Over the last couple of years I've been losing a lot of interest in roleplaying. I'm a guy that talks about what he's doing and thinking: you've only got to look at the drop-off in my contributions to this group-blog to see that I've been at a low ebb.

But I've been feeling a resurgence in interest over the past couple of months, and in keeping with my characters, I'm going to tell you about how much gaming has sucked, and how a I'm starting to turn it around.

Last year I was involved in two of the least-enjoyable games I've ever had. They were Ivan's Elizabethan SF and my own Space Western II. I want to just chuck a disclaimer at the start here to say that there's really no good reason these games were awful: I've had top fun with almost everyone at both of those games before and since. I'd broken my ankle and was laid up for weeks, and was pretty depressed about it, and to an extent, I'd been chasing the Lace and Steel dragon: the domestic-scale game that changed my life.

For me alone Elizabethan SF was a game where I felt that the GM was insensible of my character's story potentials and motivators. Which was because I'd designed an Iconic rather than Dramatic hero in terms used by Robin Laws, whereas I think dramatic characters are his forte as GM. Combined with a totally different gaming paradigm from at least one of the other players and I found myself alternately bored and frustrated, with a constant undercurrent of confusion as to what the whole thing was about.

The Space Western II was a sand-box where I'd given the players no real toys, and precious little by way of story seeds. I blundered at every turn trying to figure out what was interesting and relevant. It was without any doubt my worst outing as GM ever.

Both of these games wrapped with my spirits at a very low ebb; particularly Space Western II. I think that if I could realistically have written off the play-group of either game as untenable or deeply flawed, that I would have felt better about both games. As stated, nothing could be further from the case, with all players in both games having better than solid reputations around Wellington, and all but two having demonstrated their excellence to me previously. I felt at the time that I had been the kryptonite of both games - sucking the life from them.

Ivan's current game then started up "Big Honkin' Spaceship" - imagined by me as a larger-than life tale of diplomacy and intrigue... where the first three sessions were dominated by one player's commercial wranglings and the focus of another on minutiae of no interest to me. I should have seen my inability to click with any of the other players' character ideas and head-butting with the GM as the critical warning signs they were. I crashed and burned out of the game, which has gone on with other players to be an enduring success.

Coming from the thoroughly enjoyable romp that had been Dale's Warhammer Fantasy game, I couldn't reconcile this image of myself as the destroyer of gaming fun and went into substantive hibernation. I emerged for Fright Night, Post-box Con and KapCon, but my heart just wasn't in it.

To be continued...

Lotta people been talking about how to use Google Wave for RPG play, e.g. Ars Technica, At Will.

Getting the most attention is Will Hindmarch's piece. Will proposes a model where the in-game content is developed in parallel to the out-of-game content, and edited to determine a "final" version of the scene fiction before moving on. The in-game content in his model comes out like a script.

It seems to me that there's something unrecognized in Will's piece, and that I haven't seen in discussion anywhere so far. This model, for the first time, shows how RPGs can produce content.

Most "artforms" (yes, I know, just roll with it) are all about production - the night in the theatre, the painting on the wall, the photograph on Flickr.

RPGs, however, struggle massively to derive any kind of productive element from their play experience. At the end of a game, there's pretty much nothing to show for it - a bunch of ancillary content maybe (maps, handouts), but nothing solid that captures the core of what was done.

Yes, there are exceptions to that. Being able to tell a cool story about your character is of course a kind of production, but it doesn't extend beyond the self like other kinds of production do. Some games do produce solid content - but that's usually by massive post-hoc effort e.g. Craig Oxbrow's Watch House. Podcast games kinda scratch around this but again that's mostly about play-as-content rather than generated-fiction-as-content.

The closest we've seen so far is the in-character channel of online play, where the fiction develops through forum-based back-and forth (see also the online RP form in general). However, even here I think there's a gamechanging shift in the Wave model, and that's the fact that Waves can be edited throughout their length. This means that the content that emerges from play can be produced and developed out of sequence. That small change in input capacity results in a huge shift in how content can be treated by participants.

So I think Wave is a huge deal. What we've stumbled on is a collaborative machine for both story-playing and story-making. At the moment everyone's hacking around with it to make it optimal for story-playing, but you can expect exploration of the story-making side soon enough. In fact, I see a whole different model of play on the horizon, one in which the goal of the play group - can I stir some trouble and say the creative agenda? - is to create a story that will be enjoyed by other people.

Exciting times!

(Oh yeah - no-one's given me a wave invite yet so don't bother asking me for one... I haven't played on it yet myself!)

I have written a few posts on Skill Challenges here on gametime and after more experience with them and reading over the DMG2 I think I can now start formulating some useful tips for using them.

( Transparency and Success/Milestones )

D&Ders seem to read the Skill Challenge rules as meaning that once one has started that the game doesn't go anywhere until its completed. This makes them feel like a judder bar of mechanics and stunted focus. This need not be true. If you keep Skill Challenges less transparent, call for them at the right times and apply open milestones, then not only are they smooth to integrate into play but they give a lot of leeway to reflect the course of play organically. This the allows Skill Challenges to benefit the game.

Recently I have been taking a lot of interest in dungeon crawling. This was spurred by the fact that the two introductory modules for AD&D1e and D&D3e (Village of Hommlet and Sunless Citadel) are considered relatively fondly, yet the introductory module for D&D4e (Keep of the Shadowfell) is not.

First, let me just say that Keep of the Shadowfell is not a great adventure. However, leaving emotions aside, on reading all three together I have to admit that it is better than either of its predecessors. The story of all three are similar, yet Keep of the Shadowfell is more coherent and dynamic. Those parts that shine in the earlier modules are reflected in KotS. KotS has a pretty decent town with base intrigue and spies. KotS has a monster sidekick NPC and a sinster bad guy in the basement.

At a loss, I have been trying to work out what may have changed over the last 8 years that makes KotS leave a strange taste in my mouth.

( Encounters v Exploration )

Without really factoring this in, I also realise that this was my approach with my recent remake of Village of Hommlet. It goes between moments of exploration and moments of encounters for good effect, making the whole thing breathe in a natural way with plenty of excitement.

A recent gaming experience has shown me exactly how flexible our sense of time is.

I don’t know about you, but I find that in many ways, long-term games or campaigns challenge my ability to keep track of in-game time and continuity. For instance, something that happens in the second session of a two-year campaign might seem vital to explore right at the moment it happened, but it fades into a fond, never-quite-gotten-around-to-following-it-up memory by the end of the story.

I’ve hardly ever played with rigorous note-takers or continuity buffs, so the idea of ‘What really happened’ and ‘What we need to do next’ tends to be quite flexible in my games. If we were a TV audience watching an objectively real series of episodes, we could be rabidly disappointed at the number of red herrings and false leads. As participants in a game, I find there’s more of a sense of flow, and a focus on exploring what’s dramatically important right at this moment.

