[Annalise] In which there is neither Annalise nor a vampire
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
So, once a week, Nathan Paoletta and Tim Koppang come over to my place, we have dinner and partake of wine & other bar-based badness, we gossip something awful about the independent role-playing scene, maybe watch an episode of a conversationally-relevant TV show, and ... um, oh yes, we play Annalise. We're not rushing it, placing no end-point in real time, and simply playing whatever part we're in at whatever rate we feel like at the moment. So far, we've played three sessions.
We first talked briefly about the setting for play, and I said I'd like to try a very specific modern American context, what's sometimes called "swing-state," but is actually much more local.
During the fall of 2008, in 18 days prior to and including the U.S. presidential election, two young journalists did a series for AlJazeera English called the Red Blue Road Trip. They drove like crazy to 18 counties and towns, and a couple of cities, that had all polled right on the 50-50 knife-edge of the two sides and shot video interviews, posting them as they went. Some of the interviews were planned, at very short notice, but others were just impromptu conversations. A lot of data about each community was provided as well. I think it's one of the best, most accurate, most enlightening series on American economics, life-style, and political culture ever made. If you're interested, the best way to view them is in chronological order, and since only segments 11-18 are available at the Blue-Red Road Trip blog, and at AlJazeera, you should probably start at YouTube and go by dates; the search that shows them all is here.
Anyway, I said that the exact location didn't matter so much, but I wanted play to be somewhere those guys might have visited. Nathan and Tim agreed enthusiastically, and some imagery started appearing in our conversation right away. We moved into making characters.
Strangely not about anyone named Annalise, nor anyone like her
The game text totally captures a particular image, personality, personal crisis, time period, and circumstances. It's the title. It's the cover image. It's the primary, if not only, example throughout the text. It's supported by a detailed color piece opening the book, including a unique paper type. It's consistent with the music references and the art style. It's deeply intertwined with a particular thematic take on vampires.
But the game has no fixed setting. Nor does it even place/determine the concept of vampirism into any sort of emotion or personal circumstances, nor is vampirism defined in any kind of physical way. Absolutely none of all that Color, and Annalise as a game text is freaking drenched in Color, actually informs play at all. What the fuck? OK, fine ... but that was only the left jab. It's the right cross that lands next ... and it works. Double what-the-fuck?? How can an absolute disconnect between the directed, focused, Color of the game's presentation be so totally divorced from the topic of play as it might occur for a given group, and yet help that group so much?
I mean, it shouldn't surprise me so much. I'm the guy who says that when presenting a system which is to be customized by a given play-group for setting and everything else, that you should present your single solid example right up-front. In fact, in the past, I've suggested to game designers with intended generic systems to provide a canonical setting or at least a detailed example for default play. I figure that leaves it to players to hack it if they wanted, with the logic being that if the system is that well suited for it, people will do it anyway. So you'd think I'd understand this ... but it's still a surprise to see this particular, extraordinary level of disconnect being functional, with the example being so ostensibly canonical when it's so thoroughly not.
OK, here's the scoop as I see it - the system is set up simply to ensure pure and simple alienation, for the player-characters. The "Annalise" business is a simple and evocative example, and that's all. It's as if Nathan is saying, "When I think alienation, this is what I get. How about you?"
Given the Red-Blue context, here's what:
My character is Bobbi, whom I suppose I should explain slightly because the concept is quite edgy. A few years ago, I was working at home, diagramming the ways Cheney and his pals had corrupted the national security hierarchy (no, not kidding), and the exterminator came by to squirt our house. I have lots of books so I care about this being done right. Anyway, the exterminator woman and I chatted for a little while. and it turned out she was in the National Guard and just back from Iraq, where she'd been a truck driver. I was interested in her experiences and she was a real character - totally outspoken, funny. Regarding her stateside job, she was talking about going into people's houses in all kinds of neighborhoods, and how she'd told her supervisor, "If I run into any danger to my vagina," and she pointed for emphasis, then again straight forward, "I'm coming for you." Definitely the kind of person who sticks in your head. I didn't mention the statistics I'd been seeing on how often servicewomen in Iraq and Afghanistan had been raped by their fellow soldiers and co-workers, and the cover-ups. The conversation saddened me in the long run, because I realized that both of her professional lives were overshadowed by the same threat, and in ways which might render her voiceless in society, despite her powerful and engaging voice as person.
