[Apocrypha] Blind fate, blind justice, and blind love
Ron Edwards:
Hi Luke,
Here are the things that jumped out at me, in no particular order.
1. Despite having an immense set of prep and support techniques, a clear notion of agenda, great enthusiasm about the material, and a group of people who really knew what they were doing and how to do it, the game fell down in terms of pure enjoyment of the fiction, both making it and experiencing it as audience. So something didn't work. I think there's more to reflect on there besides intangibles.
i) The experience reinforced exactly how important Reward is, in the overriding Color + Reward context for play. As I see it, reward is creative, social, and intangible, but it includes the possibility of reward mechanics as part of the game's system. I am not referring to ultimately-empty incentive mechanisms ("refer to your character's motivation and gain a Story Point! Spend a Story Point to get a re-roll!"), but rather to enjoyment mechanisms, or things that are fun to see change on one's character sheet, and fun to use. Apocrypha has no such thing.
ii) The other set of techniques were probably lacking on my part: the failure to have Stakes in the Trollbabe sense, or the card flip either for character Fate or for the scenario in Everway. Both of these are ways to say, "All right, that did it, the overall situation will now go this way because of what just happened." In the two games I just mentioned, those are concrete mechanics. Whereas in our long-running game of Hero Wars a while ago, we did observe and enjoy this effect, but without mechanics. So it's not distinct mechanics I'm looking for, but the technique of discovering when fictional events have provided a tipping-point for larger-scale, situational, even setting-level change. At the moment, I find myself wondering whether it's a matter of having enough genuinely political crisis a-boil in the situation, either due to GM prep or to material inherent in the canonical setting.
2. Non-cinematic techniques can be developed and made central via role-playing. It seems clear to me that movies are considered the gold standard for entertainment media in today's world. A book is "good" if it can be made into a movie, and it is a confirmation of a book being good if someone wants to make a movie from it ("turn it into a movie"). A role-playing experience is "good" if someone describes it as being like a movie. I find this annoying. It seems to me that books, or any other medium, can be good without reference to movies, and can successfully utilize techniques that would either be un-entertaining or even impossible in the cinematic medium.
I found the blindness concept very productive in trying to move into that non-cinematic experiential potential for role-playing.
3. I greatly appreciate how elegantly the authors put together the resolution system, using standard features like attributes, skills, traits, and target numbers. They did it in the face of twenty-plus years of many, many RPGs which used those features in unconsidered and clunky ways, without any social support structure. A lot of innovative game design has occurred since then by throwing all or most of those standard features away, but at least a couple of my own designs and a handful of others' display attempts to retain or find what can be good using the older framework. I think Apocrypha is a solid member of that small company. I'd like to meet the authors one day to talk about that.
Best, Ron
C Luke Mula:
Hey Ron,
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I find myself wondering whether it's a matter of having enough genuinely political crisis a-boil in the situation, either due to GM prep or to material inherent in the canonical setting.
When you say "genuinely political," do you mean it in the sense of it pertaining to human government? Or do you mean it in the sense of larger scale relationships and tensions (like Fronts in Apocalypse World or Factions in Stars Without Number)?
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I found the blindness concept very productive in trying to move into that non-cinematic experiential potential for role-playing.
This reminds me of what I've heard of the Jeepform "Gang Rape" (I haven't seen it or read it myself, so I could be wrong in that comparison). Seems like both are great examples of using each medium for what only that particular medium can do.
- Luke
Ron Edwards:
Hi Luke,
I definitely mean human government, specifically the genuine meaning of the word "politics," i.e., the rigors of making policy. (As opposed to electioneering, which is the debased meaning of "politics" in ordinary American speech.) Whether it's directly commenting or modeled upon some actual current-events situation, or relatively speculative, either way is fine by me.
I have continued to think about our difficulties relating the reward mechanics of Apocrypha to the feedback loop of enjoyment. Perhaps my thinking on the topic has changed since then, because I was in fact able to relate a very similar reward mechanic in DeGenesis to the conflicts inherent in the setting. It seems to me that how one specialized one's skills, over time, was a very big deal (and it's not too different from the improvement mechanic in HeroQuest, regarding character abilities anyway). Yet we didn't do that for Apocrypha. It may have been due to the combination of (i) our not seeing it, although it may have been there to do; and (ii) the lack of productive tension in the one-race setting as textually presented, despite my effort to put some there. I think it's easier because the DeGenesis setting is rife with powerful conflicts, many of which are insightful twistings of real ones.
Regarding that latter, there was a certain distinctly 1990s assumption that I think peeped out from behind the shutters in the Apocrypha text: the idea that the biggest problem facing us was diversity, and that in the one-race application, not much was there to be done besides genre emulation. Because if we were all one "sort," then we'd have no problems, perhaps. I'm familiar with this viewpoint among some of my friends, who like to think of themselves as enlightened, because they are so tolerant, without realizing the bigotry underlying their ideas.
Well, that might be laying too much criticism on the undeserving text of the game, which as I say does present a lot of provocative and interesting ideas. Revisiting my (ii) above, perhaps again, this is more about the failures of my own skill-set, not being able to bring as strong a political and ethical crisis to the potential the setting offered.
Best, Ron
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