[Dead of Night] Nice Mr. Fitzgerald
David Berg:
Eero,
Yeah, the strain of using my brain to track a bunch of stuff at once sometimes makes GMing less fun, so I totally see the value in lightening that load. The more I can focus on the SIS now (as opposed to the SIS that was, or the SIS that will be), the more I can get my player-like fun of dumping in portrayal and other color.
Ron,
"Just play the monster" sounds like a blast.
Your clarification about how the genre expectations simplify GM responsibilities is well taken. I'm actually relatively ignorant of those expectations, which probably contributes to my fuzziness here (I don't often watch horror movies).
The fact that the players' attempts to do stuff are also simple for the GM to handle (Suvival Point expenditure = get what you wanted) is big too; I hadn't thought about that.
Regarding Tension Points, I think I knew that they go up and down, not just scene-to-scene, but also in response to how actively the GM is trying to screw the players. That wasn't one of the things I took away from the AP threads, though, so I guess I kind of trivialized it. Thinking about that now, though, it sounds interesting and fun.
I find it hard to infer from your explanation how scene framing, and prep to inform that, is impacted by all this. I guess with a little fleshing out of the monster beforehand, it's just a matter of "ad lib some genre-appropriate locations & NPCs" (and play the monster), and a halfway-decent GM can't really go wrong?
Do the monster types in the book come fully loaded with, "Just play THIS, and it WILL create interesting situations," or does the GM have to build that in by detailing backstory, methods, signals, schemes, etc.? I'd imagine there's a bit of an art form to the latter.
Thanks,
-David
P.S. I'm still curious about direct player contact with the Tension Points. If anyone can speak to whether, "Uh oh, Tension 10 means that subtle thing the GM mentioned is probably deadly!" happens, I'd appreciate it.
David Berg:
Joel, I'm a big fan of talking stuff out pre-game. Here are some of the bases I try to cover (though some of these only pertain to games that are brand new to the players).
Joel P. Shempert:
Dave, yes--I'm a big fan of it too, except that I still haven't hit my stride regarding how to get there. That is, I've had games (many, many games) with zip communication, and they had mismatched agendas and sucked. And I've had games where I tried to communicate from the get-go. . .and they had mismatched agendas and sucked. I've also had games that didn't suck, but from where I'm sitting I don't see any consistently effective methodology for communicating what play's about and the standards for input thereof. Which is why I pounced on this here. I'm trying to get a handle on what bits of communication to focus on, and how much to frontload into the game startup.
If you look at my post here, you can see that such issues are rife: I thought we had communicated sufficiently, and I tried to be delicate WRT communicating too much right off and spoiling actual play. But it turns out we didn't communicate enough, or at least not in the right ways. Fortunately we had robust enough communication in the group to recognize this and rectifiy it (in this case, by scrapping the game and planning for a new one), but I'd l;ike to figure out how to better address the issue from the get-go.
Apologies if I'm tangenting too much from the meat of this thread.
peace,
-joel
Ron Edwards:
Hi David,
This would be so much easier if you had the book.
I reorganized your questions and points, which I hope will make sense.
Genre and GMing
Whoa, wait, you don't know, or aren't into cinema horror? Then, um ... uh, what can I tell you, except that all game design is predicated on Color and Reward, and that you must at least understand those two things in order to understand a given game at all? Especially for Simulationist-in-your-face, which Dead of Night most certainly and wonderfully is. We're talking about Reward mechanics (Survival/Tension), but Color is the necessary partner. I sort of thought you had that nailed down. Huh ...
That changes my answers to your questions a lot. OK - well, in horror movies, there are specific plot and ability tropes, but they aren't utterly stereotyped. They are instead fixed in a way which allows nigh-infinite variations. You can flip sympathy for the monster from full to none, or do it right in the middle. You can define a monster as twisted-human or human-appearing non-human (I'm talking thematically). You can even tweak the whole thing to be confirmatory toward familiar values, or to challenge/disturb them. You can mess with both how the abilities and weaknesses look, and how they relate to the monster's emotional state. I'm speaking here about monster/horror movies; this is a big part of why people like them, in addition to certain victim-empowerment issues which aren't relevant to this thread.*
Anyway, in playing Dead of Night, generally people get that stuff without any need to articulate or analyze it. What I'm saying is that the monster types in the book do come fully loaded with "grab and go," but that is embedded in the expectation that the reader knows what I wrote above. It's up to me as GM to play it as pure menace (like I did with Mr. Fitzgerald, albeit fully masked) or some other way. In fact, the very fact that I might say "mummy" or "werewolf" incites others who like this genre, or set of genres, to be interested in which way I'll be doing it.
So how do I, as GM, do that? It's not so much building a whole scenario-book full of clues and signals and encounters, as simply how I present things and play them. Does the werewolf try to kill his lover, or does he avoid her frequently and try to direct his uncontrollable other side toward people she dislikes? It's really not about planning how to convince the players of this or that. It's just, you know, what he looks like, what he does, what he says, and what happens. I play him, and that's my part; the players will do theirs. That's the Color bedrock in action. Given an equally solid Reward in action, you have a game.
Tension
OK, I think you got it pretty much, but I'm overreacting slightly to a given phrase you used. The length of what follows is perhaps misleading; I'm not saying you missed any major point. It's a quibble.
"Screw the players" isn't quite right. If I'm not mistaken, you're talking about how Tension goes down when the GM diddles with dice rolls. OK, I can see that perception ... although again, what we're describing is a limited resource for tossing in a penalty best described as Bad Fucking Luck. And since it is a resource as opposed to the widespread application of that idea through fiat in a lot of traditional Sim-horror play, that also seems to me like not being screwed. Hammering the character, absolutely yes; screwing the player, no.
Plus, don't forget that Tension decreases when a GM helps a player's dice too. I don't happen to do that often if at all, but Eero does, and the rules are very explicit that either way is OK (unless of course the group customizes the Tension rules otherwise).
Quote
I'm still curious about direct player contact with the Tension Points. If anyone can speak to whether, "Uh oh,
Tension 10 means that subtle thing the GM mentioned is probably deadly!" happens, I'd appreciate it.
That's straightforward in the text. Tension Points are written to be closed to the players. It's not a secret so much as unnecessary. And play is so, well, happening that a statement like you wrote doesn't occur - at Tension 10 and above, stuff is already being described appropriately; it's not like they have to guess. I get the idea that you're conceiving of play as being very numerically structured, almost like a board game ... it's not, it's very dialogue heavy, even blurt-heavy; the SIS is thick enough to be cut with a knife.
Andrew has written that he's played demos with a big steel d20 sitting out, partly as a teaching method and partly for physical reinforcement of tension (the phenomenon, not the mechanic, but via the mechanic). I've done the same in one of my games. My take is that for purposes of teaching the game, revealing Tension makes sense, but in simply playing with others, it doesn't matter whether the players see the number or not.
Andrew and with any luck Merwin, can you guys help out? I feel like I'm repping the game to the degree an author should be doing, and it's getting out of my comfort zone in terms of speaking authoritatively. I'm only a practitioner who likes the game, and it's hard to tell whether I'm expressing my interpretation and preferences, vs. representing the text responsibly.
Best, Ron
* Interested people, see Men, Women, and Chainsaws, for my money the only rational book about gender and horror movies ever written.
P.S. Joel, I think that Color and Reward business is going to help you. Let's talk about it over in your new thread, though.
Joel P. Shempert:
Sounds good.
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