Thoughts in Darkness

The bit where you describe your GM-ing style as "mentally combine prompt/theme with the current state of the fiction and speak the only possible words to say" really resonated with me. It's much like my own style, but better expressed.

I couldn't help but think of a game of Swords Without Master we were both players in a few months ago. In that game, you seemed very committed to the concept that your character had to embody the tone, rather than using "tone/theme plus fictional circumstances equals things to say" formula that you espoused for Bluebeard's Bride.

Dracula adaptations/spinoffs/reimaginings, for some reason:

This is especially true of horror RPGs and it’s doubly true of Haunted House RPGs

This is especially true of horror RPGs and it’s doubly true of Haunted House RPGs

A woman showed up a shared a LOT of DARK SHIT and I could tell there were aspects of the game that really spoke to some personal traumas. The line between her and her character was razor thin the whole game. In the end she shared even MORE DARK SHIT but expressed how the game had given her a tiny ounce of reprieve for like 10 minutes.

I think some of the other players were mad about this. And the more I sat with it, the more mad I got about them. Like, way to miss the very point of the game. That woman needed to be there and was brought there by god knows what unseen forces and I am made a better person for her presence and vulnerability.

So, let's talk about "The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow". This game started with me thinking about an RPG that played out like Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Which is to say, each player would effectively get a single turn in which they played out a single panel vignette about their character.

It rapidly evolved to be a bit more than that. You see, it plays like a card game. Each round of play is a bit like this Lenore comic, "Leap Frog" creating a vignette that frequently results in the demise of either one of the PC children or NPC adults. The whole game is just one long Series of Unfortunate Events, if you catch my meaning.

The goal of the game is to be the last child standing but like all my games that's a bit of misdirection as it's almost impossible to achieve that with any kind of intention or purpose. In fact, the fastest way to lose is by trying to win or rather to win too directly.

You see, "The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven's Hollow", like all my games, is a meditation on crime and punishment. While the children are the subject of the story, they aren't the narrative's true protagonists. That would be The Ravens.

You see once a child player is "eliminated" they take on a new role: A Raven. The children can only be vicious to each other or the adults. There are, after all, extraordinarily horrible children. Ravens, on the other hand, have vast sweeping abilities to shape the flow of the narrative and the outcome of the game. That's why you can't intentionally win a game of Raven's Hollow. No single child has the power to decide that. The collective actions of the Ravens decide that.

Most people know the collective noun for crows is "murder", less know that the collective noun for ravens is "unkindness" or "conspiracy." And that's what The Ravens in this game are: an unkind conspiracy passing judgement on the horrible children.

The way to win a Raven's Hollow game is to get The Ravens on your side. You know, the characters played by the people you just spent the rest of the game trying to eliminate. That's why playing too viciously will just cost you the game faster.

By the way, it's not enough to JUST be the last child standing. You also have face the mob of angry adults who have slowly been catching on that something isn't right with the children of Raven's Hollow. It's a very delicate balance of:

Murdering your fellow children.

Murdering the adults.

Not earning the ire of The Ravens while doing the above.

Since RPG Trader just opened for business I'm going to take a minute to talk about some of my stuff that doesn't get as much attention as my play treatises.

Haunted dates back to about 2011 when Ron Edwards was still doing "The Ronnies" on The Forge. "The Ronnies" were a game jam like event judged solely by Ron using 2 out of 4 terms he selected for each event. I don't remember all four terms but mine were "whisper" and "murder". Haunted ultimately came in as a "Runner Up" and only didn't place because I over engineered who the police were most suspicious of. I've since removed that element from the game such that including police is entirely optional and even if included they function like any other supporting character.

Fundamentally, the game is a ghost story. It's about a murderer being stalked by the ghost of their victim. One player always plays the murderer and another player always plays the ghost. Everyone else plays any of the other characters whenever it's appropriate. Only the murderer can see and hear the ghost and the ghost can't really interact with anything except through indirect supernatural means. It's a fun dynamic.

It's a GMless game but I've carefully constructed a set of "right of way" rules regarding decision making so nothing ever breaks down into story conferencing. I actually really hate purely collaborative/consensus based rules and have been careful to avoid them here.

Another features that may likely jump out to gearheads upon reading is that the math behind the mechanics is intentionally "broken". If every player simply maximizes their odds of success at every instance of play the dice will rapidly become a death spiral against the murderer and they will be crushed under an avalanche of opposition. This is because I want selfish players to end their games quickly and hopefully never play it again because it's "broken". I'm tired of designing around "the worst player at the table." The path around the "broken" mechanics is empathy. Treating the characters as real people, with real concerns, and most importantly, capable of change and growth will avoid invoking the death spiral, at least immediately. You see, the murderer still is at a horrible mechanical disadvantage out of the gate and about 90% of games play out like a supernatural episode of Columbo. Even when not directly dog piling the murderer, pressure tends to circle in until the murderer breaks and goes mad, goes to jail, or commits suicide. And that's.... fine. That's one way the game can go and it's fine that it's also the most common.

But it doesn't have to be that way. The game has a kind of restorative justice path mechanically built into the rules. What's really fascinating to me, is how people don't seem to really know how to engage them. They're right there. They're not hard to understand. But they do require treating the characters as real people, with real concerns, and most importantly capable of change and growth.

Haunted has taught me that role-players are WONDERFUL at portraying one note characters and DRAMATIC CONFLICTS! But they seem real bad at reflection and change without some kind of cue card telling them to do so. So, if you want to develop the art of subtle character development without hand rails just keep playing games of Haunted until they stop playing out like supernatural episodes of Columbo.

But in the mean time, supernatural episodes of Columbo are kind of fun.

Every year in October, I run a little horror RPG festival at the office for my coworkers. This is the first of two interviews that came out of that festival last year.