Four Games

I got four games about love submitted to my contest:
"a very loose interpretation of the wikipedia article on greek words for love," a "roll vs. GM's target" system.
"Beneath the Honeysuckle," a surprisingly gay Arthurian romance game from the specific scene structure attribute manipulation school of Bliss Stage and My Life With Master.
"Romantic Comedy" a game in the style of Archipelagio.
"A Breath of the Heart" in jeepform style.

I will be posting my readings and reactions about the games over the next week.

Contest Entry: a very loose interpretation of the wikipedia article on greek words for love

For most of these, I'm going to rely on quotes from the text, but this one is short enough that I'm just going to quote it in full. If the author minds, I'm sure he'll tell me.

Each character starts with five traits, rated from 1 to 5, with each value being used once and only once.

Agape - Roll Agape whenever you're trying to do something that would inflict suffering or badness onto yourself, for another person's benefit. The GM rolls your Agape whenever you're inflicting suffering or badness on another for your own benefit.
Eros - Roll Eros whenever you are acting on romantic love, or sensual desire. The GM rolls Eros whenever you are acting against someone you find beautiful, or sexually attractive, or doing something extremely unpleasant.
Philia - Roll Philia whenever you are acting to benefit your friends, or community. The GM rolls your Philia when you're acting against friends or community.
Storge - Roll Eros whenever you are acting to benefit somebody in your family. The GM rolls your Storge whenever you are acting against someone in your family.
Thelema - Roll when none of the above apply. The GM rolls when none of the above apply.

Roll means roll a number of d6s equal to the applicable trait, find the sum, and compare to what your opponent rolled.

(If more than one attribute would be applicable, use the highest of those attributes which isn't Thelema.)

Collaboratively decide upon a setting, an initial situation, and a GM. The GM decides what everyone who isn't a PC does, and is the ultimate authority regarding disputes on the rules. Go play!

This is acknowledged to be a pretty short, incomplete text. Technically speaking, it doesn't even say what the result of a roll is (well, you get your number and you compare it to another number, but after that it's a bit of a fill-in-the-blank.) I'm going to assume for review purposes that it is "if the players roll is higher, the action succeeds; if the GM's roll is higher the action fails / becomes complicated in some negative way."

One of the things that I think is very interesting about this system is the degree of focus for play (as mungy and settingless as it is). In order for the rules to function, our characters must have a family, friends, a community, and people that they find romantically and/or sexually desireable. That's pretty interesting! And already, if you talk about this stuff, you have a pretty rich tapestry for your character to occupy. On the design front, it's also interestingly baked into the "pure mechanical" elements of game play, rather than separated off into other parts.

There's a split in the attributes, presumably as the author had a hard time coming up with anything to fit into the active and resistive roles of each. Some of the attributes are triggered based on the content or intent of the character's action (that would inflict suffering and badness ...) and some of them are defined by who the character is acting on behalf of. Were I to be revising the text, I would shift all into one box or the other (personally, I would shift them all to who you are acting on behalf of / against.) In this light, Thelema presents an interesting dilemma. Presuming that Agape is "acting on behalf of someone who you have no personal connection to," as it is sort of that universal love, then the only thing left for Thelema is "acting on behalf of yourself." Which is very interesting given the modern usage of the term by Crowlites. That's a bit of a tangent, though.

If losing the roll is defined as "failure" then I think you're going to find the game very frustrating. Either interpretation of die-usage is going to be fudged so the player consistently has an advantage, or you're going to end up with a very whiffy sort of game. To solve this, I would give all players an extra die or I would work out some other definition of failure.

All in all, I think that this is a pretty interesting gamelet. I probably won't play it as-is but I probably would if the basic mechanical stuff (how do you resolve die rolls?) was addressed, even without a setting as such. I think that the things it needs, aside from the basic mechanical stuff, is maybe some guidance about *what* characters do (not in terms of mechanical resolution but maybe just a list of things you do) and/or a decent situation engine (including, as a possibility, simply some GM advice about how to get conflict rolling.) For long term play, there'd need to be some sort of rules about character change, I think, although perhaps as simple as "characters change but your scores never do."

