I’d like to celebrate the virtues of my game Fantasy for Real, especially the phrase I hit upon at some point in its latter-day development, “irresponsible adventure,” and what that means. I’ve been playing the hell out of it during April through various events I’ve attended.
The brief history is that I worked on two small role-playing games in 1998, the year following completing my doctorate and including my first prof job, in Georgia. I wanted them to be partners in the sense of nigh-complete opposites in mechanics, as I understood them at the time, as a “system does matter” demonstration in addition to being pretty good for play. I called one of them Love, Crime, and Memory in the Human Machine, and the other Fantasy for Real, the latter inspired greatly by conversations about magic systems with my friend John Marron. Both games, or rather, notes-for-maybe design, were discussed and passed around in the early days of the Forge, and significantly mined by me and others.
I said “brief,” so fast-forward to 2020 or so, when I finally found the old binder with the print-outs. I had effectively abandoned them mentally, considering that just about everything useful (with the exception of the Fantasy for Real magic) had been mined out. But now, I said, wait, these still have some life in them. Fantasy for Real hit its final version and was made available about a year and a half ago.
Since then, I always keep some usable notes available, as the game is eminently well-suited to sudden play. It does require preparation, however, so here are the current play materials I keep around, including some ready characters. Including a couple of errors in construction, bonus.
It looks blank and incomplete, right? It is. I often print notes like this long before they’re ready to use (and certainly before anyone else could make sense of them). I write all over them for the final preparation, and use that sheet, as you’ve no doubt noticed if you’ve been examining almost any of my play-posts.
Add to it the fact that if something is completely solid in my mind during preparation, I often don’t type or write it at all, so what’s visible is mostly context for the unspoken known thing. I think this is a lot more common in the arts than researchers and archivers want to admit, especially those who seek to document process.
In this post’s case, it’s worse: since the events took place across three consecutive weekends (Cinema event, Conpulsion, and Gothcon), I didn’t print new sheets but instead wrote on the same sheet during play, for all four games played across these events. So it’s an incomprehensible mess as far as archival understanding of preparation and play is concerned.
Skills for the GM
It says right there on the cover: “… this text is also written to develop skills for playing as game master.” By which I mean,
- Situational play, especially concerning failed tests in a current scene and the activities of entities who aren’t in the current scene.
- In practice, the most common example concerns brewing magic, when multiple spells’ and/or trinkets’ effects synergize into something new with quite a bit of power, quantitatively. “Oooh,” say the players, “that’s why magic doesn’t need resolution rolls …” because their own enthusiasm with so-easy, so-effective spellcasting has only done what it might well be expected to do.
- Players aren’t worried about dying, so the question is what do they want to do (or choose not to want); and for the GM, what do you do when it’s not about threatening death or mitigating it
- An observation: players have no problem playing their characters’ desire not to die, even though they know well that mechanically this doesn’t occur.
Historically, most of the language I’ve tried in various game texts, especially Sorcerer, has backfired terribly and even contributed to some of the worst play-habits and design I know. For example, “Pressure the players …” by which I meant playing known things as reponsive to characters’ activity, not invent ad hoc shit to hobble and rug-pull them. In 1996-1998, I didn’t know that my understanding of “pressure” as a result of assertive, undirected, but non-manipulative could not be understood by people who had internalized the play-experience as a served-up dish to an audience, and thus would interpret it as directions for force-fed emotions.
Here’s the language I use in this game as instructions, as opposed to explanations. .
First, the pickle is the location, its history, and currently-active people or things. By contrast, the picklets are the goals or problems carried by player-characters, as created, introduced, resolved, or abandoned by the players; and whose details are played by the GM after they’ve been introduced.
Second, three ending conditions are specified, any of which must close the adventure.
- An arc closes neatly, typically concerning at least one picklet that either began play or was invented during play.
- Every player-character is “dead” or in absurdly dire straits.
- Nothing is going right for anyone else in the situation, effectively total madness of one sort or another.
All together, these constitute the “irresponsibility,” in the sense that no one is assessing a direction and thereby constructing a conclusion, because it’s impossible. Maybe someone besides me could post some time about their experiences using these instructions.