So I pretty much took this brief conversation as the basis for my character. I never saw the real woman again and don't know much about her life, so used everything I wrote above as the start for my character, gave her a new name, and recast and filled out the concept to fit into our setting. I defined her Vulnerability as being the threat of sexual assault, and specifically attendant voicelessness.
Tim's character is Vince, a former high school football star, back from a failed year in college, whose Vulnerability is fear of failure. Nathan's character is Jasper, a guy who never left town and became a plumber, whose Vulnerability is overwhelming debt. The three are all from the same graduating class in high school, now not too long before they turn 30.
The vampire is right behind you
So to return to the whole "how does this work when it's not Annalise and the vampire isn't like the one in the story" issue, it works because the theme and crisis of characters come first, in what can effectively be an entirely vampire-free environment. The vampire's presence, features, and even existence may be retrofitted into that crisis after it's well under way. For example, at the end of the second session, we'd seen nothing that need be a vampire. We had no clue whatsoever how a vampire might be involved. We had no idea in fact that any of the deaths in the story to that point were caused by it. Nor will any of them necessarily be established as the vampire's work. Granted, Nathan often adds bloody stuff to his narrations, and I did the same with a character's death at the end of the second session, but it's not obligatory.
I'm not sure I'm explaining this right. I'm saying that the game allows a spectrum of approaches. One extreme would establish the vampire in the story from the beginning, and play would shift to the Confrontation probably because the various characters teamed up against it; the other extreme is taking it as far as it can go without the vampire, probably shifting to the Confrontation phase for Traits reasons, and then retrofitting how vampire was involved all along, and indeed what the hell it is. I think the text generally leans strongly although not exclusively toward the latter. Our play is slammed about as far in that direction as it's possible to get.
Our game
We've played three lengthy sessions and I'm currently posting about the first two. I've played my character Bobbi very strongly from her Secret, building strong Traits onto it. She narrowly evaded a very bad drinking-soaked encounter with a co-worker but unfortunately it got another co-worker killed and she was arrested. It turns out that her parents' house, where she lives now that her mom's gone and her dad's in Florida (except he's back), has a creepy office in it with a skull that she, uh, talks to. Someone tried to mutilate her cat and she beaned him with a shovel. On the plus side, she organized a ten-year non-reunion party with her old high school classmates. Tim's character, Vince, displayed an astonishing core of hostility toward just about everybody - he's a mean, spiteful butt-head. At the party, he finally mended fences with Katie, his on-again off-again girlfriend, or rather sex partner, only to wake up to her body drained of blood from incisions in her wrist, said blood soaking the carpet. At least Tim feels bad about that! Nathan's character, Jasper, is a pretty nice guy with the worst impulse control on the planet, and at this point in play was pretty much struggling between a newfound hobby called cocaine, and a woman named Gabrielle who's taken it upon herself to help him. Nathan's trying to get away from her harder than Jasper is.
Nathan's kept stringent records of the scenes, the Moments, and the various Outcomes of each Moment, so eventually either he or I will post those. It's pretty interesting to watch in-the-moment choices become major plot consequences so organically; in this and in a couple of other ways, Annalise is similar to Spione. For instance, it's fun that the characters are desperate to turtle but the players and system won't let them
At the end of the second session, we were definitely still in Laying the Foundations, with no particular proximity to anything resembling vampires, and without Traits filling up the sheets yet. What I liked the most about this precise point is that we're very engaged with the characters' psychology and personal hassles (the Core Traits are, after all, called Vulnerability and Secret), without a defined external threat. Yet threat lurks over all of them, and it's totally thematic, intimately bound up with the economic bleakness, the confusion of people of that age facing a society without much to offer them, and various aspects of their own behavior that have graduated from personal quirkiness to near-clinical obsessions and habits. The creative challenge for me and us as a group, I think, is to concoct a vampire bit by bit, organically, including discovering which if any of the existing freaky NPCs might be it (Gabrielle, Bobbi's father, Vince's parents, Ray the co-worker, anyone!). Or maybe "vampire" means something more general, being a group, or something almost intangible. It's a challenge because the very worst thing I can think of seeing happen ("worst" in a bad way, not the excellent-adversity way) is for us to end up with some Balkan weirdo with a cape lurking around, flashing fangs through windows, and turning into a bat. Given the depth of the characters and our slightly stylized but harshly emotional depiction of their world, our vampire is going to have to hit a pretty high creative bar in all ways.
