anyway.

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thread: 2006-03-22 : Mechanics and Flinching

On 2006-03-25, anon. wrote:

0. D.C.

Yep, they're in DC. We hung out at the Zoo! Coolness.

1. Hurting me

Having sparked this thing, I wanted to wrest the topic back round to something Vincent asked me about how I'm using "hurt" and "unsafe," particularly in reference to:

"I want us as players to be cheering together as you ruthlessly, flinchlessly, hurt my character...But I wouldn't use "hurt" and "unsafe" to refer to that....What's unsafe to me is [for example, when] Joshua and Ben conspired in play to confront me with a fact of my own personality; their contributions to the game made it into fiction that criticized who I am. It wasn't a safe thing for them to do. I might have been really hurt, I might have had to throw the game instead of going through with it. I didn't, but I was NOT cheering along with them."

I think my own experiences with Whatever This Thing Is have been in the borderland between "hurting my character" and "criticized who I am." I'm thinking of incidents where I really, really wanted "my character" to develop one way, and someone else—Tony Lower-Basch, actually, every time—said, "Nope, your character's not like that" and confronted me with something else.

In each case, I flinched before accepting (surrendering to?) Tony's idea: I had stomach-flipping, adrenaline-releasing "you can't do that!" moments before I let go—and of course, once I let go, it was supremely cool.

"Hurt my character"? It was more than that. "Criticize me as a person"? Well, I'm not sure quite what Tony was thinking, actually, but in each case, after the game, the experience led me to criticize myself as a person.

3. Specifics

In one case, in our longrunning Capes game, I was playing my typical brooding heroine, Doomed To Suffer, and suddenly Tony forced her face-to-face with the possiblity of escape—absolution, even. I fought with everything the system gave me to hang on to her doomedness before I realized that the dice were not with me, the third player (Eric) wasn't with me, and that I needed to stop punishing my (surrogate) self and let other people give her a chance... something I, in my real life, have spent decades struggling to do: "If you take away my pain, there's nothing left of who I am!" I responded, out of a lifetime of training; and Tony went, "Really? Let's find out!"

Second case, same campaign, different character, either the session before or the session after: My attempt to play a noble, heroic straight arrow—a male character even—except he ended up being a controlling dorkwad to all the other protagonists. Okay, I thought, I got it, I'll reform him, have him let go, and make him a true hero . And Tony and Eric essentially said, "No, he's not doing that, he's still an asshole"—and backed it up with system-enforced stuff that didn't even give me a chance to roll dice to avoid the intentions they imputed to my character. After, I realized I'd been asking, out of my own life, "so if I try to control people, but I really do like them, I'm a good guy, right?"—and gotten a resounding, "no!"

Third case (last one, I promise): Our Prime Time Adventures game, with me playing a dishonorably discharged military officer (female, of course). Her Issue was "honor," and my spotlight episode was full of flashbacks to discover what she'd actually done. And I had some ideas for her trangressions, all about her failing to do the right thing according to her military code of honor. But Tony kept pushing and pushing the character into situations where no course of action was honorable, where there was no good choice: Ultimately we found out that my character's unit had been mobbed by angry refugees, mostly women and children, and she'd given the order to open fire rather than be torn apart. I'd been asking the question, "how can I be a good person? How can I choose right?" and gotten the answer, "sometimes, you can't."

4. Mechanics

Here's the thing: In the two Capes examples, the conflict system gave Tony the power to force the change in my character on me, and he used it. In the Prime Time Adventures game, he didn't have that power and we were simply brainstorming together—at least, not the way we interpreted the rules—but I had trained myself to trust Tony and rode out my flinch reaction to say, "yes, that happens."

When another player who didn't have that rapport with Tony disagreed with him on something, though, the game seized up because PTA's system didn't give either a lever to impose his or her will on the other. Tony and the other player were on the spot, unwilling to back off their desired outcomes but unwilling to hurt the other person by taking away their outcome, either—until Tony gave. But that was not a decision channeled by the system, and it was at least a little painful for him.

So the parts of PTA that make it "safe" and help avoid "hurt"—that everyone brainstorms together, that no one can impose an answer on anyone else—were the very things that let us bog down in the disagreement with nothing in the written system to extricate ourselves. We were faced with a choice between "I hurt you to get what I want" and "I will let myself be hurt to save the larger endeavor." The safety factors, in the end, guaranteed hurt.

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