Don't I Know You? & Dread
Aug. 16th, 2023 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catchasparkTwo game reviews:
Recently a group of friends and I played a game, currently in closed beta, called Don't I Know You.
For conflict of interest reasons and also closed beta reasons I'll just describe the basics. The game is GMless and low-prep; you pick a role which gives you the basic outline of a past life's history (i.e., the Guilty, who has done something terrible to someone), and collectively decide on the settings for your past and present lives. You play out scenes in the present, each character targeting another to get answers about the past life they're only just beginning to remember; at an appropriate moment, they ask a question about their history, both players propose an answer to what 'really happened', and then roll to decide which of them has spoken the actual truth.
as a test of the system: it certainly did what it had been designed to do, viz, enabled us to create an interlocking, complex story of reincarnation and mutual entanglement with no prep! I was pleased, I have edit thoughts I should get around to doing anything about.
Also I just had so much fun playing this one for reasons that are not especially related to the system.
uskglass had the fully brilliant idea of starting with a pre-existing mutually known setting as the past lives; we picked Arthuriana, and had a neutral friend review our secret decisions of who our past lives were to ensure that we had no duplicates. In our present, we were the final waking shift of a cryoship approaching a new uninhabited planet on which we were due to land and colonize.
We had:
* Gawain, the Victim (who knows he was killed unjustly but not why), now a brash and about-to-be-useless starship pilot named Chuck;
* Arthur, the Awkward (who knows he wants to avoid someone in the future but not why), now Jason from HR whose passion is correct safety protocols and not having to make powerpoint presentations in the very near future*;
* Merlin, the Guilty (who knows he must make amends for a terrible deed but not what or why), now a creche-raised extremely socially maladjusted EXTREMELY bossy tech expert teenager named Jordan;
* and Mordred, the Remnant (who neither died nor lost her memories), Arthur's wayward bastard daughter, who awoke in the ship's greenhouse in the trunk of a tree and hid out until the next shift awoke and she could pretend to be Roanoke Rezin, a friendly extremely normal botanist.
We established a story in which Arthur and Merlin had, as twin souls, used Merlin's ability to see the future to chart a bitter and best-guess course to peace, into which Mordred's bitter disaffected and extremely lonely ability to see the future but only the shit parts and Gawain's completely nonsupernatural desire not to be ceaselessly patronized and protected had led very directly to ruin. Now everyone was stuck on a very nice forested planet about it. This gave a certain 'first as a tragedy, second as a bittersweet-dramedy-of-errors' approach to the story.
Play centered around the fraught questions of "do and can we build Camelot again?" (Arthur, Merlin); "what is the amount of control and protection that you can give to those you love without it becoming a strangling collar and chain?" (Arthur, Mordred, Gawain), "is it like 'good' if your only go-to move in response to conflict is to try to set fire to the conflict and also any local polities?" (Arthur, Mordred, Gawain); and "sorry I feel like you weren't listening the first time when i said we were ON A NEW PLANET AND COULD BUILD CAMELOT AGAIN SO PLEASE COME HELP ME FIGURE OUT THE AQUEDUCT SYSTEM. I AM NO LONGER ASKING" (Merlin). As may be indicated by my all caps here I would say that the winner in terms of achieving her goals here was Jordan, once Merlin, who had had just the most boring shit isolated caged-up boarding school life imaginable in her current incarnation, and as Merlin had lost everything she'd built, and this time did not have to, and was full of an absolute nineteen-year-old certainty that she could pull it off and furthermore would pull it off once we all stopped yelling about the past. Which she did and we did.
In discussion about this game and its pluses and minuses we talked a lot afterwards about the sense you can have in a DM-less game that you are, like, a fish flopping around on a sad shoreline frantically hoping that your fellow players will somehow instantiate a large body of water on top of you, which is very real, but otoh this was very much a group of people fully willing to open the floodgates and create a river for any lost salmon that they might have seen. This metaphor is not my strongest. I'm not sure the world we built was entirely literally coherent, but it thematically held together and made me laugh and tear up. That is a high you can't get in non TTRPG contexts! And I really enjoyed playing sexy immortal reincarnated tortured jock Mordred who just wants Daddy to pay attention to her but is 100% aware that Daddy unfortunately doesn't really like her very much but also won't leave her alone to drown or murder everyone or whatever. I should do that more often.
