Abstractions in role-playing. My Life With Master.
Mar 12th, 2008 by Bryan White
If my own admissions of nerd-affection couldn’t possibly go any deeper, believe it, brothers and sisters. They’re about to. It’s fairly obvious that I have wasted precious hours of my life obsessively cataloging data about actors, directors, writers and movie titles in the futile hope that one day I will be the undisputed king of some as-yet-unnamed quiz show that asks a lot of questions about Universal Monsters, slasher flicks, Roger Corman and Italian cops and robbers flicks. There’s also the recent resurgence in my obsessions with all things graphic novel and now I am about to seal the deal. Yes! I also have a Crown Royal bag nearly bursting at the seams with a veritable rainbow of dice featuring more or fewer sides than six. Why does one guy need so many ten and twenty sided dice? Well, when you’re playing combat oriented characters whose levels number in the double digits, in excess of 20, you start to need to roll a shitload of dice at once and it’s just easier to throw a handful than it is to roll one at a time and keep track of your results mentally. I mean, does anyone play AD&D before midnight anymore? By that time my blood is severely thinned by staggering amounts of mountain dew and my capacity for remembering things, such as hit dice and THAC0 is severely limited.
Sheesh. Is anyone still reading this?
Boing Boing posted an article about a game that is appropriate enough for my site and also sounds like a lot of fun. My Life With Master sounds like the kind of game that I’d want to play. Like a horror themed version of Paranoia. You play the minion or creation of a supreme character, like a mad scientist or Santa Claus and go about the usual themes of self-loathing while going to great lengths to please Master. Hilarity and carnage ensue. The game is getting a shit-ton of positive press. From Play This Thing:
Imagine a gothic countryside burg, like the quite Bavarian steppes where Victor Frankenstein might have lived, or the brambly swamps of Dracula’s castle. We’re talking Eastern Europe before communism, when science was just kissing the brittle lips of superstition and stable poverty. The game begins by the group collectively designing a “Master”, the otherworldly antagonist who dwells in some stereotypical castle or haunted house or ancient catacomb. This master has some kind of M.O. - discovering the secret of eternal life, rejuvenation, astral projection, or maybe just a nice skin suit, get creative. Then the players design their characters, minions of this master, complete with a tragic flaw and constrained power. Then the real game begins.
The game is based on a few variables: Love, Self-Loathing, Weariness, and Fear. If you have any game design experience, you may be experiencing a form of cerebral arousal right now - we’re talking about a spreadsheet soaked in procedural theme, yet elegant to the scale of Euclidean geometry. This sets the incentives for players to act a conflict of love versus self-loathing, where doing work for the master increases self-loathing, and making overtures to villagers increases love. Remember in Bride of Frankenstein when he smokes the pipe with the blind man? Stuff like that, but in the context of your character design, and acted out with your own pathos.
Eventually the contours of the dynamic, the way the spreadsheet algorithmically tends to move, puts the dramatic arc toward a climax, with one minion swelling with enough love to rebel against the master. Then everything goes crazy, the villagers start attacking the minions, and the fight with the master goes back and forth. After the master is killed, each character gets their own epilogue scenario based on what their numbers were at the finish.
This is a game that lets you experience the monster within, and make peace with it. It also is elegant proof that algorithms can provide context to dramatic storytelling. It should be distributed in collegiate game design courses. Everyone should read this. You can get a PDF for a reasonable price, I recommend it.
Basically, this sounds like the kind of game for people whose blood runs cold at the thought of another long, drawn out Forgotten Realms campaign and want to have a laugh and a game that can be played, in its entirety, in the span of a single evening. Get on the ball, y’all and order the game.
