[Land of Nodd] Mermaid Sashimi (is antagonism a mirror to protagonism?)
Paul T:
Over the last few weeks, I've been playing a game of my own design, Land of Nodd, with three friends. It's been an interesting experience on many levels, and I'd like to share it. It has also brought up a few interesting questions, about which I hope you may have some useful advice--or maybe even answers.
This Wednesday night will be our final session, as we are about to hit endgame and wrap up the story. If you have any advice for us, please don't hesitate!
Note: I'm going to segregate the information pretty strictly into sections. Feel free to skip sections that don't interest you as you read through this!
The People
For simplicity's sake, in this AP report I will not refer to the three other players by their given names, but in terms of the characters they are playing. I hope all three will read this thread, however. I'll leave it up to them to decide whether they wish to join in the discussion and/or identify themselves.
Before this game, I had only met one of the three other players, and only very briefly (although we'd also conversed now and then online, via forum discussions and e-mail). The other two players were his girlfriend/partner, and another fellow who they had played with in the past. I could be wrong, but I don't think they knew each other very well prior to the game.
We've now played three times. This upcoming session will be our fourth. Our sessions usually last between 2 and 3 hours. It's been a really great experience so far, in many different ways. The game has been great, yes, but even better, I feel like I've quickly grown to become friends with these three people. They are warm, fun, welcoming people, and I'm immensely grateful to them--if you're reading this, thank you!
I was a little concerned about gaming with strangers--strangers from the Internet! Turns out I needn't have worried. This is in part because of things we did right. Here are the main two "things" that come to mind:
1. We all took the time to get to know each other, before and aside from playing the game. I met and had lunch with one of the players before the first session, and we've all been meeting to have dinner before each game, as well as walking to the train together afterwards. We spend most of that time talking about things other than the game, so we've had a good chance to get to know each other in a way that's been fun and rewarding.
2. We've also been taking time to discuss the game itself, sometimes in the middle of play ("hang on, what just happened in that scene?") and sometimes over e-mail between sessions ("how did you feel about that scene?"). I've always had trouble in the past finding people who were willing to engage in such discussion in a productive way, and this has been extremely positive, both in a social sense and in strengthening the game. We're sensitive to potential disagreements and so far we've managed to nip them in the bud before they develop into issues. This is a breath of fresh air for me, after some of my past roleplaying experiences, and I'm really digging it.
For instance, I had initially interpreted one of the characters (Cinderella) as a kind of low-down, scraping-in-the-mud rebel, and narrated for her accordingly. The player, however, had envisioned the character as powerful, significant--after all, she's royalty. This led to a little confusion and some clash between us in that character's first scene. Discussing it afterwards immediately cleared the confusion, not only straightening out the fiction but also avoiding any bad feelings between us.
The Game System
Land of Nodd is a game that takes a few independent plotlines and weaves them together in strange and unexpected ways. Each player plays the protagonist within one of the plotlines, while the players all take turns narrating scenes for each protagonist. On each turn, one player is the Protagonist (i.e. is playing his character) and another is the Narrator--an extremely heavy-handed GM figure who throws the Protagonist into serious trouble. The uninvolved players act to invoke the game mechanics, allowing the Protagonist a chance to overturn the bad situations created by the Narrator. They also name "Risks"--dangers, unfortunate consequences, and complications--that the Protagonist tries to avoid. The Protagonist player uses a system that's sort of a mix of The Pool and Otherkind to decide which Risks are avoided and which are not, and whether the player character succeeds at their goal within that scene. The result is usually that scenes, while initially dominated by the Narrator, spin off in unexpected directions when the game mechanics are called into play.
The system is suited to mysterious stories, full of strange coincidences and weird twists and turns.
The Setting
The game begins with a structured brainstorm phase. We spent much longer in this phase than usual for this game: I suggested something along the lines of "what if fairy tales were a cleaned-up version of things that really happened, sanitized for children?" One of the players came back with, "what if there was a world that contained all the stuff of our imagination, fairy tales, mythology, etc, and that world began bleeding over into our world?"
This concept was involved enough that we chose to spend quite a while hashing it out. This was well worth it, however, and we all riffed off one another's ideas in a way that was productive and enjoyable. I think we all were feeling pretty pumped for the game by the end of the process!
