Here I am with some fresh reflections after another miserable experience. I’m playing Monsterhearts II with a group. It’s a game I know well and have played a lot. I don’t think it’s exceptionally strong on pure mechanics, but it has lots of elements that spark tense situations between characters with dynamics I find interesting.
We’re playing in a quiet town on the Cascadian coast. We are five people playing the game: the MC and four other players, with these characters:
• Victor (me), a Ghoul who woke up in his family mausoleum a hundred years after his death, with hazy memories of a ritual performed by black-hooded men who brought him back (and now he wants to live his teenage years to the limit!)
• Nula, a Selkie from the ocean on “vacation” on the land, attractive and completely uninhibited.
• Astin, a Chosen girl with a goth aesthetic, hunted by a satanic cult she escaped from (which apparently was at the cemetery the night Victor was brought back.)
• Lara, an Infernal, an otherwise ordinary girl who sold her soul to a demon and now tries to deliver new souls to her master (for some reason, Victor only feels alive when he’s near her… literally. When he’s with her, his heart starts beating again.)
Now that I’m writing this post, we’re around the sixth session, and I think this is the biggest train wreck I’ve played lately (and by the way, I’m not saying that in a positive way).
So, to make this experience useful, I tried to step back and ask myself why I consider it miserable. I figured this might help me become a more self-aware player (and maybe it can help you too, I don’t know…)
My discomfort has nothing to do with the “quality” of the story produced (which I don’t care about) but everything to do with the here-and-now experience at the table.
For loose context, here’s a rough reconstruction of what happened:
Victor is half in love with a classmate, Brad, a guy from a poor family who works at a local café. Victor always tries to rope him into trouble, mostly as an excuse to be around him. Brad often refuses because he’s afraid of losing his job.
Nula is dating Kevin, athletic and a bully. Her always-over-the-top behavior has earned her the reputation of a “crazy bitch.”
Lara pays close attention to what happens at school, and she seems to select boys who “deserve it” to seduce and, during quickies at school, scratch a pentacle on their backs so her demon master can claim their souls (she does it to Kevin after he bullies a classmate.)
Courtney, the nagging class president, invites everyone to chaperone a Boy Scout trip to a nature park just outside town. No one seems interested. The next day Courtney doesn’t show up at school. She seems to have disappeared.
Victor feels his heart beat again when he’s with Lara and wants to understand why. He invites her to the cemetery (he actually spends the day at school and the night in the family mausoleum inside the cemetery). They’re followed by Astin, who’s investigating Victor since she was there when he came back to life. Victor openly tells the two girls he’s a risen dead and wants to understand why his heart beats around Lara. Lara seems fascinated and promises to help. To Victor, Lara feels familiar, connected to the ritual that brought him back. Lara reveals she is in contact with a demon, and Victor convinces himself the demon might give him back his soul, which is maybe what he’s missing to feel whole again.
Victor convinces Brad to let them use the basement of the café where he works to do some satanic ritual (classic teenage stuff, right?) During the ritual they actually summon Lara’s demon, who tells them Victor’s soul is held by a rival demon… the same one hunting Astin! When Brad discovers Victor is a walking dead, he panics and sees him as a monster. Victor is heartbroken and even more determined to get his soul back, convinced that’s the only way to prove to Brad he isn’t a monster after all.
Nula decides to go look for the missing Courtney to prove to the whole school she’s not a “crazy bitch” and can actually do good. Her friend Astin goes with her. They get lost in the forest, have strange encounters with Native Americans living in the forest (I don’t want to expand on that), and are attacked by cultists who want to capture Astin. During the escape, Astin tells Nula she escaped from a cult that’s now looking for her and wants her back… or worse.
Lara seems more and more fascinated by Victor, but he, a bit uncomfortable, tells her not to get any ideas because he’s gay. Lara doesn’t care; she honestly just wants to help him. They do some research at the town’s historical society and learn Victor is the dead only son of a family that disappeared more than a century ago. Lara also insists Victor can’t keep sleeping in the dusty family mausoleum and suggests him to squat in the decaying abandoned mansion on the edge of town. Victor is hesitant but in the end he is convinced, and they go there together at night.
There, Victor feels strangely drawn to Lara, they kiss, but Lara prefers not to have sex with him. Victor assumes it’s because she’s always used sex as a tool to steal people’s souls. Deeply struck by this, he decides to simply rest next to her. He is definitely developing feelings for her. Lara has promised to try to get Victor’s soul back, and they decide the best way is to get Astin’s soul and trade it to the demon that’s after her. They decide to lure her into the mansion and kill her together.