Regarding Claims, I'm making lots, using them as they appear, and freeing them to Float pretty quickly. I tend not to keep and boost them. Our Claims in action, after two sessions, included: "Just shut up, stop talking" "Greasy gross hand" "Friendly plumber" "Tears on her face" "This fuckin' town" "'Real' drinks" "Homeless guy on bench" "Another beer out of the fridge" "His mom loves him" "Man totally out of place" "I'm not trying to be a jerk here" "Big dreams" "They're gonna send me back to Iraq" "Bobbi's cat" "Blood down the tracks" "Ed" "I'm gonna regret this" "'Whatever'" "Surrounded by bodies" "Yearbook" "I hate the cops." Special mention goes to "Vomits EVERYWHERE" which has been utilized regarding all three player-characters' actions at one point or another.
If you know the game text, then you've probably already spotted that we've diverged a bit from the instructions regarding Claims' content. They're almost all motifs of customizable dialogue and imagery, with hardly any agency-ownership. So the "tears" could be on any female character's face for any reason, or the "greasy gross hand" could be anyone's hand with any number of sources of any kind of grease, or it could be any mom, or any number of reasons or persons involved in repeating a particular line of dialogue. I don't know why it developed that way, but it creates a unity of tone and kind of a symphony of strong motifs which is working well for us. The few which better match the rules (the cat, Ed) were made very late in the second session and haven't seen much use.
Talking, tokens, dice
I already referenced my diagram of the coin-moving mechanics in Pompeii and the Cult of Blood, but here's the link again. The brief summary is that during the Laying the Foundations phase, there are three ways for new currency to enter play, two of which are quite generous, and the effect is to enrich the game's content and atmosphere, as well as to shake out which introduced elements end up being most relevant and fun. You can push the tension/plot aspects of play during this time if you want, but everyone is rich in resources for messing with the outcomes to taste. Whereas during the Confrontation phase, two of those three ways dry up, and no new mechanics elements may be introduced, so that player/character resources can't help but start sucking wind. Since the vampire character or presence is now mechanically engaged as well, this phase is marked by desperation, transformation, revelation, and emergent plot climax.
The diagram also illustrates the differences between two parallel mechanics, Claims vs. Traits. Traits affect the number of "things" being rolled for, which sets the number of dice going into rolls, with one small exception permitting a re-roll. Claims affect the roll outcomes, in a variety of ways with a variety of costs, with one small exception permitting adding a whole new non-rolled Outcome. So you spend off both or either during play, and also add more of either during the Laying the Foundations phase.
Since Claims are free and easy, and since a whammo-easy Outcome is available from using them, they're the more fluid side of the Currency movement. Traits are more connected to the story arc, as filling up the Traits is one way to transition into the third phase of play, and spending from Traits directly or indirectly hastens the descent of the Core Traits toward zero.
It sounds pretty mechanical and rules-entrenched, right? That's why the other primary feature of the game needs to be understood too: Openness! So many things are handled with a light touch - the mechanics are present, but they may be played soft or hard, with the softest option, bringing those things into play without mechanical cueing at all, also being available if that's what you want.
One really good example is the rule for Giving In to the vampire. Here are the ways it can happen:
1. Fight like a dog against it - keep your Vulnerability above 0, to avoid Holds; assign high rolls to oppose the Give In Outcome during the Confrontation phase, regardless of the cost to the character in the form of other Outcomes; never say "I Give In." If the mechanics knee you in the groin, though, suck it up and your character Gives In.
2. Use the mechanics as your cue to Give In, either because your Vulnerability hits 0 or you happen to assign a low roll to the Give In Outcome based on what you want for the other Outcomes.
3. Just say, "I Give In," period, never mind what any Coins or scores are doing at the moment.
Any or all are valid. All are good play. Every one of them is a game mechanic, even #3 in the form of a ritualized phrase during a particular phase of play (i.e. a Drama mechanic). I don't think any part of Giving In (or any aspect of Annalise) can properly be called free-form, any more than in playing carry or Grey Ranks, but the interrelationship between invoking a mechanic to hit the fiction (always an option), vs. using current fiction to affect a mechanic, or to replicate its effects, is quite deft. By that I mean, whether you are doing #1, #2, or #3, is a matter of constant decision, engagement, and response during play itself.
So, uh, that was a considerable post. Any thoughts, questions, ideas, about playing Annalise or similar games? About the characters and story we're making (including a long and eventful session following what I've described so far)? About the mechanics or system issues I've raised?
Best, Ron
Adam Dray:
I don't like vampire games, so I actually avoided Annalise for some time, while it was still in its early editions. Then I watched Nathan play it and I finally understood it. Nathan's games always do this to me. (People: Do not think you understand a game from reading the text.) Once I realized that Annalise wasn't a vampire game, I fell in love with it.
