The Bastard Out of Boston and the End of the World

One of the interesting things about tabletop roleplaying is the ability to set up tensions between the game’s concepts and practical play considerations. Many tabletop gamers have a Manichean streak where something has to either cleave to the Big Idea or the Big Idea has to utterly suborn itself to practical issues. To my way of thinking, that misses the point of tabletop play. If it’s so structured that it can be run by a bot or somebody with a passive attitude, I don’t think it’s worth doing at the table.

It can work with electronic games, where players need the freedom to choose their own commitment level within the structure, since they’re playing with the product as the partner, not other people they value beyond the play space, or maybe convention play where people are temporary companions in a sharply delineated experience. It can work for the odd one shot. Beyond that, sustainable RPG play happens in a zone of negotiation, where play and text conflict, produce useful compromises, and give birth to a story through the responses of participants to the crisis.

I’ve been reminded of this lately on two fronts. First, I did a search for Mage: The Awakening’s Nemean: an NPC I created to helm the game’s signature city, Boston. Second, RPGNet talked about the end of Mage: The Ascension six years later — specifically, the scenario I wrote, “Judgment.” Both of these presented cases where I wanted to provide practical stuff in creative tension with Big Ideas (or Big Ideas I thought gamers would assume were there). So, one at a time:

Judgment: The Consensus is Just a GMPC

One of the important elements of Mage: The Ascension is that reality is determined by the massed, mixed up beliefs of human beings: the game’s Capital-C Consensus. That leads to a vision of ending the game where one faction or another wins, or we get some kind of new compromise as vetted by the human majority. The problem with this is that it contradicts the idea that the PCs decide what’s happening, and it’s not much of a basis for the action-oriented, fantastical and horrific elements of the game. I suppose I could have designed a scenario where the PCs go on a massive PR campaign, shake a lot of hands, save the Computer’s baby and win it to their side and dodge Republican Technocrats with Guns, but that would have been either boring or hokey. Boring, in that having meetings isn’t very action-fantasy-horrorific; hokey in that as contrived as “Judgment” was in some places, it would require an even bigger contrivance to set up scenes where the PCs win hearts and minds based on big stunts. Basically, the Consensus takes the place of the unbeatable NPC, whose heart is only moved by the GM’s whims or whatever is coded into the adventure.

All the same, the PC-centered quest makes everybody else look like they’re sitting on their asses, being overrode with True Will. So what’s a poor boy charged with blowing up a corner of the World of Darkness to do? Telos, as conceived by Bill Bridges, was pretty loose; I probably could have run “Barack bani Obama: Telos We Can Believe In!” or the Glorious Proletarian Mass Magical Thing (some of both was in Judgment, but I didn’t have room for one and had to cut the other). But subtext slithered beneath M: TAsc‘s bombastic, thesis-first front. One subtext had to do with an increasing realization that parts of the Consensus concept were unworkable, sinister and even immoral. Ethan Skemp often spoke of how the concept undermined the idea of humanity being part of nature. Under Phil Brucato, the game said spirits wore masks, but kind of had their own thing going on no matter what anyone thought. I also wrestled with a number of disturbing thought experiments (Does a sexist Consensus make women stupider?).

Plus, I increasingly became aware that M: TAsc had a very deep mythology and one that was surprisingly well integrated for something built by people who often had wildly divergent ideas about the game and how people should get along in general. I wanted to be true to that. I wanted to answer the prophecy in The Fragile Path and build upon obscure references in Sorcerer’s Crusade (which is where the Ixoi come from — I didn’t make ‘em up). And I wanted to give Voormas his due because I knew from direct experience that he was one of the greatest antagonists for real, ongoing chronicles. I wanted to make things work with Kathy Ryan’s stuff as much as possible, after a productive, epic phone call that helped me leave room for individual personalities, since these drove her work on the line.

And of course, I wanted to exercise a writer’s privilege to make a few observations in reaction to a game that I loved. One wrestles with a good game, and I spent five years wrestling with my M: TAsc chronicle.  This gave me room for boots on the ground insights that aren’t so neat and tidy (like the Nephandi being self-deceptive, since they really come off as clowns under smart PC examination) but felt substantial at the table. I decided the best solution was to take this stuff, question the Big Idea of the Consensus, mix it up with all that canon, and bomb my players with it. I adjusted the results in the writing and Bill Bridges told me how to best fit it into the book.

