Merry Christmas and Other Such Tidings

[lydamorehouse]

Image: finished rosettes, pecan tossies, and some not made by us pettifores.

Merry Christmas to those of your for whom this is not just a weirdly rainy Monday. I'm, of course, somewhere in between. My family celebrates Solstice as our holy day/seasonal holiday, but both Shawn and I grew up celebrating Christmas. (Her more than me, since my parents are secular humanist Unitarian Universalists and so I grew up weirdly not-Christian, despite two years of Catholic grade school and an extended family who were all Roman Catholic.) Plus, when Mason was little, we basically used the dominant culture's celebration to draw out gift giving. Solstice is our biggest day, but we also dribble out presents on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. We like the idea of Christmas morning stockings, so we do that, too. All of these things have become tradition, so we basically give presents from Solstice to Christmas morning.

One of the things you will not be surprised that I received as one of those presents was four RPGs from Mason, including the new Evil Hat Productions Girl by Moonlight. Evil Hat is the outfit that put out Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Girl by Moonlight is basically Sailor Moon-inspired Magical Girl role-playing. He also asked his game theory professor for recommendations for cyberpunk games, so I now I have three of those as well.

In other RPG news, Stay in Touch, the post-apocalyptic missive game is underway with a number of people.

I have one friend who decided to try email for the letters and so, technically, by chance, we're actually already finished. The official rules are that after players roll three doubles (you roll two dice so anytime you get the same number twice,), the game is over. We don't feel done and so have agreed to continue through another set of doubles. But, it's been interesting, because we've already hit a number of snags.

I've been pondering the problems with this game, its format and its mechanics. The games rules are quite short, the whole thing only being about three pages in length. There is, in comparison, a great deal of real estate devoted to metagaming and its importance, but it's only a couple of paragraphs. Turns out, META-GAMING REALLY, SUPER-DUPER IMPORTANT. Far more than the rules imply.

The problem is one of agency.

If you think about it, it makes sense that this could become an issue. The player writing the first letter can just say, "Remember when you punched me in the face...?" and that becomes canon. It's written. In ink. Meanwhile, the other player might be thinking, "Uh... I was hoping to play an avowed pacifist??? but okay, I GUESS."

In a lot of ways, this game is about co-creating each other's backstories and that's just not how it's normally DONE. It's frankly, kind of weird? As I note, there is a real danger of accidentally deciding something for the other player that they never intended--or worse--do not like or do not want. If you plow ahead without doing a LOT of checking-in you can end up where my friend and I did, which is where you end up kind of competitively trying to shift the story as soon as you get control of it. And the meta conversation can start to become kind of "Hey! What are you doing saying this? You're making me look like a coward!" or whatever, but decidedly not constructive.

We also discovered that the game is not really set-up well for a forward-moving story per se. It's more set-up, it seems to me, to be reflective about the past. It's set-up to be world-building and not... character driven? I mean, the characters are at the center, but trying to move them towards each other is clunky because it disrupts how the letters interact.

So, meta-gaming is SUPER critical, actually.

There are some advantages to emailing, however. It's really FAST and that's a lot of fun. But, I do think that having part of the story be snail mail and the other part, the meta-gaming, being email is actually non-negotiable. Like, you need to just agree that's how it's going to go so that you can ask a lot of questions, do a lot of checking-in, etc., before writing a reply.

I'm glad I had this experience before the letters I know are on their way from other players have arrived, however.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

Happy Solstice! The cookies look delicious. I'm contemplating baking a cake tonight.

[lydamorehouse]

Did you make a cake? What kind?

Also, I sent you an email! Go read it. We should have a chat sometime soon!

[xochiquetzl]

Om nom nom those cookies look amazing!!!

The game… yeah. It sounds interesting, but it would be hard to reconcile it with a really strong idea of what your character is.

[lydamorehouse]

Thanks, the cookies taste like sugared air, they are truly magical.

And, the game is... well, I mean, I think it just has a lot of the problems you'd expect from a collaboratively written game.

[kore]

//lost in admiration and desire for those cookies

[lydamorehouse]

So GOOD.

[sabotabby]

Those cookies look so incredible. I wish I'd taken pictures of mine before packaging them up but they didn't look that beautiful anyway.

[lydamorehouse]

Rosettes automatically look good because you make them with an iron--deep fried cookies? You kind of can't fail, so there's that.

All my cookies where I have to actually do decorating look like a 4 year old found the finger paints again.

[offcntr]

Rosettes! Haven't had them in decades.

[lydamorehouse]

Well, I mean, they are basically DEEP FRIED cookies. They taste like air with sugar if you do them right, so there's that.