A few years ago I played a few games of Avery Alder’s Abnormal. The game come up in another context and I was surprised to discover my post about it was only in a comment on the Patreon. So, I decided to repost it here.
So, I played three full games of Abnormal. The first was with two players, the second was with three and the third game I did solo.
In the two player game, I played The Horror. It ended up being a game about a psychiatrist who kept hearing voices urging her to sacrifice her patients to God. We ended up with the Normalize ending which basically meant that the psychiatrist accepted that she had become schizophrenic herself and just had to process these voices as any of her patients would.
Although the game text says that the two players share the support roles, I found it mostly falling to me except maybe when The Witness was framing scenes and wanted to establish something very particular about the support character. This was fine and I didn’t have much problem switching modes from “introduce horror stuff” and “play a supportive character”.
However, in the three player game I did find it very useful to have a dedicated player for playing the support characters. The text claims that the support character doesn’t have much to do but I didn’t find that really to be the case. The majority of the character-to-character interaction was via the support player.
In the three player game I played The Witness. I was a tech-bro leading a double life between his stable and routine home life and a night life of prostitutes and gambling. We also ended up with a Normalize ending but kind of on a technicality I’ll talk about in a moment. My character was kind of merging with his car and in the end, ended up taking his son on an eternal road trip.
Here’s some observations…
The game says The Witness should play tactically, however, in both of those games there came a point where The Witness should have Acted Like Nothing Is Wrong in order to consolidate fragments but it was very clear, to The Witness player, that they would actually be Searching For Meaning.
I don’t think this is a problem. I actually think there is a maximizing strategy for collecting the fragments and if you don’t emotionally play into The Witness’s panic and their care for the support characters there is no reason to deviate from it.
There’s also a couple of strange rules cases. It’s actually possible to hit the Consumed and the Normalize conditions on the same turn. This actually happened in the three player game. The text offers no clarification on which should take precedence. We just picked “Normalize” although with how hauntingly strange the ending was, I suppose it could be kind of a mix.
Can you ask an infected support for help? The text suggests that you can. If that’s the case you technically need only worry about one of your support becoming infected. Because you can just ask them for support over and over and it’s no more risky than Searching For Meaning. They’re already in it with you, might as well ride or die together.
I’m really happy to say that both games had meaning and both times it arose primarily from interactions between a support character and the witness during an Ask For Help scene.
In the two player game one of the support character’s was one of the witness’s patients. I had him say, “when you’re hearing voices they don’t necessarily represent your desires but what you fear you might desire.” The Witness player picked that up and ran with the idea that the psychiatrist feared that the only way to truly save her patients would be to kill them. From that moment on the game (for the last couple of rounds) was about euthanasia.
In the three player game The Horror player urged my character to get into my car and just drive as far away as possible. After a couple of scenes of road tripping to nowhere in particular, I did an Ask For Help scene where I called my eldest son. During the conversation I said, “Please give me a reason to come home.” The support player said something like, “Just come home, even if it’s just to pick me up, so I can come with you.” And at that point the game was clearly about running away from an unhappy life.
So you can clearly see thematic bounce here that is independent of just shuffling the fragments around. Moving the fragments and just throwing around weird stuff won’t get you there on their own.
Now for the solo play. I made myself a Detective. My two support characters were my partner and my wife, both women. The horror was mouths forming all over my body. It ended with the Reclaiming My Life ending, so I quit my job, my wife and moved away and started a new life (although leaving my partner behind, infected by the mouths). In some ways it was about the perversion of police work consuming me (and then my partner).
I definitely found myself imaginarily going to places I’m not sure I would dare to tread with other people. In some ways I would liken it to playing The Beast (a solo game about having a sexual relationship with a monster).
With regard to bounce in solo play, I have to wonder if there’s a “bouncy” quality to one’s mind. I’m the kind of person you can say something to and that will remind me of a fun fact I know about an actor, which in turn will make me think about a movie they were in, which will remind me of another film I’ve always wanted to do a double feature night with that first film, which finally gets me thinking about who I’d want to invite to such a screening. And then I’ll realize I never responded to the initial thing you said. I call that my brain “bouncing”.
