[Dead of Night] Nice Mr. Fitzgerald
Ron Edwards:
This was my third full non-demo time for this game. As part of my GenCon prep in case we had a chance to devote an evening to it, I'd decided upon a fully suburban game, with Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Lost Boys as more-or-less setting models. The monster would be a Witch by the rules, but appearing as a single man recently moved to area, very evil, appearing to be the perfect neighbor and neighborhood participant. Sort of Fright Night without the final hour of makeup and action. (Does anyone ever remember the first hour of that movie? I kind of like that part a lot.)
Mr. Fitzgerald
Identify 5 / Obscure 3 / Impersonate 8*
Persuade 3 / Dissuade 5 / Sorcery 9*
Pursue 5 / Escape 5
Assault 3 / Protect 5 / Evil Eye 7
3 Survival Points
I had a couple of ideas, including how smarmy and supportive he'd be at a kid's funeral, or perhaps hosting a fun Halloween party at his house, or stuff like that. But I also knew that he'd be generally reactive, as opposed to, for instance, stalking out into the night and killing people in alleys like a werewolf might. I wanted most of the clues and confrontations to be player-driven, with me playing this awful villain mainly as trying to live his life and causing maximum misery and evil without much ruckus.
Anyway, other games intruded at GenCon, and I didn't get around to it. So last month, some of us got together and we made up the characters but didn't play. More delay, curses.
Mariana, Mexican cleaning lady, played by Maura
Identify 3 / Obscure 5 / Invisible 7
Persuade 5 / Dissuade 5
Pursue 2 / Escape 6 / Side Streets 8
Assault 1 / Protect 7 / Cleaning Products 9
5 Survival Points
If you've ever role-played with Maura, that fighting specialty is probably sending a chill down your spine. Mariana's Survival Points dropped, then fluctuated 1-2-1-0-1-0-1-2 for most of the story. She squeaked through the ending by a very narrow streak of luck.
Tom, neighborhood kid (about 12), played by Tod
Identify 6 / Obscure 4
Persuade 6 / Dissuade 2 / Fast Talker 9
Pursue 6 / Escape 2 / Knows the Neighborhood 8
Assault 4 / Protect 6
5 Survival Points
This kid turned out to be the ultimate protagonist, as Tod rolled crazy-well and got lots of doubles, ramping the Survival Points way up. The final scene jacked them down fast, but he had enough to live through the final explosions and hellfire and stuff.
Mrs. Bernice Florin, elderly lady, played by Julie
Identify 3 / Obscure 5 / Distract 8
Persuade 4 / Dissuade 4 / Heavy cane 8
Pursue 3 / Escape 5 / Always around 7
Assault 4 / Protect 6
5 Survival Points
Poor Mrs. Florin sort of turned out the opposite from Tom, as her Survival Points decreased steadily, and she was the player-character to meet her end at Mr. Fitzgerald's hands. Actually, he said "boo!" and her stout heart finally seized.
We finally, finally got a chance to play last weekend. We set our Tension rules as follows: no spending in fights; 3 max for spending at any time. I liked these parameters, as I wanted to see a steady build rather than the up-down up-down of our previous game, which had created a kind of European horror-calm, not bad but not entirely satisfying at times. Curiously, they are very similar to the guidelines Eero's group used in his [Dead of Night] Hair game (except that they only spent Tension during fights), which I only realized while prepping this post.
Early in play, the players didn't spend many Survival Points, but after the first couple of scenes they started spending them like crazy - for all kinds of things, to my delight. Often for Look What I Found (because I learned long ago not to give characters anything useful in scene framing when they can spend resources to create it themselves), for flipping the numbers of a given pair (something I hadn't seen in play before, so that was cool), and sometimes re-rolls. 5 Survival Points is a lot, and even Mrs. Florin's demise took a long time. It's really hard to knock down a player-character into the potential death zone unless you optimize the monsters for it. If you want your character to live, and if he or she is not actually being eviscerated by multiple opponents, then there are several ways to gain instant Survival Point during the vulnerable 0-left stage.
