There’s intersections going on between games I’m playing in and conversations online in multiple places about RPGs and what level of rawness they bring to the table.

**

We’re playing Primetime Adventures. The characters are fighting memetic entities that are slowly eating people’s memories and existence, a bit of a cross up between Satoshi Kon’s Paprika and Paranoia Agent, and the expanding threat at the end of the Japanese horror movie Pulse. One of my players, her character has a girlfriend, she fails a key conflict but I get the narration. She’s sure her girlfriend is going to die, but that was never a stake I wanted on the table – separated for a while, yes, dead, no.

I hear the relief in the player’s voice; she had already started sliding into grief stacked on top of a life of real world stresses where even her imaginary happiness was getting ripped away. This is Primetime Adventures; we already had set general genre expectations as part of play, I wasn’t going to do the brutally tragic outcome, but she’s been through in real life so much she can’t see anything else. Not having the worst possible outcome helped shift a place for her, even in failed outcome.

We play in the ruins of everyone’s mental space in real world battles. The battles never end so if you always wait “for a better time” you just don’t roleplay at all.

**

We’re playing Errant. The characters have during the course of the campaign, wasted quite of bit of lucky goodwill their party has gained with the local authorities, and, along the way, started a faction war with a crime cartel. In one conflict, they manage to mostly trounce the thugs sent their way, but one of them happens to randomly be someone with a bit more sense who sees how powerful these adventurers are, and sues for peace; he’s going to tell his bosses that this is basically pissing off John Wick and not worth the cost. Behind the scenes, I make a couple of rolls; “oh, oh no”. Like many organizations, the competent layer isn’t at the top, and the guys at the top are running on pride and ego. “No one does this to us. They HAVE to pay.” I roll the random event chart. “An NPC dies.”

The party had tried to send their ally, a mercenary captain and her small band of warriors on a boat, to get away from this. Of course the criminal cartel goes for her.

A player, different from before, had this as her best friend. We played through the arc, but, definitely the tenor of play shifted. I think maybe we didn’t expect this level of pain to be in the game.

Big sets of mechanics have a lot going on, and often hide hard hitting outcomes or patterns you might not see right away. It’s the punches you don’t see coming that hit the hardest.

**

We’re playing my friend’s highly modded 5E campaign. It’s not a meat grinder, but many battles are hard fought, but most importantly it’s a game with a lot of powerful factions and our characters with networks of connections; vulnerable, hard to protect connections, getting cut out, one by one.

Another friend is playing his street tough hobgoblin, has found his gang scattered. Among them, a father and his two kids kidnapped and magically experimented on. By the time we get there to save them… well, the kids are altered, the father half digested by some gargantuan monstrosity that has been turned into an alchemical factory. In the moment of crisis, it’s just “get out with whomever you can save” but sessions later, the daughter, says to the hobgoblin, “My father’s dead because you didn’t protect him like you promised, and now you want me to make you feel better about it?!?”

I think he was always angling for a level of tragedy; we’re just not sure where on the dial that was going to be. This is harder than we expected; not game breaking, but again, a tonal shift, one we accept and roll with. (It is, after all, more than what D&D’s rules would give us on it’s own). There is an emotional Sword of Damocles hanging over many of the characters and we know some losses are going to stick.

You also know things matter to the group, there is engagement, if there’s a place where people feel something about it.

Emotional engagement

It’s not always moments of tragedy, but I think they’re the easiest ones to see the engagement of “this matters, but that’s also why it can hurt”. (Golden Sky Stories is a great counterexample of a game that somehow manages to just generate engagement on pure good will). And just as much as I was saying a key thing for Narrativist play is finding a dramatic engagement, the Conflicts that matter, a good system will guide the group both in understanding what to expect, what kinds of Conflicts, what kinds of tone and genre boundaries, and where things should be pushed.

Yes, of course you can do this on your own. No, you don’t need the book to do that for you. However, if your group is still developing a communication mode with each other, if people are going through a lot in real life that maybe isn’t communicated, if people are coming to the table with different expectations; the text having some of that laid out up front can make a lot of that easier. As I often say, half the “problem player” stories are just people who wanted different games and could have been avoided with clarity up front.

Two Dials

Let’s think of two dials.

The first dial is the experience during the game itself – Emotional Stakes to the player. Low/Medium/High. How fraught is the experience.

The second dial is where the game system will take you. Guaranteed happy ending, probable happy ending, possible happy ending, probable tragic ending, guaranteed tragic ending. (“What if the game doesn’t guarantee any outcome? Possible happy ending.”)

You know what the difference is between a Disney movie and a Don Bluth Studios movie? Disney is typically not going further than Low/Medium stakes for a Guaranteed Happy Ending. Don Bluth is going to take you through some shit with High stakes and leave you at the end with a Possible Happy Ending.

Real people making real feelings in unreal worlds

Anyway, your group is real people who have to navigate The Fantastic Respite and the Horizon of the Real, and if the game doesn’t help you figure out where you want to be on that space, you might be sliding into some emotional space you’re not ready for and turn the fun into not fun. It’s one thing if you’re ready to go into the space where you know as a group I Will Not Abandon You is on the table, but if not, you end up with “Why Are We Here?” and “This Isn’t Fun”.

Some of this, is how well a game communicates what it’s bringing to you before you play. It’s why I consider the highly fraught space of All Praise the Hawkmoth King to be perfect in telling you it’s about to be ugly, messy stories of teens making bad choices with supernatural powers, and sex, in an exploitative society (real world, mostly). It’s also why I think the nadir of the spiritual journey in Thirty to be a cheap gotcha and highly distasteful in terms of both the history it touches and dishonest to the players about what kind of emotional experience they’re going to be signing up for.

I’m glad we’ve moved past the point where RPG culture generally pointed to moments of emotional connection being solely “good roleplayers” where system could not touch (instead of, facilitate), but I also think that we’re probably still 10-20 years away from a developed general language about the vast array of possibilities of how that can happen. Not a design language, but as a play culture, in the same way movie or book reviews can give full nuance.

Until then, it’s a bit like feeling our way in the dark and using a lot of workarounds and communications to try not to stumble over each other too much.

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