So along those lines, Abnormal is somewhat of a word-association game. You start with “beautiful” and “puckering” and end up with mouths in your hands making out as you anxiously rub them together while walking around a bloody crime scene.
Another thing I found is that I tended to think of the main action in a scene and wrote down a few notes about it. I did not actually mentally or verbally think about what the characters actually said or did moment to moment. In some ways this made what the scenes were about very clear in my head. And it got me thinking about how we tend to overvalue “dialogue” and speaking in character. Not that those things aren’t fun or bad but how relying on them TOO much can actually contribute to murk. In other words, actual spoken dialogue is a subroutine of the action in a scene. Maybe. This is a half formed thought.
6 responses to “Three Rounds of Abnormal”
Here’s my easy and fun response to what I think is the most important part.
Regarding two-person and three-person play,
Agreed in full! In this case, Bounce arrives, or may be experienced, from how different people work with the same pieces, via different lenses of the authorities they employ. It’s the most familiar form of the activity. (For anyone who’s interested: “Bounce” is one of my few current made-up terms, referring to how one may feel when any circumstances of play change, as a need or inspiration to do things differently now. It is an experience, not a system feature.)
Regarding the solo play,
This is also a core benefit or feature. As well as The Beast, see also Joe Prince’s Swords of the Skull-Takers, my Cathedral (I hope), and I’m looking forward to your seeing an upcoming one by a friend, called Black Lipstick.
My view about Bounce during solo play is that it’s prompted by experiencing what you did at a previous moment of play as if someone else had done it. Because circumstances have changed in a way which throw what you did and what happened into a new light. I think it’s a make-or-break requirement for whether solo role-playing qualifies for the activity at all. A psychologist might call it confronting oneself as Other. If the rapid associations you’re describing take you into that point or condition, then yes, I see what you mean – but it would merely be your personal path to getting there, not the “there.” I mean, that is, if you care whether my terminology is worth developing, not something I necessarily expect you have to do.
Note to the reader: what follows is intense and arguably unhinged. I’m not interested in explaining it beyond what’s here. Please feel free to shake your head once, hard, and move on because there’s nothing to see.
This part isn’t making sense to me, or I’m not seeing how it relates to your other points.
In more detail: insofar as it does make sense, then it’s messed-up. There is a maximizing strategy and it’s reachable if you don’t care … OK, the first phrase is the essence of the axiom of determinacy which is related to Graham-Nash equilibria: solving (beating) the game itself rather than playing within it. This has problems of its own, and it’s inapplicable to role-playing as such. I hope anyone reading this will see that it’s inapplicable to anything we casually call a game, which includes the concept of being playable at all. A good game in the broadest sense, including sports, is not solvable via Graham-Nash equilibria. The casual and accurate term for one that can be solved like that is “broken,” or “sucks.”
Then the second phrase introduces plain nonsense: to play away from (deviate from) equilibrial strategy despite its structural presence, and therefore to sacrifice the obvious Van Neumann-Morgenstern payoff, only because one “should” hold beliefs which contradict them. So it’s a dumb thing piled on top of a broken thing.
In hobby terms, this is well-known to the point of being a core principle. It’s the notion that one must either play for effectiveness (typically character survival, but anything identifiable as beating the game) or for “the story” (the euphemism for deviating from effectiveness in order to get some alleged dramatic payoff from the system or from the GM or from your own ego). This is the 1990s tumor of unequivocally bad design and distorted play culture regarding any given design. It’s basically telling people they’re supposed to play this solvable game (really pseudo-game) to lose because good players wouldn’t want to solve it.
