[Land of Nodd] Mermaid Sashimi (is antagonism a mirror to protagonism?)
Paul T:
Ron,
Yes, of course! It's all about what the player cares about, not the character.
In Land of Nodd, the player's "wants" for their character manifest in three ways, system-wise (as far as I can tell):
1. The character's Desire, which is defined by the player. I think all four strongly want our characters to succeed and achieve their Desires, Lawrence's player included. It's the prime "Flag".
2. The player gets to name their character's Goal in any given conflict, which often reveals not only how they're interpreting the scene, but how they see it as relevant to their character, and where they go next. Note that if there is no conflict, this feature does not come up--which is what happened in the last three scenes we played out with Lawrence: two scenes without conflict, and then one with a pretty "bland" Goal (I believe it was, "kill all his attackers").
3. The player can spend a point of in-game currency to select a Narrator and ask them to frame a particular scene. This can also be revealing, in terms of the player's wants and wishes for their character and their story. I've suggested to the group that Lawrence's player take this option at the start of the next session. That choice is in Lawrence's player's hands at the moment, so we'll see what happens tomorrow!
As for your final question (does he care about addressing such conflicts), I can't really answer for the player, especially given that I don't know him very well personally. I also don't have any other shared game history with him. Are there ways we can tease out an answer to that question? Are there some questions we might that player? Or some information we can glean by analyzing play up to this point? What kinds of questions would be helpful, here, in order to answer yours?
Thanks!
Paul
jenskot:
Cinderella here! Paul, great AP write up. Thanks for gaming with us!
Paul, let me know if any of this is incorrect.
The system encourages the protagonist to work towards achieving their desire. The system also encourages the other players to present compelling obstacles and risks that the protagonist cares about so that they spend their resources to overcome these obstacles and risks. These spent resources are awarded to the other players to be used later for their own protagonists.
Resources are drawn from a fixed pool. So if the protagonist doesn't spend their resources, the other players have no other way of gaining additional resources (of this type) for themselves. Which means that the other players end up choosing NOT to play their own protagonist on their turn and instead choose to play the role antagonist for the player with the most resources.
So in our last game, 3 of the 4 players chose not to play their own protagonists and instead chose to play the antagonist of Lawrence. Which meant we had 3 scenes, 10+ minutes each focused only on Lawrence. Mainly due to the first 2 scenes generating no conflict and the 3rd scene generating a conflict that Lawrence's player was only partially invested in (as indicated by the number of resources they sacrificed).
Now I should stress that those scenes were highly entertaining. And even though I may have felt a little frustrated not getting to play my own protagonist, I am extremely invested in Lawrence. So much so that I want to see how his story unfolds more than my own protagonist's (not due to a lack of interest).
Potential points to consider:
1. Lawrence's player generally likes to go with the flow in games. Several times he was confronted with horrible risks for his character that his character would obviously not want to have happen but that he found entertaining (seriously horrible stuff, like having your ears blown apart and losing you sense of smell due to major head trauma). He even seemed disappointed when the resolution system went his way and said he could get his goal AND avoid all risks presented. This actually happened to the majority of the players at different points. Screwing our own characters and then roleplaying them screwed up is a huge draw for us. In With Great Power we tend to devastate our aspects quickly!
2. Desires are static. Maybe Lawrence's desire no longer reflects what the player is interested in. Or maybe the desire is problematic. His desire is to survive the week so he can retire. Surviving is a fairly standard goal for all the characters.
3. Even though the risks were horrible, maybe they are simply not targeted enough at the player. Maybe we are too focused on him surviving and less so on him retiring in a week. Maybe we should assume he survives and instead threaten retirement of his ability to enjoy that retirement.
4. Lawrence's player is having a good time (except for feeling guilty for taking up so much spotlight time) and feels he is exploring what his character would do in the given situation.
I hope that helps!
Best,
John
Paul T:
John,
Thanks for chiming in! All good stuff, and I agree with your assessment 100%.
