
Crow (the Savvyhead) was doing his completely own thing while the others traveled towards the Quarry. He was called in by Starbucks to take a look at the water engine that got smashed up good in the fight between his gang and the democrats. He got to the top of Starbucks Tower and basically started lecturing people on proper maintenance and security of machines before he started his repair. I decided it would be some minor damage but the psychic part of the water engine was out of place and needed to be reconfigured. You see, the water engine is Crow’s Reality’s Fraying Edge move. He and I had at this point established that the reason for the rest of the compound’s sanity compared to the rest of the world is caused by the machine’s influence on the drinking water.

So, while Crow starts to work on the water engine conflict brews up at the marketplace. Things get a little hot-headed between the people from the Quarry and the gang. Maestro calms down and is ready to work with Starbucks’ gang after she mentions that the tours in her truck get awfully lonely from time to time and not very subtlely nudges L Carmino into «keeping her company» later that night. Tamaris also comments on the fact that one might not get patched up as well as usual next time they need medical attention if he or she keeps fighting over pointless stuff. Everyone agrees to work with each other again suprisingly fast.
The bikes accompanied by Maestro’s truck are on their way when Crow comes across a part of his machine whose purpose he can’t remember. He rolls a pretty decent It’s a strange box on the machine’s side with speakers and some turning knobs. He rolls a pretty decent Things Speak and next thing you know he is talking over Maestro’s cheap-ass cassette radio. Apart from Tamaris heavily flirting with Jacques on the way to the Quarry not that much happens half the way through the distorted land. I think Aeki rolled an Open Your Brain to try to keep the gang safe and on track.

They discovered they spot where the rest of the convoy to Starbucks City – apart from Maestro, Jacques and Müllermeier – had been slaughtered. There is blood everywhere, the bodies were cut open with their eyes, tongues and inner organs removed. Investigating the area they spot a cloud of black smoke from beyond a hill of sharp cliff and twisted edges. L Carmino and Tamaris get into a pretty fierce argument about what to do. L Carmino wants to take a look at the origin of the black smoke while Tamaris thinks that the safety of the Quarry comes first. That part – from my perspective as an MC – was somewhat goodbad. The argument between those two was wonderful. Both had valid points and I had the gang more or less shift between «Well, that guy is the one in charge but she is the one who will fix us up when shit happens», so they had to come to a conclusion themselves. At a certain point I asked each of them «So you basically want to manipulate him / her into doing what you want, right? Why should he / she do so? What’s your leverage?» We ended up with Tamaris manipulate L Carmino into taking only a small part of the gang with him by suggesting that he wanted to be patched up next time he fucks up for sure. I’m not sure how I felt about that resolution of conflict. It felt a little bit constructed and shallow but worked out so far. I guess it might be all about getting comfortable with using the basic moves.

While the gang split up, Crow fucked up his Open Your Brain big time and gave me my personal favorite moment of improvised madness. He wanted to figure out if the machine will do its job properly and rolled 5. I told him about this small windows in his mind, right behind his eyes, opening up and a menacing voice telling him that the little nice new world he’s built up only will be safe from the real world for so far. I really wonder what the source of that voice is and can’t wait for the group and me to figure it out one way or the other.
The group that was with Tamaris, Aeki and Graywolf arrived safely at the Quarry which was locked up from the inside because the stonecutter have been seeing strange things out there in the distortion last night. They talk to Weiße Mäuse, to matriarch of the Quarry, and – seeing the place’s protection is not enough by far – Graywolf agrees to stay there in order to help them set up at least basic security. The others decide to return to Starbucks City.
L Carmino and his gang make their way through the sharp-edged hills and are able to sneak up on the origin of the black smoke. They see six perfectly pitch-black people sitting around a campfire. There are pieces of meat on a grate. L Carmino watches as one of them searchs around the back of his head with his hands until he cuts it open with a small knife and insert an eye into it that immediately spots L Carmino. L Carmino doesn’t hesitate and commands his gang to attack killing all of the pitch-black people without any serious damage taken on his side. After that he burns the corpses and returns back to Starbucks City.

And that’s about it. For the first «real» session it was quite interesting. The other players and me had a lot of fun. I feel like I could improve my MC-ing on many levels but the session felt great nonetheless. For some reason I can’t seem to get into asking questions as much as I want to. After the 2nd one (and the later ones I’m gonna tell you about) I thought about the progress of events and thought «Damn, it would have been great to just ask them instead of doing the thing that seemed natural / not looking into it any further.» It gives me this strange feeling that the events continue but I’m / we’re missing out on certain basic facts that could / should be resolved within the first few sessions. Especially simple things. Where they get their food, what their «normal day» looks like. I’ve got this instinct from other rpgs to DO something. Throw an event at them. While I don’t plan anything of it ahead and just to what comes to mind and works with my prep I guess it could be less event-ish and more.. everyday-life-like.. if that makes any sense.

Any thoughts on that by you guys? Do I overthink or is that «a thing»?