So, I’m including Player and Game Master chapters for Houses of the Blooded and I realized what I had just written would have made a great Play Dirty chapter. Specifically, a follow-up on the “play dirty for players” chapter. That’s right, more goodies for you player-types.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to know anything about Houses to understand what’s going on in this chapter. There are a couple of references, but the idea is pretty universal.
So, for fans of that little firecracker, here’s 2700 words on The Morley-Wick Method of Roleplaying.
(a special tip of the hat to Sheldon who gave me Mamet and to Jared who taught me everyone can be the GM.)
Actually, Sheldon is an actor and a musician. He’s still a good friend of mine. And by “actor,” I mean real actor. Not us wanna-be community actors, no, my buddy Sheldon has skills.
So anyway, Sheldon and I used to go to LARPs. (That’s “live action roleplaying” for all you unsophisticated heathens.) A lot of LARPs. But Sheldon and I seemed to have a problem. We were driving home from a particularly boring LARP, complaining as we usually do. I don’t remember which of us suggested it, but one of us said, “Maybe we’re doing something wrong.”
But what could we be doing wrong? We had great characters. Characters with history. Deep history. Well-written and easy to work with. We were rich with potential. Untapped potential.
And yet, there we were. Bored out of our skulls. We’d interact with the other players, but only in a shallow way. There was just nothing to talk about.
And when we looked around, it seemed to us that the most successful players had the most shallow characters. That is, there really wasn’t anything to them. So, again, why were we having such a miserable time when those other folks were having so much success?
That was our first observation, but in fact, we were wrong. Our observation had betrayed us. It took deeper analysis to understand our problem. So, we sat at Norm’s (at 2:00 AM) and talked about it. Sheldon came up with the solution.
“We’re playing the wrong game,” he told me.
I grabbed the ketchup and Tabasco for my eggs. “What do you mean?”
“Our characters have deep secrets.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“That nobody knows but us.”
That made me pause. And think. “Yeah,” I said. Slowly.
We spent the rest of the night talking about the problem. It wasn’t a problem with the other players. They were playing the game correctly. The problem was with us.
I think Sheldon also nailed down the guy who could solve our problem. David Mamet. The director/screenwriter. His books and essays on “the method” approach to acting really inspired Sheldon, which in turn, inspired me. Using Mamet’s critiques, we came up with a solution to our problem.
From Mamet, to Sheldon, to me. To you.
What’s Wrong?
So, after that long introduction, let me explain what Sheldon and I were doing wrong and why it relates to David Mamet.
“The method” is an acting technique. Actors try replicating real life emotions, calling on sense memories from their own past similar to the emotions the character experiences. Method actors also create “rich interior landscapes.” That is, they create detailed histories for their characters. They know everything about their characters, so when a circumstance arises, they’ll know how their character would respond.
Rich interior landscapes.
Watching an actor on stage, watching him respond to something seemingly innocuous with a cryptic sigh or a mysterious glance or some other enigmatic gesture. The audience doesn’t know what it means, but obviously, the actor’s done his research. He’s done the work. He’s using the method.
Unfortunately, the audience doesn’t know what it means. The actor isn’t communicating anything to the audience.
In other words, he’s failing the entire purpose of acting. Communicating to the audience.
As gamers, we have a similar problem. We come up with elaborate and detailed backgrounds. Rich internal landscapes. And then, when we start playing, whole sessions go by without the other players having a single clue. Cooperative storytelling.
Characters have secrets. Sure they do. That’s fine. But authors use devices to give the audience clues as to why a character responds a certain way. We get to see that rich internal landscape. Even if a reaction is a mystery, we trust that somewhere down the line, the author will let us in on the secret. We’ll eventually understand all those cryptic sighs, mysterious glances and enigmatic gestures. Eventually.
But in roleplaying games, we keep secrets. We write the GM private notes. We take him aside for a whispered meeting. We keep that 24 page background to ourselves. Nobody else gets to see it. It’s ours and ours alone.
The method. Secrecy. Otherwise known as mental masturbation.
You are, quite literally, playing with yourself.
Nobody else is invited. Nobody else gets to know about your character’s past. That lost lover. That blood feud with your father. That secret conversation you had with your mother. Your childhood rivalry with your sister. Your secret marriage. That secret you’ve kept for twenty years and never told a soul.
All that rich background you’re selfishly keeping to yourself. That no other player will ever know about. It’s yours and yours alone. And you’re the only one who will ever enjoy it.
This is what’s wrong. We’ve got great characters and nobody knows but us. Why is that? Why do we feel we need to hide our characters’ secrets from the other players?
Well, most LARP settings are PVP (player vs. player), so we don’t want others to know our secrets. We assume the other players will take advantage of out-of-character information. And, sadly, we’re usually correct in this assumption. But at a table top game, surrounded by friends and people we trust, why do we still follow the same behavior?
Reflex perhaps. Maybe it’s just habit.