What we ended up with was a really interesting, twisted, dark setting, outlined in general terms:
This other world or dimension (which we usually refer to as 'fantasy land', simply enough) has somehow begun to cross over into the real world--roughly, modern-day America, for the purposes of our story. Fantasy creatures sometimes come into our world, but must maintain the guise of real-world things to exist there. This takes great concentration and willpower for them.
Humans, on the other hand, have just recently learned how to cross over into fantasy land. Its existence is still a secret only known to a few, but it has now attracted the attention of some secret government organizations as well as the criminal underworld, which trades in goods like powdered unicorn horn (a powerful and addictive drug). However, it seems the only people who can cross over into fantasy land are twisted, unhinged people, either insane or otherwise out of touch with reality.
We also established some basic facts, such as that real-world technology is hopelessly addictive to fantasy creatures (especially television), and that, due to human interference, there is now a civil way brewing in fantasy land. That done, we were ready to create our protagonists and begin the game.
The Characters
(Note: At the outset of the game, the characters are completely unrelated to each other, each pursuing his or her personal desire in a completely separate plotline.)
Lawrence is a narcotics officer on the verge or retirement. His wife, Martha, is cheating on him (unbeknownst to him), and his antagonist (a player-defined NPC) is a mafia boss who deals in the underground fantasy flesh trade. (We'd established as one of our facts the existence of a private, secret restaurant, serving such delicacies to an elite clientèle.) Lawrence's Desire (a game-defined story goal that play centers around) is to survive his last week of duty and retire comfortably.
I had some issues with his Desire--I've found in past playtests that the game runs better for characters who have a very active Desire that they can pursue, whereas Lawrence's is more passive: "can he survive for a week?" I voiced this concern, but we decided as a group to go ahead and move on to play. In the last session, it seems like we might have shifted the emphasis of his Desire on to the ...and retire comfortably part, which can be pursued a little more actively. In any case, this may be one of the causes of our troubles. More on that later.
Marina is the last mermaid, living in the human world and working for the NYPD in human guise. Her Desire is to find out what has happened to all the other mermaids--where have they gone? In play, it seems to me that we might be shifting the focus of this Desire as well, to something more like "can Marina save the remaining mermaids?" This is yet to be seen.
Jeff Jenkins is an experimental scientist carrying with top-secret research about "fantasy land" and relevant technology for a government agency. He is deeply unhappy: his Desire is to escape this world and find some way he can enter this mysterious other world, and live there permanently. Preferably without going crazy, of course.
Cinderella has divorced Prince Charming and is now a powerful revolutionary leader within fantasy land, organizing resistance to remove the human presence from fantasy land, as well as fighting against any "human sympathizers" within it. Her Desire is to free fantasy land of all human presence, by any means necessary.
The Story
For the sake of time, a few highlights from each storyline:
Marina
...almost loses her job when a friend of hers arrives at the NYPD offices, dripping wet. He was caught swimming in the East River, and claims he can hear the mermaids' song...
...at a presidential campaign rally, Marina attempts to prevent an assassination on the prime candidate. She fails, even though she takes a bullet for him. The shock of the injury causes her to drop her human guise for a moment. As her "legs" turn into a tail, she falls to the ground... The event is captured on camera, and she is immediately fired from her job...
...now relocated to the suburbs, she finds herself trailed by a mysterious man through a shopping mall. It turns out that the shopping mall is a halfway home for fantasy creatures like herself, intentionally overlooked by the government. She escapes with the help of a diminutive mall gnome, traveling through a mirror to fantasy land, but accidentally drops her wallet for the strange man to find...
...stepping through a mirror back into the real world, she steps into a mafia killer's bathroom, catches him in a net, and drags him back through the mirror, only to find herself emerging in some human-occupied area of the fantasy land.
Lawrence
...comes home to discover a DVD, carelessly left lying by the television, that shows his wife having sex with a monstrous brute of a man...
...outraged, he enters a restaurant he has been investigating for months, looking for answers. There he is fed delicate, white meat like he has never tasted before...
...he is offered a chance to get some information, but before he can do so, he is interrupted...