I've played Annalise twice, not counting rapid-fire convention play where I facilitated. The first time, we set our game in a Mars colony that was falling apart. The game collapsed for social, not mechanical, reasons and we never got past the first session. But god, it was cool while it lasted. I was playing a character whose personality was beamed to a body on Mars a la Altered Carbon and I was there to do a job. As a player, I wasn't really sure what that job was, but I knew it was dark and dangerous: assassination, demolition, something like that. Daniel played a fuck-up ambulance driver. Rob played a frustrated security officer we called the Sheriff. Marc played some kind of computer tech, I think; I can't remember now. All of our characters were struggling just to get through the day. We bounced off each other in weird, incidental ways, rarely making real connections. Slowly through play, the "ouija board" started suggesting some vast governmental conspiracy, plus some kind of weird influence from the supernatural or possibly aliens. It was spooky and no one at the table understood what it was yet.
The second time I played with Daniel (Levine). Just him and me. I played an old, heart-troubled widower living alone. Daniel played a rebellious, overweight teenage girl, my granddaughter. This game started out with slice-of-life stuff but started into the weird very quickly--perhaps because there were just two of us playing, but also because Daniel likes the really weird stuff and I had been watching old seasons of Supernatural. I remember Daniel claiming "rotting meat" and me claiming "mail packages." These things became important motifs. My guy ended up on a quest to free the ghost of his dead wife, who he believed was sending him packages through the mail. Daniel's girl was troubled by spirits of some kind that caused her trouble but also did terrible things to the school bullies who tormented her. There were rooms with non-Euclidean geometry, and wooden doors (another Claim) that were portals into this weird dreamlike space, often full of bookshelves or desks. Daniel and I did get through all the phases of Annalise with this one, over three or four evenings of play. I can't remember how it ended, but we managed to tie it all together. There was some strange ghoul cult of cannibals in a graveyard that turned out to be the Vampire.
As I read your post, Ron, I laughed when I got to your "disclaimer"--so to speak--about creating improper Claims. I was planning on saying something about it until I got to that part. I personally believe that there is no mechanical need for the limitation Annalise puts on the content of Claims. Players tend to ignore that rule anyway, and even when I've corrected people whom I've taught the game, it's occasionally been difficult to find a clean line between a good and a bad Claim. To my thinking, the design purpose behind Claims is to create repeating motifs, for purposes of reincorporation and "foreshadowing." It doesn't matter if the motif is a tangible thing or not: a player can still introduce some wildly intangible Claim like "unbridled ennui" into narration. If it has teeth, that Claim will keep getting bolstered with coins or picked up by other players from the Free Claims pile. If it doesn't have teeth, it'll get drained and left for dead.
Claims are flags. Making a Claim is saying, "This is interesting to me! I want to see this in play." And the mechanics support that flag. And you can release that flag into the wild by letting it go Free, and see if another player picks it up. Further, because you used that Claim to influence Moments already, that flag has been planted in the fiction. Using a Claim increases its utility. That is, by using it once, it gets tied into the fiction; it becomes easier to use again, and thus the Claim becomes more powerful. Repetition burns the idea of that Claim into the screen of the fiction, to use an old video monitor analogy that kids-these-days probably won't understand. On the other hand, Claims are self-limiting. If you use them too much, the repetition becomes ridiculous. I don't believe there's anything in the rules that limits this--it's left to the players to regulate their use of claims. Of course, if everyone is on the same page creatively, this will not be a problem.
I'm curious about your Moments. When you guys play, how hard-hitting are your conflicts? I find when I play that I often enjoy seeing terrible things happen to "my guy" and I don't fight as hard as I've seen other players. And it's not that my fellow players aren't pushing hard enough. Daniel is a lot like me in this regard, and we both go for the jugular in Moments. Occasionally, I will want my story to go in a different direction and fight the dice a bit harder. A lot of times, though, I fight a little bit on behalf of "my guy" and then let it go. Do you experience this?
Ron Edwards:
Hi Adam,
I generally agree with you about Claims. However, I think the "Flags" concept is reversed logic, or rather, reflects a fix for what in a better world wouldn't be an issue. We can talk about that more if you'd like.
You wrote,
Quote
I'm curious about your Moments. When you guys play, how hard-hitting are your conflicts? I find when I play that I often enjoy seeing terrible things happen to "my guy" and I don't fight as hard as I've seen other players. And it's not that my fellow players aren't pushing hard enough. Daniel is a lot like me in this regard, and we both go for the jugular in Moments. Occasionally, I will want my story to go in a different direction and fight the dice a bit harder. A lot of times, though, I fight a little bit on behalf of "my guy" and then let it go. Do you experience this?