Or another way to put it is, if you want lots of player-character fatality in Dead of Night, then (a) use really horrible monsters like the Lone Killer or werewolves,* and (b) construct Tension rules that favor characters taking damage rapidly. In this case, we were going for fear rather than mayhem, and for violence with uncertain results rather than insta-lethal violence.
As with most Dead of Night play, Tension began at 5 (the slight creepiness of having an old neighbor die recently and be found in her home). It dropped to 2 or 3 as I messed with some rolls, and then it started building, building, building. I spent it when I could, but my opportunities were actually pretty limited given the way the dice were falling. I bet I missed some moments, though, as I'm generally bad at remembering and using all the mechanics available to me to screw player-characters' effectiveness. So I had the fun of living up to the ever-increasing, but not jumpy or over-rapidly increasing Tension.
In GM terms, I busted out some truly nasty horror, surprising myself really, and the players got really into it. Often when I have a notion (as in my first Dead of Night game, "werewolves, family, war zone, soldiers") I don't dress it up in prep, hoping that the engine catches in play itself, and that's what certainly happened here. I don't take the credit; that rightly belongs to the rules for how to introduce and describe things based on current Tension levels. The benchmarks are 5 (vaguely creepy), 10 (outright grim and shocking), and 15 (over the top). When a monster is in a scene, it hops up by 5, but those extra are "ambient" only and cannot be spent like regular Tension; plus, they go away when the monster's not there. You still use total ambient Tension for descriptions, though.
That was all I needed, given my starting concept and some player-characters who were pretty much defined by their nosiness. At first, Mr. Fitzgerald's arrival was associated with nothing more than missing cats, and when Tom spied on him (so ambient Tension hopped up to 8), I could show him dragging something with a long, floppy, wrapped item in his basement. That +5 helped when he was active, observed, or spied upon, so some scary details could be found in the house or in his words. But it was also cool in his absence, as the lower-Tension feel of "normal life" created an alienated feeling among the player-characters - you know, "Why doesn't anyone else believe that this guy is obviously crazy and evil?"
At Tension 10, a neighborhood kid dies, the external house becomes grim and scary to the protagonists (moving lights, a bloody hand slapped against a window pane); and with the +5, I could do the church scene. Oh man, the church scene. Mrs. Florin went through much trauma, including the Evil Eye and a car accident, to try to get Mr. Fitzgerald to come to her church, and then she reeeeally wished she hadn't. At that point, I could also go all-out in a series of events that left Tom's mother badly impaired. After that, it was full-scale psychedelic horror as the protagonists went Rambo and tried to burn down the house, twice actually. Tension racked up so high during the climax that I was forced to multiply my personal concept of this film's budget by a big number.
Tod gets huge credit for using a Survival Point to say Tom found a spooky ceramic cat in the display case (which had its own history in play so far), which he smashed, calling it an Assault roll. Cats had become a weird motif, playing on the whole notion of the witch's familiar without having any such explicit being in the story. It resulted through unplanned, minor contributions without much acknowledgment, and Tod really exposed how strongly it was working with this sequence.
The Witch is a tricky monster, because ultimately, she (or he in this case) is not quantitatively very powerful compared to most monsters in the book. Evil Eye is really the only damage, and it's indirect, only penalizing a character's next roll, so you have to think carefully about how to do it (Mr. Fitzgerald got aerosol spray in his face when he tried it on Mariana!). Impersonation is a key ability, especially for my suburban-normal-guy witch, it costs Survival Points, and you're only starting with 3 as opposed to a player-character's 5. Sorcery costs Survival Points and doesn't do damage. I figured out fast that I needed to use the Evil Eye a lot. I was relieved that the characters' tactics to confront the witch were pretty explosive, which meant they had to make some protective rolls too. Since I wasn't allowed to spend Tension in combat, it was really up for grabs whether Mr. Fitzgerald would be taken down early in the final fight.