* I'm not sure I'm ever going to shake the mark that Jason from HR left on me and my understanding of Arthurian mythos. This is just what King Arthur is to me now. A charismatic and commanding leader who has a little spreadsheet with everyone's birthdays and who will be throwing you a party for them whether you like them or not.
Then I ran a game of Dread for the same group of friends! We'd played it once already; here is my DM's post about that run, which was truly spectacular. His post summarizes the rules and principles of Dread as well so I don't have to go into it again! I will merely add some observations:
'what was the story about emma' well [inhales] our protagonists are the sailors of one of Odysseus' other ships, cast into a vast storm for deciding to cook and eat the sun god's cattle. Lysandros, the captain, is sick and fucking tired of watching his men die and also of people not liking him; Kriton, the eldest member of the crew, lost his son back at Troy and has decided it-- and everything else that happens to him-- are just payment for his decision to kill a kinsman for trying to ravish a priest of Artemis; and Merops, the youngest member of the crew, a singer and at times a mascot, is longing for the sense of adulthood and whole selfhood he had at Troy rather than the worthless childhood he had on Ithaka.
After the storm they're shipwrecked on an island, and decide to burn their dead with proper honor... and discover as they do so that the place they've made landfall on is crawling away underneath them, changing under their feet. Their dead, too, get up and walk away-- and rejoin them apparently whole and healthy, saying that of course this is Troy, where they are about to start a battle. It sure does look more and more like Troy, too, which is a shame, because what it appears to have originally looked like-- the place they actually seemed to have landed-- was Ithaka.
Kriton decided right away that he would rather die than live to bring the curse he felt he was responsible for. Summoning the god Persephone, he asked what he could do to make amends, and was told this was not a punishment, but he could leave if he wanted-- leaving the ghost of his son behind on the island. He took the offer.
Lysandros and Merops, meanwhile, followed the increasing chaos to the brink of a pitched battle in the middle of a definitively Ithakan fisher-village, where Merops in a real This-is-the-Bad-Place! monologue revealed to his fellow sailors that the reason they hadn't recognized Ithaka, the reason this was all so strange even from the start, was that this was Ithaka far in the future. At which point Hermes revealed himself as one of the previously cute and harmless NPC fellow-sailors (This is the most fun I have ever had pulling off a Spider-Man mask.) and explained that this had been his attempt to help them out: they'd been sailing the River Lethe for centuries, and he did want to give them what they wanted, which was a return to Ithaka-- and also the other thing they wanted, which was a return to Troy. Hence the confusion. Couldn't they make up their minds?
They could. Merops corralled the crew and dragged them to a place where they would definitively be in only one place at once-- the burial site of Kriton's kinsman, sacred to Artemis and to Persephone, and not bendable by Hermes' witchcraft. The sailors'curse cool magic gift was broken and they were left on Ithaka with the ghosts of their dead fading away into the light.
*
Keen-eyed readers might be aware that this basic idea, realizing you've come home to a place you can't return to, is the plot of a book by Diana Wynne Jones! (I can't name the book without spoiling it.) Realizing I could play that for-- well, it's already somewhat played for horror in the book, but for more horror-- is what made me decide to actually run the game, and then to add the second element: that they could return to something, but only by remaking the slaughter they'd been spending a few years trying to leave behind them... it was fun playing with this. given the premise of an Odyssey horror game, "the spooky island is actually Ithaka" and "the spooky island is actually Troy" are probably the two most obvious takes you could have on it, and I can only hope that combining them reduced the obviousness enough to make the reveal fun.