...attacked in the restaurant by heavily armed gangsters, Lawrence barely escapes, the DVD evidence destroyed, and he begins to hallucinate, from the fantasy flesh he has eaten--which he almost instantly knows he is now hopelessly addicted to...
...is captured by mafia and taken to a mysterious headquarters where mermaids are trapped in glass tubes and mesmerized by televisions, while bits of their flesh are harvested by robotic knives...
...he is armed and sent to kill the presidential candidate, which he agrees to do...
...when he arrives at the candidate's house, he finds only a homeless man, then is attacked by more men with guns... and kills them all.
Jenkins
...catches Crow Jim, a homeless man, in the act of stealing his television set...
...takes the homeless man to his lab, hoping to perform experiments on him, but loses sight of him...
...finds his lab overgrown with strange, otherworldly plants...
...a mysterious figure offers to take him where he wants to go, while holding Crow Jim hostage...
...Crow Jim warns him not to listen, that he is not human, doesn't belong in this world, just as he has always felt...
...Jenkins saves Crow Jim's life, but loses everything.
Cinderella
...finds a group of gnomes and other fantasy-folk offering a captive unicorn to a mysterious human on the beach in front of her Mexican villa...
...a human cruise ship, the Rainbow Trout, an experimental vessel designed to send humans into a psychotropic mental state sufficient to allow them to visit fantasy land, arrives on her island...
...Cinderella takes command of the ship, using a powerful serum to turn the hapless passengers into deranged soldiers. The soldiers begin to spread through fantasy land, committing murder in her name...
...Cinderella mounts an assault on Castle Beauty (originally Sleeping Beauty's castle, now a high-security U.S. prison), killing or converting all the humans there, only to walk right into a trap: a room mounted with a single television set...
...her troops begin to mutiny, spreading rumours of "democracy", a better way of life, throughout fantasy land.
The game has been full of memorable and shocking moments for me, such as when the monstrous brute of a man Lawrence saw in the DVD comes after him. "I'm gonna do to you what I did to your wife," he growls. We sure cheered when Lawrence backed his car into the brute's face!
I also remember the moment when we all realized that the delicious, tender meat Lawrence was served at the restaurant was mermaid flesh--even though no one had actually said it out loud.
Or when Cinderella, despite all precautions and care, became hopelessly addicted to television (and it later almost cost her her life).
System Impact
I'm very happy about the way the system consistently delivers mysterious coincidences for the story overall and tough, tough choices for the players within scenes. Their choices are often highly revealing!
* The overlapping elements between the storylines combine over time to suggest a larger plot, a larger picture that none of the players at the table are aware of, and play feels like a process of revelation, a mystery exposed piece by piece. This is the first time I've had a chance to play this game for more than one session, and the cumulative process of building coincidence upon coincidence is delivering exactly the experience I was hoping to achieve for the game. It seems like a larger plot, unknown to anyone at the table, is slowly emerging, and we all get glimpses of it now and then.
* The mechanics of conflict create intense adversity for each character. Playing this game has made me understand something Vincent Baker wrote over at Anyway: "The challenge facing rpg designers is to create outcomes that every single person at the table would reject, yet are compelling enough that nobody actually does so."
We all care about the characters--not only our own, but also those of the other players. We're cheering them on, hoping they will succeed. But, if you want your character to succeed, you need to maneuver those other players' characters into major, twisted trainwrecks that risk destroying them. The system then resolves those situations, and, more often than not, those protagonists really suffer. Usually, they suffer in exchange for achieving their goals, moving towards the resolution of their Desires. And sometimes that price is steep.
Our characters have faced situations that were dark, miserable, pathetic. There's usually a glimmer of hope, but there's a lot of bad stuff going on as well. I loved how my character, Jenkins, chose to save the homeless man's life, and in the process not only lost a chance to finally experience this other world he yearns after, but also fell into the hands of the conspirators who have been pursuing him. Worse yet, the very reason he saved the man backfired: as a result of that conflict, he has lost his trust.
Those kinds of outcomes, to me, are painful but also awesome. They make for a great story. We, the players, want all the characters to succeed, but the game keeps throwing adversity at them. And I really dig that--I can get the finger-biting audience thrill as well as that tense "my character is in trouble" feeling. Jesse Burneko has posted some mini-essays on a blog entitled "Play Passionately", which articulate this feeling very eloquently.
