We played a game of Zombie Cinema. It was at home, 4 players including me, my wife, a very old friend with whom I played RPG for 20 years, and another good friend “roleplayer” veteran, whatever it means.
I found that it is an excellent game and that I want to play more. It reads like a 101 excellent “what do you do” when you say you play a RPG, with the right dose of instructions (“the active player frames a scene and decides when and where it happens, and which character are inside”) and explanation (“you advocate for your character”). That’s for the text.
At the end of the session, I came up with some conclusions in my mind.
The most important one is that, although I enjoyed the session, I don’t think we did very well. Everyone used properly the procedure and “did his job”, but in the end, the aesthetic and the fiction was not very good.
I’m not writing that I “enjoyed the session” to defensively reenact a taboo. What I enjoyed is that the game procedures allowed me to properly understand why I don’t think it was very good. I could spot it in how the other players played, and mostly their lack of skills, but above all because it was clear which skill I needed to improve.
Writing this reflexively, it’s a combination of two things
- the way the game distributes authorities with the active players, really the “GM tasks” of framing the scene and “having the last word” on what happens that are not related to the other player’s character, changing every turn.
- the reflexive process of participation in the workshop, discussions and structured courses designed and led by Ron at Adept Play, and playing with people here who are in the same process.
Here is why I don’t think it was a very compelling session.
There is two things at work here.
- I felt that it was difficult for most of the participants to reincorporate aspects of the fictions as established by other people into their own scene framing, or to include their own characters in other’s scene.
- When it happened, the aesthetics produced was not very good.
For instance, one of the players got the card “It’s all my fault” and decided that the Zombie Apocalypse was created by a mistake in a laboratory where he was working. He didn’t want to share the content of the card at the beginning of the game (hiding the card), then used a big reveal at the end of the first scene.
His character ended up being defined by this only thing and “big reveal!” moment. During the 2h30 session, this character was only defined by that one narrative function (“the reveal!”) and was then no longer interesting. He had no family, no motivation, no relatives. He was entirely defined (and played) through his guilt about the laboratory incident. He became a secondary role, entering the other’s scene to express his guilt and based on the decision to “create some fiction, anything”.
One of the other character, a lawyer hired by the “big company at the origin of the virus” ended up to be always defined by this only function (“defend the company’s interest”), without reference to relatives or own motivation.
It has never been so clear to me that those uninteresting characters were the outcome of a lack in skills and not a deficit in procedures, should they be as written or as applied at the table.
I tried to give so motivation and to own character, a 65 years old communist physician married to a loving psychologist and looking for his lovely 22-year-old student grand-daughter, which they raised due to the early loss of his own daughter. I think I’m not bad at bringing an interesting idiosyncrasy into the game, but I know very well that I have to improve widely my reincorporation of the other’s established contributions. This is shown again in this game. I’m still really invested in developing this, which I do by not playing the traditional “GM” role at all since February (and until at least next September at the happening 2025, is everything goes well).
I also observed another phenomenon: that it was impossible to have a conversation about what just happened with the players involved at the time. The minute the game was ended, one of my friend triggered a conversation about “how to fix the game” by bringing ideas that I think can be separated in two topics:
- “Fixing the preparation”, with suggestions about making relationships between characters beforehand, etc.
- “Fixing the game” was an underlying assumptions of the following conversation, following that logic: if the session is not good, it’s because the textual procedures are not good (B), or because the preparation is not good (C). Fixing B or/and C will make A better.
[Assumption about the determinants of a “good session” obfuscating the real discussion about playing skills]
Interestingly, no one said that the session was aesthetically not very good.
Everything happened as if it was a terrible taboo to point at the fact that, maybe, key skills in roleplaying existed and that we were not really good at this specific sessions in exercising them. That topic is obfuscated under a discussion about “how to fix the rules”.
I don’t think that I’m providing an incredible insight here. I hope to make a small contribution from my experience. Ron has tried (and sometimes succeeded) to bring contributors here at those conclusions (me included) for years – and, Oh Ron, I hope it’s a bit of a relief to see that is not a lost cause and that all this energy is worth it to.
I think there are some things to be framed positively based on this experience. Let’s enumerate some of them:
- Zombie Cinema is a really interesting game for anyone who wants to look at their own skill. Nothing in the game can hide the lack of basic skills of the players around the table into creating interesting fiction. To me, it worked as a Rorschach test like “the Pool” is presented in Ron’s “Playing with the Pool” class.
- Once the idea that a session can be aesthetically unsatisfying or dull even if all the textual procedures have been internalized and applied by all the participants is accepted, I think that it’s a very good game to spot his own zones of improvement. I would like to play more with other participants. Then have an objective conversation about the fiction produced, maybe not right after the session, and not obfuscated into the “How to fix the game” discussion.