The surveys got me the rest of the way though. The Dread character survey, in which you write out a set of leading questions to slightly differentiate broad character types and then let your players build their little guys out of it, is (a) a lot of work (b) brilliant. It really forced me to think through what information I needed and was planning to use-- physical touchstones for Ithaka, people left behind in Troy... It provided essential scaffolding to the story-- Kriton's guilt and sense that he had already lost everything due to his choices, Lysandros' responsibility and feigned jadedness in the face of what he hoped he could fix, Merops' blunt realization that he had been someone with a life and a role back at Troy and was only a mascot out of it... I was into it! I would perhaps advise my fellow GMs that if you're like, I'd like to give my players carte blanche to make up a magical item, and you know you are playing with people who are very creative, that you either rethink that plan or rework your plot better to integrate e.g. the magical double that one of your players creates in their survey. The latter is preferable as the magical double fucking ruled as a concept, I just wish I'd done more with it.
I used a couple of physical tricks to build out the setting which I think worked well: I made little character placards for the people in any given scene to help people track the names, and added commentary on them as we went along, viz, "Echetos, a sailor (injured)". I duplicated the card exactly as written for Merops (complete with a corrected typo and an exclamation point) for his siren double. When I got to the point of revealing Hermes I flipped Agon's card inside out, revealing the god's name already written inside. That was satisfying for me at least!
But this was just enabling activity for my players; I have missed GMing, I have missed getting really, really invested in my players' guys; I have missed giving them a problem and watching a solution well up before them. I was off the charts delighted when Lysandros slowly unveiled the story he was in, viz, one in which the only thing he wanted was to make everyone happy all at once; that being the besetting sin of the curse, he could not see his way out of it. Hermes asked him at one point what he wanted for everyone, what one thing he wanted so that Hermes could give it to him, with the implicit promise of a way out. Lysandros paused a long time and then laughed bitterly: to be on Ithaka, the way they left it. The one thing he can't have.
Building on my experience during our first game, I instituted a rule that if you wanted to invoke a god, you could pull two blocks to get their aid. This worked great as storytelling, it made everything more tense, brought the divine to within the realm of the player agency, and led to some wonderful, wonderful moments. Kriton summoned Persephone into a grove of trees to atone for his transgression many years ago, learned he was not being punished, and still chose to go with her into a true and total death. Meanwhile, Merops ran after Hermes as Hermes tried to make a sexy well-my-work-here-is-done fleetfooted exit, the terrain changing under his feet and tripping up the great god so that Merops had a chance to yell down at him, "Don't you want to win?!"
So. Like. I had fun! I must say my mechanical innovation did not at all solve what I wanted it to solve, which is: Jenga towers are really fucking sturdy. You would not think so but it is true. Consider that a standard Jenga tower is made up of 54 blocks and that people on reddit are like average is between 25-35 pulls. Kriton knocked over the tower at the five hour mark. If we'd wanted it to collapse in that time we would have to have been pulling every 12 minutes for the 25 block figure and every nine minutes for the 35 block figure. This is really fucking hard. A roll every ten minutes is already a pretty brisk pace for an RP-heavy game but remember that every single pull must (1) be a genuinely contested action and (2) plausibly place your PC's life or immortal soul or what have you in danger, because, at any time, the tower could fall over-- i.e., you can't just have people pull where they'd normally do a Perception check, unless it would not feel cheap for the Perception check to drive them mad with what they see! Plus ideally you'd be driving home the themes, right, like, you're doing a game about the impossibility of return once you have departed except by enacting your own past on others, so every time you roll it should tie into that somehow, so you can't just have them fall down a slope and break their neck even if the slope is really spooky. Tricky. Anyway I think despite all this we probably did have a block pull every ten minutes, plus people were pulling two blocks at once, and the fucker still didn't fall over. I have yet to witness a Jenga tower collapse in a Dread game. Something must be done. Maybe we all need to just be more shaky-handed.
(This is one reason I thinkuskglass was really, really onto something with the 'tower collapse represents the collapse of order on the ship' mechanic; it's easier to justify just about any contested action as something that might upset that very fragile order, and that theme remained present throughout!)
Both fun! First one's not available yet but I recommend Dread wholeheartedly to anyone. Make sure you really think about those surveys.
