(said somewhat defensively) I have never seen an episode of Dallas and, back then, I managed to avoid most information that seeped around as cultural references.
You might have heard that it was a terrible flop, implied to be poor design, and the financial disaster that led to the publisher’s demise. However, the actual business history is apparently more complex than that, and more to the point for our purposes … this design is really good!
Seriously, it’s not just me writing into the margins. The text is strangely clear that you do not merely depict the characters because they’re written for you in the show, so that you are just a fan cosplaying the famous and defined figures. Instead, right and wrong, or if you prefer, emotionally authenticity, as baked into content in the way fiction theorists are always explaining to us, are … wide open. It’s going to be our Dallas, the more so given the rules for new supporting cast and goals, and blink or you’ll miss it, rules for new main characters. One might even imagine an original spin-off at the table with a strikingly different premise, impossible to anticipate until after substantial play.
The chart, or rather, what it shows
The focused utility of kin-and-sex relationships lies in unknown, unpredictable dramatic plot outcomes, and by extension, themes which relfect collective but differing inputs, which might be a surprise when linked to a hard-core canon-drenched franchise.
Briefly: kin and sexual contact are perceived as solid things which mean definite things, as if saying things like “we’re family” or “we’re a couple” would absolutely determine a single and precise course of action which anyone would agree with and would themselves do for the same reason. However, the direction or purpose is in practice nothing of the sort, even when it is felt to be obvious. Instead, what people do is very much a matter of this particular rubber hitting this particular road, in extremely specific relation to past events, both remote and recent.
it contributes to the collective activity in a fashion that can’t be duplicated by another kind. Without claiming any and all conflicts are rooted in kin and sex, I submit that it/they are remarkably compatible in procedure with many, many other procedures in many combinations, across a wide variety of content as well. The chart as such serves merely as a content-reminder.
The Dallas game just nails it. I drew the family map in the lead image based on the game presentation. Blue = siblings, purple = married; I set the ages based on the birthdates in the text and the show’s launch in 1978.
You have the game procedures which entail direct and outright conflicts of interest among them. You have the implicit content that despite everything it will remain stable … but whether it’s rough but admirably steady, or utterly toxic among nearly everyone, or basically loving but marred by an undiagnosed psycho in their midst, or perhaps doomed as a culture but burning brightly at the end … that’s up to play and entirely to people’s own best-felt creative intuitions. When character A “loses” to character B, how are they played? Did one capitulate because love is more important? Or did the other win because they leveraged “family” like a hostile corporation leverages any asset? Or however it may be played. It’s like a Rorschach test that gets elaborated upon to become a unique and revealing self-portrait, which is only possible because this particular instrument is brought front and center.
In this game, winning cards does establish who ultimately gets what they want … but it’s not as zero-sum as it looks, as all characters have “four out of these six” for winning this effect or something similar rather than a fixed specific set, some share cards for victory (i.e. a card counts for A and B if either has it), and significantly, one might cede a card to another player during play who gives it back later for the win – so sharing (“caring!”) is in fact possible inside the strategic context. The question is not even really who wins, but how in terms of others’ interactiosns with them, and why.
God is saying that you have too much money
In this case, the obvious content-context is secrets and lies and resentments which cannot be openly voiced … but going one step deeper, the class and wealth topic is offered in a fashion far less superficial than I usually observe in role-playing content.
The main characters (Ray, Bobby, Pam, Ellie, Jock, Lucy, J.R., Sue Ellen; less Cliff, who may be imagined as lurking just off-frame):
Arguaby this show, like so many before it and after it, is rich people porn, full stop … except at least as presented in the game, this feature is not lionized and slobbered over. Instead, it’s fully evident as a never-ending source of conflict, because the privilege and security are actually precarity, and it constantly raises the question of when “values” are or are not hypocrisy.
I’m not making this up! The text reinforces this point at many levels, including some hilarious land-mines buried in secondary characters and entities’ mechanics, and a well-written, provocative history of oil and politics in Texas, devoid of the smug historical celebration one might expect.
It may even make possible that rare and wonderful thing in fiction, unpretentious critique.