Edit: This puts me in mind of a diagram that Ron drew for me at one point from sociobiology. It was a set of concentric circles which were community spheres of increasing size. Self, Mate and Children, Kinship Group, Community, Humanity. He talked about classifying human behavior as a series of trade-offs between these levels. In a way, such trade-offs are necessarily baked into this game, but in a surprisingly non ham-fisted way.

Contest Entry: Romantic Comedy

Original in this thread

Romantic Comedy is a game for two or more players about creating stories in the Romantic Comedy genre. It self-describes as being related to role-playing poems and Archipelago II, and since I'm not actually familiar with either I'll take it at face value there.

One of the things that strikes me about this game is that it self-defines as romantic comedy but is pretty unlike most romantic comedies I've seen (although I've seen Groundhog Day which is apparently one of the sources.) I guess I just tend to thing of RomCom as a more female centered genre. For example, my platonic ideal of a romantic comedy is French Kiss, with Meg Ryan. So that constantly threw me for a loop as I was reading the game. I kinda sorta have a feeling for what you're going for (a film genre which I, in keeping with the male-normative nature of my society, think of as just "comedy.")

So, to start with, we do set-up. One player is the Star, everyone else is the World. One of the World's characters is the Love Interest. Okay, cool. We have to do a consensus thing where we figure out what our setting is, who are characters are, and why they can't get together. Okay. In a finished game I'd like some serious help in this part of the process, because I can see it taking a long time without a pretty focused technique set to get to the point and to play. Maybe that's part of the fun? I dunno.

Then we play the game in scenes. We take turns with scene framing, and the World players do a draft of characters, with the Star picking up the slack (this is pretty interesting to me.) I'm not sure who starts the draft, but again this seems like a process that's going to take a fair amount of time without a clear benefit. Is there an advantage to not just having it be "play the characters you usually play?" If so, why not make the rule simply "you can't play the same character two scenes in a row unless you're the Star?" Do you forsee arguments about, say, who gets to play the love interest in this scene? If not, what's the draft doing there?

I'd also love to see some guidance on scene framing. Even something simple like "frame the scene based on what the Star was doing at the end of the last scene."

There is a three act structure that the game is based around. I really like this, I'd love to see it even more related to play (for instance, say that you can only have a conflict once a scene during act one or whatever) but if that's not needed it's not needed.

There are rules for conflict. This is where it gets really confusing for me, and I think that there may be a cross-cultural misunderstanding here which makes it difficult for me to parse the game.

In short, the game I know as "20 questions" is not scored at all like your 15 questions is. Namely, a "no" answer is as useful as a "yes" answer in my 20 questions: the sole goal is to figure out what the other person is thinking of by the end of your 20. Yours, on the other hand, scores us at +1 for each "yes" answer and -1 for each "no" answer. What do you do if you actually figure out what it is? It's all very confusing to me.

I'm also not clear how score rolls over between the "five question" rounds.

Conflict also seems very time-consuming, and not for a lot of benefit (in short, the process of conflict isn't really developing the fiction in any way, it's just this totally disjoint subgame.) I think that, were I to play the game, I would avoid conflict whenever possible and settle most fictional conflicts by suasion, social pressure, and the logic of the fiction, rather than use the conflict system.

Which segues into another point. The game is very time consuming. There are three time-consuming chunks (the prep, the character draft, and the conflict system) two of which are going to come up repeatedly during play. Unless these are adding something to the game, I think that they probably need to be cut or changed in some way to diminish them.

Despite the negative tone of this post, I think that there's a lot of good in the game. The act structure is great, the basic idea is good, and I think that there's a good game in here, you just need to cling closer to your vision and not include bits because you think that they need to be included. I also think that the conflict has some really interesting potential, although this may not be the game for it.

My thoughts would be: Cut the conflict system, scrap the character draft, give concrete scene framing advice, and base the introduction and resolution of conflict not on a resolution mechanic as such but on the three act structure (for instance: during the first act, the main character loses most conflicts. As soon as they win two conflicts in a row, move to act two. Or whatever.) Give more notes about how to play your character and genre emulation. But I'm not sure if that's the direction you want to take the game or not.

Regardless, I think that there's some interesting food for thought. Thank you for the game!