Recently a group of friends and I played a game, currently in closed beta, called Don't I Know You.
For conflict of interest reasons and also closed beta reasons I'll just describe the basics. The game is GMless and low-prep; you pick a role which gives you the basic outline of a past life's history (i.e., the Guilty, who has done something terrible to someone), and collectively decide on the settings for your past and present lives. You play out scenes in the present, each character targeting another to get answers about the past life they're only just beginning to remember; at an appropriate moment, they ask a question about their history, both players propose an answer to what 'really happened', and then roll to decide which of them has spoken the actual truth.
as a test of the system: it certainly did what it had been designed to do, viz, enabled us to create an interlocking, complex story of reincarnation and mutual entanglement with no prep! I was pleased, I have edit thoughts I should get around to doing anything about.
Also I just had so much fun playing this one for reasons that are not especially related to the system.
uskglass had the fully brilliant idea of starting with a pre-existing mutually known setting as the past lives; we picked Arthuriana, and had a neutral friend review our secret decisions of who our past lives were to ensure that we had no duplicates. In our present, we were the final waking shift of a cryoship approaching a new uninhabited planet on which we were due to land and colonize.We had:
* Gawain, the Victim (who knows he was killed unjustly but not why), now a brash and about-to-be-useless starship pilot named Chuck;
* Arthur, the Awkward (who knows he wants to avoid someone in the future but not why), now Jason from HR whose passion is correct safety protocols and not having to make powerpoint presentations in the very near future*;
* Merlin, the Guilty (who knows he must make amends for a terrible deed but not what or why), now a creche-raised extremely socially maladjusted EXTREMELY bossy tech expert teenager named Jordan;
* and Mordred, the Remnant (who neither died nor lost her memories), Arthur's wayward bastard daughter, who awoke in the ship's greenhouse in the trunk of a tree and hid out until the next shift awoke and she could pretend to be Roanoke Rezin, a friendly extremely normal botanist.
We established a story in which Arthur and Merlin had, as twin souls, used Merlin's ability to see the future to chart a bitter and best-guess course to peace, into which Mordred's bitter disaffected and extremely lonely ability to see the future but only the shit parts and Gawain's completely nonsupernatural desire not to be ceaselessly patronized and protected had led very directly to ruin. Now everyone was stuck on a very nice forested planet about it. This gave a certain 'first as a tragedy, second as a bittersweet-dramedy-of-errors' approach to the story.
Play centered around the fraught questions of "do and can we build Camelot again?" (Arthur, Merlin); "what is the amount of control and protection that you can give to those you love without it becoming a strangling collar and chain?" (Arthur, Mordred, Gawain), "is it like 'good' if your only go-to move in response to conflict is to try to set fire to the conflict and also any local polities?" (Arthur, Mordred, Gawain); and "sorry I feel like you weren't listening the first time when i said we were ON A NEW PLANET AND COULD BUILD CAMELOT AGAIN SO PLEASE COME HELP ME FIGURE OUT THE AQUEDUCT SYSTEM. I AM NO LONGER ASKING" (Merlin). As may be indicated by my all caps here I would say that the winner in terms of achieving her goals here was Jordan, once Merlin, who had had just the most boring shit isolated caged-up boarding school life imaginable in her current incarnation, and as Merlin had lost everything she'd built, and this time did not have to, and was full of an absolute nineteen-year-old certainty that she could pull it off and furthermore would pull it off once we all stopped yelling about the past. Which she did and we did.
In discussion about this game and its pluses and minuses we talked a lot afterwards about the sense you can have in a DM-less game that you are, like, a fish flopping around on a sad shoreline frantically hoping that your fellow players will somehow instantiate a large body of water on top of you, which is very real, but otoh this was very much a group of people fully willing to open the floodgates and create a river for any lost salmon that they might have seen. This metaphor is not my strongest. I'm not sure the world we built was entirely literally coherent, but it thematically held together and made me laugh and tear up. That is a high you can't get in non TTRPG contexts! And I really enjoyed playing sexy immortal reincarnated tortured jock Mordred who just wants Daddy to pay attention to her but is 100% aware that Daddy unfortunately doesn't really like her very much but also won't leave her alone to drown or murder everyone or whatever. I should do that more often.
