[Dreamation 2008] Troublesome Munchausen
Kat Miller:
Quote from: Callan S. on February 02, 2008, 05:32:12 PM
Michael,
Before diving into the unpleasantness, would you acknowledge your using constructive denial? As in, during the game insisting for example 'French poodles on the moon is exactly what a baron munchausen game is'? But now your out of the game you could say that really that isn't strictly true? But it's rather fun during the game to believe that is just what a baron game is?
It's possible to talk about the unpleasantness, but I think if we have to talk to each other in double talk about what the game 'really' is, talks will be fruitless.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean about the double talk of what teh game "really" is.
Harlequin:
Sam - that's very nicely asked, so I'm going to try and express an answer, even though I'm having a lot of difficulty pinning it down. Bear with me.
I think there's definitely a hint when you mention that you weren't thinking in terms of theme. (I presume you're using this in the more common sense of motifs and topic areas, rather than Ron's very constrained definition for Nar theory; I prefer the general term myself.) To me, Baron Munchausen is all about theme and colour, and damn near nothing else. If I had to capture the essential elements I was expecting, and not seeing...
1) The characters are presumptively not only aristocrats but aristocratic in their behaviour. So for example if the Baron were to find himself in possession of a lady's underthings, it would be a necessary act to offset this potential failing in gentlemanly action by an apology or disclaimer of some kind... the more over-the-top and florid, the better. Or for another example, a Lady would never, ever actually speak of a sexual act. Indeed the closer to the forbidden territory and the scandalous the topic comes, I think the more necessary it is for the counterweighting courtesies to be overemphasized. This seems like a subtle point but I'm not sure this is true; it is, however, something that one couldn't reasonably expect someone to pick up automatically.
It seems on the face of it like the Baron throws away the strictures of upright period-aristocrat behaviour, and one could come away with only that impression, without realizing that it's in between the lightly scandalous deeds and the overly courtly language that the actual aristocracy is being hoist on a two-pronged skewer. We had transgressive Barons and Baronesses who would not have been wholly out of place in a light-weight Sorcerer game, without the counterweight at all.
Chalk this one up to a subtlety of the mode without which it lost balance and fell down.
2) The preposterous felt like it was largely out of reach for many of us (including me), remaining stuck at the level of the mildly absurd. This is definitely a skill thing, and one of the elements one would expect to include in the final judgment calls. So it's definitely not blameworthy, except inasmuch as it meant that what suffered wasn't a session which could have been great... it was a session which would have topped out at pretty good, even if all other flaws had been remedied. I'm sure this contributed to the sour taste in my mouth, but it's inherent to a first play of a difficult game and I shouldn't place it in the same category.
3) Several other missing motifs from the source could have been present, but weren't, which would have helped as well. For example, the motif of the extraordinary companions (the fellow who could hear for miles, etc), which serves I think to spread the glory around and allow the Baron to profess humility even when he's boasting. Again it's probably ignorance of the source, and it's also revealing how much of an effect these elements have in facilitating some of the underlying themes; not something you'd think of, 'til they weren't there.
4) The table talk suffered from breaches of kayfabe (good phrasing), and from interjections which allowed the meta-level stuff (which was theoretically permissible as 'table talk', and thus by convention not subject to the same rules) to migrate their feel into the narratives. Having the one influence the other is definitely an upshot of the fact that the table talk is, itself, in-character. This is where the swearing bothered me... somewhat in its own right as a breach of character/theme, and moreso in that it intruded into the stories and dragged them downward as well. There was no separate out-of-character voice in which to express them. My own intuition says that therefore, this should have meant that either such a voice be cleanly separated ("okay, I just have to cut in and say this even though my Baron totally wouldn't... you were such a bitch to that poor Prince!") or not expressed until after.
All of these exacerbated by the fact that there is, quite simply, nothing else under the hood except motifs and colour. They, and not the coins, constitute the real 'system' in Lumpley Principle terms. In many ways it's definitely a Gamist game... "can you demonstrate skill at telling an original story which holds closely to the following elements? Step up and try." Which analysis suggests that Michael's intuition, that he needs to do substantially better briefing and mood-setting next time, is precisely correct. In a very real sense, he didn't actually explain the rules. Not his fault, especially with all these coin tricks pretending to be the real rules... but definitely something to remedy next time.
Does that help pin it down?
- Eric
Valamir:
Eric, that's excellent, and really speaks to why I was rather profoundly disappointed by BM as a game on the two occassions I played.
Not having read the book, how clear are these elements presented?
I'm speculating that they are probably present in the presentation of the text, but not made explicit such that the reader has to interpret that presentation as part of the rules rather than ignoring it as the usual fictional fluff found in many games.
Would it be possible to create a list of these motifs that is at once succinct enough to be employable as a "cheat sheet" for teaching the game but yet inclusive enough to really get the point across? Has someone already done such a thing?
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
I thought I'd add a bit from a different angle, although I do not want to derail the points made by Eero and Eric. This is already a rich thread based on a few posts, and I'm hoping to get yet another weave or facet into it. It's GNS stuff, and it's composed of a few parts.
The first part comes from playing the game Once Upon a Time a lot, which now that I think of it had a big influence on a lot of us sometime in the late 1990s. It may even have had a role in generating Endgame mechanics in RPG design. There are two points I can draw from playing it so much that I think are relevant here.
