[Dead of Night] Nice Mr. Fitzgerald
Ron Edwards:
Hi Callan,
I can see how that might seem likely given the written description, but as it happened in our game, Mr. Fitzgerald was supremely evil in how he killed Mrs. Florin. He'd already Evil Eye'd her into a car accident, corrupted her church horribly, and otherwise made her life miserable. Technically, doing damage (using the Assault score) by saying "boo" isn't something that character is capable of by the rules, if it came right out of nowhere or were part of the ordinary-if-evil course of actions he'd conduct casually. However, with Tension racked up to 20+ (well past the threshold which allows, even requires surreal descriptions), with the history between the two characters (as Mrs. Florin had made the awful mistake of trying to engage and challenge him on a moral, community plane), and with the point-by-point history of accumulating physical and psychological damage he'd done to her which placed her at 0 Survival Points,* it was exactly the way to kill her, with color & rules & in-game fiction all firing at once.
Nasty, awful monster-character. One of the worst I think I've ever done, possibly because it's built straight out of my personal fears as a first-time father. I described the setting as being "a couple of blocks south of here," which describes streets and houses and demographics just like my own street.
The more I type this, the more I think you'd like this game. It is physically and textually so practical, and yet all its best properties are emergent.
Best, Ron
* Important rule: your character doesn't die at Survival Points = 0, but taking damage at that time means he or she does die.
David Berg:
Hi Ron,
From the various Dead of Night threads I've read on the Forge, I've formed this picture of Tension Points as saying, "We're making this session look like one of those movies that gets creepier and more dangerous as it progresses; so, GMs, do that!" And then they provide useful illustrations of "getting creepier" for the GM to refer to, and mechanical reinforcement of "getting more dangerous" as applied to violence.
So, I feel like I'm probably missing something. I mean, I feel like, given the same mission statement, I could just sort of GM accordingly, and things would indeed get more creepy and more dangerous. I'd just describe grosser things and give the badguys more resources. But your post clearly states that this was not your experience:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 13, 2008, 09:48:50 AM
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?"
Am I underselling the importance of guidelines to the GM? I can see how some numerical guidelines would help a little, but do you feel they helped a lot in pacing/mood? Was this difference a huge factor in making play successful, or just a small one?
Was the loss of Survival Points relevant because it made character death more likely? Or because it signalled to the players "we're gearing up for the climax"?
How much do feel the successful vibe was a result of purely in-fiction developments, and how much of it was a result of direct player contact with mechanics (Tension Points & Survival Points, I guess)? Was there any, "Uh oh, we know that subtle thing Ron just described is probably very bad news, because we're at Tension 8!"?
This game is interesting to me on two fronts:
1) I have a few overlapping goals and vaguley similar mechanics I'm testing in my own designs
2) I initially had no interest in playing but that is starting to turn into some serious curiosity
Thanks,
-David
Eero Tuovinen:
That's what I thought about Tension points before I played the game, David! I rarely misread mechanics, but this was just so different from what I'm used to, that I misjudged the effect Tension points would have.
I played another session of DoN last weekend, and the way I explained Tension points to the players was that they have two functions:
Their number tells the GM when to reveal backstory - it's not just "getting creepier" like the rulebook a bit misleadingly states, it's about whether to hold back or give away stuff. This decision is arbitrary drama-wise, you could do either and get good results in this sort of immersive play, so having the decision taken off your hands makes it easier to GM.The Tension points are a resource you use to lock play into a genre mode - the GM spends the points to follow his own, sole aesthetic vision about how individual conflicts "should" go. This means that the naturalism that rules low Tension levels gives way to determinism when you have more points to spend.Because the latter function interacts with the former by changing the amount of Tension, you get this interesting dynamic zigzag in play that supports GMing really well. The GM actually doesn't need to think about dramatic coordination at all, he just needs to make spot decisions about whether he'd prefer the monster or the player to win a given conflict, and he needs to look at the Tension points to decide whether to delay some (horrific) reveal or not. It's all about GM convenience, not any sort of elaborate guidelines - I could make these choices myself, but with Tension points I don't have to, and can therefore concentrate on other things.