Last night my Tuesday night group finished Season 2 of our Primetime Adventures (PTA) game. PTA is a set of rules to help you create games that feel like TV shows. Our show was called The Other Side, and was set in a fantasy kingdom in the middle of being culturally and economically taken over by modern-day Earth.

I think it’s a game that demonstrates that flexible sense of time, as well as intuitive continuity, in a variety of ways.

 

Total time played

We started playing this game on May 27 2008 with a pitch session that as per normal flailed around for a little bit before locking in to a rock solid idea filled with lots of interesting aspects to explore. That's 16 months, which (even with a 4-month break between seasons) is the longest our group has played a game for. It's positively an old-school D&D campaign by our standards. The key to keeping our interest (I believe) was that we were all equally fascinated with the idea of exploring the setting and our characters; from the moment we first started playing, we were all excited to jump in with little bits of setting details (a pair of married animated doors; an over-enthusiastic talking battering ram; Will Smith as the Prince of Hell), an excitement which continued right to the very end.

 

Time to complete seasons

I said this game had gone for two seasons. We were playing ‘long’ seasons, which in PTA consist of nine episodes. An episode tends to last until the Producer of the show runs out of ‘budget’ – a resource that they use to start conflicts.

Our episodes moved a quite a leisurely pace, with no particular pressure on forcing a conflict to emerge in a scene. We were all very happy with that pace – less frenetic, more time to look around and explore. As a result, quite a few episodes stretched out to two sessions – which we felt was necessary in order to do the story and the characters justice.

Also, I feel like when it gets quite late at night during a session of gaming there’s a temptation to rush through the end. We often decided to ignore that time pressure.

As a result, a season of The Other Side lasts for between 11 and 13 sessions. Given that we play every two weeks, that’s about half a year. Given that both seasons were interrupted by a month long film festival, that’s a pretty long time.

 

Time between episodes

Over the years, I have discovered something about my gaming – two weeks is the point when my memories of and emotional attachment to the events of the previous game session start to fade. If I play a game every week, then everything is extremely vivid to me – I have very little trouble getting back into character and back into the plot. That’s probably because I think about the game during that week, visualizing what happened, and what could happen next. After about a week, that intense visualization begins to fade.

Given that we were playing PTA every fortnight, that meant that in many cases our episodes went through little dips every time we started – where we had to remembered where we were, what was going on, and what we were interested in.

 

Time between seasons.

We finished on 30 November 2008, and it actually wasn't certain that we'd ever play it again). But the characters and situation stuck in all of our memories, and we decided to renew the show on March 18 2009. A four month gap, and one of the first times our group has gone back to a story.

All the characters were in very different situations this time round - one who's stuck on Earth, another who's a King, another who used to be a prince and is now a janitor. This is one of the benefits running a game in the style of PTA brings: without a rigorous second-by-second continuity, you can jump events forward in time, to a point where the characters are all in interesting situations that aren't necessarily immediate follow-ons from where we left them. That allowed us to be less precious about adhering to a half-remembered continuity of events from Season 1.

 

Our group’s been together a long time

Our group has been together since 2003 – long enough to go through all the stages of group dynamics: forming, storming, norming and performing. There have been a couple of pivotal games during that time that have established our group culture: a one-shot of Universalis where we created a documentary in a sci-fi world; an extremely shaggy and loosely paced game of superheros in high school. As a result, we’re all pretty comfortable with each other and with our creative input … and I’ve been increasingly feeling that as this season has moved to its conclusion. I really felt it in the last episode, as all of us seemed to focus our attention onto the other players, drawing out their issues and problems, and giving them the spotlight in quite a generous way.

 

Time felt compressed within the season

It’s hard to say exactly how much time passed inside a season of The Other Side. For instance, Season 1 sort-of centred on a wedding that led to a civil war, but looking back it feels like all the events played out over about a two-week period. It’s that sense of compressed time that you get when you watch one of Shakespeare’s plays, or the weirdly different effect you get when you watch a TV series week by week rather than back-to-back on DVD

 

Time to finish

As we approached the end of the last episode of Season 2, we found character relationships and plotlines were suddenly starting to resolve.

For instance, Alfredo, former prince of the realm, seemed to be involved in two major plotlines:

1. He was on a collision course with my character about who would wind up as King of the Other Side
2. He was involved in some unresolved sexual tension with Jenni’s character, Sam.
   

As the episode played out, Alfredo was forced to father a magical baby, chose to become King of Hell, and backed out of the romantic triangle – and all of these seemed like natural, strong, and (most importantly) definitive choices.

All of our characters (and quite a few of the NPCs) seemed to make these definitive choices – ones that closed off further story possibilities and finished up character stories.

Oddly, this ‘push for resolution’ didn’t seem to be deliberate on our part. We didn’t talk about this episode in terms of being a finale for the entire show, but all of a sudden there was a real sense of emotional weight and closure to the scenes that we were playing out.

***

The upshot is this: time inside games is plastic. We adjust and manipulate it in ways we don't even realize, while we’re playing.

We create an intuitive continuity that doesn’t necessarily follow the ‘objective’ facts established in a previous episode.

Sometimes we play at a leisurely pace, and then all of a sudden we rush to wrap things up when we realize that one of our players is going to be late for the train.

Time between episodes causes the intensity and sense of connection with a story to fade. You have to spend some time building that back up.

We can confuse the real-world time spend playing the game (six months, say) with the in-game time. A storyline can feel epic because it took six months of real-world time to play out, while only covering two or three weeks of a character’s life. There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact, I think it’s pretty cool.

There are lots of RPGs where time is a valuable resource that needs to be carefully accounted for. There are lots of people who enjoy creating in-character diaries and keeping track of events using calendars (in fact, I used to be one of them). But there’s also a joy to be had from playing a game where time and the story that comes out of it are a bit more ephemeral – the shape of a session becomes a bit looser, the experience of playing becomes more relaxed.

I guess I’m saying I enjoyed playing The Other Side, and I’m sad to see it end. But it was time.

I was a bit disinterested in this topic. Like Matt, my main thought on "Time" is "where do I get more of it?". Energy ditto. Roleplaying is a hobby which can eat as much time as you care to let it. It is not atypical in this regard.

What is probably less usual, is that I think roleplaying is not a hobby where you can readily store time. Let me offer a contrast - Wargaming. Getting into the hobby was a drag - thousands of dollars and hours buying and painting a smegload of little figures. But now that's done, I can wargame at a moment's notice. The entry into the hobby was time-consuming, but it provided re-usable material, and embedded its core skills that haven't faded much.

However, sitting down at a table with fellow roleplayers, I rarely if ever get the sense that I'm starting out with a grasp of what's going on, what's needed, what is expected. Every game virtually requires a period of time to feel out the group, the GM, the system... Time which is often described as "laying pipe", and is time I don't usually feel like I have to spend on my other hobbies.

I recently travelled to Auckland where I played an evening of Ultimate Frisbee with a team I'd never met before. Within about 5 minutes, I was settled into the team and having fun. There's never been an RPG where I could claim such a short timeframe.

