[Nicotine Girls] If you want it hard enough, and you try hard enough - and?
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
Julie, Maura, and I played Nicotine Girls. I asked Julie to be a GM for a number of reasons, one of which was that I wasn't inclined to be the male GM for two women playing nicotine girl characters.
I had recently re-read the rules with an eye toward imminent play and found, or remembered, the main reason I hadn't in the past: a bit of the rules had made no sense to me. I asked Paul some questions, then cut-and-pasted his answers into my copy-pasted printout of the rules. So now I had what I considered to be a usable rulebook.
If you don't know much about this game, then you should understand that when Paul published it, the nearly universal response was "it's unplayable." They weren't talking about the minor rules confusion either; they were saying that no one could play a game about low-rent girls and their lives.
I disagreed even back then, but having played now, I am more certain why. Nicotine Girls is the first, and to date still one of the very few, role-playing games about social class. Real social class, too, not some jumped-up exsanguinated Merchant Ivory production either. Americans especially don't like to talk about or think about it, and the middle-class American attitude toward people below a certain income/opportunity level is best described as pure contempt, as derogatory and exploitative as any caste system you ever heard of. You can find all sorts of wriggling and uncomfortable disclaimers when people praise Nicotine Girls but say "... and I can't play it," or "... my group would never play it."
Paul wrote a game that rips the lid off middle-class smugness, and the degree to which it's under-played is a shame.
Maura's character was Britney, 17 years old, with Hope of 4 and Fear of 2, Sex 1, Money 2, Cry 2, Smoke 1, whose dream was to "fix her brother's Mustang and drive it to a town big enough to get a job at WalMart."
My character was Nicole, 16 years old, with Hope of 5 and Fear of 1, Sex 2, Money 1, Cry 1, Smoke 2, whose dream was to "go to acting school" which was what she called the theater program at the JCC.
My character-making experience yielded a delayed jolt for me, because I'd started with the Methods scores and had sort of forgotten about them when I set her age a little while later - overlooking, in the moment, that I'd created a 16-year-old whose strongest scores included Sex. More on this in a minute.
Some clarifications to the rules:
- Hope never goes down. If you fail a Hope roll, you can't use it for a roll again during this story, but it doesn't decrease and you still get to roll for your Dreams at the end.
- If the GM does something to you that is like an item on the Fear list, it doesn't give you Fear; only you can give yourself Fear. The former should be protagonizing adversity, but the latter should be trauma and dysfunction, pure Jerry Springer territory.
- Fear increases from the Fear list are permanent. Yes, this means you could build an insanely high, can't fail Fear score. Which also means your character's life chaos is awful - so Paul specified that it's a prerequisite to play to love your character and not want such a life for her, Dream or no Dream.
I should also point out that succeeding in conflicts barely affects your final Dreams roll, and the tiny bit it does is entirely Hope-based, so racking up that kind of Fear is not strategically meaningful anyway.
We played by alternating characters' scenes, but they were available to one another as characters in each others' scenes, if desired.
The initial scene involved a For Sale sign on the Mustang and Britney managing to buy the car herself from her dad, if she can scrape up the money. Maura rolled Hope using Money as the method, and she succeeded! I must say that Julie had a touch with post-roll resolving narrations which tended to reveal much more about the characters as well as be intensely depressing.
Then Nicole had to negotiate a change of shifts at her ice-cream place job (Hope/Money), in which she smoked a little with Britney first to get some advice. She considered playing up to Brent, the manager, but Britney told her to be straightforward about it, which she did - and succeeded too! Well, granted, using Hope with Money basically to bribe a co-worker to switch shifts.
Maura and I experienced remarkable tension leading up to and during the rolls. The sensations of empathy for one's own character and engagement with the other character were startlingly intense. I found myself considering that a certain dignity – or at least the sense of humanity inherent in this person whose values and worldview were so different from mine – was necessary to put into play in order to play at all.
Britney’s mom demanded that she get rid of that car, which had a lot to do with why her dad had put it up for sale in the first place, and Julie spared us nothing in understanding Britney’s family/home dynamic. What I didn’t see coming was the total exposure of the pain underneath the dysfunction when, after Britney succeeded with the Hope/Cry roll, concerning the death of her brother in Iraq.
Julie pointed out that Maura tried a couple of times for Britney to use reason in negotiating, and it got her nowhere: Sex, Cry, Money, with or without smoking first, and that’s the menu, nothing but.
For me, Britney was at the top of her game when she put the car into neutral, set her teenage back to it, and rolled it through the streets to a new home.
Nicole found herself able to attend the after-school arts program, but was stunned to discover that people had to show themselves to be good at something in order to perform in the upcoming show (sort of a talent show, with a framing sort of plot). An instructor gave her a copy of West Side Story to watch, and as it turned out, she busted out a pretty good song with Hope/Cry too.
This was Nicole at the top of her game, all determination, not knowing really what it was or what kind of information was out there, but actually able to do it.
Britney had a problem: where to put the car actually. She decided to see if she could house it at Mark’s, Mark having been Darryl’s best friend. Julie described Mark as not quite right since having returned from Iraq, not even counting the missing foot. Britney got in a Smoke with Nicole first, and here’s where I had to confront both the in-fiction logic and the system, working in tandem to hit me with the limitations in the girls’ choices.
I waffled a little by thinking of having Nicole advise Britney to Cry her way through, but it didn’t work for me. Here was Nicole with her head abuzz about MGM true love set to music, and the only thing that made sense to me – and as it happened to Maura as well, as we role-played the conversation, was for Nicole to advise Sex. The sting is, by the rules, if the girl follows the advice, she rolls bonus dice equal to her Smoke score. But if she doesn’t follow it, then she gets that number of dice deducted.
