[MLWM] Not being able to kill the Master
RPL:
Hi there :),
This last week me a two friends of mine played My Life With Master. It lasted 4 sessions including one for character and master creation only.
One of the players never played this game and me and the other had played it once before, both with PCs, so this was my first time GMing this.
The Master was an aristocrat cast off who was trying to build some sort of close family (wife, kids, kids friends, etc.) that he could show to the rest of his family and thus proving his worth to them (Feeder-brain I believe).
It all went pretty well, and by “well” I mean gut-wrenching, teeth grinding, body twitching, face hiding behind hands crying “oh my god how can this be happening, I have no soul!”. So lots of fun.
The players started the game by going along with their Master request, pretty soft stuff at first, throw this and that person to the dogs (so they could feed on them), kidnapping children, etc. All along trying to create and protect their connections with the town’s people.
Only by the second session did they start trying to fight what the Master orders. By the end of the third session both players had a Love score greater than Fear + Weariness and (together) were able to reject the Masters order to kill everyone in the castle while he tried to run away from a group of Gypsies that were storming in.
After they succeeded we entered the cycle of play to kill the master. With a couple of scenes in were I dumped all the clichés I could remember from old MLWM-like horror movies, a Fight in a tall crumbling tower during a Lightning storm, from were the three (master + minions) fell. A chariot fight thru a dark wood, a slim slippery dirt road by a cliff with the sea underneath and an unstable suspension bridge.
This was when we hit a little bump. After failing the first roll the players Weariness increased (following the rules) witch diminished their dice pool (I say they because both players were involved in the fight aiding each other) and every roll after that it keep going down, until eventually they had a total of 2d4 (plus any bonus from the Intimacy, Desperation, Honesty dice) against my 12 or 13 d4s.
When we got to this point we noticed that both players Epilogues were at Weariness greater than Reason + Self-Loathing, so there was no point in trying to keep rolling because it was clear that they weren’t going to be able to kill the master, nor would their epilogues changed. So we just decided that the master would run away and so would the minions.
So my question with this AP is this, is the Master really supposed to die or is this scenario (a Weariness so high that winning becomes impossible) a probability fluke? Or maybe we fumbled some rule in the book during the fight, but I think not, since we kept reading it even after play ended (just to make sure we did it right).
All and all it was a great game story with horrible doings, intense psychological terror and really strong character defining scenes. Even one person who wasn’t playing with us but was in the same room literally bent herself self in two when the orphanage director said to one of the minions (the one responsible for getting children for the master) “you seem like a nice boy, could you please take charge of the orphanage while I recover from my illness (she had a broken leg)”, so that was pretty strong.
All the Best,
D.
Adam Dray:
I usually run this as a one-shot and I make one minor change that virtually ensures the Master's death: play with Reason and Fear values throughout the game, usually in response to the fiction.
Still, the minions shouldn't be having that much trouble killing Master. It might take a few attempts but they should get it eventually.
1. Do they have enough Love? They might need to work in some scenes with Connections to get more. You can use flashbacks and other dramatic techniques to make them make sense.
2. Are you using the rules for The Horror Revealed to keep Self-Loathing in check? The rule says, if ever a minion's Self-Loathing would increase such that it is greater than Love + Reason, do not raise Self-Loathing; instead, the terrible deeds the minion has done bleed out into the Town, and the minion's player narrates a scene about how the townspeople are doing terrible things.
3. Are the minions Providing Aid to one another in the endgame scenes? Any minion can add (Love - Weariness) dice to any other minion's endgame roll.
4. Are the minions earning bonus dice for Intimacy, Desperation, or Sincerity? It's generally pretty easy to get at least an extra d6 in any scene. The d8 for Sincerity is harder, especially in the endgame scenes.
Christoph Boeckle:
Hi
Ah! I need to play this game again! Not much more to say, but I found an old thread I had read years ago where Paul Czege essentially says you did the right thing: When Endgame crashes and burns.
Adam Dray:
I'll also ask, what did you set Fear and Reason at?
If I were to hack MLwM to ensure a clean endgame, I'd add the following simple rule: The first time each minion attempts to kill the Master, reduce Fear by 1 point, to a minimum of 0.
Really, though I haven't seen this issue occur in play, but this might be because I know I'm in a one-shot. I will often set Fear and Reason both to 3, and near the end of the four-hour session, raise Reason to 5 and maybe lower Fear to 2.
Speeds the game along without sacrificing any of the flavor.
Eero Tuovinen:
I like Adam's hack, it makes sense. All in all, this is a soft spot in the rules. Paul has earlier (like, five years back) said that the players should play through the endgame procedure until it's clear what epilogue everybody's getting, after which the Master just up and dies on his lonesome by fiat. I don't know what his thoughts on the matter are today.
My own hack for this is that when any character challenges the Master, the Fear value is considered zero for the purposes of any other formulas aside from the direct confrontation. This almost always means that once one character has dragged himself that far, most of the others are also so high in love that they can join the rebellion when Fear is removed from their loyalty equation. The combined strength of several minions has so far always been enough to off the Master even if one minion alone couldn't do it.
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