Procedures and concepts
A scene is played in two parts: first, Negotiations for everyone, which allow for giving or trading cards and Power markers, in which conflicts may be defined by what happens; and then, Conflicts are resolved for everyone. In practice, I found the best way was to arrive sooner or later at a collective time-unit, then set the sequence of Negotiations based on the necessary times of day, and then, we sort of time-travel back into each negotiatory unit to see how the Conflicts in them went. If we get to a point in which a conflict’s outcome would generate significantly more time passage or extensive negotjations, that’s a sign that we hit the limits of the time-unit. (The text does provide for a little wiggle-room between the two phases, e.g., if you discover the need for a bit more Negotiation following a given reolution.)
The GM doesn’t initiate conflicts with proactive NPC activity. Instead, if the GM or any player won’t acquiesce to a player’s desire during Negotiations, and that person decides to go into conflcit, that’s the only way.
GMing as content is remarkably open-ended; the rules’ so-called “scripts” include an initial scene which is pretty full, then the next is less so to be adapted to whatever happened, and the ones afterward are wide open,; in fact the last one or two listed are always blank. Also they don’t prescribe the actual number of scenes, but say “finish up or keep going as needed.” Finally, the GM has a number of unrelated incident prompts to toss in or use as desired, or not.
However, there’s one weirdly toxic bit, in the first introductory page. Most of the following text is rational, until you get to the three sentences which begin “Keep in mind …”
These sentenes are nonsense, meaning, they’re straightforwardly impossible and inapplicable, relative to the game’s actual procedures. Such control would require overriding statements which players are supposed to be able to make, or framing people into micro-situations without any input of what they wanted their characters to do, or flatly to override dice outcomes which as far as I can tell are usually rolled openly. Perhaps significantly, this three-sentence excerpt or anything like it is absent from the more detailed Script Writer’s Guide section which are here (falsely) implied to reinforce it. I mildly suspect that these sentences were inserted or superimposed into this introduction during a later stage of text revisions.
OK! I was using the text’s Script 1, called “The Great Claim.” It showcases the feature that only two of the characters are directly opposed in the fiction (J.R. vs. Cliff, maybe Jr. vs. Bobby but not as severely), but most of the others aren’t doing anything land-grant-oriented … it’s just that their victory cards interfere with some of the cards for those characters who are.
Here are some conclusions from play + a bit of review + different people’s readings.
- Conflicts are one-on-one. The way people ally is by providing Power markers during the Negotiations before we move into the Conflicts.
- It’s so intuitive to think that one may be facing more than one opponent in resolving conflicts that I kept looking for the team-up procedures throughout the first session, and only realized it doesn’t happen between sessions.
- Power: it works differently for major (player) characters and the other entities; the former’s Power score merely sets their scene pool for Power Markers, whereas the latter’s is a standing bonus for all their scores.
- You can see us puzzle through this throughout the first session, including the sequence of when it may be spent, or how it is given from one character to another
- In the second, we nailed it down at the start and used action counters and Power beads, and the mechanic instantly jumped way up in play
- Whoever is playing J.R. soon discovers that although he may steamroll anyone early in the turn, if people anticipate his target and start sharing Power, and if he has to take a couple of hits first, then he really ought to be thinking about allies too
- The meaning and use of face-up vs. face-down cards, and for whom
- Especially items, and especially the damn letters (as it wasn’t clear to me that I should have established for myself exactly where they were!) For example, when Jessica wanted the FBI to investigate J.R. regarding the letters, I think the question is whether he has to flip over his hidden card (which happens to be the Land Grant) to show her it’s not what she’s looking for, but she does find out what it is.
- We also waffled or misplayed when someone wanted to talk to someone controlled by another player but they’re face-down, as with Mix Nevelstone
- As well as, what if you start playing a face-down card; presumably you flip it over to do that, as I started to do in the second session
- As a related point, we weren’t collectively accustomed yet to playing all the cards we control, as demonstrated in session 1 regarding Mix – Erik basically should have played him entirely, probably forced to flip him face-up when Kristoffer played Pam visiting him, because Mix is not a secretive person or difficult to find. Note too that one’s Power markers may be employed for any character you currently play.
- How to manage GM cards
- Items and characters/organizations, which led us to some inconclusive play
- what starts face-up and face-down; key being that players can investigate, but how is that done, designating a face-down card at random, or asking “what about the land grant” (or whatever) and if that person doesn’t have it (someone else does, face-down), does that entail saying “I don’t have it” at the expense of that action?
- For the second session, I decided that all the GM’s people or entity cards would be face-up, but all the items and events cards would be face-down until played or discovered.