So that feeling of struggling, at once accepting and questioning the basis of the game — and aiming for something that felt naturalistic despite all of the Big Scary Crap translated itself into the result, designed to be playable in the context of a game wrestling with the consequences of its development, and the PCs wrestling with the results in a structure that let them tour as much of it as possible — all while leaving something with a comprehensible basic structure, and without something as lame as “We like unicorns now. Signed, Humanity.” Writer fiat that throws an archmage in your face at least sets the stage for an unpredictable result (Protip: Voormas can probably kick your ass, and will countermagic attempts to do that 10 success Corr trick in the book unless you’re very sly). Writer fiat through 6 billion people working the Fifth Business is just lame.

The Wizard Crapped in Your Cornflakes

Ah, the Nemean. I love that guy. Mage: The Awakening went through lots of iterations. That includes the Boston section (and book). We knew that the game was going to feature lots of internecine struggle — “all against the Man” was there, but not  as big a deal as its predecessor. The preconditions for the Nemean already existed, but the Consilium structure was fairly open-ended. It could be a whole bunch of things, from a tyranny to Grownup Hogwarts. This made the whole idea of making Boston a “model” Awakening city problematic. The closest thing you could do was make it a staid academic gathering that must band together against something or other from time to time when it’s not arguing over brandy. Boring!

I didn’t want a “model.” I wanted something people would use in real games. So I designed a real sonofabitch who could be ported into these roles:

The Quest Guy: As the boss, the Nemean can send PCs to do cool stuff. Yeah, this isn’t innovative, but sometimes “innovative” takes a back seat to something people will actually use. Plus, Mage was redesigned so that a quest provides concrete rewards (Arcane Experience) even when you don’t get to keep all the goodies.

The Hammer: Novice GMs sometimes need a guy to lay down the law and declare standards, and even experienced GMs can use a guy like that. Again, this isn’t original, but it works. I knew the dangers of this (killer NPC!) which is why I declared that in the Nemean’s Boston, you can grab ass and stab each other as much as you want if you leave the city and general order of things intact. He won’t bug you except to enforce basic minimums that also happen to be what GMs need to avoid SWAT Shooting Gallery Nights.

The Predecessor: Finally — and this is the big one — the Nemean was designed to be replaced. One of the shallower critiques of this guy is that the Bad Ruler is Vampire‘s shtick (really? There can be no bad bosses outside of Vampire?) but Mage has a mortal hierarchy with no time constraints on gaining power. It’s inevitable that a PC cabal will eventually earn the power to overthrow him, and his desire to stay on top means it automatically generates a plot, particularly since he sits on one of the setting’s secrets.

This is the basic difference between writing for play and writing to satisfy somebody’s sense of structure. If I was just looking at it as filler that adhered to a format I’m sure I could have gone the fannish route and picked Guy Who Fits In, but I didn’t want him to end up on the same ash heap as so many canon characters. (Do you know who the Awakening signature characters are? I do, because I’ve got ‘em written down, but they’re not doing much. They’re not bad, but for some reason nobody ever ran with them as they did with Solomon Birch.) I wanted people to use him.

Did it work? I’ve seen him in dozens of games and writeups. There’s an early 1900s hack of him on Obsidian Portal. I’ve seen folks commiserate about dealing with him in their respective games. I love that. Not only is he getting used, but he’s generating common experiences. As for me, I actually started with him deposed in my Toronto-based game, and got lots of mileage out of a treacherous alliance with the PCs.

One thing I freely admit about the guy is that he’s not the height of eccentricity and innovation. I’ve designed all kinds of bizarre NPCs, but I didn’t want the Nemean to be one of them. I wanted him to be accessible to people just getting into the game, but giving him a strong (if mostly passive) core motivation, an easy way to portray him and ways he could move the game along, but with room to make him more complicated, if necessary. Vampire‘s Solomon Birch has a lot of these same accessible qualities. He’s got a strong personality, an unusual look, an immediate hook via his faction, and is set up to get things done.

Fighting With Yourself

In both cases I was tempted to just go with the flow, accept the Big Idea at face value and slot things in. Instead, I erred on the side of making something to play, then fought to reconcile it with all the Meta stuff. In one case I got something very complicated; in another, I ended up with something pretty simple, even stereotypical. I’m happy that people have made use of both, even if they did their own wrestling along the way. I encourage people to discover cool, playable stuff that throws the Big Ideas of their own games into question. Yeah, you’ll end up making excuses (I am, right here!) but the important thing is that they’re cool excuses.

Tags: Mage: The Ascension, Mage: The Awakening, NPCs, RPG design, RPG Playcraft