Also like Matt, I think that when you start to get stretched for time to game, this period of laying pipe becomes an unacceptable obstacle. For example, when playing in the Lace and Steel game that I've posted on before, I was perfectly happy to spend the first 10 sessions quietly settling in. These days, 10 sessions is about as long as the entire run of most games I'm involved in.

My "holy grail" these days are the techniques and habits which can make a game awesome from session 1, and keep it popping until my beard is long and grey. There must be a core set of transferable skills and habits which obviate or at least mitigate the need to "lay pipe". And I think some of the previous posts in this sequence have touched on them:

Push the envelope - don't just sit around waiting for stuff to happen.
Structure your game - so that there's always a way forward.
Use non-linear time - allowing you to compress time spent on exposition, and cut to the heart of the stories that interest you.
Re-use pipe - don't needlessly re-invent the wheel, but hang onto games and groups that excite you.


--------
Just as a kind of post-script, happy Anniversary to ME! Give or take a week I've now been gaming 20 years. There's probably another lengthy post playing "spot the difference", but Old School was last year's topic.

There are a sizeable number of roleplaying games out there set in historical time periods, some more loose in terms of historical accuracy than others. A large number of these games provide excellent source books filled with advice and historical information to support the setting within the game world.

However, writing and running a game in a historical setting, whether LARP or table-top, does create some interesting issues around accuracy.

( On anachronism, pedanticism, historicism and near-enoughism... )

small dreams has always had an odd relationship with time.

small dreams is a Changeling: The Dreaming game. I'm the GM. It has a sprawling cast of a dozen or so character players, with five or six regulars at any one time. The game recently came back to life after a long break.

This game has an odd relationship with time. Three reasons why, that I can think of:

One - it has spent a large chunk of time not being played
Two - time in the game is really slow-moving
Three - it is closely tied to a very specific moment in time

I think these three things give the game a lot of its flavour and character. Below the cut I'm gonna talk about why...
( Read more... )

Lately, I've played in several campaigns, and the occasional one-off, that took a very loose approach to narrative structure.  Some of this has manifested in multiple characters per player, or the casual assignment of NPCs to players to run for a session, but it also shows up in making the campaign timeline do loops and bows and strange wiggly bits designed to do players' heads in. 

So we get flashbacks that establish more of a character's background, or provide more clues or evidence of the Bad Guys (TM) antisocial activities.  Or we get cutscenes that show what someone else, like perhaps the Bad Guy, is doing, sometimes as a prologue to the story proper or spliced into the main narrative.  One of the things that helps this approach work is a certain flexibility and ambiguity to story elements on the part of both GM and players - it's hard to run a heavily planned game when the outcome of a flashback session could wipe out the initial conditions of several months of roleplaying (the cry of "Damn you for having script immunity!" is a particularly pleasing one to hear, mind), and there are limits to a Tunnel of Fun's ability to force the story back onto its tracks.  I've also heard of a roleplaying variant of Memento which took the exact opposite approach, with no ability to deviate from the preordained storyline.  Sadly I didn't get a chance to play in that game, so don't know how it turned out.  About the biggest risk I've seen so far is one also shared by a multiple character campaign, which is that sometime's it's hard to remember who knows what, when.

Whatever the case, playing fun and games with the timeline can bring a lot of richness into a campaign, as it provides alternate viewpoints to what's going on and allows players to build layers of meaning into their characters that weren't necessarily apparent at the beginning of the story.  It's also not a new approach - several friends of my ex-defacto-stepdad's have several times regaled me with the story of a campaign he ran about 20 years ago in which the players split up and he ran the two groups on different nights of the week.  One group heard an awesome story about a couple of people who fell off a colosseum and lived, and worked out from the description that it was probably their mates.  It was two weeks later that the other group had a run of bizarre dice rolls that culminated in falling off the colosseum and living.  Nobody knows if this was planned or luck, and my ex-defacto-stepdad just ain't telling.

Columboism was a term coined by rpgactionfigure on gametime in this entry: http://community.livejournal.com/gametime/42287.html. Mash responded later with New Columboism in this entry on his own LJ: http://mashugenah.livejournal.com/265559.html.

For the most part I have stayed away from the discussion, despite sharing Malc’s concern over the traditional approach to investigation and Mash’s subsequent concern over Columboism’s approach to investigation.

Mash’s New Columboism resonates with me the most, but even Mash admitted that it is difficult to implement as it forces a GM to make not finding a clue always a fun and story progressing event.

Recently, I have been have been constructing an investigative Skill Challenge for my Village of Hommlet scenario and I think it demonstrates a tool that embodies the New Columboism idea but in a way that is practical. In some ways, it combines elements investigation from Inspectres with New Columboism.

First, let’s go back to the beginning.

( Skill Challenge vs Investigation - FIGHT! )

The approach is a little different from New Columboism. It makes the clues follow the PCs like in Columboism. However, it maintains the idea that information is revealed over time satisfying that need to investigate. It also preserves the potential for failure on some level and provides a structure to ensure that such failure will be fun and move the story along on a wide scale. On a practical level, it avoids some of the issues of New Columboism by making the clues malleable but not a given and dealing with failure on a global level.

I don’t see this as a new approach to investigation. The title of the entry is somewhat in jest. Instead, it is more an application of the ideas already raised and discussed.

This is a discussion of in game time management, rather than out of game time management.

Many RPGs include PC resources that recovered on a daily basis; either through sleeping or from the passage of time. The result of this, from a purely mechanical point of view, is that the players are encouraged to rest as much as possible and to move ahead conservatively.

I am sure people have been in a situation where the players sneak in a little nap before doing something dangerous, like the showdown with the big bad, even when that nap seems completely contrary to the drama. For obvious reasons, this behaviour tends to contradict the protagonists of the stories on which most RPGs are based. It may also undermine the RPG on a mechanical level too if there is an assumption that the PCs will rest at appropriate occasions.

The most common method to deal with this is to add in a narrative imperative for the PCs to continue: the GM says that the PCs have only 2 hours to solve the mystery. Though this can work well in some situations, it isn’t a universal fix as not all stories have this narrative imperative and even in those that do the PCs may not be aware of it. Adding it artificially can feel weak and the tool of an arbitrary GM trying to restrict players’ full range of options to make things harder for them.

This issue is often made worse by the fact that the GM doesn’t have any real way of backing up the threat if the players decide to hell with it and rest anyway. The GM often snookers themselves between saying that the rest had no real effect (saving his prepared material) or that the PCs fail (which, if the restriction appeared arbitrary to begin with, will only make matters worse).

This very subject is raised in the Dungeon Masters Guide 2, which I have been reading recently, and it provides some excellent advice on what a GM can do. In brief it suggests:

1. Momentum: Providing motivation for the PCs to not rest.

2. Rewards: Give the PCs rewards for not resting.

3. Deadlines: Set an in-game time limit under which the PCs must succeed.

4. Prohibitions: Restrict the benefits of resting.

These are all good advice. However, none of them real encapsulates the main way I think this matter should be approached: consequences.

