Play: What we did for a single session with Masks of the Leviathan, a design of Dithmer’s that he facilitated for Felix and me, which I believe is in a late-stage, fine-tuning phase. It’s fantasy. We had:
- A merry band of boy pterodactyl-riders, with names like Zan, Roberd, and Taner (me)
- A dwarf named Threndor guarding a well of wisdom (Dithmer)
- Lamus the lemur-cat, given the keys to the kingdom due to his telepathic abilities (Felix)
Characters (rather, “figures, which can be a single character or multiple, or a concept or something inanimate embodied as a character) and the broad situation came from In A Wicked Age-like oracles, from which we developed relations and the situation a bit more. Scenes are ruled by Moods, which determine outcome possibilities when the character who has the upper hand decides to seize the moment and roll dice.
The characters each have a goal, which the game as such doesn’t concern itself with resolving or not–they’re there to launch us into action. My troupe of lost boys wanted their own island, Threndor the dwarf wanted someone to sacrifice at his well so that he could eat, and the lemur-cat Lamus wanted to escape from his responsibilities.
Play: within the play above. That is, play of Masks of the Leviathan is explicitly framed as a play on a stage. This isn’t mechanized or legislated, but a few melodramatic touches from the Moods as well as an option within resolution to “don the mask”, which intensifies outcomes, feed well into the conceit of play-as-theatre. One of the Moods active in our game was Leviathan (domination and rulership), which meant that whoever has the upper hand at the beginning of such a scene must state what they want the future to look like. This is easily imagined as a direct address to the audience.
Our first scene saw the pterodactyl-riders landing on Threndor’s island–the kingdom was made up of floating islands–proclaiming that they want to take it over, as it made for good hunting grounds and wasn’t being used for anything…useful. Cue Threndor trying to tempt Zan, the leader of the boys, to drink from his well’s wisdom at the cost of sacrificing a pterodactyl. Dithmar played the dwarf pretts intensely, and Zan and I were disgusted by his lust for pterodactyl flesh, so I relinquished the upper hand, giving Dithmar the dice, and he promptly seized the moment and rolled. Constrained by what is rolled, the other players offer suggestions for outcomes, and the rolling player chooses one or comes up with their own. In our scene, Threndor ending up clinging to a pterodactyl leg as the Zan bid the boys to fly away.
Play: The inter-Play between fictional frames. That is, between viewing the fiction “as-is”, without an intentional mimicry of other media, and viewing it specifically as something expressed through the actions and language of the theatre. The events of play as I imagined them vacillated between these frames naturally and easily.
For example, at the outset of play, I described my group of riders as an actor wearing an elaborate suit from which sprouted papier-mรขchรฉ pterodactyls and riders, that all flapped and orbited as he moved around the stage. And then in the play of the scene above, I imagined everything as whatever “normal” play is for me: more or less naturalistic. Until Threndor grabbed the pterodactyl’s leg, at which point we were again on the stage as all went dark and the spotlight focused on the dwarf hanging by a wire, facing up into a fan that simulated wind.
For me this was a good example of a feature of roleplaying as a medium that I used to think of as a bug until I encountered it here some time ago (maybe in the People and Play course, maybe in someone’s post): although play is only made together, how we envision the events of it individually are not and cannot be exactly the same. The reason this particular session was a good instance of this was because of the two fictional frames mentioned above overlapping and changing within my own head. With that much going on for me individually, there’s no way that the same processes were applying and being experienced by Felix and Dithmar in the same way at the same time.
4 responses to “Play-Play-Play”
I love the characters and the game’s on-a-stage conceit, which I’ve first read about in bits of Itras By (where a card might mandate that you add a theatre audience to the surreal proceedings, for instance) but have never seen in play. Your experience and analysis of the interplay between the two frames is fascinating!
I want to make sure I understand correctly. My reading of your post is that the literal theatrical imagery or effects are implied by phrasing and some structural steps, but are not introduced as shared content. It doesn’t factor in as something which one person says and is then reincorporated by another person. Therefore it operates mainly as inspiration or as private processing. Is that right?
I mixed some points up. Sometimes the theatrical imagery was introduced as shared content, amd sometimes it was not.
Sorry for the delay in following up – there are a lot of conversations happening!
I’ve played a lot of role-playing systems that include a curious, deliberate interface with other media. Some of them are subtler than others, so I want to focus on ones which are extremely explicit, like Extreme Vengeance (for cinema), Primetime Adventures (for a certain type of television), and my Shine a Light (for a certain type of comics). Castle Falkenstein includes a very nice version regarding Victorian adventure fiction written as memoir or found journal. I think Nathan Paoletta has tried some things along these lines too. In these, not only is the content expected to conform aesthetically to the known material, allowing for individuation and expression but using a very focused launch pad; but the actual medium is shaped by and spoken of as the other medium.
Sometimes this approach is pilloried as too metafictional, including accusations toward Extreme Vengeance that the characters would look down and actually see the subtitles running across their chests, et cetera, and similar things, none of which is true. I’ve found it to be quite powerful in that embracing the language and structure (and procedures which express them as constraints) can open doors to strong new expressions, not merely conforming to the known works and not operating only to be snarky about their details.
Therefore I don’t have to ask whether this feature was valued added in the game you played, because I’m as sure that it was as I can be, from reading and not actually having been there. I’d like to recognize it as a solid feature and not as compromise nor any degree of superficiality or separation from what we’re doing.