Cinema
This is an annual event here in Norrköping, held at a local activity center which includes a film studio. They added a game day a while ago and I’ve participated since then. For some reason, it’s always a very friendly and successful event, and I’ll provide a more complete post about the games and activities.
Near the end of the scheduled time, I was already beginning to pack up and leave when not one, but two “I’d like to try role-playing” arrivals appeared, one after the other, both in their early teens at most. This prompted two relatively short but surprisingly intense Fantasy for Real games, also, both rather sweet and heartwarming.
- For the first, the person and his parent chose the Bubbling Swamp, in which Yip tamed the tentacle frog and saved his confused outlander pal from the family feud he’d stumbled into.
- For the second, the single person chose Zorandor, in which Yip befriended the obviously out-of-his-depth axe guy and got him away from the manipulative clan elders.
I think, though, that these templates for these locations have lived long enough, as I’ve been using them a lot for almost two years. I’ve retired them and have come up with different combinations of elements for each.
Conpulsion
I’ll write a separate post about attending Conpulsion in Edinburgh; this bit is only about our scheduled play for this game, with me, Jerry, Renee, Discourse (preferred public name), and another person who I think was Erik. They played, respectively, Jizulah, Urghulahkulah, Habbak, and Yip.
They chose the Crystal Shore, which is geographically more complex than the other locations. I’ve enjoyed specifying different places in it, like the seedy Rackriver Port, the bourgeois and bucolic inland, and, as i decided in this case, the outlying islands, which I had not really thought much about before. If you look at the map in the game, you’ll see that I zoomed in on the biggest one (and in terms of its design, I was apparently influenced by my experience with paramecia).
Somehow I got the idea that one of the communities there was an art colony, considered something of a pet project by altruistic donors; I also had pretty clear notions of the fortress having been tacitly taken over by pirates, which didn’t bother anyone because all the practices remained exactly as before.
This adventure blew up into one of those outrageous magical disasters based on interacting spells, in this case almost all united by some verbal element like Command or Saying. Every picklet spiraled into unfortunate although not tragic failures: the barbaric mom’s son who’d become a snooty artist, the determined assassin from Rackriver Port, the magical trinket which, upon a failed discovery roll, was destroyed in an artistic project to demonstrate the profundity of nothingness …
It ended with a couple of the characters still swirling into the eddies or vortices of the out-of-control magic, but also with one of them re-appearing at the very end in “no one could have survived that” fashion.
Gothcon
This was a casual pick-up game in the Indierummet play area, during some free time between my intensive scheduled sessions for much more complex games. I didn’t even write down people’s names because, “of course, I’ll remember.” They played Yip and
it’s not the first time players have fixed upon the University of All Relevant Wisdom and its lopwing laboratories, but this time went really deep into it.
We determined that most of the academics were located near the center, but the actual labs are high on the left slope, and the city sprawl in that area is mostly crap student housing and related structures.
They played Yip and Asyastimus, which entailed some magical disguises in this somewhat human-centric region. That worked until everything blew up among Dr. Marwang, his clockwork (cyber) modifications, Alyssa the activist, and Kozo the supervisory enginee, none of whom liked the others one bit. Purple magic + a fat rat or two (kept for feeding lopwings) + sudden mayhem led to our definitely anti-heroes escaping on the lopwing.
The point
…. and really, why it’s good: maximal consequences of anything present and occuring in this place, with minimal concerns about whether it’s good in any longer-term, transitive (to an audience), or hyper-critical way. And yet given the integrity of any and all moments in play, the human capacity to create good work is engaged – and not sabotaged by those performative, emotionally-disengaged, and anxiety-based concerns.
I don’t ordinarily point to purchase, but what the hell, buy it here if you’d like.
5 responses to “Irresponsibility and integrity”
Hey Ron! As it happens I’d just watched the youtube videos of you playing it at Gothcon. Good stuff, illustrated how things go.
There were a few points I was unclear about from the rules that became clear (or less obvious things became obvious).