So, now, what's the trouble?
The Problem, and how it relates to Antagonism
I'd say that so far, everything has been going well. The moments where we didn't see eye to eye have been quickly smoothed over, and everyone seems to understand how the mechanics work and how to use them to move the game into new and unexpected territory. However, in the last session, we encountered some difficulty.
Here's what happened:
It feels as though one of the characters, Lawrence, has overstepped some boundary. He has gone from being a protagonist--a man hunted by mafia, a man whose wife betrays him with some kind of troll or ogre--to someone whose nature we are no longer sure about. His anger has turned to darkness, and he has begun to commit pretty questionable deeds, such as agreeing without hesitation to murder a stranger.
The other three players (including myself), narrated scenes for Lawrence, and it seems to me that we all attempted (with various degrees of success) to place him in situations where he would have to make a choice. We presented him with nasty, evil people who asked him to side with them. And, in all three scenes, Lawrence agreed.
Now, this is not in any way wrong. It's a cool development, and it leaves Lawrence's eventual fate totally up for grabs. However, it caused a lot of difficulty at the game table. I think we all know, intuitively, what to do with a protagonist: a protagonist needs some adversity, some opposition, some tough choices, all of which serve to test him or her, give him or her a chance to be a hero or take a moral stand.
But when it comes to Lawrence, we're no longer sure if he's a protagonist and a hero. He might have become a villain. Or maybe he's just lost his sense of moral judgement temporarily. Maybe he's just so driven by pain and the desire for revenge that he'll do anything. It's hard to say just yet. But it seems we're having trouble narrating scenes for him now. When he was a clear protagonist, we could pile on the adversity, because his goals and desires were at least somewhat noble, and we could cheer for him, and hope to see him succeed. But now that he is in a grey area, or possibly even entirely on the "dark side", it seems like we're all having trouble creating scenes for him or presenting him with adversity. We're unsure what to do.
How do we deal with a protagonist who is becoming an antagonist? We know what to throw at a protagonist. But what does an antagonist need in a story?
(Incidentally, we may be facing this issue with Cinderella, as well. She has transformed through play for a spunky princess into somewhat of a dark and tyrannical queen. However, I think we can sympathize with her ultimate goals, so thus far it hasn't been an issue.)
There's been a lot written about Protagonism, and how it can be established, preserved, etc. But is there a flipside, when a character seems to go over to the other side? How do we deal with that?
Is an antagonist just a certain type of protagonist, a mirror image of one, or something entirely different? What should we try to provide for such a character?
Paul T:
Relevant links:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=26962.0
http://playpassionately.wordpress.com/
Peter Nordstrand:
Based on your account, you don't have a problem. At all. So one or two players have their characters start to behave in questionable ways. They may even turn out to be antagonists, you may end up rooting against them. So what? Just keep up doing what you do. If Lawrence is siding with the bad guys then find out what that leads to. Will he change when he sees that innocent people suffers as a result of his actions?
Root for the good guys, the ones that you identify with. They are the true protagonists of your story, whether they are player characters or not. Hope the bad guys fail, even if they are player characters. Then let the conflict resolution system run its course and hope for the best.
It seems to me that you are having a great success on your hands. Keep it up and don't worry. If he agonized like you do, Shakespeare might never have written MacBeth.
Thank you for the magnificent report.
Paul T:
Thanks, Peter.
However, there is still an issue there. You see, the system relies on us, the other three players, being able to find or create conflicts that the fourth player's character cares about. In the last session, we struggled with this, partially because we were presenting "moral dilemma"-type conflicts. Lawrence just went ahead and took the easy (evil?) choice. Which meant there wasn't really a conflict there.
So, we're looking for better ways to challenge him. He's not a villain with a wicked plan or some frightening ambition; he's just trying to survive and get away from this all. How can we create conflicts he cares about? I think we all have *some* ideas, but we're also flailing a little bit.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Paul,
Perhaps it would help to consider that the issue is not conflicts which the player's character cares about, but which the player cares about. In fact, does that player even care about addressing "conflicts I care about" in play at all?
Best, Ron
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