Ron Edwards:
Hi David,
Although that question isn't unfair or wrong to ask, it puts me in a difficult position: I have to explain the game rules to you, then justify or deeply explain them, but without you having the text there to decide whether that makes sense or not. I never like the way this works out in a discussion, because the other person's point of feedback-reference just isn't there. It's like trying to make out with fog even if the other person is doing their best to try to understand. Well, all that said, I'll do my best - which is also to say that I think I can only give it one good shot.
To review the Tension rules in the most basic play (there are some sophistications, but never mind): it starts at 5, and all Survival Points spent or lost by characters rack it higher, 1:1. It drops when you, the GM, spend it, typically on the monster's special abilities or on modifying dice rolls' outcomes (I am meaner than Eero and typically always spend against the player-characters). That's all of the quantitative side, nothing more tricky involved. I'll try to place that into the larger context of the rules as a whole.
1. In playing Dead of Night, it's not hard to "make a story" in the most basic sense. First, Premise isn't an issue, so decisions of any kind don't relate to heightening it as a question or seeing it turn into theme via results. Also, it literally doesn't matter what anyone does because the basic point is that the characters are in danger of being killed/worse, and that's all. Thirdly, nor does any sort of survivorship really matter in terms of the point of play; although it's important to act as the character's advocate in general, it deeply enriches the basic enjoyment of what's going on when a character dies just as much as when he or she survives. All of this is to say that the GM has a very easy, wave-front sort of job. The rules are built specifically for him or her to consult what's up, and in so doing, to decide what to do quite simply.
2. When I say "what's up," there are three parts. The first is actually the least constraining: what's gone on in the fiction so far. I mean, it's a monster-horror campfire-story movie thing; the characters are wherever they are from last time, and either the monster is present right away in the next scene or it's not, and recent events usually make those pretty easy. The second is Tension Level, which is to say, how horrifying and surreal you describe things. That's rated on a roughly 5-point scale, and the relevant range is 0 to 15, so it's not hard to do either (not many ratings to know). The third is whatever Survival Points get spent for things like clues or other prop-oriented stuff; you as GM don't have to decide whether there's a pickup truck with some gas left or not, because if they want it, they can make it up themselves and pay for it.
So I think you can see that all "what shall happen now" decisions usually left entirely up to GM as uber-powerful plot-go man are simply not there. The neat thing is that even with all three of the points in #2 going on, you still get to play the monster in terms of specific abilities, choosing a target, being up to something else (bad), and moving around stealthily or not-stealthily. GMing Dead of Night is not a wind-up toy, but the framework provided by everything I numbered and listed above makes the "you" part very fun - you can throw your whole weight into how bad the thing is, period.
And if true Tension ever hits 15, start wrapping it up, which pretty much means the monster goes for the total (or specially targeted) kill-or-worse, or that the player-characters are already doing the same toward it and now get a clear shot, or both.
Does that help? I'm especially trying to get across that Tension, played strictly and in full, is a key part of all of the above, but it's neither a boring metronome nor a boring "the monster does this now" rubric that dictates your GMing as a whole.
Best, Ron
Joel P. Shempert:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on November 16, 2008, 07:49:18 PM
There's nothing in the text about cliches being silly or not silly, foreshadowed or not foreshadowed, or anything else. The numerous examples are generally descriptive and range from the very familiar to the thought-provoking. Graham's question was the right one - how did I, the GM in this case, organize "my discretion?" When the rules hand me the judgment call like this, I am a big believer in telling people what's on my mind, and finding out what's on theirs, because I don't like to start over case-by-case during play.
I just wanted to break in here with a side question: this communication process ("telling people what's on my mind, and finding out what's on theirs") is relevant across game texts, no? Like, it's a technique you employ whenever "the rules hand [you] the judgment call like this", though not the only possible functional technique.
Reason I ask is, group struggle with a shared standard for such judgment calls (in this case assigning bonus Dice) was one of the many mismatches and frustrations that led to the recent demise of my Sorcerer game. Would this be a valuable technique for Sorcerer play, to talk over the aesthetic standard for judgment before play, so all parties have an idea of what to play toward in garnering Bonus Dice? It strikes me that this could be one more thing that gets formally defined for a particular game, right alongside Humanity and Demons and Ritual. Or is this different somehow from the DoN "Cliche-->Survival Points" thing?
I don't have much more to say about the AP except that every time you post Dead of Night play, it makes me wanna play the game so bad!
Peace,
-Joel
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