Paul T:
The next session is tonight. If anyone has advice for us, please speak up!
How do we find conflicts the player cares about when we're unsure where the character is headed?
Paul T:
Last night, we played the final session of the game, which had a few difficulties but otherwise was a lot of fun and full of really interesting surprises.
The problems that arose were due to a little bit of wonkiness in the endgame rules (previously unplaytested) and the fact that we socialized so much before the game that we ended up having to rush through the last part of the story, which compounded a few of the rules issues. I'm going to discuss the game itself a little bit, then throw out the questions that jumped out at me, especially as they concern protagonism/antagonism and the concept of Story Now/Story After.
It was also interesting how our game was inspired by the events of the last couple of days--in particular, the U.S. elections. I enjoyed that fiction/real world parallel, which, in a way, contrasted with the way our fictional setup has two worlds, completely and shockingly different from each other.
System Stuff
First of all, I'd like to say that I'm very happy about the design overall, which I would be happy to discuss, if anyone is interested. The key points are:
* Within each scene, a very "traditional" dynamic between the player and the GM-figure. The main protagonist can "immerse" as much as he or she likes, and never has to touch or worry about mechanics or anything metagame. The GM-figure, on the other hand, can and should use a heavy-handed forceful approach (borderline painfully railroad-esque) to shove the protagonist into some trouble.
* The conflict mechanics then introduce complications which are combined in ways that tend to surprise everyone at the table, and lead to the implications of that scene spinning wildly out of the control of the GM-figure.
* Everyone experiences a sense of mystery about the overarching "metaplot", which is built upon in small pieces by the players.
These elements worked together very much as I had hoped, creating a "metaplot" that surprised us all, and could not have been predicted at the outset. By the word "metaplot" I'm not referring to the use of that word I've heard about in games with extensive setting supplements and canonical "events", but rather something specific to this game: as the individual plotlines reveal their connections, a previously hidden "background plot" or "larger picture" becomes apparent to the players. This "metaplot" is effectively implied by all the individual scenes and narrations the players were guided in creating for the story, and has parts that are overt and parts that can only be deduced, built together from minor details created by the various players.
I'd love to hear from the other players, also: did we all "see" the same "larger picture", or did the game create multiple interpretations, different for each of us? In particular, it's interesting how (for me), that larger picture emerged upon reflection, which may be in part due to the rushed nature of the last stages of the game. I'll be returning to this at the bottom of this report.
Story Stuff
I really liked the surprising and twisted journey that carried us from the beginning to the end. I think it was full of surprises for all of us. I'm going to relate the events in some detail, not only because they are interesting, but for posterity, for the enjoyment of my fellow players. In other words, this is the "let me tell you about my character" bit. If that bores you, feel free to scroll down to the next heading ("Questions to Adress"). Nevertheless, there were some interesting techniques that came into play, which I will mention in this section.
At the beginning, we had:
Quote from: Paul T on November 03, 2008, 09:05:33 PM
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.
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.
This was followed by the events described in the first post, and concluded in the events described below. To me, at least, the conclusion of the story was wildly unlike anything I could have predicted from the setup, while still appearing logical and flowing naturally from that setup:
Lawrence
Lawrence escapes from his attackers, and dedicates the next two weeks to hunting down Bob Gordon (the acting president). He finds himself driven by whatever changes have taken place in him after eating the mermaid flesh and unicorn horn he was fed, with unnaturally alert senses, greater strength and determination, and reduced need for sleep.
(During this part of the story, it is established that Bob Gordon has been missing for some time. As we later learn, it is because he has been taking psychotropic drugs, allowing him to enter fantasy land for limited periods of time, and waging an electoral campaign there against Cinderella and her rebel army.)