Well, let’s break that habit. Let’s get out of the “method” philosophy of character creation and play. Let’s try something different.
Let’s have open secrets.
A Novel Approach
Now, I should be up front about this. Many of these techniques are not new—I didn’t invent them—but putting them together in one set, with one philosophy guiding them, I think qualifies as “a new approach.”
I’ll take you through it, step-by-step. Read through them, adopt the steps you like, throw out the ones you don’t, come up with your own. After all, this whole chapter is about modifying things to your own group’s tastes. Step-by-step.
Character Background
One page.
That’s all you get. One page. I’ve provided a page for you at the end of the book for your character’s background. That’s all you get. Don’t try writing small or using a tiny font.
One page.
I know, you’ve got a lot to say about your character. This is what I call “Character Control Syndrome,” or “CCS.” You think this is the last time you’re going to have any control over your character, so you want to squeeze as much content and detail in there as possible.
Relax. Take deep breaths.
Just write one page. In fact, don’t even finish filling out the page. Leave a few details open. Figure out what you think is important, but leave the rest blank. Vague. Open. Let me tell you why.
I was playing a character once. A magic cop. I really didn’t have any idea about his past. I just kind of made him an arcane Columbo. But I bumped into a story involving a kidnapped girl. Something triggered in my head. I had no idea about my cop’s family. Wife, kids. No clue. I hadn’t really thought about it. But at that moment—that very moment—I knew he had a daughter. And he lost that daughter. I didn’t know how or why. I just knew it. I knew it.
That one little detail, a detail I didn’t know until I started playing, changed the entire course of the character’s past and future. Completely changed him. Turned him from an arcane Columbo into something much deeper. And, in a lot of ways, a lot scarier.
All because I had kept a detail open and filled it during play.
So, one page. That’s all you get. If that. You don’t need to know all the details before you roll dice. Some details—most, in fact—you can discover days, weeks, even months after the first session. You’ll bump into things that inspire you to fill in those blanks. Keep an eye out for even the tiniest details. After all, like grandma says, it’s the little things that make the soup.
External Exposition
Tony is a friend of mine. He has a style of play that’s always intrigued me. Specifically, he practices external exposition.
He doesn’t just tell you what his character is doing, he tells you why his character is doing that. Like an author, he gives you subtle clues. For example…
Tony’s playing RevQ’an Burghe, a minor Baron from the northern islands. He’s one of the many nobles at a party both of you decided to attend. As the GM, I ask Tony, “What are you doing?” This is his reply.
“I stand up,” he says. And he stands up. “And I walk across the room. My pace is slow. My head, hung low. My hand hangs on my sword pommel. Gripping it. Like I don’t know what to do with it. When I get to Baron Vaccon (that’s you, by the way), I hesitate. You can see there’s something in my eyes that tells you I don’t want to do what I’m about to do. And I think about the promise to Lady Shara I made. And the promise she made me. And then, I say, ‘Baron… I find myself in the position where I must challenge you to a duel.’”
Tony pantomimes all these behaviors. He pantomimes his hand on the sword. He walks across the room slowly. Uncertainty in his stride. And when he talks to you, his tone reflects the exposition he’s giving.
The exposition punctuates the action. Not only does he give you external clues, but he gives you internal clues as well. “I think about the promise…” He even gives a bit more information than he should. “And the promise she made to me.”
Tony leaves himself wide open when he plays. He exposes his character’s weaknesses, keeps no secrets. Why does Tony do this?
Because he knows his friends won’t take advantage of him and sabotage his fun. Besides, part of the fun is knowing other character’s weaknesses. And having other players know yours. We put weaknesses on our sheets because we want them exploited. We want to get hurt, get knocked down, get beaten within an inch of our lives. How can we come back from the bottom if we never even get knocked down?
You’re probably familiar with the term “Mary Sue character.” Over-idealized characters who never make a mistake, never flounder, never flub their lines. You see them all the time in fan fiction. You see them all the time in professional fiction, too.
You see them even more in roleplaying games. A lot more. Especially when you run con demos. Oh, Blessed Eris. Flashbacks. Flashbacks!
Excuse me for a moment…
It’s okay. I’m back.
One of the reasons I designed Houses with weaknesses was to avoid Mary Sue characters. The ven aren’t just bigger than humans in good ways, they’re bigger than us in every way. That means their flaws are bigger, too.
Now, if you play your character close to the chest, if you don’t let the other players see his foibles as well as his strengths, no-one will ever get to see that great background you developed or hear that inner monologue they’d usually get to hear if they were reading a book or watching TV.
Use external exposition. You don’t have to do it like Tony does. You can find your own way to do it. But do it. Let the other players in. Let them see the man behind the curtain. Armed with wagers, they’ll be more than happy to let your character live out that tired old Chinese cliché about “interesting times.”
And you’ll thank them for it.
No Passing Notes in Class
A lot of players like passing notes and having secret meetings with the GM. Especially in a game like this one where everyone has a secret to keep.