It was scary. That guy was really evil. What happened to Tom's mother by the end pushed the story into old-school King and Bava territory, rather than slick A-level faux-fear. I liked that a lot.
Over in "Sandbox" adventures, I wrote about a play-issue or perhaps Technique that I've taken to calling the Screwdown, which is to say, how significant crises and climactic resolutions can be brought to arise by working with the current fiction. Now, in Dead of Night, climactic and finalizing events are pretty much mechanically mandated through the Tension 15 rule. However, as I've found anyway, by the time you get to Tension 15, things are so under way and there's so much to work with, that the fiction is pretty much straining at the bit already. I'd like to muse more about how that happened, especially because in this case we're talking about hard-and-overt Simulationist play, not Narrativism.
I've raved about it before, and lots of others have too, but I'll say it again - this game provides one of the finest combinations of thoughtful design and in-play emotional spiking (of a particular kind) in role-playing history.
Best, Ron
* [Dead of Night] Werewolves! Men with guns! Mom!; also, Eero's thread, linked to above, also includes a brief account of my second game of Dead of Night
Eero Tuovinen:
This is a fortuitous coincidence! I'm going to Oulu tomorrow for a game convention, and you're reminding me of the great DoN session we played there a year ago with largely the same people I'm going to be seeing now. Perhaps it's time for Hair II, the sequel I already know is going to be set somewhere in the great plains, with long highways, lonely trucker bars and biker gangs...
Man, that's not a bad idea at all. I have a huge bunch of new indie in my bag from Gencon, but there's practically nothing that does this GM-controlled sim storytelling thing.
Graham W:
Ron, how do you handle awarding Survival Points for horror cliches with this sort of game? It seems you're at a level slightly above B-Movie Horror, so there's little chance to award Survival Points for, say, running in high heels.
This rule is the bit I don't quite understand about Dead of Night.
Graham
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
Actually we talked a little bit about this in play. If I can remember it well enough to phrase correctly, we hit upon a construction that worked very well.
The idea was that a stated cliche had to arise from what was already happening, so the effect would hit as a cliche only after it happened, not as an inserted self-referential bit. If characters were in a house and one of them decided to go down to the basement alone with no discernible point - not even saying "Gee, the laundry should be done, think I'll get my socks," then it wasn't worth a point. The best way would be to go down to the basement alone to fix the fuse box after the electricity cut out.
I think Tom got a Survival Point for spying in the basement window just because nosy kids do this,* and Mariana got one for ripping out curses in Spanish ... although now that I think of it, she should have received one later on as well, when after many scenes of feigning lousy English, and after having been arrested basically for being Mexican, she spoke in perfect (annoyed) English to the cops. There might have been a few others too.
So it really wasn't much different from what a director decides in making a horror movie. Do you have the cliche induce a roar of laughter because it's been inserted in an incongruous way? Or does it fit in just right because we'd seen her spend time buying those heels in the first scene, then she's wearing them for her date, and now she's running from the demon dog in them? The unstated goal, now that I think of it, was for cliches to generate a certain sympathetic pain or sudden chill of danger. No one in our story had sex, but I think if they had, we'd have aimed for the original reason why it became a cliche: to sympathize however briefly with the couple, or in the case of the cheerleader and jock, to be irked (still at a human level) at their selfishness.
My call is that we did not avoid cliches but rather embraced them if they arose, again, rather than pasting them on with self-referential grins.
Best, Ron
* As I see it, Tom was played by both Coreys at once.
andrew_kenrick:
I agree with Ron's handling of cliches - it's the way I handle them too. I give them out for sensible and appropriate inclusion of cliches, not for throwing them in just to get a survival point with no bearing on the story.
The purpose of giving survival points out for cliches is to encourage players to act in a way befitting a horror movie, rather than "turtling up" and going into PC survival mode (as in, I won't go into the woods as OOC I know that something bad will happen to my character).
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page