- Segregated information, especially regarding face-down cards
- Initial logistic hassles with ten people aside, this can’t possibly go so far as to mean a separate profile of face-up/face-down cards for every single person relative to every other person
- The text recommends parsing player knowledge by character knowledge at many different points, but also acknowledges that this feature must be tuned per table; we just haven’t figured out our tuning point yet
- We played it with almost no private information except for face-down cards, and occasionally if one person figured out “what that card is” via Investigation, then they were showed individually – but Yaroslav rightly pointed out that a little more secrecy or segreation would strengthen play
- We quickly and unanimously decided to delete the Luck mechanic, which is absolutely nothing but a speedbump regarding losing conflicts
- Especially Cliff’s beautiful boxcars during the second session – it was thoroughly dramatic and enjoyable as played, and it would be completely drained and annoying with some “no ya didn’t” secondary roll attached
I don’t mind saying it’s at least as good as a critically-adjusted Primetime Adventures, and absent the sentences I mentioned above, arguably a solid step better.
Our experience
Here’s what I want to say: conflicts of interest are context for role-playing, and role-playing is more than merely dress-up for enacting them. The inner lives and anything worth judging about these player-character versions of the Dallas characters are – and can only be – what the role-playing tells us. Therefore which conflicts of interest really hit the fan, and any viewpoints we may have, as people, regarding how they turn out, are a matter for play. that’s not baked in.
Therefore phrasings like “what’s the object of the game” will typically go nowhere. There is a good inquiry and answer, but it occurs at the level of who is playing, how they play, and what happens. The markers and cards, as with any instrumention for role-playing, operate significantly and cannot be ignored regarding those three concepts, but they may not be considered definitively toward playing on purposes.
Which brings me to talking about the new players in this game, who not only instantly picked up on this very point but also returned for the second session with visible energy and activity toward it. The rough learning you can see in the first session jumps up into dynamism in the second, which I’m editing now and will include soon.
9 responses to “The Great Claim”
I had somehow missed this post!
I’m going to take a closer look at the videos. I have to admit I had kind of imagined the negotiation phase happening away from the table. Giving people time to have private/secret side conversations. Kind of LARP-lite. Then when people returned to the table conflicts represent mini-scenes of everyone executing whatever little schemes they had devised.
Kind of following on from that logic, I had similarly imagined that “investigation” referred to you targeting another player and if you were successful you and only you got to peek at one of their face-down cards. Sort of like what one does while playing Clue.
But all of that may be a much too “gamey” reading of the rules. I’m curious to see where this much more open approach leads.
I think you’re right about both things, although the degree of separation and privacy for the first one is definitely adjustable, as presented in the text. The second was slighted in the first session in our particular learning curve, but we caught its gears better in the second session, which I’m editing now. I suspect that fluid, systemic, and table-adjusted systemic play will not be fully observed for this group and first-contact with the game. But we’re having a good time getting there.
Session 2 is available; here’s the direct link into the playlist.
This time we managed most of the listed items in the post much better.
Our decision to ignore the Luck mechanic still seems right to me, but I also realized how important it is for J.R., who has much more than anyone else. I don’t want to get too far into game design with this, but I speculate that maybe it would work best if he had a little and no one else had any.
Here’s the single concept that I think we’re going to focus on for the next session: that if you have the card, you play that character or entity, in full. Clarifying and applying that will hop up the dynamic aspects of the situation quite a bit.
There’s a basic timing concept that I haven’t managed to nail yet. Formally, we’re supposed to play – as in, fully play – as much of any character’s actions and interactions, potentially several distinct things, as possible until hitting a distinct conflict with someone. Doing this might cover a fair amount of fictional time and necessarily sets up a timed sequence of events, leaving many or most characters “hovering” at different points in that sequence. After doing this, then we resolve the many conflicts, or as many as possible according to the action marker currency.
So it’s a little tricky in terms of in-fiction timing, not impossible or broken, but a bit different from what most of us are used to. I’m still not sure I can articulate it properly or fully grasp how to conduct it. I’m thinking about a time-chart per turn which might help, which as it happens is a useful device in playing Harnmaster, and I’m beginning to appreciate the role of such things in the earliest superhero games (Superhero 2044, Supergame).
I really liked the amount of interaction players had between themselves, as oppose to each one talking with GM.
It’s exciting! I’m editing the third session now and this is happening throughout. It’s also a great skill to develop by playing something like Dallas, because – in fact – players are perfectly capable and often justified in doing the same thing in most other role-playing. Even if they are playing a single character each, nothing stops them from talking to one another in play, as play, for real reasons and with real effects, not merely colorful noise.