The typical 1990s text, still very much with us and now instated as “D&D,” is such a mess that one might ignore the presumption and still operate many of its procedures, or most of them. Therefore what happens at the table can still be role-playing design, which is another way of saying we can find a way to make someone’s garbage actually work because they weren’t ruthless enough at cleaning away the core function. One might analogize our collective hobby skill at doing this, “making it work,” “well, you can play Call of Cthulhu differently,” as Keynesian policy, essentially tap-dancing and designing in place and impermanently, in order to maintain the pretense that we have a system.
From this 1990s tumor, a metastasis called Indie or Narrative was spawned at Story Games and adjacent social clusters: embracing the Graham-Nash model and identifying “payoff” with “getting your way,” structurally assuming that a player will be inclined to do so, or if not, then enticed. This is widget thinking, including the axiom of determinacy and Graham-Nash equilibria as before, adding alleged incentives (gamification) and shifts in control. It’s also straight-up libertarianism, not even as analogy, but as literal application, including the empty promise of “story” in place of the von Hayek promise of “freedom.” You beat the game and you call doing that the story: essentially a writers’ room muddied by stochasticity and defined by bullying. It’s trash – no role-playing design at all, no matter how cyclically clever or tarted up with colorful content.
Throwing out this entire heap of nonsense means instead to play with sequential equilibria, which is the part of game theory and set theory that includes what we actually call games (i.e., we can play). In this case, along the way, each node is a product or profile of whatever has happened so far, often unpredictably at a level of pure content. Therefore it creates new potential nodes which were not even conceived before. In some forms, each participant can adjust their beliefs as they go along, i.e., the personal commitment to participation is Bayesian, not defined by a shared understanding of a single, zero-sum ending. Graham-Nash equilibria simply do not exist, as the system is not broken and cannot be solved. As nothing more than a final node, the ending profile is unique to this experience and its multitude of decision-moments, and without an identifiable prior understanding of which one is the right one (which accords with the axiom of choice). In this case, there’s no hypocrisy necessary, and no contradiction between playing strategically and caring. In fact, they’re both necessary and integrated with one another; “maximal strategy” is non-repeatable from node to node, and non-identical from player to player, so it’s synonymous with “whatever I want to [try to] do right now.”
Which would mean, bluntly, that whatever the maximizing strategy (that you see) is in Abnormal, is bad design in the first place. Or, at best, thinking that it’s there is a self-laid trap which effectively cancels play, similar to fixating on the “becoming a force of fear” ending for My Life with Master and guaranteeing it simply by never acquiring Love. The latter may or may not be a design flaw depending on one’s outlook.
That’s why I’m confused about your point in that paragraph. Are you calling out the maximizing strategy as bad design or not? And for clarity’s sake, what is that strategy actually?
First, that all makes sense to me! But let’s delve deeper into what I see in Abnormal.
To start, from a purely Fragment (the game’s currency) perspective The Horror player’s game IS entirely deterministic. They roll a d4 and execute the resulting procedure.
The text does say this: “Awaken and Overwhelm both introduce a new type of action that the Horror player may elect to do instead of rolling the die and taking a regular turn.” However, there are no such actions in the game. So either something was left out or this is a leftover from an older draft of the game. In any event, when I played it, The Horror player just rolled the d4 every turn.
The Witness’s moves have an obvious hierarchy of effectiveness toward achieving their goal of reclaiming 4 Fragments.
If any of the cards have 3 Fragments on them you want to “Ask For Help” because this has a 75% chance of getting you three quarters of the way to your goal in a single move.
If there aren’t three Fragments on a single card, you want to “Act Like Nothing Is Wrong” to begin to consulate Fragments onto a single card. (So you can “Ask For Help” when there are 3).
If you can’t “Act Like Nothing Is Wrong” (because there are no Fragments on Stage 2 or 3 or there is only 1 Fragment in play and thus nothing to consolidate) then you can “Search For Meaning”
You only want to “Drive Some Away” if they’re Infected and you’re one turn away from losing because of it. Even then all this does is buy you one more turn hoping that the Horror’s d4 roll will increase your chances at a Hail Mary “Ask For Help” or “Search For Meaning” (if you had to drive away your last support).