* I'm not sure I'm ever going to shake the mark that Jason from HR left on me and my understanding of Arthurian mythos. This is just what King Arthur is to me now. A charismatic and commanding leader who has a little spreadsheet with everyone's birthdays and who will be throwing you a party for them whether you like them or not.
Then I ran a game of Dread for the same group of friends! We'd played it once already; here is my DM's post about that run, which was truly spectacular. His post summarizes the rules and principles of Dread as well so I don't have to go into it again! I will merely add some observations:
'what was the story about emma' well [inhales] our protagonists are the sailors of one of Odysseus' other ships, cast into a vast storm for deciding to cook and eat the sun god's cattle. Lysandros, the captain, is sick and fucking tired of watching his men die and also of people not liking him; Kriton, the eldest member of the crew, lost his son back at Troy and has decided it-- and everything else that happens to him-- are just payment for his decision to kill a kinsman for trying to ravish a priest of Artemis; and Merops, the youngest member of the crew, a singer and at times a mascot, is longing for the sense of adulthood and whole selfhood he had at Troy rather than the worthless childhood he had on Ithaka.
After the storm they're shipwrecked on an island, and decide to burn their dead with proper honor... and discover as they do so that the place they've made landfall on is crawling away underneath them, changing under their feet. Their dead, too, get up and walk away-- and rejoin them apparently whole and healthy, saying that of course this is Troy, where they are about to start a battle. It sure does look more and more like Troy, too, which is a shame, because what it appears to have originally looked like-- the place they actually seemed to have landed-- was Ithaka.
Kriton decided right away that he would rather die than live to bring the curse he felt he was responsible for. Summoning the god Persephone, he asked what he could do to make amends, and was told this was not a punishment, but he could leave if he wanted-- leaving the ghost of his son behind on the island. He took the offer.
Lysandros and Merops, meanwhile, followed the increasing chaos to the brink of a pitched battle in the middle of a definitively Ithakan fisher-village, where Merops in a real This-is-the-Bad-Place! monologue revealed to his fellow sailors that the reason they hadn't recognized Ithaka, the reason this was all so strange even from the start, was that this was Ithaka far in the future. At which point Hermes revealed himself as one of the previously cute and harmless NPC fellow-sailors (This is the most fun I have ever had pulling off a Spider-Man mask.) and explained that this had been his attempt to help them out: they'd been sailing the River Lethe for centuries, and he did want to give them what they wanted, which was a return to Ithaka-- and also the other thing they wanted, which was a return to Troy. Hence the confusion. Couldn't they make up their minds?
They could. Merops corralled the crew and dragged them to a place where they would definitively be in only one place at once-- the burial site of Kriton's kinsman, sacred to Artemis and to Persephone, and not bendable by Hermes' witchcraft. The sailors'
*
Keen-eyed readers might be aware that this basic idea, realizing you've come home to a place you can't return to, is the plot of a book by Diana Wynne Jones! (I can't name the book without spoiling it.) Realizing I could play that for-- well, it's already somewhat played for horror in the book, but for more horror-- is what made me decide to actually run the game, and then to add the second element: that they could return to something, but only by remaking the slaughter they'd been spending a few years trying to leave behind them... it was fun playing with this. given the premise of an Odyssey horror game, "the spooky island is actually Ithaka" and "the spooky island is actually Troy" are probably the two most obvious takes you could have on it, and I can only hope that combining them reduced the obviousness enough to make the reveal fun.