The problem with Momentum is that it is mostly an illusion and, though it can be a good idea, it is unreliable. What happens if the PCs ignore the momentum? Rewards can work, but will often feel artificial and can be ignored. Deadlines don’t answer the question as to what happens if the PCs don’t meet the deadline. Prohibitions are heavy handed and unless there is a good reason for it, will cause issues.

There has been a lot of discussion of late on making failure fun and move the story along. However, I think it can be equally applied to the issue of resting. A GM should ask themselves what are the consequences of resting? The consequence should be a real one but it should not be one that brings the story to a dead end. Perhaps it should even make the story more fun.

( Spoilers for Village of Hommlet )

So, where time is important in a game, I suggest that a GM spends time to consider the consequences of resting and allow for an impact that is real but allows the story to move on in some way.

Have you checked out Matt's discussion of where his time went, here: http://community.livejournal.com/gametime/74720.html

This year I've played in 2 roleplaying games that my battered memory can recall.  One was at Kapcon and was a Best Friends Lord of the Rings parody.  The other was a game of Zombie Cinema.  I think that brings my total hours spent roleplaying in 2009 to about 4.

What else have I been doing?  Stuff.  Other important stuff.

Like a number of other gamers of my generation I've started a family.  This has pushed me even further in the direction I had been tending, of preferring high impact one-off games to campaigns.  I still really enjoy games when I make* the time to play them but that's an infrequent thing.  I want to jump into a one-off with both feet and rock out from start to finish, doing something I haven't done before.  It's pretty much a recipe for indie gaming enthusiasm.  It also makes me expect a lot from the games I do play in.  I want to load story significance into every scene and take risks and unexpected turns from the get go.  I don't have time to plod through the satisfying journey of character enhancement.  I don't have time to play rehashes of games I've played before.  I need NEW and FULL ON gaming in intense bursts.

This has, in theory, made me a less considerate player.  I'm willing to mess with other players if it gives the story a kick in the pants.  I will throw my character into mortal peril without worrying about the consequences.  I will roll with my shit off safety.

If I ever make the time to actually play :-)

*I firmly believe there's a difference between 'wanting to find time' and 'making time'.  To me one is an idle desire, the other is an action.  I could spend my whole life wanting to find time to do stuff, but unless I *make* time to do it all I'll have is a string of missed opportunities hidden behind all the stuff that otherwise fills up my time.  At the moment I'm making time to write, to watch a lot of TV shows, and spend a lot of time with my family.  I'm choosing to make time for things other than gaming.

Kia ora koutou, haere mai! Hello and welcome to the third anniversary celebration here on Gametime! For three turns of the sun we’ve been chugging away here in the far antipodes, talking about the international roleplaying scene as it looks from Aotearoa New Zealand.

Last year’s celebratory post-fest was around the theme of Old School, and this year we’re going to do Time. It’s a bit of an abstract theme that people can bend in lots of directions, and I’m keen to see what kind of stuff we get posted.

Over the last year we have had some game reviews, some actual play accounts, and a few oddities.

There’s been posts about RPG theory (mostly from Mash) and posts about D&D 4E (mostly from Luke).

There’s been reflections on NZ’s premiere RPG con Kapcon and its premiere LARP con Chimera.

And of course there’s been a few interviews with some interesting game-connected folk.

Thanks for reading. This is still New Zealand's only RPG groupblog, delivering fresh perspectives from the South Pacific, and we are very pleased to have you here. Cheers!

Belatedly continuing from this post in a series about some games I played at Chimera 2009. Took ages to get time to set down these comments, my apologies.

Reflecting on the Dragon

There was a lot about this game that concerned me. As previously noted, I work in the cross-cultural area so I'm highly sensitive to how cultures are represented and how inter-cultural interaction is depicted and managed. This game's representation of China caught my attention.
Now, of course, "China" is not the same as "Chinese culture" (and furthermore China has a bunch of cultures but we'll set that aside for now). However, look at the backstory's presentation of China: aggressively expansionist on a massive scale, launching invasions across the Pacific, suppressing resistance with "brutal force", conducting ethnic and political cleansing of the conquered populations, and more. The in-game events also included depictions of some particularly ruthless suppression of resistance. The Chinese occupying forces are a an unambiguous bad guy.

Here we are, however, in the real world. The Chinese community in NZ is very concerned about discrimination, and feels somewhat vulnerable. The furore in 2007 about MP Deborah Coddington's article "Asian Angst: Is It Time To Send Some Back?" is just one obvious example of the fact that Chinese presence in NZ society is contested and controversial.

( Read more... )

On Friday night I went to Death By Chocolate, an interactive murder mystery show that won an award at the Melbourne Fringe and sold out with great reviews at the hugely competitive Edinburgh Fringe. (My review of the night is here.)

In the show, guests take on the roles of detectives and mingle freely with the suspects, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. It's an experience that has lots in common with role-playing games, but creator Vanessa B Baylen arrived at this show by a completely different route.

After the jump, Vanessa answers my questions about where this show came from, and about the specific techniques and processes she's used with the performers to create the experience.

( Read more... )

Thanks Vanessa for taking the time to answer these questions!

If you're in the Wellington, I strongly recommend the show - it's an excellent experience. It's on this Thursday through Sunday. Find out more here!

Sorry haven't been able to write the fifth and final chunk, life has been rather busy of late.

So in the absence of that, I will linky to this: a post by Karen Healey on cultural consultants.

Karen (who was recently interviewed right here on Gametime, part one and part two) discusses how she as a non_Maori went about trying to do a good job of representing Maori culture in her upcoming debut novel, Guardian of the Dead. She covers a lot of the points that have gone through my mind thinking about the first game discussed in this short series, the Requiem game set at the dawn of colonial New Zealand. Although she's writing about prose fiction rather than a live game, much of what she says is directly applicable.

Highly recommended.

Hopefully I'll get to part 5 before this week is out...

Continuing from this post in a series about some games I played at Chimera 2009.

Anxiety and Intrusion: Evicting the Dragon

My first game on Sunday, the second-last of the convention, was Evicting the Dragon. This was a stand-alone game written and produced by a small team (two people?) of Aucklanders - Patrick Cummuskey is credited as writer and was the prime mover but he had some help. It was set in an alternate New Zealand that had fallen to a Chinese invasion; the game would depict an attempt to force the occupying Chinese out.

In the near future, China and its allies have unleashed its military might to invade and occupy countries throughout Asia and Oceania, triggering in essence World War 3...

Now, as the Coalition forces have finally got the upper hand, a secret meeting has been arranged of the resistance leaders in Auckland to finalise a plan to strike at the Chinese occupiers and deal them a crippling blow.

Pre-game experience

The first set of content that came to the players was a background sheet explaining what had happened in the alternate reality of the game. Essentially, China had launched a multi-front war, sparking a global hot conflict with China and allies on one side and the USA and allies on the other. New Zealand itself was invaded and overwhelmed, with China asserting direct authority over the urban centres and fending off resistance from the rural areas.