(This only changes slightly if there is one Fragment on the Normalize Stage because at that point you’re at a 25% chance of losing the game every Horror turn).
Anyway, that’s the “solution” to the game if all you’re trying to do is maximize your odds of getting 4 Fragments before The Horror player meets either of its two end conditions (you have a 48% chance of success). And yet, none of the games I played used this strategy; not even the one I played by myself.
Why?
Because these are not buttons on a video game controller. They each carry fictional content, constraints, risks and rewards.
As The Witness, depending on what The Horror player introduced, I frequently did not WANT to “Act Like Nothing Is Wrong” because I did not wish for my character to express that level of denial.
Depending on what The Support player did with their characters, I frequently did not wish to risk burdening them with what The Horror player was serving up by “Asking For Help.”
You see, maximizing “Ask For Help” doesn’t JUST yield three quarters of your goal 75% of the time it ALSO inflicts suffering on one of your support characters 50% of the time. That is critical and is what kicks it off the pedestal of “best choice”. But that secondary risk only holds value if you’ve been listening and reincorporating what the The Support and Horror players have been contributing.
Those 90s texts treat “the story” as a kind of totemic externality. A thing the play group should “serve”. We’ve talked about people’s commitment to the platonic ideal of certain story forms/genres. It has only gotten worse as mass media has become more commodified and more consumerist.
I truly believe this is at the root of the struggle inherent in the 90s texts. They simply could not cope (accept?) with the fact that no two people hold the exact same platonic ideal of a story. No matter how deep their friendship. No matter how much they geek out over the “deep lore” of a shared reference point. No matter how many quotes and favorite moments they can throw at each other.
A group of deeply committed fans come together to play “Star Wars”. After all, no one knows “Star Wars” like they do. And yet, when they play “Star Wars” its platonic ideal fails to emerge. Because no one can perfectly match anyone else’s platonic ideal. Everything feels “off’ in ways the group can’t even articulate. Things just aren’t happening at the right pace, the right moment, the right way. How can that be? They’re all oh-so committed to the totem of “Star Wars”.
The 90s text solution was to simply elect the GM as “holder of the platonic ideal”. It’s YOUR job to make sure “Star Wars” happens to everyone’s satisfaction. The Story Games solution was to encode the platonic ideal directly into the structural design so that now, at least, the totem was VISIBLE. Here, is the platonic form, and you will simply color it in within an acceptable standard deviation. The totem will tell us what it requires, and we will deliver.
I suggest that Abnormal avoids that. Perhaps by the narrowest of margins. Perhaps imperfectly (putting it in company with that My Life With Master rule you mentioned).
I did not pick mathematically sub-optimal choices in service of the fandom’s consensus on Cronenberg’s filmography. The Fly and Videodrome did not hover in my mind as benchmarks to be met.
I picked mathematically sub-optimal choices because to do otherwise would have dishonored myself and it would have dishonored the contributions of my fellow players. It would have been disingenuous and disrespectful to simply tap the moves like buttons on a controller. To simply play out the algorithm I initially outlined would have required dismissing and minimizing the other people’s contributions.
I suspect the underlying problem is independent of mechanics, to wit, that a player decides on a goal before play (or very early) and then never considers the fiction as it dynamically develops, relentlessly pursuing his goal regardless of what happens.
I dimly remember a player declaring he would play a fallen Jedi, i.e. he played a Jedi and planned on having him fall to the Dark Side before play even started.
I’ve played some *For the Queen* recently, and while rejecting a particular card (with prompts such as “The queen has humiliated you. What happened?”) is part of the mechanics and seems to happen more often late in the game, when characters have gelled, a friend rejected rather a lot and earlier than I and the third player — likely because he had a particular vision for his (otherwise interesting) character.