SESSION 3 (in playlist; direct link)
PROCEDURES AND LEARNING CURVE
Wow!
I knew there was one remaining thing to make clear before playing the third session: that when you have a card, you fully role-play that person or entity without reference to anyone’s direction. Therefore each person is playing a little stable, obviously with their main character as beneficiary, but also in reference to each specific person or entity as a proactive being. Arguably the minor card character might not even be receiving orders from the main one; it’s merely that whatever they do benefits the main one. And if someone else is trying to get that card, it begins with role-playing (Negotiations phase), and you will be playing the entity, e.g. Alice Kaye Rupschorn, or the FBI, or whatever, on your own.
With that point stated outright, and since everyone already knew that these cards can change players rapidly, play opened up almost explosively. What I tried to do at first, pretty awkward, didn’t go anywhere; then took off; scene creation = consequence of play, e.g., the press conference
Afterwards in the Discord chat, someone said “this Dallas was more entertaining than the real show,” and this (the three sessions) was only our first try, rough and fumbling as it began. I’m confirmed in the game’s excellent design. I can only hope to enjoy playing an episode from the start with everyone fully on-board with the procedures and their dynamics.
For people who attended the Free Radical course, I’d like you to review this play-experience to observe deliberate group experiential learning, which relies on the starting principle that none of us actually knows, and we all want all of us to know.
In-fiction time sequencing is still a work in progress, but I think the progress is real. Briefly, it’s similar to what I instituted for Spione – playing everyone up until each one’s necessary resolution point, then resolving them all “simultaneously” or at least in a single phase. The tricky part is that each player has three action counters, so we need to map those throughout a fictional time-period, and aside from negotiations/conflict distinction, it’s also clear that results from a given conflict would necessarily alter the negotiations regarding a subsequent potential conflict in the same turn, so a strict negotiations-only conflict-only phase distinction isn’t always the most sensible.
To summarize the Power rules: main characters have a pool of markers which refreshes at the start of each turn; markers can be used in offense or defense during card-oriented conflicts, for any character in the stable; by contrast, secondary characters/entities have a fixed Power score that is always active for defense only, and no markers. You can see us work our way through assumptions, confusions, tentative resolution, and finally understanding, with no stress about making mistakes as part of the process.
We made some provisional decisions about fictional identities for cards, e.g., Bribe a government official: if you get that card from someone, does it refer to the specific in-fiction bribe that brought it into play, or is it a standing/floating “bribes are going on around here” which may be tuned to a novel bribe in the circumstances of a later moment. I am tempted by the latter but it’s probably more sensible to be the former.
Speaking of standing components, legal consequences are evidently always in play, apparently to the extent that getting someone else’s main character indicted or even imprisoned is real, even listed in the Victory Points as if it were a normal thing that might happen to anyone. Considering the half-dozen subornments of law enforcement and media scattered through our session, I think that whoever is playing the FBI, local police, Texas Rangers, et cetera, might deliver some impact that way.
ENDINGS AND PROPERTIES
I like the system feature that the characters’ “get what you want” conditions are not entirely zero-sum. Also, the degree varies. E.g., (1) entirely orthogonal, e.g., Ellie wants to keep the blackmail/letters problem secret from Jock, but Jock is not trying to discover anything about that matter and doesn’t need any of the same cards; (2) almost entirely antagonistic (zero-sum), e.g., J.R. and Cliff regarding the land grant; (3) potentially interfering but not necessarily, e.g., different people want M.X. for different reasons, but no one needs him unequivocally to get what they want.
Looking back over the “story we made” is clear as day. The four male characters ripped each other up over their little drama-queen power trips over property, and none of them got what they wanted in rules-terms. (Cliff did not achieve social justice regarding the land grant, Bobby didn’t insulate Ewing Oil from legal or social conflict despite coming quite close, Jock didn’t insulate Ewing Oil from the instability of the land grant, and J.R. didn’t pull off a shady network of deals in the context of the land grant.) Whereas the two female characters worked their soft-touch, not-entirely-complete alliance and their firm grasps on specific resources to succeed at their personal endeavors.