Characters were assigned prior to the game, and character sheets were distributed just prior. I was given the role of Peter Greenway, "an engineer involved in the secretive Sirius Group of scientists and engineers". I dressed in civvies, a mix of clothing that felt right for Peter - nondescript, ready for going rough. Other people turned up in camo; one, notably, in a suit of "power armour". We were all shepherded to the game environment, where the GMs explained some things about the background, about our shared understanding, about how the game would play out. The GMs offered camo outfits to anyone who wanted them, but stated that probably the characters would be unlikely to wear such a motif - in the game, a resistance wouldn't want to be marked as such. The GMs both positioned themselves within the fiction - they would have roles to play in-game.

I was cautious about this material, to say the least. There were several reasons. This was a game with a strategy component - such games have never been much to my preference. More importantly, this was a game in which China had occupied New Zealand. A big chunk of my life right now is engaging closely with issues of diversity and discrimination in New Zealand, and the experience of NZ's Chinese communities (NZ-born and migrant, and their various subsets) is a significant chunk of that. I am unsure about an entertainment that has Chinese soldiers walking the streets of NZ cities, killing the locals. But I was ready to take everything on its own merits; my experience is that people I meet through gaming-type communities have almost always thought beyond the surface. To an extent I'd find that to be true here; but in some other important ways, I walked away from this game concerned.

The game itself

This game began with one of the most audacious and interesting maneuvers I've ever seen in a LARP; I think this moment by itself justified my trip up to the convention. The main GM, at the front of the room and apparently stepping into character, asked that we begin the game by turning to face the flag and singing the national anthem. Sure enough, the hall we were in was equipped with an NZ flag, and the GM held a salute and began to sing. It was an instantly challenging moment.

For overseas readers, particularly from the U.S., I should point out that our national anthem is not a strong symbol. It is little-loved due to its dirge-like character and because it's straight hard to sing. Its prominent appeal to God sits oddly with the mostly-secular NZ society. Going beyond the specifics of the anthem, it isn't a huge part of our culture in a participative way; we hear the anthem performed before sporting fixtures, and sometimes on certain crucial national days, but singing it yourself is pretty unusual for anyone out of primary school. It just isn't hugely important here. So bringing out the anthem is a dramatic move and instantly raises a whole mess of issues - principally, about citizenship and nationhood, especially in a time of strife.

Personally, I'm deeply suspicious of nationalisms of all stripes, and I think a lot about issues of identity, including national identity, in this country. I don't think God Defend New Zealand is the right anthem for Aotearoa NZ. So I haven't sung our national anthem for a long time, and don't mean to change that any time soon. But there I was, on the spot with moments to decide whether I would participate or not. Around me, voices quietly joined to sing the anthem as we all stood and regarded the flag. And in one of those moments of inspiration, I fixed on something that would completely change the game for me. I didn't want to sing the anthem, but I understood from the character sheet I'd been given that Peter Greenway loved his country. In my play, Peter did not sing - instead, he prayed. There is nothing on his character sheet that suggests he has any faith at all, but something really chimed for me in the idea. While the others sang, Peter stayed silent and spoke to God. It would prove a fateful direction in which to take Peter.

Usually when the anthem is sung in public here, the first verse is sung in either English or Maori, and then repeated in the other language. However, our GM character kept going from first verse in English into the rarely-heard second verse, whereupon one of the other players (playing a Maori gang leader) launched singlehandedly into the Maori version of the first verse, representing strongly. The GM continued further into the third verse which I don't think I've ever heard sung before. This persistence was fascinating; the other players, like me, did not know the words to these later verses and so everyone soon fell silent and watched the GM persist alone. One of the other GMs approached him and whispered in his ear, but he shrugged the guy away and kept going, all without even looking at any of the other players. It was a great moment; we were forced to confront and address a whole confusing mess of issues at the heart of being a New Zealander, all engaged through a perfect bit of theatre that transitioned us from "briefing" to "in-game". There's heaps more I could say about the anthem, but I'll leave it for now - as far as I'm concerned, however, it was a hugely successful moment. Kudos to the GMs for this.

When that was done we moved into the planning room that would be the scene of almost the entire game to come. A big table was laid out with a laminated map of the region, while in an adjoining room a communications setup was delivering and receiving secure messages. And we began to talk.

I won't go into specifics - don't want to spoil this for anyone who plays again - but the talk mostly consisted of people trying to identify key objectives and to note important resources, mixed in with some paranoia about spying and counter-plots. It was wildly unstructured, with the loudest voice usually holding the room's attention, and little ability evident around the table to focus on specific issues or adopt a methodical approach. We wouldn't have won any awards for meeting-room efficiency, put it that way. This, in turn, fed into the conception of Peter that was building for me; I found him turning more and more inward (also helped by another metafictional factor, namely that at the big game the previous night I'd been intensely voluble and sociable, so this game probably caught some rebound into silence). Several times I kept my mouth shut when I knew I had useful information; not to be spiteful or because I wanted people to fail, but because I/Peter was becoming increasingly furious at the failure in the room to provide some authority and structure and to act swiftly on the things I did speak about, and above all to engage with the situation strategically rather than tactically. Peter, described on his sheet as "pessimistic and determined", more or less gave up during the game; in fact, I think I realized my version of Peter had given up a long time ago, and his determination was not directed towards victory. I could go into greater psychological detail, but I won't because it will swiftly get into spoilers territory; suffice it to say that we could have fared better at our stated goals if I'd played Peter in a more generous way. Sorry, fellow players!

As that note above suggests, we did not achieve a shining success by (for example) minimizing civilian casualties, but we did achieve our main objectives. The game ended with a short dramatic scene and then a general debrief about the strategic and tactical decisions we'd made, about what certain maneuvers had meant, and how we could have done better than we managed. We left the game area and mixed back into the main crowd of Chimera-goers and all started making ready for our next game.

Next: probably the last post in this series - reflecting on the Dragon

Continuing from this post about some games I played at Chimera 2009.

Colonization and Racism: Curse of the Pharaoh

The first game of the weekend, on the Friday night "horror slot" (which was, in practice, taken over by the massively popular alternative for those not into horror games, Spy Hard) was Curse of the Pharaoh, by UK murder-mystery writers Freeform Games. It was a small theatreform game for less than a dozen people, set in Egypt's Valley of Kings on April 23, 1894. [111 years later to the day was when I visited the Valley of Kings. It was hot.]

We gathered in the small room, went through our briefing papers, and dove into an intense experience full of intrigue and mystery with a steadily worsening supernatural threat. My character was Sir William Saville, host for the evening with not a few secrets himself (which I won't mention in case others end up getting to play this fun game). It definitely says something about my comfort level going into this game that I spent far more time coming up with ways Sir William could thoughtlessly insult the Egyptian people ("wogs", "fuzzy wuzzies", "Johnny Foreigner", etc.) than thinking about his goals or secrets.