Astin is fleeing with Nula from the cultists in the forest. The cultists catch up. Nula looks done for, but Astin manages to escape. She calls her supposed friend Lara for protection, and Lara tells her to come to the abandoned mansion (where she and Victor are setting an ambush).
Shortly after Astin arrives at the mansion, Victor attacks her. In the struggle, Victor seems to regress to the undead thing he is and starts eating her alive. Lara is horrified and tries to stop him with no avail. As a last resort she tries to summon her demon, but by mistake she summons Astin’s demon, who now tries to devour her, clawing at the other two as well. Astin suddenly recovers and they start fighting the demon together; cultist goons show up, too. The three teens prevail, and Astin manages to gouge out one of the demon’s eyes and flee, with the demon in pursuit…
Wow. This is not what I expected from a Monsterhearts II game!… for better or worse. Why do I consider it a total train wreck? Because by now I don’t care about anything that’s happening, and despite my active attempts to resonate with something that interests me, the elements I try to connect with fizzle out soon after. It’s not simply that “the story” is going in a direction I don’t like. That’s rarely an issue for me, since I’m trying more and more to detach from the idea of “a story” when I role-play (actually is something I’m trying to do when I engage with any medium, in the sense of a Story curated and edited to fit pre-set structures and tropes).
No, I think the problem for me is the absence of resonant elements and authenticity in the content.
Quick aside: I also think the current play culture around role-playing games titles doesn’t help. I often see players try to “use the game’s rules to play” instead of “play using the game’s rules.” It’s a subtle difference. What I mean is the experience is much better when everyone understands we’re here to roleplay together and we’ll take inspiration from a given text to do it, instead of saying “we’re PLAYING this game!”
This inversion leads players to stress the mechanics for their own sake, like pressing a button to see what happens, instead of focusing on the core activity of roleplaying and using the text to give it structure. This kind of random button-mashing often produces content with no authenticity.
Other things that generate inauthentic content are the “subroutines” that have become a sad default: the GM says someone has disappeared, so I expect to go look for them, even if my character wouldn’t care. Or throwing in elements just because they’re genre tropes, not because I care about them, like playing my character as a bitchy cheerleader because it’s a genre staple, without actually caring or trying to resonate with it.
Paradoxically I’m seeing how, more and more (at least in certain bubbles of Italian play culture), the GM tries to “play” as little as possible, without preparing even the bare minimum for a playable situation (because of the taboo “don’t prep the story!”) or without injecting elements that resonate for the GM, limiting themselves to reactive responses to what players say, without adding things they personally find authentically resonant (again because of that taboo, I guess).
I’m more and more convinced that this idea of resonance and authenticity is key to whether a session satisfies me or not. Maybe I’m misunderstanding these concepts completely, but in current play culture they seem to get very little attention.
Maybe it’s because people too often approach a role-playing game session too passively, like engaging with a film, a book, a TV series episode, or even a videogame in some ways, where you just press buttons to receive structured feedback.
By contrast, the freedom to add elements that resonate with us and see what happens with them is one of the roleplaying medium’s unique features.
4 responses to “The Overlooked Importance of Resonance”
I’d like to revisit your topic. Although you mention resonance, every point you make concerns others’ lack of engagement + incompetence at play. I accept that the latter combination was happening … but it has nothing to do with resonance, and in fact, removes resonance from the picture. I think you accidentally distracted yourself, intending to write about resonance, and instead veered off to address the other (familiar, and more depressing) topic.
So let’s get back to the topic in isolation. Assuming at least the capacity for engagement and competent play, what then is or would be the lack of resonance? Or more positively, and probably easier to describe, what is the presence of resonance as a real thing in play, or in British English slang, “What’s that then, when it’s at home?”
Terms like resonance, engagement, and interest are at risk of becoming vague buzzwords, no different from the “magic” people inexcusably talk about. I want to understand what you mean as concretely as possible.
Ok, I tried an interesting exercise. I tried to trace, as concretely as possible, where my discomfort came from, keeping it anchored to what actually happened, and I think I’ve reached some conclusions I find interesting. I hope sharing this is useful. At the very least it helps me define a few things and approach our hobby in a more enjoyable way.
So… when I read “others’ lack of engagement” in your comment, I realized that my issue with those sessions was actually MY OWN lack of engagement. To avoid the buzzword, I’ll try to describe what I was actually feeling: I didn’t care about what was happening. It feels like when you’re watching a movie and you hit the point where you realize it’s lost all personal appeal. You stop really following it, you get distracted, but you’re too lazy to turn it off, switch to something else, or decide to do anything different, like… I don’t know… sleep? (God, am I the only one who feels this?)
