[Silent Sound] Revisiting My White Whale
jburneko:
Hey Chris,
About the penalties: Scars and stuff give The Shadow the ability to mess with your Flashbacks. It gives that player power to alter the "facts in the case" so to speak. The more the Shadow wins the more the Shadow can make it actually, really true that you were responsible for horrible things. The crime erodes from, "Hey this one time I made a bad call" to "No, it was a long string of deliberate decisions and willful denial that you could have bailed on at any point but didn't."
Your idea about players making up facts as they go along is an alternative structure I've considered. I've thought about having the players NOT define their crime up front. Instead the game starts with this question: Why are you here? (basically the Lure in the current design) and at key points answering ever deepening questions until the final one which is: Why are you REALLY here? which actually reveals and defines the crime.
Along those lines I've considered having the game play almost more like a clue chain mystery with the twist being that (a) players get to make up clues and (b) they get to assign them to other players. So a character might find a bit of torn newspaper with part of police log reporting a domestic dispute. That player can then hand that to another player and say this has something to do with your character. The point would be to piece together the truth for that character from the pile of created clues and symbols.
But then I'm not sure how to tie that process into the threatening environment.
Jesse
Chris_Chinn:
Hi Jesse,
The question that these kinds of stories have is, "Are you a horrible person, a messed up person in a hellish situation, or a person who can find their way out of the darkness?"
To me, it feels like a player doesn't have a lot of control after the dice get rolled - and if accumulating scars, etc. means changing the facts of the backstory directly through that, then it gets harder to justify one's humanity/goodness.
"Oh, you accidentally killed your wife in a car accident, it's ok, it was an accident."
"Oh, you were trying to commit suicide and you had her in the car?"
"Oh, you drugged her, and wanted to drive both of you off the cliff in a double suicide so she wouldn't leave you? WTF MAN."
Whether it's the Shadow player or other players, I feel like there needs to be some more control over the dice or choices (besides the voting between areas) and maybe something that limits how quickly the crime is revealed as well.
And the big design question is which parts do you want the system to ruthlessly drive, vs. which parts do you want the people playing to make judgments upon?
One of the options in Dirty Secrets is that the investigator is an unreliable narrator and may be the criminal themself- I'd check out playing with that option a few times and see how it manages making slow reveals as well as it's points of danger- it might give you some ideas of how to structure it in fun ways.
Chris
hix:
Thanks, Jesse. I’ve had a bit more of a read through Silent Sound, and wanted to check my understanding and ask you a couple more questions. To start with, I had a think about your answers to Vincent’s questions, and I added in a mid-level answer:
What are we doing right this minute?
Exploring a surreal landscape, interpreting symbolic clues, and fighting demonic monsters.
What are we doing over the course of, say, an hour of play?
All the Condemned characters travel through the rooms of a Location and learn more about their past through confronting images and demons.
What are we here to do with this game?
Discover whether the characters can come to terms with their past or not.
How does that sound?
THE BASIC PROCEDURES OF PLAY
Here’s how I understand the game works:
Locations are the big areas to explore, that contain some sort of thematic connection to the Condemned’s past live or their relationship to the Lure (like a high school or a hospital or a lakeside hotel). Rooms are sub-areas inside that Location.
The Condemned enters a room.
The Voice of Reason describes a memory the Condemned character has. The memory presents a small situation that calls for the character’s reaction.
The Condemned is then confronted by a nightmare (a symbol, a message or a demon). All the Condemned players confront the nightmare simultaneously. The confrontation involves one to three exchanges.
The Condemned leaves the room. If they didn't confront a nightmare, they can discard a black die or The Voice of Reason may give the player a white die from his pool. If they did confront a nightmare, the Condemned may either move past the substantive content of the nightmare or the nightmare gets a hold of the character and recurs through the rest of the game.
Condemned characters may meet between rooms, discuss their situation and trade dice.