For me, this game was a highly enjoyable experience, if a bit haphazard in its final resolution. I quite liked the way the rules worked to govern interaction between characters, but this opinion was not universal. I recommend it - lots of fun. But, as the existence of this post will have tipped you off, it started some wheels turning in my head...

The Myth of Western Superiority

There are some character types that are highly likely to crop up in a role-playing game from a given setting. One of these, familiar from countless games of Call of Cthulhu (Gaslight and 20s), is the upper class Brit who thinks other ethnicities are basically primitives. You know the one; all "Haw haw haw" and "Bally foreigners don't know what's good for them what" etc. You've probably played one; I certainly have.

This game actively invites such portrayals. Its shared introductory document, a fictional newspaper called the Cairo Gazette (find it in this .pdf), includes lines such as "Superstitious Natives Restless ...Rather than attempt to secure an interview with a native Egyption, from which little of value could likely be learned...". (Interestingly, it shifts gears as it goes, the same article concluding with a comment on the "Egyptian political-intellectual classes" and their concerns over the extraction of resources from and colonial manipulation of their nation. These concerns are dispatched with an appeal to the superiority of British rule to any other power, but it's an odd note alongside the first, as if the game is attempting to have its cake and eat it too - we'll mock the silly racism of the past, and we'll also reflect on realpolitik as it played out in the late colonial era.)

It's an interesting character type in lots of ways. The racism is almost always played for ironic laughs, the player inviting mockery of their character. Often it is thrown forward with enthusiasm, as if the player is keen to distance himself from these ideas by satirically disavowing them (I think this motivation is part of what drove me in this game). Even otherwise heroic characters can be played like this, without contradiction; we can admire the selflessness and heroism of the character within certain limits, and observe how they are blinkered and foolishly racist men/women of their era at the same time.

The racism of these characters has been obviously and thoroughly discredited, and that is part of why it is so easy to play it for laughs. However, the fact that it has been discredited doesn't do enough to explain this. After all, racism against black Americans has likewise been thoroughly discredited, but that racism isn't played for laughs often. (There have plenty of mocking portrayals of the Ku Klux Klan, of course, their rituals and costumes do most of the work there; but the everyday racism of pre-Civil Rights America is almost exclusively a serious subject.

Why can we laugh at and mock one and not another?

Is it distance? Through shared media and shared language I feel closer to the black experience in America, I feel I have some understanding of the perspective of the victims of racism. However, the experience of India under the British Raj, or Egypt under British occupation, is not as well-known, and in particular the perspectives of the local peoples are not well-known. When I think of the racism of the British Empire, I think mostly in terms of the people who perpetuated that racism; their perspective is the only one I can access. Perhaps if I was better acquainted with colonial violence and repression in these places, I wouldn't be so ready to play characters who toss of epithets about the dirty, primitive natives, because I'd know the real-world consequences of such thoughts.

It it power? Perhaps it's just that Black Americans are still embedded in the consequences of their oppression, whereas India and Egypt are (superficially at least) charting their own course, with the colonial era locked in the past.

Is it class? This archetype is almost exclusively an upper class member of British society; it's easy to attack and mock those who have power in society, such satire has been the tool of those who don't for millenia. Racism in the US, however, is at present highly concentrated among the lower classes, the poor and disenfranchised. (It was not always so, from what I've read.) Would I play a coal miner in 1900s Newcastle and spin his racism for humour?

There is a lot of weirdness that sits under this portrayal in gaming fictions, and one of the most notable is that this archetypal racist disregard is almost always embedded in talk of "superstition". The poor native is so superstitious, believing in ghosts and witches and things that go bump in the night!

And yet, the most common games to call upon this archetype are - you guessed it - horror-based games, in which the native superstition is accurate. Ghosts, witches, bumping things - all are real, and the native guides usually know far more about it that the sophisticated British toff.

While I've never yet seen it emerge in play, it has occurred to me that this actually changes the meaning of the "scoffing racist colonial" archetype. Horror games, almost without exception, offer an anti-modernist construction of reality, in which rationalism and humanism are fanciful distractions from the horrible, primitive truths that we have forgotten. Thus, the character is not racist for labelling a culture as primitive for its difference; rather, the character is racist as a side-effect of their retreat from primitive values. For the character-as-she-is-played there is not much difference, but one posits a native culture that is essentially contemporary-but-different, while the other posits a native culture that is essentially romantic-primitive. And that opens a whole heap of other cans of worms.

Fortunately (?), in play, the characters all usually die or go insane before that can really be worked out.

In any case, this game gave me a chance to dive full-throttle into such a character, and I did so and had a blast. Without the other games providing more reason to reflect on these themes, I doubt this aspect of that game would have stood out for me at all. As part of the weekend I ended up having, however, it was a very interesting counterpoint.

Next: Hating the Chinese

Continuing from this post about a Requiem game played at Chimera 2009.

Reflection and analysis

There was a lot about this game that was laudable.

This was an honest attempt to deliver a game experience founded in a cultural context that is not founded in Western (popular) culture. For that alone, it deserves respect. Rare is the game that takes predominantly white middle-class Western-culture gamers and puts them in a world in which they aren't competent. Crossing cultures is a challenging and valuable thing in and of itself, and for stepping in this direction the game gained power and layers of meaning beyond the obvious.

This was a New Zealand game. It was a game that could be played nowhere else in the world; it was highly specific to New Zealand, and in particular to New Zealand at the start of the 21st century. It was a game that felt entirely ours.

(Which reminds me of visiting the Edinburgh wargames convention Claymore in 2003, where the Phoenix Wargamers Club of Glasgow presented a dramatic battle from the land wars, complete with dozens of carefully-painted Maori warriors. I experienced no small degree of cognitive dissonance, observing these diligent Scottish wargamers enacting through play and discussing through conversation the tactical and strategic intelligence of the Maori during the land wars.)

Finally, while it was not a game about politics and colonization, it was structured to bring those issues to the fore and provide plenty of opportunity to engage with them. It is hard to think of a more consistently charged subject in New Zealand political discourse over the last two decades than the process and effects of colonization. It is very much a live issue, by no means settled, and one that speaks directly to the lives of New Zealanders, and particularly to Maori (as the colonized) and Pakeha (as the colonizers). Any game that steps into the realm of political relevance for the participants is brave and these matters were presented here in a way that did not force any particular conclusion, which is of course the best way to enter into such territory.

However, there were plenty of aspects of the game that gave me pause.

We who took on the roles of Maori in this game all felt some kind of responsibility to do the job well, and to do our best to step out of our own cultures to portray a different mindset. Also, I think, everyone was wary of romanticising the Maori, of depicting them as "noble savage". This was helped by the game material; the writers made it impossible to ignore the brutality of some of the warfare between iwi, for a start.

However, perhaps inevitably, the game couldn't escape these traps entirely.