Lawrence arrives at Bob Gordon's mansion and storms through it, killing guards left and right. Here we had an interesting thing happen: the current Narrator framed two flashbacks, the first going back to a time five years previous, when Lawrence and his wife Martha were debating possibilities for vacation spots and their eventual retirement home. The two uninvolved players jumped in and played Martha and a travel agent, establishing the beginning of her eventual affair. I think we all enjoyed this scene a great detail, as each player picked up on cues supplied by the others and riffed off them--for instance, the setup for the affair, as well as various details which brought life to the story (such as the various vacation spots the couple looked at and debated, and the details of Lawrence's retirement plan), were not introduced by the Narrator but all improvised by the players. I think we all enjoyed the flashbacks immensely, and they helped define Lawrence's character in more detail. We learned a little more about who he was, and why he wanted to retire. It not only humanized him but led to us introducing details that turned out to foreshadow his eventual fate--in this case, his attraction to a brochure showing a suburban retirement home built in the shadow of Disneyland.
(All this play effectively reframed Lawrence's Desire to be about his retirement as opposed to his survival, which I think helped us guide his story to its conclusion. I admire the way the other players handled this, achieving all of that without ever needing to stop play or discuss it out of game. In this case, it worked really well!)
Back in the present, Lawrence finds some of Bob Gordon's psychotropic drugs, injects himself with a good dose, and steps into fantasy land. Bob Gordon and some of his men are racing towards the portal back to the real world, chased by Cinderella and a herd of fantasy creatures (gnomes, leprechauns, bears, unicorns, munchkins, etc) shouting, "Death to humans!"
That's when Lawrence realizes where he is: there is a castle not too far away (a fairy tale castle, looking quite similar to his dream location in Disneyland). The surroundings are beautiful, more colourful than the drab world he has always known. He decides right then and there that he will remain here, in fantasy land. There is some tense (in-character) negotiation between Lawrence, Bob Gordon, and Cinderella, to the effect that:
* Bob Gordon is thrown out of fantasy land, but promises to keep providing Lawrence with the mind-bending drugs that will allow him to remain in fantasy land, for as long as he is able (how long that will last is very unclear, however).
* Cinderella also resolves her Desire in this scene, throwing the humans out of fantasy land, but allows Lawrence to remain.
The interesting twist that arose from the conflict mechanics, however, is that while Lawrence may stay, his addiction to fantasy flesh will only grow worse over the years... will he become a monster? Perhaps.
Cinderella
We jump forward in time, finding Cinderella's storyline at the final critical point of her ambitions. The civil war has reached an impasse, and the concepts of democracy have taken hold in fantasy land. She has to face her rival, Bob Gordon, in a free election. She delivers a powerful, moving speech to the creatures of fantasy land, showing them examples of their former glory brought low by their addiction to human technology (she brings forward characters like Winnie the Pooh and the Beast, reduced to mangy, sickly, television-addicted wretches), and urges a return to better times. This part of the story had some neat elements of Color, supplied by various players: even as she delivered her anti-television speech, her other hand clasped a remote control behind her back, compulsively clicking the buttons, as though changing channels. After all, she had become a television junkie herself as a price for her power, as established in an earlier conflict.
(Speaking of Color: Cinderella's campaign slogan? "Happily Ever After!" Of course. What else could it be?)
She is successful, and her followers chase Bob Gordon and his human supporters out of fantasy land. However, her victory is also bittersweet: we establish through the conflict mechanics that the creatures of fantasy land will not give up their excursions into the human world, and that the struggle, the clash between the two worlds, will go on indefinitely.
Of note were some dangerous outcomes narrated by the other players that she managed to avoid, such as the Risk that she would have to go back to scrubbing floors or that she would turn into a human (due to a serum she had taken earlier in the story), aging and growing ugly and fat through the years. The game system gives players a way to target each other with such frightening outcomes as part of fun, enjoyable play. To me, at least, that never felt competitive or adversarial--it seemed we all enjoyed creating problems for each other even while "cheering" for the protagonists.
Jenkins
Jenkins awakens in a strange laboratory he doesn't recognize. A witch (with green skin, warts and all) in a lab coat and a clipboard is demanding that he get back to work, and asking him to open one of the cages, below. What's in the cages? Small children, kidnapped, orphans, captured to serve as her lunch during her busy workdays.