Another nuance was added by Julie, who had narrational rights, who preferred a broader interpretation of Sex as a method, with more emphasis on promises and expectations than on the physicality. The interesting thing is that despite a certain trepidation, both Maura as author and I as partial author were reconciled to Britney having sex with Mark. A little grim, perhaps a lot, but not out of bounds. (Does anyone really think Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a funny movie? Or at least that scene where Stacy has sex for the first time?) But Julie was thinking more in terms of a character whose name I've forgotten from Freaks & Geeks, who according to her and as Maura agreed, used sex as a manipulative method all the time without necessarily doing anything physical. Which is fine; in a game of this type, the GM pretty much sets the Lines, and we went with that.
I knew that sooner or later I might find myself playing Nicole to use Sex as a method too. A difficult issue. I was valuing her sojourn into airy fantasy for a bit, and didn’t look forward to the nigh-inevitable comedown, especially at Julie’s capable narrational disposal.
However, the next scene turned out to be about something else entirely, when I decided Nicole would break the news that she had no intention of finishing high school in order to get to the JCC as fast as possible. Mom said no, and here, the fiction gripped me in its iron paw. I could not see a way to use Hope, and Money and Sex were flat out, which meant our first Fear-based roll. I could have used straight-up Fear for a really crappy roll, but this was important, so … well, after waffling again and almost picking some cop-out options, I chose Divorce/Separation.
Sure enough, apparently Nicole’s dad had an entirely different family we knew nothing about, as he had fathered the child of the girl who worked at the gas station (!! Where Nicole bought her cigarettes!), and now was bringing them all home – i.e., here. Mom: “Pack your things. This isn’t home any more.” The conflict evolved a bit here, to be about whether Nicole could stay at Tracy’s instead of moving out of town, until the end of the term (i.e. and the show’s production). Adding the Fear got me some serious dice and I made the Cry roll.
It was time to wrap up for the night. Paul had explained to me that Endgame is possible at the end of any game session. Basically, the group decides whether they want to end it here or to play another session. We went ahead and ended it, and rolled in genuine earnest for our girls' Dreams ...
Neither one got it. Your best shot is to roll two 1's on a number of d10s equal to your Hope, or your Hope +1 if you didn't blow a Hope roll earlier. So I rolled six d10s and Maura rolled five. Both of us rolled a single success, not two. There's nothing in the rules constraining or suggesting that this is a "partial success," either, so you have a free hand in making up the Epilogue no matter what you roll, as long as she either does or does not get her Dreams as resolved by the roll.
Nicotine Girls is not a wind-up toy. You can win every conflict and you know what, that only means a tiny increase in your chances, and that's all the bennies you get. Starting Hope is far more important. If you start with a Hope of 2 and never fail with it, you roll three dice. If you start with a Hope of 5 and blow a Hope roll, then you'll roll five. No, you can't rack the 2 up to whatever because you kept succeeding. That is middle-class fantasy.
Maura said that a couple of years with Mark was not easy, and Britney never did manage to finish fixing the car. She did leave town and get that job at WalMart, but the dream aspect was gone.
I said that Nicole divided her time between the two family households and although she went to the JCC, she got a certificate in business administration, and ended up with a very normal and not-very-upwards job. Occasionally people think about that sparkling junior year in high school and wonder whatever became of that girl.
If you're marginal, rational negotiation and honest empathy are not options. You can't explain things to a cop, or to a boss. You can't inspire true support in those who regard you as less than human, nor can you engage with them rationally. Your peers and family cannot help you because they have no power either. You only have sex, money, manipulative plays for sympathy, and advice from those who are just as marginal as you. Hope isn't magic; it doesn't make things happen. You can dream, sure. But dreams aren't a golden path to follow or a call into the universe for it to respond to. All that is petit-bourgeois mythology, and stories that challenge it confront the middle-class psyche like a cold, grasping hand to the groin.
That's probably why people recoil from playing this game. I think there's no actually-legitimate excuse, including me for the last six years.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Oh, clever, that's right, forget the link: Nicotine Girls.
Best, Ron
jburneko:
Ron,
It's exciting to see Nicotine Girls play because it's one of those games I look at periodically and say, "I really want to play this" and then don't. The game "spoke" to me the first time I saw it.
I'm a little curious about your interpretation of the rules. Perhaps this is what you clarified with Paul. The text uses the word "session", not "story" with regard to Hope. So if you make it through a "session" without failing when you use your Hope it goes up by one. Doesn't it follow then that if your story lasts more than a single session that Hope could conceivably increase by the number of sessions you chose to play? (I'm not imagining an 18 session Nicotine Girl mega-campaign but two to four doesn't seem to be out of the realm of possibility).
A fairly hefty part of your interpretation of the thematic dynamics of the game relies on the fact that the +1 applies to the story as a whole rather than per "session" as the text states.
Jesse
jrs:
Jesse,
You are correct in that if the game is played over multiple sessions, Hope can go up. In the game we played, the story was only going to be one session so there was little opportunity for increasing hope other than the add one to Hope if no Hope contest failed.
It is an interesting game dynamic. Fear can fluctuate wildly during a session, but not Hope which is either ruled out as an option after its first failure or go up slowly over extended play.
Julie
jrs:
Which reminds me ... we did have a rule question for Paul.
At one point during the game, Ron's character's Fear dropped to zero. Solely through successful use of the Hope motivation in conflicts. Is there any game effect other than the inability to use Fear as a motivation in a conflict? (In afterthought, as GM, this would have been a prime opportunity to inflict violence on the character.)
Julie
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