The treatment of colonization in the game was the strongest example of this; the narrative that emerged was itself a romantic one, in which Maori were forced into trade with the insidious white man by a kind of prisoner's dilemma logic, with foreknowledge that European culture would be disastrous for them; in actual history engagement with European traders and culture was incredibly varied and haphazard, and many tribes enthusiastically embraced not only the valuable weapons but also the ways of the visitors, including their religion and their entertainments. Others, of course, resisted vigorously, or were cautious in their entrance into trade, or worked to develop their own hybrid cultures. And these divisions occurred of course at the individual level as well as the group level. The near-unified front that developed among the Maori factions says much more about the contemporary cultural and political stances of the players than it does about history.

My character was a "storyteller and historian". It was an interesting position that, to my knowledge then and now, does not exist in any Maori cultural context. Oral traditions were hugely important to Maori, of course, but I don't think there was any specific storyteller "role" in the same way, for example, the tohunga was a specific role. This further struck me as, perhaps, betraying a kind of primitivism in the game writers' assumptions - that oral societies tended to ritualise their knowledge and imbue certain people with supernatural authority over that knowledge. In my personal engagement with the character I interpreted the phrase "the storyteller and historian for the Ngai Tahu" as meaning I was renowned as an accomplished storyteller and a knowledgeable historian; that is, I had no special position with any cultural authority, I was just a guy who was really good at those two things. (Of course, if there was actually a "storyteller/historian" position in pre-contact Maori society these concerns instantly disappear.)

Another aspect of concern to me was the representation of Maori that we were encouraged to adopt. The adoption of moko in particular was a point of concern. Ta moko, as mentioned in the previous post, is something of great significance among Maori. Moko are not taken lightly, or worn lightly; they are imbued heavily with meaning. The adoption of moko by celebrities (Mike Tyson) or fictional characters has produced fierce debate among Maori, with a lot of agreement that casual or un-informed use is objectionable. Here, we were asked to moko ourselves purely as a signifier or Maori-ness, moko as costume with no deeper meaning, and while I didn't find it offensive at all, I was very uncomfortable with it and did not personally participate.

There were several secondary issues that were problematic but not of great significance. I found the choice of groupings in the game to be odd. A gathering of chiefs from three of the major iwi in New Zealand never quite seemed justified - the provocation for the meeting, as dramatic as it was, seemed to be essentially a local issue. It would have made more sense to me if the game had set a meeting between hapu (large family groups) rather than iwi to discuss these events. However, the use of iwi meant the GMs could use historical conflicts to inform the game, and gave greater weight to the underlying conflicts that encouraged trade for muskets; major aspects of the game would have been impossible without an iwi focus. So perhaps the answer would have been to communicate more effectively just how important this meeting was.

Another secondary issue was the use of language in the game. Obviously, English was used at all points during the game, but this had unusual effects for suspension of disbelief. It would be vastly more appropriate for Maori to be using te reo for their deliberations, especially because the Europeans were not important to the main decisions to be made. The Europeans in question could certainly be assumed to be fluent in Maori, but in play both fluency and vocabulary resided with the outsiders, with Maori players asking for explanations about terminology used by the Europeans. More powerfully, it meant that the whole discussion was framed within a European/English-language context, and Maori worldviews could not be asserted effectively. There's no obvious way around the language issue, but greater attention to the matter would have been appreciated.

Finally, and most importantly, play in this game was hampered by a lack of understanding of what it meant to be Maori. The play offered by everyone was weakly informed by history and cultural appreciation. Knowledge of Maori protocol was spread very thin among the group and there was no support through briefings, structured play, or metagame communication techniques to make the most of it. More pointedly, the main action of the game, the argument over what to do with the mother and her unborn child, was one for which we were massively ill-equipped as players. This argument turned on matters of cultural principle and compromise that we could only guess at. This in turn made the argument the weakest part of the game, for it was a dilemma that rested explicitly on a supernatural problem founded in an inaccessible cultural worldview (and one that was of necessity devised by the authors of the scenario and bearing little to no relationship to anything in history). Ultimately we had no way to navigate this argument without reference to our own contemporary worldviews, or the cultural assumptions we were comfortable making. It was impossible to engage with this plot within the roles we were ostensibly playing; this can only be seen as a missed opportunity.

Recommendations

The game was interesting and ambitious but it did not allow its players to engage fully with the cultural content it raised. As an entertainment it was successful, but viewed with a wider lense it left much to be desired.

I was, throughout the game, conscious of what my Maori friends might say were they there. I don't pretend to know their minds entirely well, but it was safe to say that I would not be confident of their approval. To my mind, what the game needed was some Maori leadership - a strong voice, confident in tikanga, who could lead the players into their roles and duties with some authority and insight. Someone to advise on how to represent protocol, on how to signify moko without inadvertant offence, on how the matters raised related to Maori cultural understandings. This is not to say that a game is impossible with a seal of approval from some designated Maori - lord knows there are disagreements among Maori about what is appropriate and what is not, they are hardly a monoculture - but rather that a game entering into terrain like this would be immeasurably improved by a skilful guide who was actively serving as cultural guide. It is no secret that the status of Maori in NZ society is contentious, and the meaning and value of Maori culture even more so. Given the very real stakes at play in depictions of Maori culture, it would be very responsible to have some active guidance.

I also think it would have been a lot more fun.

What else? In order to escape romanticised narratives you need to steer the participants away from them; they're the downhill that water always runs towards. Priming material should work to provide a diverse set of perspectives, none of which give participants space to fill in the blanks with the well-rehearsed narratives that lurk in our shared local knowledge. Force players to see things differently, and they will certainly rise to the occasion.

Also, pay attention to the kinds of history that are being used to feed into a game. The dramatic warfare stories were obvious elements to use, but there is more to Maori history and activity than that; more could have been made of this, to provide more anchors for understanding than war and rivalry.

The bigger recommendation, of course, is about being aware of the cultural context in which you're operating. Everything gets value from what is going on around it and from what people bring to it; the more awareness writers and players have of these effects, the better. But more about this in the next game I'm going to talk about.

To come: ignorant wogs and Chinese-as-enemy

Over last weekend I attended Chimera, the second annual Live-action roleplay convention in NZ. LARP is a form I've drifted away from in the past decade, but I have enough of an interest that travelling up to Auckland seemed worthwhile; and it did prove to be an interesting and valuable expedition.

However, some parts of the weekend caught my attention, especially because I returned from Auckland to land right in the thick of the NZ Diversity Forum. I was, perhaps, primed to notice and consider diversity issues, and the games I participated in gave me much to think about on this subject. Here is some of that thinking. I will be trying to work this out as I type; it will probably take me a couple posts to get through it all.

I'll start with a fairly lengthy description before I get to reflection and analysis.

Colonization and indigeneity: Requiem

The first game on Saturday morning, and the second overall in the convention, was a "special episode" of an ongoing game of Requiem, the White Wolf Vampire live game. The ongoing game is set in contemporary NZ, and this session was a flashback to NZ in the early 1800s. Participants in the game were present for the birth of one of the game's important NPCs, and in principle at least the outcome of this game would echo forward to impact on the ongoing experience. I was very intrigued by this game once I saw that the premise was an early-colonial period where the player characters would be predominantly Maori. In a weekend where costume was widely encouraged, instructions for this game were to come wearing simple black clothing.