How did I get to that point?
In our session, a character had just torn out one of a demon’s eyes and discovered that if she took the other one, the demon would be banished for good. All the characters agreed to summon the demon and ambush it. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The demon is hunting one of the characters, so it could be the end for her if things go badly. The situation is extremely tense, and yet I found I don’t care about any of it.
What do I actually mean?
At the start of the game I had this character, Victor. I was excited to play. I like leaning into the disaster-teen aesthetic and the romantic morbidity of a dead guy who comes back to live life to the fullest. All of that pushed me to act: to see where his thirst for thrills and for life (sometimes literally) would take him, and what would happen when he collided, for better or worse, with other equally messed-up teens with their own problems and desires. For some time my enthusiasm stayed high, especially when Victor was actually on a collision course with the other characters. When did all that stop mattering to me?
Here’s where it gets interesting, because I increasingly see the problem was probably me: to put it bluntly (and I’m trying to be as honest as possible, or this exercise is pointless), I arrogantly started to think the game master was incompetent.
I saw him as desperately beholden to his own reading of the rules, such that if there wasn’t a mechanic to support action (recognizing a move trigger, reacting to a miss with an MC move) he basically didn’t act. The one exception was introducing the disappearance of a classmate, which would kick off a kind of aimless exploratory quest in the woods, with constant action scenes of demonic attacks handled without much flow. (Concretely, the violence move “Lash Out” seems to not really resolve anything. Maybe you deal harm to the demon, but there’s no numerical threshold that says when that’s enough, so the situation doesn’t really change and the MC just decides that there’s no way a single dice roll kills the demon, so of course it can’t be enough. “When would it be enough, you ask? I’ll feel it…”)
My issue, though, is that I probably had expectations about how the MC and the other players should play. In my head I kept asking myself, “Why is that player saying their character randomly goes into the woods at night to look for that classmate she doesn’t even care about? They must think they have to because it’s the GM’s quest! And why is the GM never using the demon’s Strings on the Infernal to push her to do horrible things? I want to see how the Infernal reacts to that!”
Maybe “expectations” is the wrong term here but, basically, I started to see the situation as inauthentic and not believable, so why was I supposed to engage with it?
I definitely have to admit a lack of honesty on my part toward the rest of my group, because I chose to drag myself along and keep playing even though I was completely uninterested, instead of just speaking up about it. The group’s quiet social pressure and the idea that I might blow up and sink the game pushed me to keep playing, and my own experience got worse and worse.
If by resonance we mean something that drives you to act, then I agree with you that resonance was completely out of the picture, and the problems arose well before that.
Here’s what I’m thinking, and although it may seem like “why not both” and “split the difference,” my conclusion is characteristically harsh. I’m basing it on my own experience as a player in Monsterhearts, also playing a Ghoul as it happens (see the title tag here for the posts). Your description of play is essentially identical to mine.
I don’t see any reason to question your perception of the GM’s and other players’ activity. I even think that people who are otherwise committed to play, and perhaps as excited as you about their characters and their potential, may be thrown off their stride and into murky, frantic non-play with this game. It doesn’t have to happen, but I have been looking at people’s attempts with it, including my own (as player), and the result seems suspiciously similar over and over. Someone gets confused about events, basic situational content, or mechanics, or some combination, and when one person’s confused, everyone else’s play apparently goes awry as well. If I ever try it again, all of us playing will put some real effort into situational weight and a sense of what “is” or “isn’t” in backdrop terms.
When you perceive that murk reigns, it’s not irresponsible, selfish, or blame-y (well, maybe a little blame-y) to lose one’s desire to play; it’s probably correctly assessing the state of affairs. Your exercise of assuming or sharing the responsibility is admirable in its generosity but maybe a bit too much so.
Regardless (since I wasn’t there and cannot say), the last thing I’ll bring is the suggestion that “speaking up about it,” once things have hit this level of not playing, is not really a solution. It’s socially good or useful, perhaps, but it’s not going to bring play into function.
Totally agree with your last point. In fact, by ‘speaking up about it’ I meant something more like: “Sorry guys, I’ve kind of lost interest in playing. I’m fine, I’d just like to quit, no hard feelings” without any intention of trying to ‘fix’ this game with these people, which I’d actually see as a bit paternalistic on my part.