One of the things that I somehow didn’t quite get on my first read-through of the test rules was the fact that the die roll is used both for success/failure (even or odd) and degree of effect/success/failure (number 1-6). I think I figured that out with a little re-reading and the videos confirmed.
Another thing that I didn’t quite get initially though again, figured it out eventually and confirmed from the videos, was that when the rules talk about rolls to “attack” and “defend” those rolls are all that happense. I thought on first read-through that there might be some kind of roll the opponent made to attack you which you rolled to “defend” against, but no, that *is* the defense roll. The GM’s characters don’t roll.
Something that contributed to the confusion there was that as far as I can tell, the rules sometimes refer to an NPC’s Base as their Number. I was wondering if Base and Number were different things, that left me open to wondering if there was going to be a GM die roll involved in that Number… Number is just Base right?
(Very minor thing, it wasn’t obvious to me at first what the numbers in parentheses after spell words were — I did eventually clock to the meaning “these specify number of syllables in cases where that may be unclear or ambiguous!”)
There are a couple things I’m still not sure about. First off in the Magic paragraph it says “Pick one table per point of your total.” What? What’s “total” here? Base plus Pool maybe? Unsure.
Another is in the section on trinkets, it says “Once per scene, when you say any of these things, test Weird Lore” and I have no idea what “say any of these things” means.
Other than that, I feel like I have a pretty solid grasp of the rules, and I’m going to be looking for a chance to run this. I threw together a pickle in the Crystal Shore, that I think might be interesting to play out.
It was interesting to watch the situation with Marchu and the Axe play out at the table, where the characters didn’t engage much with it directly till the very end when the princess’ picklet engaged with it, and then read your note here that “Yip befriended the obviously out-of-his-depth axe guy and got him away from the manipulative clan elders” which is *such* a different and neat way for things to go!
Point of that being, it ain’t the GM’s job to make assumptions about what the characters are going to care about and whether and in what way they’re going to engage.
I have another game of The Pool coming up this weekend after a long break due to schedules. Going to remember that as I organize and prep what’s going on.
As I feared, you’re working with an older text. That sentence about “per point of your current total” was corrected long ago, but for some reason, it seems that every single person who reads the game has that version, probably from an in-progress file I shared at Patreon. I’ll send you the actually-published game.
For the final text bits you mentioned, “number,” non-capitalized, is used once in reference to an NPC’s current Base. Regarding trinkets, “Say any of these things” refers to the list in the sentence just before it.
This is what I care about most.
That’s the most important thing. I’m glad that it’s evident from comparing the two instances of the Zorandor scenario, and I hope from other aspects of the text and videos too.
I wondered if that was an unfinished text! That explains a lot.
And yes, the text does make that clear re: not making assumptions about what the characters will care about and do.
I want to break this topic out from the previous comment stream, concerning texts and clarity. So it’s still continuing dialogue with Ed although anyone is welcome to join.
A question to consider is whether and how one is primed to understand a given thing from a text, especially regarding role-playing or any similar activity (I often talk about music, martial arts, and scientific investigation).
For example, directed to Ed, you’ve been familiar with Trollbabe since its first publication in 2003. Every rule in it, but specifically its GMing instructions, are very similar to those in Fantasy for Real. So my question – not for reply here if you prefer not to, just personal reflection – is whether, in 2003 or even until pretty recently, you were able to see those instructions for what they were. Now, having taken People and Play, having taken Playing with The Pool, having participated in In/Over … now, in looking at Fantasy for Real, those instructions appear coherent and even a bit obvious. I think those in Trollbabe would too. But before then?
My experience suggests that text alone cannot, not ever, not in any way, suffice for actually instructing anyone for things of this kind. Given even the best imaginable writing or other presentation, it’s not “clear” until it can be clear to that person. A person cannot “see” what it says until they go through experiential learning, whether beforehand in their own history, beforehand in some dedicated way (e.g. a course like one of those above), or concurrently regarding that particular text.
Yes. All the evidence suggests that my brain was not, until recently, in a place where I could actually have put those Trollbabe instructions into practice, without smuggling in a bunch of assumptions that turned the whole thing into something *entirely* different, even contradictory to what it was supposed to be.