Some games like Abnormal or MLwM have obvious mechanical ‘goals’ (or maybe numerical trigger points?) and some players might home in on them, setting their sights on reaching them, fiction be damned (or being attracted by the fictional effect, e.g. becoming “a force of fear”).
One may design mechanics to safeguard against this – for instance, requiring a roll to switch from the Dark Side to the Light side and vice versa in Star Wars – and that may help such players to leave their comfort zone and to keep things hard to predict for the rest of us. But the underlying problem remains.
We’ll clarify a bit here for other readers that “determinist” means one specific thing in set theory, and it doesn’t correspond to the casual use or even to a greater philosophical meaning. For now, I’d appreciate it if people could see the word here and just think of it as “Axiom Type Purple,” and the other one as “Axiom Type Orange.” I mean, if anyone else is reading this math-ic babble at all.
I get all that and it’s fine, in fact, it’s more or less the “playing on purpose” necessity if one is dealing with a design marred by the presence of a stable Graham-Nash equilibrium. But I want to talk about whether that’s in fact an actually-present feature for a given design, and the presumption or insistence that it must be there, no matter what (which ties into what Martin wrote).
Let’s contrast this with The Pool and its internet-associated petri dish of stupidity which seems never to die, the claim that playing is optimized by always including all your Pool dice in your roll. It’s simply not true: the percentage gain isn’t really all that much, for one thing, and in fact you’re maximizing your chance of having no dice in your Pool at any given moment. So it’s not a matter of “maximize vs. thematic,” it’s recognizing that the widely-claimed maximum is nothing of the kind.
Let’s examine Spione as well, in which one might say, to get through the day, the spy might simply never disclose their Trespass and let their close relationships come to grief, until “it’s over” however that will turn out. The point here is that there’s no actual advantage to doing so, no imaginable gain. The spy’s Card Number increases at every such person’s departure from play, whether it’s due to a Flashpoint outcome (usually bad for them) or to a Fate (available if the spy has disclosed, but whether bad or good for that person is 50-50). There is no trade-off between (1) abandoning any hope for anything good for these characters and (2) gaining advantage of any sort in one’s hellish existence as an agency’s asset.
And finally, getting back to My Life with Master, as well as a lot of Tim Koppang’s work, and (I’m willing to accept) Abnormal, in which the maximal strategy is present … but only kind of, when it’s projected as a tautology: if someone says “that’s the goal!!” because they see a Graham-Nash type strategy that will do it, then they come full circle and say the obvious point of play is to get that goal and therefore they’ve solved/beaten the game by following that strategy. The big point for me is that, no, the game doesn’t make anyone actually want that goal. My Life with Master doesn’t demand that you seize upon one of the epilogues as your chosen best outcome, Mars Colony doesn’t demand that you must solve as many colonial-management problems as you possibly can, and Abnormal doesn’t demand that you recover all four fragments.
Now, I’ll say my own piece: that I can’t bothered with this issue. Believe me, I have endured many cries of, “But, but of course it does!” regarding these and other games, and life’s too short to put up with it. I prefer playing – which includes designing – procedures in which stable equilibria are either entirely absent or swiftly evaporate upon grasping them. They suit me better personally.
However, let’s examine the viable possibility that actively or by passive inclination, the author simply doesn’t care whether some goofball out there does this, especially if it entails projecting “this is the goal!!” into play on their own. Such an author says, if they do, they’ll have a dumb/bad time, or give themselves a self-administered wet thumb up their sphincter ego for thinking they’re smart, and none of what a goofball like that chooses to do is any skin off my nose. From a certain perspective this is admirably defiant, and I’m not sure that I really agree about that, but I respect it. What I don’t like is that there might form a social node or meme out there, unfortunately quite persistent and infectious, that “this is the game.” I also don’t like that the existence of such games tends to perpetuate the broken model that I referred to in my previous comment, that role-playing must choose between optima vs. thematic (creative, emotional, whatever we call it) investment.
I completely agree with all that. Especially your point about irritatingly infections notions about what a game’s objective “must be”.