(A great line: "Sure, I may be evil, but I still have my rights!" The politics of fantasy land are very different from ours!)
Jenkins is shocked, confused, completely uncomprehending of where he is or what he is doing. It turns out that those sandwiches, mysteriously delivered to his lab in the real world, contain his memories--each one individually wrapped and labelled with a specific memory. As he begins to eat them, he is overwhelmed by sudden knowledge, and drops the keys to the cages with the children. Soon, the sounds of children's bones, crunching between the witch's teeth, fill the air.
In this scene we play the cards and learn who Jenkins really is: not only is he not human, but he is the son of the Prince, the mafia leader responsible for the flesh trade, the man who hunted down all but the last mermaid, and the one who sent Lawrence to kill Bob Gordon.
It turns out that Jenkins was somehow brainwashed into thinking he was human as a baby, and sent into the human world to act as a sort of spy: to learn the secrets of science so that now he could put them to use, designing a killer virus the Prince plans to use against the humans. It seems that the Prince's plans went well beyond the flesh trade!
So, although Jenkins achieves his Desire (to live in fantasy world), it is not a good ending for him: he is revealed as an unwitting villain, and, resigned to his fate, joins his father's side.
This part of the story was heavily defined by the GM, but very much with the concensus of the other players. As Jenkins' player, I had essentially signed up to find out about his fate, and was happy having it "revealed" to me. In another game, this might have been frustrating. In Land of Nodd, however, it didn't bother me. First of all, that's because the play of the cards that forms the conflict resolution mechanic let me have the final say on his situation (although I didn't draw well enough to avoid his ignominious fate as a villain, I could have chosen failure, and a return to the human world, for example). Second, my ability to contribute greatly to the other storylines meant that it wasn't in any way frustrating to take more of an audience role in my own protagonist's story: rather, a lot of the enjoyment there was in discovering his story, as the other players effectively told it to me (with the caveat of the conflict mechanics, as mentioned earlier, where, as the Protagonist player, I maintained the most power over the consequences of his choices).
Marina
Marina struggles with the mafia goon she has captured, falling into fantasy land in an area occupied by human soldiers. However, she manages to escape and convinces him to tell her where the mermaids are kept. This part got a little blurry, as we tried to rush through the fiction in order to finish the game before we had to go home, and the story was definitely hurt by the lack of narration. Nevertheless, the outcome was very interesting and dramatic:
While Marina made it back to the human world, found the mermaids, and managed to set them free, she could not herself escape in time, and was captured in the process. Alas, her flesh will be eaten by greeding gangsters and human celebrities. So, in a tragic turn of events, while she accomplished her Desire, she had to pay for it with her life.
On top of that, there was another Risk Marina's player didn't manage to avoid: the mermaids were set free, but, while they escaped the clutches of the flesh trade, could never find their way back to fantasy land, trapped in the polluted waters of the real world forever.
...
So, in the end, the unrelated plotlines grew to converge, revealing a backstory, a larger metaplot, as I had hoped. This "Prince" character turned out to be behind the disappearance of the mermaids, the flesh trade, the attempted assassinations on the presidential candidates, and who knows what else--a true villain. And Jenkins, the poor hapless unknowing accomplice, turned out to be his son. Cinderella became a television-addicted ruler of a democratic fantasy land. Marina sacrificed her life to free her fellow mermaids, and Lawrence found his dream retirement in a land plagued by problems he could never have imagined (the dream fairy tale castle he decided to settle under, for instance, was either a secret virus lab or a top-security prison littered with corpses, casualties of war), and might grow to become a villain in his own right as his hunger for the flesh of innocent fantasy creatures grows over the years.
(Upon reflection, it sounds like he has become a fairy tale character after all--although his story's end is not a "happily ever after..." but a potential tranformation into the villain of future fairy tales.)
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