I have tried to play RPGs-by-post on maybe half a dozen occasions. I’ve never stuck with them for more than a few weeks. A few have had the issue with disparate post volume, a few just haven’t been very good, but every single one of them suffered from the problem of interiority and how/when it got expressed.
For the most part, I presumed (and desired) that those games would proceed along the same lines as a typical tabletop game. GM would ask what we do, we tell them, maybe some dice get tossed, they respond, etc. It’d all be reasonably succinct with modest e-mails shot back-and-forth, maybe a bit of lag for folks who weren’t by a computer all day.
What actually happened, though, was that because we never really talked about it in advance, I always ended up with a mismatch between my descriptive but reasonably succinct descriptions of words or actions and one or two other posters’ deep and analytical postings about how their characters felt about what they were doing. Pretend this is all via email or text:
GM: “Jim, the Romulan pulls a disruptor on your Cadet, what do you do?”
Me: “I throw my hands up and say “Whoah, whoah, easy there, friend, we’re stranded here just like you. I look to the Ensign to back me up.”
Ensign’s Player: “The Ensign’s eyes narrow. It had been a full two decades since she’d seen a Romulan, but she’d never forget that arrogant sneer, the martial bearing. Her rational mind recognized that this terrified and bleeding uhlon was as far from Commander Tomalok as she was from Captain Picard, but she couldn’t help but see her burning colony reflected in his eyes. She gritted her teeth, casting her glance around for a phaser, and, seeing none, she resolved that she’d use the enemy’s own disruptor to kill him. It wouldn’t be easy, she’d need to bide her time, get him to trust her, or at least let his guard down, but with the Cadet’s help, and a little luck, she might finally know what it was like to see a Romulan’s blood flow like her brother’s had those many years ago.”
GM: “Cool. What do you actually do?”
You get the idea. Because we were writing, and not sitting at a table chatting, it brought out the author in some of the players, who laid out the interior thoughts of their characters in a way that was explicitly novelistic. Instead of description or dialogue, they gave narration, a description of inner thoughts and feelings that would not be at all apparent to anyone in that scene that wasn’t inside that character’s head. To my mind, this always bogged things down, and I’d eventually get frustrated that the game wasn’t ‘going anywhere’ and leave.
Now, several years along and having been introduced to other forms of online roleplay, I understand that neither of us was doing anything wrong, we just hadn’t discussed exactly what sort of ‘RPG’ we were involved in. Was it one where we’d reveal emotion and intellect purely via action and dialogue, or would we use novelistic and documentary techniques to explicitly reveal otherwise-private thoughts and feelings? Or some interstitial or shifting space between those extremes?
It occurred to me that this is something that’s rarely discussed in a typical Session Zero: how and when do we express interiority at the table? Is it reserved for certain scenes or situations, perhaps even explicitly mechanized? Ex-Capes, my retired superhero game in development, has a Flashback structure that generates emergent backstory for characters as the game progresses. Its basis in comics means that medium’s conventions will naturally and easily come into play here, and it’s medium with thought balloons and narration boxes letting us in on the characters’ thoughts. That makes it an ideal situation for laying out, say, regrets, trauma, unresolved feelings, all those things that may not otherwise make sense to air out in the middle of a car chase. It takes a game that’s principally about dialogue and action and creating a momentary space to step up a layer and allow that character a private voice. To uncover private truths as players that the other characters may not (and indeed may never) be privy to.
It’s only recently that I’ve noticed designers seem to be recognizing this and explicitly calling out those opportunities to switch modes: it’s present in a nascent way in some of the early pbta hacks, notably Monsterhearts, where being Turned On may prompt a discussion about a character’s reaction to desire and control. It’s made utterly explicit in Hearts of Wulin, the pbta game of Romantic Wuxia, which has a Move called Inner Conflict that you roll whenever your character faces a situation where competing desires or duties or emotions… conflict. I’ve seen folks criticize it because it’s possible for “nothing to happen”: you roll well and stand your ground. But in declaring the role, you also describe what the conflict is: you narrate your state of mind in a way that wouldn’t normally come out if we just mechanized social interaction or dueling (which the game also does). The purpose of the Move isn’t necessarily to change the fiction significantly, it’s to provide explicit narrative permission to narrate for a bit. It’s brilliant, and I’m looking forward to seeing other games do something similar, as well as noticing it in other games where I missed it before.
He stared at the page, wondering if there was anything more to say about the tricky nature of character interiority and how and when to express it in tabletop RPGs. “Not today there isn’t,” he muttered. “I still need to talk about what I played last week. Hopefully they get the idea.”
JUST PLAYED:
On Tuesday, via The Gauntlet: Ex-Capes, my WIP hack of The Between, about middle-aged former superheroes who can’t seem to give up that life. We had a great session, all 4 players, and got through an entire cycle of play in one session for the first time. The PCs managed to defeat a Threat, the atomic supercar ‘Coupe de Grace’ and one of the characters used a special form of Flashback to unlock a playbook-specific Threat (“Hearsay”, which I’ll spend the weekend writing up!). We’ve got two more November sessions before hiatus until January, at which point I hope it’ll be in a condition I can hand it around for others to try and run. Leave a comment or DM/e-mail me if you might be interested in helping test it.
On Wednesday, Stonetop, our ongoing Iron Age-ish pbta fantasy campaign DMed by veteran fantasy artist THE Storn Cook. We’re back in town after an expedition to save the Forest Folk. The bulk of the session was political maneuvering over who will be named mayor in the coming season, and it was interesting and fun. Our GM has been whipping up some cool custom Moves for us, and we all got to decide if we were going to weigh in on the election to contribute to the campaign of the candidate one of our fellow PCs is backing. My uncanny nature spirit character isn’t really one for stump speeches, but their job as translator and liaison to the Forest Folk meant their explanations of what the Stonetoppers were doing (including mentioning that the current Mayor wanted to keep them from going to save the Forest Folk village)had an impact nonetheless. We’re off next week for the US Thanksgiving Holiday, but looking forward to the election after that!
Thursday: Ares Ascendant, a Paragon playset of Martian colonization presented by designer and game-runner Dan Brown on The Gauntlet. This was our third and final session, and it was sufficient that I feel like I now have a real handle on the Paragon system. We discovered a second Mars colony(!) and managed to avoid going to war with them before we combined into one new society. In the final scene, my supposedly reformed tech guru was seen secretly beaming our new tech specs to Earth for his company to patent. No ethical consumption anywhere under the sun!
It was a certified delight to play with Dan again, as well as three new faces from The Gauntlet community I hadn’t played with before. Three sessions was a satisfying run; the game was robust enough to probably take a total of half a dozen or so, but we realized a complete and coherent story even though we were learning as we went. All in all a quite successful and satisfying series.
I am going to take next week off for US Thanksgiving (I’m a long-time vegetarian and will be having a super-delicious Tofurkey with friends), so enjoy your Holiday if you celebrate, and play something cool if not. See you in two weeks.
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You’ll find my game writing in the pages of Codex magazine and other Gauntlet publishing works, including the upcoming Trophy RPG.
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My podcast, Just Played, is currently on hiatus, but the archives are available. Each episode features an in-depth recap of an RPG session I participated in as a GM or player.
I’m always looking for topics, so if there’s a tabletop RPG-related subject you’re curious about, let me know, and I’ll do my best to take a run at it. Comments responded to as I’m able and amenable.
But now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go play another game!
You know I'm interested in taking Ex-Capes for a spin!
That thing you did in the last paragraph of the main essay is my favorite thing of the week! Good on ya!