1. The game underwent a major revision in the second edition, which is the only one I played - namely, the addition of Ending cards. This is huge. I cannot even imagine what it would have been like to play without them, because I think the game would degenerate into pure struggle for control. "Look, we made an SIS, and now it's a free-for-all of derails, subversions, and interruptions until it's over."
2. The second edition still yielded a card-game equivalent of the incompatibility of Gamist and Narrativist goals. The former subordinated the thematic punch of the developing story to who could lock down the ending, as we competed for that in terms of rules and cards. In this case, merely laying down the Ending card by the rules did the job, even if the narration that bridged the gap to the ending was a bit lame in thematic/plausibility terms. That didn't matter much because that particular narration is pro forma. By contrast, the latter subordinated the "who wins" question to whoever could line up the best run-up to their ending, in terms of plausibility and thematic punch. That meant that one didn't play an Ending card although it was possible, because the current components in action didn't line up to make that Ending "work" in a satisfying way. Winning still existed, but winning without a good narration for the Ending card was actually losing, or more accurately, a bit of a betrayal.
My experiences convinced me that the game was not fun unless either of these goals was explicitly in action for the whole group, by about halfway through the game. If one of them were firing well, though, then the game was endlessly entertaining.
The second part concerns most of the early Hogshead games, including Munchausen and reaching its peak probably with Pantheon. I find them all to be broken much in the same way as the first edition of Once Upon a Time, and also problematic in the same way as the second edition. The aesthetic seems to be, "compete for how the story goes," with currency as a method for both contribution and interruption. It's prone to a lot of bullying, and when the rules don't permit the bullying (i.e. you have the counters or whatever to stand them off), to a lot of subversion and devaluing of what others have already said. Instead of story creation, it's about story control, and I think lends itself to the worst excesses of what I described as Prima Donna play in my Narrativism essay, or if you shift it to the Gamist end of things, to the unpleasant excesses of the Hard Core play I describe in that essay). It may be that the designers had only ever expressed Narrativist goals using those tactics, and therefore to make a "story game," simply translated those tactics into rules.
(Robin's design of Rune does a better job, I think, of formalizing Hard Core Gamist play into rules without it becoming simply a breaking-down of the social power elements of play. Pantheon, in my judgment after playing it, collapses into "yes it does no it doesn't" based on tokens and points.)
3. What if one doesn't want to play it Gamist and instead as a kind of celebration of the source material? Which is, I think, where you and a couple other people at the table were coming from, Michael. Also, Eric, it seems to me that your interpretation of the game comes from that angle too. Well, my take on that is that the rules are grinning viciously at you, right from the page, when you try it. They are built to empower anyone who wants to give your genre-fun a giant wedgie, right over your head like in Dilbert. That person has the rules on their side, and thus they got your "gee the Baron is fun, let's be fun together" goal right here (with gesture).
I think that the Hogshead community of the mid-90s brought maximum innovation to maximum incoherence (in the GNS sense), and I stand by that now. The game doesn't offer a goal in terms of Creative Agenda, so people tend to project onto it whichever one they're inclined toward based on some aspect of the text (G = rules to compete for story control, N = "make a story" in a kind of naive interpretation, and S = enjoy Baron Munchausen color and light theme as a fixed entity). But the system is Gamist with the red dial of competition turned way up, and since it's Gamist over the SIS itself, it pops the competition up to the Social Contract level above that.
I dunno, Michael ... it seems to me that the game itself, for all its textual enjoyment of Baron Munchausen color, is built to hose anyone who actually wants to bring that enjoyment into the actual practice of play. Even if the participants all decide to do nothing but that, they'll accomplish it by ignoring the available options of the rules.
Best, Ron
Harlequin:
Ron - I think your conclusion there is spot on. Maximum incoherence with maximum style. Which is where I'd really like to see someone re-craft it to explicitly support a proper CA. Hell, one could probably re-craft Munchausen three times... once to support each side of the GNS triangle. Now that would be a fascinating tutorial/exemplar on GNS. Here's the exact same game done three subtly different ways, each of which is fun in a totally different way.
Ralph - this is one of those games where even the 'rules' are presented in-character. The real rules, the colour etc., drips pretty heavily, and IIRC there's no real "game fiction" distinction for people to steer around. Some of the motifs are less likely to be present - for instance, I don't know how well the text actually brings in the extraordinary companions motif - but really a full read of the game does feel like it would successfully communicate the goals as long as the rules weren't obscuring them the way they do. So your speculation is correct except that the text is well-done in that it's never "fluff" to steer around... if you steered around the fluff you wouldn't get anything at all. It's quite simply the body of the work.
Now, at the con, we didn't do a full read of the rules; I'm quite sure I had the strongest familiarity with the game at our table, and I lost my copy more than five years ago. So nobody had that osmosis treatment for the real rules, and that's something we could have opted to fix with a little more prep. A list of motifs like you describe might be doable, I dunno... it would have to be a well-steered group project between several people who had familiarity not only with the game, but also the movie and the source folktales (and preferably the body of folk lit surrounding them as well - there's snippets of Koschei the Deathless and all sorts of other stuff in there). I wouldn't trust one person to spot all the elements and weight them appropriately. You'd definitely need to triage it down into "Required", "Recommended" and "Optional", and would I think be a bigger project than just re-tasking the game text and keeping the colour-via-reading approach (but making it explicit).
Who's up for actually taking up the challenge of reinterpreting Munchausen into G, N, and S variants, with proper support for each? I'm told the game can still be had for reasonable prices on EBay and so forth.
- Eric
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