Here’s the news. That’s done.
It’s no fun to sit around while the GM goes off into another room with another player and has a private chat. For those of you who’ve done this (including in games I’ve run myself), I applaud your patience and your selflessness, but you don’t need to do it anymore.
Secret meetings get handled in front of other players. You got a note? Say it out loud.
Once again, we’re all grown-ups. We’re all friends. We all want to have a good time.
And nobody gives a single flaming turd about your rich internal landscape if they never get to see it. So, be a ven. You’ve got it. Flaunt it!
Share Plots
One of the side-benefits of being open about your character’s past is finding parallels with other characters.
You’ve got a vendetta? I’ve got a vendetta!
You’ve got a romance? I’ve got a romance!
You’ve got a hated uncle? I’ve got a favorite uncle! Maybe they’re the same!
The more connections with other characters you can make, the better. Giving you both something in common, something to talk about, something to commiserate about.
Trigger Plots
This takes a lot of trust. Use at your own risk.
The GM is a busy guy. He’s got five to six players to worry about, and sometimes, he just doesn’t have the time or focus to hit everybody every session. Sometimes, players get overlooked. Sad, but true.
With this little trick, you’ll never get overlooked.
As above, share your backgrounds with the other players. Send them all around the table. Everybody gets a peek. Look for trouble areas. You know, places where you could cause trouble if you were the GM.
Then, when you see an opportunity to do cause trouble, do it.
For example…
Shara has a problem with her father. All the players know this because they’ve read Shara’s background. They also know that she’s looking for the man who killed her mother. Armed with this knowledge, they start screwing with me.
They use wagers and style points to have Shara’s father come walking out into a party half-dressed and fully drunk. They use wagers and style points to have NPCs drop suspicious hints about secrets only Shara’s mother would know. And then there’s the kicker. One player uses style points and wagers to have Count Xanosh mention he has the missing pages from her mother’s diary.
Wagers and style points.
One more example. (Although, this one is kind of a cheat. I’ve changed the details a little bit for illustration purposes. I hope the people involved will forgive me.)
Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, there’s a young woman named Ro. She’s been playing a kind of dowager duchess in one of the playtest games and that character has a beloved servant: her frightened and fragile maid, Alice. Now, for a few months, Alice has been shivering and quaking and nervous around all the big, bad, violent beautiful noisy people. Alice doesn’t talk much, fetches tea and biscuits really well and stays out of the way even better.
But then she got caught in a little bit of trouble and someone used sorcery to force Alice to tell the truth. Someone asked her, “What have you been up to?”
And someone spent a style point and answered for poor, little Alice.
Pantomiming the whole scene, the player shows us what happens when Alice is asked the question.
Poor trembling little Alice suddenly straightens her back. Her face calms. Her breath shallows. Her eyes fill with confidence. And Ro’s little helpless maid, speaks in a deep voice she’s never used before.
“I’m a house assassin, spying on my lady, sending information to Lord So-and-So.”
The whole room was stunned. Now, that’s a typical revelation for a game like this, but what can make a revelation like that great is that it can come from the players.
The GM could have done all the stuff we’ve been talking about, but he’s just one guy. Plus, he’s got five other players to worry about. I’ve got six GMs now, each complicating my plotlines, making things more difficult for me.
Just the way I like it.
When other people know how to punch your buttons, they get pushed. And as bad as that might sound, it’s a lot better than getting overlooked by a busy GM.
Flashbacks
I also allow other players to trigger flashback scenes with style points. If another character does something odd, reacts in an unexpected way, or otherwise catches the players off-guard (even if it’s the player in control of the character), someone spends a style point and we’re off to a flashback sequence.
Each player can spend a style point to participate, playing a part in the flashback. The player with the spotlight can run the scene as the GM or let the GM do her own job or let another player be the GM for a while. We invent a scene, right there on the spot, with circumstances similar enough to the scene we were just playing, adding deeper meaning to the scene and the character.
But remember the Lost Rule. Don’t make the flashback more important than the current scene. Flashbacks provide additional flavor to current action. Flashbacks do not eclipse current action.
Of course, you could run an entire session as a flashback scene if it’s really important. An example of that may be Shara reading her mother’s missing diary pages, finally getting her hands on mom’s missing diary pages. Three degrees of cool here.
- First degree of cool: the GM tells me what they say. Eh.
- Second degree of cool: the GM makes the prop pages himself and gives them to me to read. That’s pretty hip.
- Third degree of cool. The group plays out the events in the pages with all of us discovering together what happened. Yeah, it’ll take me weeks to recover from that.
Remember, the ven go to eleven. Or, in this case, to the third degree.
Conclusion
Here’s the big lesson here. Keeping secrets is fun. Revelation is fun. Revealing a secret you’ve been keeping for months is a lot of fun. You don’t have to use all the techniques I’ve listed above, nor do you have to get rid of secrets. But keeping everything to yourself isn’t just selfish, it’s spoiling everyone’s fun. Including yours.