Here's one of the Moments for my character, as Guided and by Tim. Bobbi was out drinking with her co-workers, Ray and Tony, and she and Ray get into a drinking match. She's outweighed by a good hundred pounds.
Achievement: Bobbi beats Ray at the match
Consequence: Bobbi goes home with Ray
Achievement: Bobbi gets home from the bar (note: our notes don't show it but somehow this is still orthogonal to the above consequence, as I described it)
Consequence: Bobbi blacks out the night
I created the Satellite Trait "My choice, sober, ever," off her Vulnerability, and did whatever I could to make sure that first Consequence didn't happen. The dice ended up, in order, with 2, 6, 3, 2. So she loses the drinking match, blacks out, but Tony ends up rescuing her sodden hulk from any possibility of contact with Ray. We actually continued the scene with her waking up in Tony's car in a railway yard, with Tony missing, but that example isn't too relevant here. My point is that in the context of the available choices, the blackout was quite interesting and I looked forward to having that happen. I think I even spent to make it a 2 instead of a 1, because I preferred losing a Coin to seeing another Consequence of any kind in this situation.
I think it has a lot to do with several binary possibilities being on the table, creating a priority among them As you can see, we do tend to go for the jugular too, but as it turns out, often one or more of the Outcomes will be a Must Have (or equivalently, No Fucking Way) and one or more Consequence will be a Well I Can Live With That, especially in comparison. And the latter can then become, again in comparison, Ooh I'd Like to See That. In this case, no way was Bobbi going to have sex with anyone in any such circumstances. I even created the Satellite Trait to express my certainty about that, and was willing to back it up by spending every imaginable resource I had to alter the results, if necessary. Whereas with that on the table, something else I might have considered worth fighting for becomes ... even in its harshness ... something I'd actually like to see happen, much as Bobbi herself hates it.
Best, Ron
In our third session, we fought like dogs over whether Bobbi fell in love: 3, 4, 3, 4 ...
Gregor Hutton:
The game sounds really intense in some ways (I mean looking at Tim's and Nathan's characters/relationships they're very pointed to personal stuff to the players) but less intense in other, like the story and events are allowed to "breathe". They're given time to develop, I mean you just get to play through the game and there is not an obviously ticking clock (like the Threat Tokens in 3:16 or whatever or the endgame triggers in MLwM or Contenders).
I am totally with you on the Claims. The slight SNAFU we did was to (on a couple of times) claim things we brought in ourselves. But we learned from it, just a simple mis-step to playing it for the first time.
I really liked how the Achievements/Consequences worked too (and I need to update our AP with some detail there -- i have the notes with me today). One thing is that a natural 1 or 6 is powerful as it allows spawning extra Achievements/Consequences whereas a 1 or 6 because of a Claim doesn't. We found that even getting a mixture of results "in the middle" (where none of the Achievements or Consequences happen) is still powerful. I'll talk in our AP about how Russ decided to go with what was on the table rather than make a change and open up the results on the table to Joe and myself making further trouble for him!
I have something to say on the transitioning from one phase to another too, but I'll hold off until you get to that bit.
Adam Dray:
I think I understand what you mean by the flags concept being reversed logic. People who have come together to play a particular game, a particular way, with a particular set of people, at a particular time ought to be pressing one another's buttons all over the place and shouldn't need a game mechanic to enforce it. On the other hand, shouldn't the game mechanics reinforce that tendency? Yeah, that flagging stuff needs to be rooted in the social contract layer, but I also think that the system portion of exploration and the techniques layer should amplify that. Maybe game designers put flagging techniques into their game to remind people to do stuff in the social contract layer, though.
Upon first reading of your Moments, I didn't think they were that hard hitting. Then I thought about it more in the context of Bobbi's background and personality, and I could see where there was a lot of power there.
I'm interested in my own approach to player stance in these situations. There's a tension there between "I am my character and I don't want this terrible thing to happen to me" and "I am the author of my character's story and I want this terrible thing to happen to her." I need to play Annalise again and try to be more conscious of what's going on in my head during Moments, as I wrestle the dice into different configurations. I'm curious to see if there's anything about the specific techniques built into the Moment rules that encourage me to be in one stance or another (like from actor stance to author stance).
So, did Bobbi fall in love?
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