- I realized that I don’t want to play with some people again, although they are friends. It’s more difficult with old friends because of the social commitment of the relationship during years which makes the assessment of skills in a shared activity more difficult to discuss, especially if we have a different and non-complementary vision of the medium. I broke this taboo by saying “I’m currently looking for something else, and I think it’s fine”.
6 responses to “Eaten Taboos”
They really are taboos.
My take currently is that the preparation shibboleth is the more deeply-embedded, more intuitively-taboo of the two. In the Free Radical course, I thought we would begin with what I considered an easy-peasy, quickly-acknowledged concept, in order to step into the real meat of the first session.
Briefly, that regardless of the depth or inspiration of preparation, and regardless of the group buy-in or “same page” processing, and regardless of one person having a vision or multiple people providing content … play itself was not good play without it being actually good play, which was a completely different variable. The accompanying slide looks like this (the point – the little starburst is its own thing, and occurs or doesn’t on its own terms, not because it was pumped up prior to play):
… and the course ran into a brick wall which took the whole session to process and recover. The instant cry arose, “But, but, inspiring prep …!” Keep in mind, I didn’t say it was irrelevant, or couldn’t be a core piece of a given set of procedures, or anything rejective. But even without doing that, by saying it wasn’t intrinsically a feature of good play, I’d just shocked the value system: both of long-standing, hobby-identifying, text-assessing tradition; and of the relatively recent, alt-indie snotnose new school which turns out to be precisely compliant with that exact tradition.
I agree, overwhelming pre-play inspiration can even be more destructive than low inspiration once it encounter no-play/bad-play at the table. The disappointment is palpable in this case. I am myself guilty of falling in that trap years ago.
A footnote about the democratization of prep, because it really is relevant to my experience, but in the same time I don’t want to give this too much discussion.
The idea of “collective brainstorming” to generate “collective buy-in” often pops up as a subset of the “better prep = good session” assumption. I’ve done enough of facilitation to improve experts at producing collective works that it became a huge part of my main job today. I’ve also done this enough to dislike the marketing discourse about “collective intelligence” to be able to distinguish between marketing bullshit and effective process of collective production of knowledge. I think it’s relevant here, because I have seen similar broken assumptions in “collective prep” supposed to bring inspiration.
First, you don’t “brainstorm” then “decide” (which requires filtering and selecting) at the same time and in the same discussion. Brainstorming is about the quantity of ideas, from which 95% of the inputs are generally disqualified. That’s a normal step in brainstorming.
Most “democratic prep” I have seen seem to assume that you can brainstorm AND keep everyone’s contribution, because hey, if it’s “democratic” in this way, everyone’s contribution is valid. In my experience, those kind of session generally lead to the lowest denominator in which everyone at the table agree that it is inspiring, and a few dull things that no one feels legitimate to reject (another taboo). So, it doesn’t lead to “more” buy-in, but less, because everyone kind of accepted everything that was thrown. And I’m pretty sure that even the contributors of the less inspiring elements would themselves erase those elements from the game, should they be given the chance.
A few of those sessions, followed by not very good play, was enough to conclude that it would take a lot of investment to get me back in this kind of process.
And I agree, prep has nothing to do with the spark from which the play/inspiration cycle sparks. I recently had incredibly inspiring Fantasy for Real sessions based on almost nothing prepped (or at least, in the sense of “being written in advance”).
At the risk of extending your footnote, which you are trying not to do, I’d like to address this point in a lot of the posts I’m working on right now, because I’m applying it in the context of extensive single-person preparation. For me, in this context, it’s easy to get past the problem of pre-writing play, but there are also similar dangers (to those you describe) which apply for the same reasons, and it’s harder to avoid those.
“I realized that I don’t want to play with some people again, although they are friends.”
This is powerful. They are people I want socialize with, perhaps even play other games or do other activities. But I do not want to play an RPG with them because they cannot take the activity seriously. We aren’t blowing off steam from college or low-paying jobs that demand too much for the pay anymore. The context of the relationships have changed.
Overcoming that inertia is not easy, but for healthy play it is important.
Greg, if you feel comfortable sharing, did the people involved agree that, “it’s fine” that you’re looking for something else from roleplaying? I’m certain I can find innumerable stories where this interaction was a nightmare, but I am curious how you think it went with people of baseline maturity and goodwill.
Hello Noah. I’d rather discuss that in private with you, because it involves specific persons with whom I have specific relations.
Short answer is : “it’s ok”, but no tin a smooth way, It clearly passes a social reaction / stupefaction.