Regarding Jock, I learned a lot from Johan’s play which more or less ignored the “what I want” conditions. i.e., whether it lessened general play. However, in this scenario, Jock’s desires were pretty vanilla and would be met tacitly, if unofficially by the cards, regardless of which son prevailed. So as it happened, Jock’s textual/script desires were more or less got sidelined but he remained a strong foil and source of lent power for several other characters. Also, arguably, it’s a legitimate player prerogative to assess their character’s commitment to the stated condition, and Johan did have Jock make a couple of plays for those cards before re-prioritizing.
M.X. deserves real reflection. First, in plot and mechanics terms, he was the real football among the main characters, and ultimately, he was kept away from J.R. not due to power-struggle over the land grant, but simply because he was useful toward too many other ends. I joked at one point that the episode makes most sense as seen through his eyes, under pressure from almost everyone and caving to various people at different points. (Special mention to Pam for skating neatly among Cliff, Bobby, and J.R., in this regard.)
Second, he was characterized across us as sympathetic to the Ewings, but while he was under Erik’s ownership, whatever he thought he was doing, it was benefiting Cliff. Therefore, switching the card over to Christian (playing Pam, in this case committed to the Ewings or at least to Bobby) is literally M.X.’s own inclinations being role-played as overcoming the pressures Cliff was bringing to bear on him.
Victory Points deserve some attention for exactly how they work, but also more generally in their function, because they are not calculated toward “winning” in the sense of getting what the character wants, i.e., the card list for that episode. Instead, they represent a lot of arithmetic and attention for something which matters only for the edge case of breaking qualitative “ties,” i.e., antagonistic characters who get what they want, implying a need for a bit more fictional weight to know exactly who has the edge. Absent that, they don’t do anything. So it’s no surprise that we picked up on Victory Points as a nonspecific indicator of relative advantage at closing … and no surprise as well that, despite both J.R. and Cliff being on the ropes at the end of the episode, their Victory Points turned out far more ahead of everyone else and in fact, tied, suggesting that our story ends with the two of them deeply invested in mutual “curse you, wait ‘til next time.”
We didn’t realize until we’d finished that remaining Power, and Power spent by other players, factor strongly into Victory Points, which in retrospect makes the final Negotiations phase matter a lot, insofar as we care about the Victory Points.
As one of the participating players I thought it was a really interesting and enjoyable game. From my point of view it occupies a place somewhere between a typical role playing game with the character focus and expectation to explain and act out your actions and a board game with the clear goals and victory points.
I can easily see the game being played with leanings more towards one or the other of these two. It’s certainly possible to just say you’re using an action to persuade or coherence and roll the dice without laying out the words more, but I think they way we played was more stimulating and created more interesting situations.
The rules are simple and mostly thought through. It was a learning experience to play through, but it never felt as the game ground to a halt.
A big part of the game is just interaction between the players and/or director and the core rules with how power, actions and dice rolls work facilitates that in a way that is both unobtrusive and gives each character a profile informing the player what their strengths and weaknesses are. A revision and clarification of some parts of the rules (as mentioned, luck, or the structure of play for example) could be done however.
I’m also very impressed by how modern this game felt. It’s over 40 years old, but with a different theme this could have been released yesterday. The only games I’ve played that are somewhat close would be The King’s Dilemma (2019), Junta (originally 1979, granted) and social deduction games like Avalon or Resistance, but this manages to be significantly deeper by virtue of offering fleshed out characters with motivations, the ability to roleplay the cards your get, unique win conditions for every character and allows some players to succeed together (but probably still with only one winner if you’re really keeping score). The above mentioned modern games also relies heavily on social interactions, like a role playing game, but are actually much simpler.
Speaking of theme the rules could easily be polished up a bit and get a scenery change to any number of equally Machiavellian settings. Using a very popular soap opera probably made sense at the time since it was a hot property, but these days the setting became mostly comical for me. Still it’s a testament to the rules and scenario framing that the game was completely playable for people that hadn’t watched a second of Dallas. The clearly established win conditions, somewhat familiar setting (everyone will know what the local press, senator or police is and what they could reasonably do) and encouragement for constructive player vs. player conflict (taking each others cards because for some reason M.X Nevelstone the rag sheet magnate is the key of every plot the Ewing family members (and Cliff) can concoct).
In conclusion this is the definition of a hidden gem. It has no right being as good as it is when you see J.R’s shit-eating grin on the box, but there’s clearly a lot of thought put into the design of this game. It was a pleasure to play!
I agree! I am a little bit sad that we didn’t continue into a new episode, although maybe, not too long from now, we’ll “get the gang back together” and play another one. I expect that if we do, then it will be a remarkable experience.