Part of me really likes this article, and part of me is pissed that you are kicking a hole in my fun. I know you don’t mean it this way, but there’s a lot of “badwrongfun” poking laced into this one. It’s a bit of a jagged pill.

The simple point of fact is that very few people have a group that is emotionally close enough to play the way you describe. Sad but true. And it’s not something you can force or even construct consciously. It has to develop over time, and it’s a complete crapshoot. Or you get lucky playing with strangers (or acquaintances who may as well be strangers) for that con session that you’ll end up retelling for the rest of your gaming career.

Ultimately, I can’t help feeling like, if I can get “fake drama” of the sort you describe out of my games, I’m doing pretty well and I should be happy, rather than feeling like it’s not good enough and being disappointed.

It’s rare, but this is one of those times when I understand why some people wish indie/story/forgie people would just shut the hell up and let the rest of us have our ignorant little fun.

(not saying you should, just saying I get where they’re coming from)

I guess the images in my head are more LARPy in this case than usual. Which Mara fits, of course.

I was thinking of SHOCK, too, but that doesn’t fit because it has no referee, rather than having one separate from the antagonist. Whereas, say, Dirty Secrets doesn’t fit because it has no antagonist… hm, actually it has no referee either, does it? Been a while since I played that.

Hm. I guess the point is (which is the point you were making, I think) that the antagonist needs to be free to play hardball, and can’t really do that properly when they also have the referee/creator power. There needs to be a check against the antagonist that lets them push as hard as they can; at least if you want the kind of dark and dirty, gutsy RP that we’re talking about here.

Am I getting the gist?

I wonder what other games might fit this mold…

Ryan Macklin also EXPLICITLY does this with his movie hack for Primetime Adventures. The “villain” character of the pitched movie is always a PC and not a Producer run character. This works out really well.

Wraith may be an early example of something along these lines where PCs play each other’s Shadows and not the GM.

I still want to play Mara again some time… it’s a difficult sort of game to assemble a play group for.

All too often I feel, what I think of as “cockblocked” by game mechanics that won’t support the outcomes I feel are appropriate. It does matter how mechanical failure is characterized, to be sure- if failure is still interesting and doesn’t make me look like a loser, then it’s not so bad. But systems where “all you have is a hammer” because if you aren’t rolling your highest stat, your chances are pretty low are often frustrating.

I know that’s not exactly the same thing, sorry, bit of a tangent.

But yeah, there are definitely times when I pre-play in my head and figure out what outcomes I want beforehand rather than just seeing what happens. It depends on how invested I am in the character- it’s actually easier when I don’t care that much.

One mechanic I’ve used in my own games to deal with this is “Hero Coins”- similar to bennies in other games, except mine give you, for example, +10 on a d10 roll. They are not just a guaranteed hit, they are a guaranteed Holy Crap You Succeed With Extra Awesome! Of course you have to earn them (similarly to FATE points), but dammit, I hate turning in a FATE, an Action Point, or whatever other benny a given game has, and STILL FAILING. NOT. ACCEPTABLE. If you pay to win, then you goddamn WIN.

Hm. I think I may have actually just written two separate rants that are only tangentially related to the topic =\