Pre-game experience

We turned up to the muster and character sheets were handed out, more or less at random, while the GMs advised us of some of the parameters of the game. As I looked around the participants I was extremely aware that we were a very white bunch of players, although with a fairly large percentage who weren't born in NZ. Notably, there weren't any brown faces in the bunch.

The players of Maori characters were divided into three (real-world) tribes: Ngati Toa, Ngai Tahu and Ngapuhi. It was explained that we were coming together to determine the fate of a woman who had fallen pregnant to the taniwha who had destroyed her tribe. A taniwha is a type of creature in Maori mythology that has many aspects, most prominently as fearsome monster and as guardian spirit. Here, the fearsome monster aspect was invoked in a story of a community being killed leaving only this woman alive, and then taking her against her will as a mate and impregnating her with a spirit child.

At this point the GMs distributed small pendants to each member of the tribes. They were small, plastic tourist-style artefacts. The Ngapuhi and Ngati Toa characters were given small green plastic hei tiki, which is the classic piece of commodified Maori culture. The tribe to which I'd been assigned, Ngai Tahu, were given bone fishhooks (made of plastic of course). These, we were told, represented an element of backstory taken directly from real history, in which members of our tribe had tricked, killed, and eaten a chief of Ngati Toa. This was a reference to the events in 1828 at Kaiapoi Pa, where Te Pehi Kupe was killed and his bones made into fishhooks.

I was, I admit, quite pleased when I heard that one of the pendants had fallen and shattered, so I could go without wearing this marker; they did not entirely sit right with me, and I don't put anything around my neck lightly.

Then, the GMs produced pencils to mark the face and asked men and women to give themselves moko, or facial tattoos. I was not comfortable about doing this. Ta moko is an important cultural signifier within Maori society, and it carries much importance. It was, to be blunt, a symbolic marker that I was not prepared to mess with. I left my face bare for the game. One person questioned me, but I just said I wasn't going to wear anything on my face, and that was accepted immediately.

As we made our way to the game venue a few other interesting aspects of the game became clear. First, more by accident than design, the players we had playing our three chiefs were all women. This was entirely ahistorical; even more notable was that the chiefs were all real. Thus in the reality of this game, Te Rauparaha of Ngati Toa, one of the greatest warriors and military strategists in NZ history, was a woman.

Secondly, it became clear that the three tribes were primed in the game materials to disagree about the appropriate response to the woman's survival and pregnancy. Ngati Toa was primed to seek the death of both woman and child, in order to prevent some future catastrophe; Ngapuhi was primed to save both woman and child, to honour the taniwha and show mercy; Ngai Tahu was primed to save the woman but ensure the child died so it could not grow up to threaten the taniwha (and thus endanger the fundamental balance existing in the natural and mystical world).

Additionally, one of the participants who was not playing a Maori character approached us in the Ngai Tahu iwi and said that his whakapapa was Ngai Tahu, so more power to us. Following this I made it my business to speak to my fellow members of Ngai Tahu. I can't remember exactly what I said, but my main point was that we should stand strong. We were representing real people, and we owed it to them to represent them well. (I was thinking, as I said this, of one of the experiences I'd had at a marae, where a Maori friend lightly chastised me for being reticent and deferential; these behaviours were polite in my cultural background but they made me look out of place and unworthy of respect within a Maori cultural context.) My short comments were happily accepted by those around me, and in fact sparked a discussion over how we would present ourselves in the face of our rivals and enemies in the other tribal groupings.

My assigned character was a "storyteller", who was an advisor to the chief and secretly a member of a supernatural caste.

The game itself

The game began. One GM took the role of a tohunga (a cultural role with elements of wise advisor, cultural expert, shaman and priest) and began the game by announcing the beginning of a meeting to decide the fate of the pregnant woman. He also introduced the other trio of players, all white men who were in fact providing the neutral ground on which the meeting took place. These were, again, all historical figures: James Busby, sent by Britain to mediate disputes between the Maori and the increasing numbers of European visitors; Samuel Marsden, the first missionary to NZ; and Captain John Stewart, who in real history would go on to help Te Rauparaha avenge the Ngati Toa defeat at Kaiapoi and capture Ngai Tahu chief Te Maiharanui. Te Maiharanui was another character in the game, played as noted earlier by a woman. I should also note here that the player of Samuel Marsden was the Maori player who had approached us earlier.

It was obvious that all participants were sincere in their efforts to honour the Maori they represented. Everyone was trying very hard to stand strong, and to engage in some level of cultural immersion.

The theme of colonization was extremely strong in the game. It was virtually unmentioned in the pregame materials and discussion, but the events of the game foregrounded it by sitting three figures from colonial days at the table. Additionally, it became apparent that the colonisation of New Zealand was intended to be at issue in the game, primarily through the trade in firearms which was a point of action for several characters and which, historically, had a huge impact on NZ history by empowering some iwi over others.

Even accounting for these in-game prompts, however, my impression was that the colonial theme was irresistible in play on all sides. A great deal of time was spent by Maori players arguing forcefully that their world view was not for sale and would not be abandoned, and that trade with the European visitors would end poorly. Direct arguments with the European players were frequent. Often these took the form where the European player would explain the benefits of engaging with them, and the Maori player would vigorously refute those benefits.

There was another curious note: a number of times Maori players asked the Europeans to explain the meaning of some of their terminology. This was an interesting ploy as far as it went, but it would have been particularly nice if the device had been used to show how the two worldviews were different; instead, it seemed in practice to simply indicate that the Maori questioner was ignorant and needed to have a term explained to them.

Discussion of the ostensible purpose of the gathering, the fate of the woman and her unborn child, did not proceed very far. Essentially the three tribes presented their expectations, and when it was apparent there was no obvious way to resolve the difference, discussion stalled. The three chiefs met with the woman and tohunga in private and continued discussion, while outside the others devised arguments as to why their approach to the problem was the best one. However, these were not founded on a shared metaphysic and so did not carry much argumentative weight. Meanwhile, the European characters tried to win us over to trade, Christianity, and the benefits of engagement.

This was the way the first half of the game went. The second half began when an omen of death was seen in the meeting house (a piwakawaka, or fantail; if the small bird enters a house it is taken as a sign that someone in the house will soon die - this customary interpretation is widely known even among pakeha New Zealanders). Soon after, some players began to push their hidden agendas, and the scale of the conflict escalated swiftly into a large battle with substantial supernatural activity. Throughout this, I had my character sit crosslegged, watching but not participating. (One of the other players noted this with amused approval, saying it was very Parihaka of me, which I thought was an excellent comment to make!)

After the main pieces of action had been resolved, we came together and the GMs discussed with us what had happened, what hidden information there had been, what was based on real history and what was invented, and where this would impact on the events in their ongoing Requiem game. And then the game was ended.

Next: why this game was great, and why it bothered me