Here are some of the games I played at The Happening! I’ve pulled these instances together in hopes of making a point about what it means to play a character.

Feed, with Mika, Jerry, and Renee (me as GM)

I organized this session, having owned the game since it was published, and generally always interested in playing, but at the right moments, never remembering that I had it.

The game requires extensive preparation, including the Strain defining vampirism, a shared situation or context, and a lot of development for NPCs and entities provided by the players via character creation. I feel a certain sympathy for those who’ve struggled with Sorcerer over the years, as this game is clearly directly derived therefrom and uses the same procedures and concepts … which are more demanding than I appreciate from inside my own design.

Briefly, my Strain utterly defies pop culture vampirism as it’s developed for the past forty-five years, as I’m inspired primarily by the films Martin (1977) and The Hunger (1983). It’s explicitly based on branding, faddish tech start-ups, cheap-heat celebrity, and alleged self-help which strokes the egos of the rich. I set play in affluent sectors of Southern California, including some interlaced organizations of those types.

If I may say so, this was a bitch to set up – fun, and easy in concept to the point of fury, but also a lot of clicking around demographics and making up weirdly cool names. Ordinarily, that’s all I’d have to do until I see the player-characters, but in this case, I had to get characters partly prepared too. This is what I provided to the players – the procedure is that you make up people first and then vampirize them by changing a few traits, so I decided to let them do that. But even so, that means I had to provide a zillion NPCs, whether individual or collective, with their own traits. It would be one thing to do it with content provided by the players, but it’s much another to do it all yourself from scratch.

But this post is supposed to be about play, and that’s part of my point: preparation is not play. All of that effort (done right or centered too much on me, in this case) is not itself making play nor guaranteeing it. I recommend Greg’s post Eaten taboos regarding the broken notion that perfect preparation = perfect play.

This game illustrates the point well because the bulk of play concerns the highly structured traits, cross-character triggering, internal and external conflict, dynamic scores. see the numbers move around, identify those events and decisions which you do, inner self + transformation

So, is that “my character?” No, it isn’t. My character is what happens when I make decisions in this context, which are not themselves mandated. It includes where they go, what they say, whether they feed and if so upon whom and how much, and which traits (human or vampiric) I try hard to preserve or even merely to express.

I point specifically to the fact that one may have a vampiric trait triggered by another player, to struggle against, but may also simply play a vampiric trait as the active response or impetus on its own, as an ordinary action. You’re playing a character in an addicted state, which includes both the bad and the good … not merely the good (you the player) as threatened by the bad (GM and other players). Playing like that would be virtue signaling and misery porn, whereas playing like I’m describing it is actual and active.

I continue to struggle with useful vocabulary for the critical interaction between all those “outside and inside the lines” aspects of personal character play and the external situation (shared context and content). But that’s what I’m talking about, because one does not “play my character” without it or by treating it generically.

Traveller, with Greg, Alice, and Jerry (with me as GM)

Surprising no one, this game also relies on extensive contextual preparation. In this very early version, there’s no larger setting, only an aesthetic and the details of a single subsector. Anyway, this is what I brought to play, GM-side.

Armed with the above content, almost all generated via tables, I now point to a somewhat overlooked step: the non-directed decision about where play actually begins and what the player-characters are doing there.

Briefly, I decided to make their lives miserable. It looked to me like the Sammago system was the only serious point of contact with whatever culture included the star-spanning military the characters come from, and they just drop off people who’ve mustered out because they get a sweet deal on the produce from the exploitative farming being done there. Bam, they’re conscripted into “their right to work” for “opportunities” and “advancement.”

Wait, wasn’t this post supposed to be about playing characters? Yes, and again, don’t let the absolutely necessary GM-side preparation described above distract you from it. No matter how elaborate or careful (and this time, I greatly improved my understanding of the planet and encounter tables), it is not sufficient just to do it and show it off, see this thing I prepared, see that thing I prepared, this is what this one means, this is what that one means …

Similarly, the players are bringing their lifepath context, adverse circumstances, otherwise no structural characterization at all. Internal/among themselves conflicts are emergent and unmentioned. In this case, for reasons, we included full character creation in our session. (Two of them are shared here; I can’t find the third)

The procedures differ from Feed’s (and Sorcerer’s) in that the GM preparation isn’t concerned with who the player-characters might be; e.g., there are few if any NPCs for the GM to play who arrive on a player-character’s sheet. Please see my post Situated characters for a breakdown of how created characters relate to GM-played situations.

