Historical Reconstruction as Play
With Cadastre and RAM out the door, I've been noodling on which projects to push forward to something like completion this fall. Last week I sat back down with Hellbenders and, while it was a charming re-read, it is going to take more than some polish and templating to make it worth releasing.
My copy of Reiner Knizia's New Tactical Games with Dice and Cards (link opens in bookshop.org) arrived a few weeks ago; I picked it up after reading Skeleton Code Machine's post about GOAL. I have been reading through it and making notes on interesting engines to experiment with. A few have really grabbed my imagination, and one game in particular feels like an interesting tool to breathe some life back into The Mad Biographers, which stalled out early this year as an unbaked dice pool game. This post is my taking a crack at a revised theory of play which uses an adapted version of Knizia's Catego Dice Game.
Mad Biographers Theory of Play
Top Level Pitch - This is a game to turn OSR adventure modules into a storygame, where players are genre authors coaxing the GM through an adventure to create a bestselling narrative.
The gamerunner plays as an adventurer who narrates their experience in first person based on clarifying questions and statements made by players. The players are a group of interviewing authors who have their own backgrounds, interests, and genre preferences and are trying to turn this interview into a publication. It is known that the adventurer survived the expedition, so any outcomes that point to the contrary are likely to be picked up on by an audience - the management of "plot holes" as a key resource is a pillar of play.
This game will live and breathe on Landmark, Hidden, Secret; because sensory info is narrated by the GM in first person the exploration part of play can probably be navigated at a breezy clip until one of the interviewers decides to zoom in on a scene to flesh it out or create a Fact. For example:
- Describe a feature, trap, or mechanism (tell me some more about what you saw in there)
- Enter dialog with another subject (let's role play this out, I want to understand their point of view)
- Interrogate the adventurer's internal state at this moment
In the event of a more complex scene or situation like a chase, a battle, or a negotiation, the authors acknowledge that their tellings of the events must be cohesive enough not to raise the attention of the public. Each author seeks to contribute some personal flourishes to the agreed-upon Reconstruction of events. Which particular part they get to flourish is adjudicated in a game of Catego
Reconstruction Procedure
- It will usually be clear that you are preparing for a Reconstruction, but especially in the case of a battle there may be off-ramps where a complex situation may be avoided, ignored, or elided. It is up to the players to agree when they are ready to enter a Reconstruction
- First, players must agree on broad, verifiable brushstrokes of the facts of the scene. Who was known to be there? Did the adventurer fight their way out of the scene or did they courageously flee? The adventurer themselves may provide input on their recollection of events but the choices of the players take precedence
- Then, sketch out the following table:
| Player | Exposition | Rising Action | Climax | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alice | ||||
| Bob | ||||
| Carol | ||||
| David |
- Over four successive rounds, each player rolls 2d6 and assigns their rolled result to one of the four columns. At the end of the four rounds, whoever has the highest roll in a given column is given control over that narrative portion of the Reconstruction. We then move into the Reconstruction itself. If two players tie within a column, then they may both contribute to that part of the narrative.
- Starting with Exposition, the responsible player provides a sentence or two of Literary Flourish to flesh out the Reconstruction of events. More info on Literary Flourishes and the elements of the Reconstruction included later. Other players may not "punch up" or talk over the responsible player unless specifically asked or invited.
- Each successive element of the Reconstruction is considered to be a true Fact of what occurred during the adventure which may be referenced moving forward. However, if your part of the narrative does not lean on or reference a previously-established Fact or Truth, then you incur a Plot Hole, which risks derailing the entire project
- After all four elements of the Reconstruction have been recounted, the adventurer picks up from the Resolution and normal play resumes
Is this Fruitful?
I think so! I have an outline ahead of me on what I need to write in order to put some flesh on the bone here, but this feels like a good way to narrativize complex scenes. The key thing here is that players are not rolling to see if the adventurer succeeded or failed at their complex task; players are competing to take control of different parts of the scene itself to create favorable truths based on their preferences.
Everyone knows that the adventurer made it out of the gilded hole! But the romantasy author needs to make sure that the adventurer exchanged a sultry look with the leader of the cultists. The pop historian needs to ensure that the adventurer took a moment while fleeing the boulder trap to take a charcoal rubbing of an inscription that heavily implies interference by extraplanar beings during the tomb's construction. But if they do that without leveraging previously-established Facts at the table, then their narrative should suffer!
This is all deeply informed by Dream of Inkberry's Against Success (and Failure Too) post from a few weeks ago. As game designers, can we ask more interesting questions than "did that work?" As someone with a huge backlog of adventure modules who would like to play them in different ways, can we ask those questions while looting a tomb?