[The Secret Lives of Serial Killers] Ronnies feedback
Callan S.:
I dunno, it seems like giving an award for someone saying 'On the red light at the intersection, press the accelerator!'. Maybe it's a human conceit of 'oh yeah, I get it it/I'd get it' upon reading, because to admit it'd get you is to say your stupid like that - what's easier, to praise or admit personal frailty?
For some reason I think of a diff version where at the end of act four you drop a copy of the real rules right in front of the person, before you've gone the next step (if I'm skimming act four right). Watch them uncomprehendingly stare at you then pick the rules up and start to read, watch the horror of the twist, yet maintain a human understanding. Watch them realise they are standing at a razors edge, yet you did not push them. Watch their choice. Not some stupid PC's choice, a real breathers choice. Together.
I dunno - there seem to be alot of people who think there is some sort of 'together' after you ignore the traffic lights. But the twilight/buffy video was awesome - I think it was the sort of incision the author of buffy was trying to get at.
Baxil:
Callan,
It's pretty clear to me that it's not a matter of human conceit or anyone's personal frailty. As Ron specified in the original contest thread:
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My criteria for a Ronny are whether you use the terms centrally and well, and whether your game design seems like it has a shot at working and would quite likely be fun. You win a Ronny simply by meeting these standards ...
And in the winners thread:
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What [February winners] share, aside from meeting the terms requirement, is my judgment that this title is ready for playtest and the point of play ("the fun") is gorgeously clear.
"Secret Lives" reminds me of nothing so much as the "Freebase" RPG that was released as an insert to Hol's "Buttery Wholesomeness" supplement. (To be clear here, I share Ron's nauseated admiration for Secret Lives.) Both would be gloriously, brutally wrong to play, but their value lies outside the gameplay. I think the better analogy would be:
"Look at this awesome device I made for your car! It's fusion-powered, uses visual OCR to determine light state, and has predictive traffic algorithms that can reliably tell when a bus full of nuns is in front of your car."
"That's awesome! What does it do?"
"When you're at a red light and it sees nuns, it presses the accelerator."
Ron Edwards:
Hi Callan,
I'm not sure whether your post is directed to me or to Willow, or "either/or." Most likely the latter, but I'd rather not butt in if that's not what you wanted.
For the record, I think your suggestion to reveal the "real" game at the start of the final phase is a viable option, possibly even desirable if we're talking about my own inclinations of play. However, my inclinations aren't especially relevant once past the awards process. The question for the designer is whether she thinks that change would make the game more fun in the way she wants.
Best, Ron
David Berg:
I would thoroughly enjoy the twist if it happened to me, and I have a few friends who'd probably feel likewise. The problem is that none of us would choose to play Sunshine Boulevard.
Some sort of additional hook would help. Something like, "the friendship story is quick to play, and there's a really neat endgame mechanic I want to show you." (That might hook my designer curiosity.) Something for the in-the-know players to sell the victim on besides just "you like Benny & June?"
Ian Charvill:
It seems to me that a plausible reaction to the game of an emotionally mature, self-determining individual is just to say, at the point of the twist: that's not the game I agreed to play, and I'm not enjoying the twist -- so I'm out. I'm not sure that outcome would be a positive outcome for anyone at the table in terms of it being a worthwhile game to play.
Another emotionally mature, self-determining response would be to approve of the twist and to play out the endgame. So I think a challenge in presentation is how to invite people to the game in such a way as to select for the latter and not the former.
I think the challenge goes a bit further in that, there are people who wouldn't enjoy the twist but won't leave the table from a sense of social obligation. Them staying will likely damage them. I don't mean in some kind of melodramatic way, I mean in the staightforward sense of causing ongoing hurt and resentment. The internet is littered with posts by people who are angry about a ten or twenty year old incident of GM deceit and railroading -- and this game has that as it's first principle: the GM will lie and railroad*. So ideally, the initial invite to the game needs to select against that kind of person -- or following Callan's suggestion there needs to be some kind of opt-out clause that makes it easy for people to stop playing the game if that's what they want to do. And is the game worthwhile if they decide to stop.
I think the biggest challenge, though, in presentation for this, though, is how do you publish it and have it find and audience in the age of the internet. If you ask Bob to play Sunshine Boulavard with you and Jane, Bob's response is likely to be "is Sunshine Boulevard the secret serial killer game I read about on RPG.net?". And if so, can the three of them still play the game with total awareness and enjoy it? I'm reminded of a lot of old-school D&D discussions about character knowledge and player knowledge, and the idea that play can only be effective if players don't know what characters don't know.
Two thoughts occured to me while typing the above: firstly, there are a lot of films that follow the Sunshine Boulevard story -- A Beautiful Mind being a based-on-a-true-story example. It's a popular conceit. And also the personality type of the recluse as presented in the game text is: shy & quirky but loveable. It's a personality type that's over-represented among the role-playing deomographic -- and therefore that the baseline goodwill toward the recluse character would be particularly high among roleplayers.
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* at times the game reads less like something to be played and more like a satire on bad GMing and certain roleplaying personality types
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