Play proceeds from room to room within a location until The Shadow player uses his last black die (or until he can not use any more black dice because the players are out of white dice)
At the end of the first and second location each Condemned player calculates if the lure they are following is closer or more obtainable (or not).
OK. MORE QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS
I like the Locations --> ‘rooms’ structure that you’re using in the game. How do you think a character is going to change after going through a whole Location? And how does a character change after going through one room?
You also said the interaction between the VOR and the Condemned in the flashback creates material for the Shadow to draw on and pervert, darken or twist. That sounds cool. I think you could give more emphasis to how important these flashbacks are. You describe it as “the primary method of character development”, but in the rules they seem almost incidental.
My biggest concern is about the dice game that we play out when confronting a Nightmare:
[*]For a start, everybody’s doing basically the same thing at the same time (and it’s the same process every time), so procedurally it feels a bit monotonous.
[*]I don’t know if this is an issue for you, but the exchange mechanic doesn’t feel like it’s going to create the same sense of jeopardy for the Condemned character that an equivalent confrontation with a Nightmare in Silent Hill does. It doesn’t seem unpredictable or threatening. Part of that may be how it’s left up to the Condemned player to decide if they overcome the Nightmare or not. Maybe there’s a role for other players to decide if the Nightmare is overcome.
[*]I worry that the dice game doesn’t make the fiction very vivid. The way you explain it in the rules, a player puts a white or black die forward and then narrates either overcoming the Nightmare or not. When I imagine myself playing this game, I think that having to make that decision would take me out of the mood and the moment. Silent Hill is so much about atmosphere and unrelenting, unbelievably-protracted tension (as well as sudden instances of thrashing terror), and I’m not sure the dice game contributes to that … if that’s one of your aims.
And one final question: what’s the Reward for playing Silent Sound? What’s the real-world, social and creative fun that you want people to get out of playing the game?
jburneko:
I wanted to pop in and post to say, I haven't abandoned this thread. I'm still digesting the current round of questions and life got a little bit busy. I'll post with another round of thoughts soon.
Jesse
jburneko:
Yay, I finally have the time to respond to this properly.
The lack of control that Chris points out and the potential for monotony that Steve points out I think go hand in hand and perhaps my biggest problem with the design at the moment. The problem is that the game is meant to be so dream-like and symbolic I don't know WHERE to introduce more interesting choices. One of my big sacred cows for this game right now is that I don't what "Do you forgive yourself?" to be a question the player ever answers directly, himself. I want the *process of play* to answer that question. Maybe I need to let that go? Maybe that's impossible?
Maybe the game shouldn't try to answer in a binary fashion? Maybe the game should focus more on the events that play out and leave the answer open to interpretation by the... "audience" so to speak? I don't know.
To answer more of Steve's questions directly.
After going through each room we should know more about the character's back story. Each room provokes a flashback and presents a symbolic piece of mental baggage from that flashback. After a whole Location we have done a sorting pass through that baggage. We will know what is lingering and what has been left behind.
I'm not sure the nightmares are actually meant to be particularly threatening, in the "Oh my god I might not survive this!" kind of way. They are meant to be more evocative and highly emotionally suggestive. If the nightmares did absolutely nothing at all but stand there, they should still evoke thought and consideration about the character. That's why the player chooses. Is this something I can push past or is this something that overwhelms me?
Christopher Kubasik once called this game extremely ambitious because he doesn't think I'm creating a game that's about dramatic narrative at all. He said it's more like a game about lyric poetry. I'm inclined to agree because I've often likened it to Dante's Inferno. Indeed this particular version of the design of prompted when I once described the game as, "a dungeon crawl through the PCs own mind."
So what's this all about? What's the reward? That's a good question. I want this to be about the development and discovery of a character through play. You start with this sketch and by the end, you have this full character for better or for worse. There is no character creation and then I enact him as I envisioned him. The game is constantly forcing you to question and evaluate that character concept until the very end. Is that rewarding enough? I don't know.
Jesse
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