Updating the Jeep Dictionary
I have been meaning to post several short desciptions of new stuff we’ve tried out in recent games to the Jeep Dictionary but it hasn’t happened for many sad and unfortunate reasons. In any case, here are some notes fleshed into more readable form.
Fiat as a means of opression/abuse
The game GR uses player fiat as a mechanism for opression and abuse. There, the mechanism is used to simulate peer pressure and rape — the rapists control the victim’s body and the players may dictate how it responds and feels during the rape act. Further artificial stress is created by things like making the rapist and victim keep eye contact and forcing the rapist to use his fiat in uninterrupted 2-minutes long monologues, and punishing players that fail to deliver.
The same mechanisms can be used for things like bullying — either let the bully describe what the bullies are doing to him or her, or the other way around. If the bully fails to keep eye contact or halts his monologie, he will start to cry, or soil his pants, etc. If a bully fails he or she would lose face in front of the other bullies and perhaps be the next victim. Naturally, the mechanic should be well-adapted to the game at hand and what it is trying to do. The very short game GR (10 pages, 1 hour of play) should provide good examples of how this technique can be used.
A slightly different way of using fiat as a means of opression can be found in Julia Bond Ellingboe’s “Steal Away Jordan” where the GM decides the characters’ names etc.
Player Goals
A few jeep games of late (Drunk, Night of Nights) have experimented with player goals, i.e., assigning meta-goals to the players, orthogonal to any goals of their characters. The idea of player goals is to ensure certain functions in the game without tying these to characters. The idea of player goals is not new. Just the “making sure that the players know what the story is about” is really about establishing some sort of (shared) player goal. Just like in most Cthulhu games, the players expect their characters to die or go mad, but the charactrs generally don’t. However, player goals can be more specific and not necessarily shared.
In Drunk, for example, one player’s goal is to make sure that Ove, a particular character, “does not get away easy”. In Drunk, characters are switched between player frequently during the game and every player will play every character a couple of times. This means that Ove might be self-descructive at times and that there are times when both his wife and kid are out to get him.
Similar but different, in Night of Nights it is the goal of the the third player, who plays all extras and also does voice overs and birds-in-ears, to drive a wedge between the characters Max and Klara to destroy their impossible love.
Solo Scenes — A form of Contextualisation
Fredrik Axelzon’s The Mother” (In every abuse there is a mother) uses solo scenes, where a single player plays both the father and the daughter he abuses. The solo scenes are really a form of contextualisation and gives the game a chance to show characters important for the underlying drama, but not in the focus of the story. In The Mother, the game area has an office and a girl’s room where the solo scenes take place. As the name suggests, there is no one else in the scenes and in that respect they resemble monologues, but not quite. While the main scene in the game is about the mother trying to explain away a drawing that her daughter has made, the father can be hanging a Zorn painting of naked women bathing on his office wall, talk on the phone, scream in front of the game instead of being at the parent–teacher meeting etc. The fact that they are solo scenes let them run in parallel with the main game without risking to become too dominating.
Side-note: The notes from Anna-Karin’s workshop is still forthcoming, busy times for all of us.