However, play includes a similar role of GMing regarding the things which surround the characters. It needs an interface based on their initial actions and rolls, e.g., in our game, two of the characters used Admin to figure out just how badly they were screwed and how at least to put in the applications which might get them out of there in months rather than years, and the third character did not.

Then (finally, the point), it’s about how the characters respond to it, in shared adversity and – basically – with very few ways out. Play is straightforwardly as much of a pressure-cooker as the cross-player instigation of vampiric traits is in playing Feed.

In our case, the first day at work, they had to deal with a herd of the big herbivores, which led us into a combat altogether as stressful – if rather more sweaty and manure-stinking – as a firefight. Which is all very well as far as a set-piece goes, or rather what evolved into a set-piece via play, but again, what does that mean for who the characters actually are?

• A tissue of associations one makes from the on-paper content, but in application and action, not just sitting there reading a static sheet
• Play-decisions which may seem trivial or merely colorful at the moment, but which turns out to be/feel causal when more things happen
• Play-decisions made when the character is under stress
• Interactions among the characters, ranging from moments of calm or even boredom, to moments of life-or-death split-second actions

None of these are mandated by any aspect of prepared or pre-considered play. They are exactly what’s meant by the positive (intended) version of Vincent’s phrase, “play to find out.” Because there is literally no other way.

I’ll be a little personal here and mention something Alice said to me: that she plays up funny and broadly expressed features (e.g. voices, quirky actions), to “get other players going.” I understand it. I’ve done it myself via “I’m so deep and this character is so motivated” over-play. It’s based on her experience with people who just sit there and don’t play.

In my experience, such play isn’t effective toward that end. It can inspire and prompt similarly comedic or demonstrative play with … maybe two other people at the table, maximum. The rest or maybe all of them will be silenced all the more. I think even that degree of success is misdirected effort. You don’t need that stuff. All you need are those points I’ve listed above: to do, to receive, and to keep doing.

I/O the Human Machine, with Greg, Kristoffer, and Kristian (no single GM)

In this game, you play black-ops cyborgs doing shadowy things in service of a half-real federal agency in 2090s Russia. This mission was set in the Amur Oblast, at its capital city, which is paired across the Amur River with the Chinese city Heihei. The picture at the center-left is positioned to look across the river.

The game includes Situation and Location Packs, which include the Amur material in Pack 1. In these packs, all the situational information is complete and also used collectively, available to everyone. In play, participants depict, introduce, and respond to what’s there, but they don’t invent substantive content of any kind. Therefore, no surprises, no asymmetrical information of any kind, no twists, et cetera. For example, the signal that I’m about to mention in the next paragraph is ambiguously possibly alien in origin, which means that’s what it is, ambiguous, and will never be revealed or clarified one way or the other.

Unfortunately, although I saved all our little scraps of paper, they’re mixed up in my post-Happening stuff and it will take some time and annoying effort to find and scan them. I hope I can manage it, but for now, we had our four cyborgs with varying mechanical parts, none of whom was familiar with Amur, dealing with a possibly-valid extraterrestrial signal, a bevy of conflicted academics, and the public-privatized Roscosmos corporation in charge of the space program. I know my character’s baseline array of “moods” included Camaraderie (relationship to the squad), Endeavor (on his own time), and Numbness (strong urge or triggered response). Everyone has a baseline like this and everyone begins with the same deck of seven cards in each of the three categories.

Adversity is immediate, and you might be mangled or maimed or hacked. For a moody-feely game, there’s a lot of map-based confrontation. Although our combat was entirely within cyberspace with the ambiguous AI-thingie, it still relied on who (or what) was able to target whom (or what), precisely as if line-of-sight were operating in physical space – merely in surreal whacky cyber-psychological space.

But it’s all minimally affecting in the long-term. Similarly, however the assigned mission turns out, well, whatever, as even some kind of emergency is just another day, and in cyber-future-land, anything new is just another new normal. Thus the only unknown or developing content of play is … “who am I.” Play includes a lot of draws and card-replacement, and deck-building across everyone’s cards, with very few constraints, e.g., you can’t throw away cards from your baseline. It doesn’t happen immediately, but it also doesn’t take long for each cyborg’s deck to start looking like, well, themselves.

The core point is that just like Feed and just like Traveller, this is neither locked down from the start nor functionally amenable to personal planning. “Playing my character” in role-playing procedural terms, and making my character in the sense of how they relate to what we will eventually call the plot, and also in the sense of what they may mean, are all the same thing.