The surveys got me the rest of the way though. The Dread character survey, in which you write out a set of leading questions to slightly differentiate broad character types and then let your players build their little guys out of it, is (a) a lot of work (b) brilliant. It really forced me to think through what information I needed and was planning to use-- physical touchstones for Ithaka, people left behind in Troy... It provided essential scaffolding to the story-- Kriton's guilt and sense that he had already lost everything due to his choices, Lysandros' responsibility and feigned jadedness in the face of what he hoped he could fix, Merops' blunt realization that he had been someone with a life and a role back at Troy and was only a mascot out of it... I was into it! I would perhaps advise my fellow GMs that if you're like, I'd like to give my players carte blanche to make up a magical item, and you know you are playing with people who are very creative, that you either rethink that plan or rework your plot better to integrate e.g. the magical double that one of your players creates in their survey. The latter is preferable as the magical double fucking ruled as a concept, I just wish I'd done more with it.
I used a couple of physical tricks to build out the setting which I think worked well: I made little character placards for the people in any given scene to help people track the names, and added commentary on them as we went along, viz, "Echetos, a sailor (injured)". I duplicated the card exactly as written for Merops (complete with a corrected typo and an exclamation point) for his siren double. When I got to the point of revealing Hermes I flipped Agon's card inside out, revealing the god's name already written inside. That was satisfying for me at least!
But this was just enabling activity for my players; I have missed GMing, I have missed getting really, really invested in my players' guys; I have missed giving them a problem and watching a solution well up before them. I was off the charts delighted when Lysandros slowly unveiled the story he was in, viz, one in which the only thing he wanted was to make everyone happy all at once; that being the besetting sin of the curse, he could not see his way out of it. Hermes asked him at one point what he wanted for everyone, what one thing he wanted so that Hermes could give it to him, with the implicit promise of a way out. Lysandros paused a long time and then laughed bitterly: to be on Ithaka, the way they left it. The one thing he can't have.
Building on my experience during our first game, I instituted a rule that if you wanted to invoke a god, you could pull two blocks to get their aid. This worked great as storytelling, it made everything more tense, brought the divine to within the realm of the player agency, and led to some wonderful, wonderful moments. Kriton summoned Persephone into a grove of trees to atone for his transgression many years ago, learned he was not being punished, and still chose to go with her into a true and total death. Meanwhile, Merops ran after Hermes as Hermes tried to make a sexy well-my-work-here-is-done fleetfooted exit, the terrain changing under his feet and tripping up the great god so that Merops had a chance to yell down at him, "Don't you want to win?!"
So. Like. I had fun! I must say my mechanical innovation did not at all solve what I wanted it to solve, which is: Jenga towers are really fucking sturdy. You would not think so but it is true. Consider that a standard Jenga tower is made up of 54 blocks and that people on reddit are like average is between 25-35 pulls. Kriton knocked over the tower at the five hour mark. If we'd wanted it to collapse in that time we would have to have been pulling every 12 minutes for the 25 block figure and every nine minutes for the 35 block figure. This is really fucking hard. A roll every ten minutes is already a pretty brisk pace for an RP-heavy game but remember that every single pull must (1) be a genuinely contested action and (2) plausibly place your PC's life or immortal soul or what have you in danger, because, at any time, the tower could fall over-- i.e., you can't just have people pull where they'd normally do a Perception check, unless it would not feel cheap for the Perception check to drive them mad with what they see! Plus ideally you'd be driving home the themes, right, like, you're doing a game about the impossibility of return once you have departed except by enacting your own past on others, so every time you roll it should tie into that somehow, so you can't just have them fall down a slope and break their neck even if the slope is really spooky. Tricky. Anyway I think despite all this we probably did have a block pull every ten minutes, plus people were pulling two blocks at once, and the fucker still didn't fall over. I have yet to witness a Jenga tower collapse in a Dread game. Something must be done. Maybe we all need to just be more shaky-handed.
(This is one reason I think
uskglass was really, really onto something with the 'tower collapse represents the collapse of order on the ship' mechanic; it's easier to justify just about any contested action as something that might upset that very fragile order, and that theme remained present throughout!)Both fun! First one's not available yet but I recommend Dread wholeheartedly to anyone. Make sure you really think about those surveys.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-17 02:27 am (UTC)Also amazing: that Dread game, omg. TOP-TIER TRAGEDY CATHARSIS SHADOW STORY!!!
no subject
Date: 2023-08-18 03:10 pm (UTC)