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landingtreeIn my weekly roleplaying group, we've been running Sleepaway. We're summer camp councilors, trying to protect the children in our care from an evil spirit. It's a horror story, where partial success is the best we can hope for, set up in such a way as to require a deal of emotional spoons. It's also my favourite of the roleplaying games I've played, in ways which help explain to me a bunch of the things I don't find compelling in other games. (The next thing we intend to play has similar mechanics but a happier subject; I'll report back on whether it's equally good).
My first roleplaying experience was D&D, which pretty much assumes that characters will stay in a group and make sensible choices. I've played several D&D games where characters behaved less and less characteristically with time, because if they'd gone on as foolish/stubborn/zealotic as they'd begun, we'd have had trouble simulating the results using the D&D rules. Sleepaway, instead of assuming that characters will act pretty constantly sensibly with occasional heights of heroism, is built on what I think of as an Aubrey-Maturin seesaw mechanic: actions which express your characters' weaknesses earn points you can spend on actions which express their strengths. The seesaw is always interesting, and it softens the impact of choosing to roleplay mistakes without softening the consequences of any individual mistake.
Sleepaway isn't the only game I've seen use this, but it's the best, because each of its character templates comes with a different set of 'strong moves' which cost tokens and 'weak moves' which grant tokens. In most roleplaying games, I find it difficult to think like my character in real time, meaning that I often act neutrally -- but in Sleepaway there's almost no such thing as a neutral action. Unless I'm 'taking action, leaving myself vulnerable' (which anyone can do) each of my actions is particular to me. The Athlete can only talk about their feelings as a strong move; the Fresh Blood can bungle something they thought was easy as a weak move, or achieve something they thought was impossible as a strong move.
(I'm playing the Fresh Blood. At a certain point in character-creation someone said, 'I think this will work better if I choose a character who reflects my actual vulnerabilities,' and I agreed that that sounded right, then looked down the list of characters thinking, "They're all so interesting! I could be any of them. Except the Fresh Blood, because it's a bit close to home... Oh. Drat." The game definitely works better with me as the newest camp councilor still unsure of their place than it would have with me as the Athlete, an emotion-bottling death-machine. I do not know how to operate emotion-bottling death-machines, but I got handed an incomplete manual for 'Naive youth unsure of place in world' a while back).
The game's other two key features are its map and its enemy. The map is drawn collaboratively by the players - we each select one location which still exists and one memory of something that used to exist, which helps to convey the atmosphere of a place we knew as children and have returned to as adults. I chose the mud-castle creek and the place where frogs croaked, thus creating an eerie nexus for half-remembered bad events, and I also drew the lake, which is both a place and an entity with its own motives. As well as taking their own actions, characters can act as the places they're close to. If you're by the lake you can make secrets deeper. If you're on the field, you can resolve tensions through play.
Then there's our enemy, the Lindworm, an infallible spirit of manifest trauma. Each session a different player will channel the Lindworm, putting onto the map playing cards whose tarot-like meanings the group as a whole interprets. The rulebook instructs us to define our limits of comfort, and then be vicious within them. We have already decided on a flayed frog, dead birds lying in runic patterns on a blanket of frost, and old lovers' graffiti erased at just the right moment to cause mutual misunderstanding. As the game goes on, and the weighting of the deck of cards is changed, bonds will break and humans will die. But the book also reminds us, over and over, 'Never roleplay as the Lindworm." No one is to become invested in, or associated with, our destroyer. The game is to resist it. We can't prevent disaster, but we can make it resonant, and we can choose what to save and what to sacrifice.
I wrote this description after the first two sessions, but then thought I'd better wait for some of the story's more horrible events before recommending it as a game that mediates horror well. After four sessions, I still think it does. The third session was an interesting case, since I found it much more emotionally difficult than the others, even though what happened was 'camp records burned', set against the fourth session's seemingly-more-intense 'we each narrated our character's deepest regret and were then attacked by gruesome bone creatures.' In the third session, the Lindworm acted to make us choose some resources to destroy, and the rest of the group wanted to destroy the camp records, which had offered puzzling evidence about lost memories and non-linear time. The card hadn't particularly seemed to resonate with what had just been happening in the first place, (which turned out to be because the person channeling the Lindworm had confused spades with clubs), and this interpretation of it hurt my character (who'd been studying the records) while also seeming to me like a less interesting story-direction, (because my character and I had both been relying on that evidence to ultimately make sense of what was going on). The doubleness made me unsure how to react -- we had a safeword mechanism in place where anyone could, anonymously or otherwise, require that the current chain of events cease, but I didn't want to use that mechanism to not just increasing my emotional comfort, but to override the group's taste in storytelling with mine. I suppose navigating that combination of feelings is one difficulty with the game's format: since saying 'yes, and' is such a good principle of collaborative storytelling, where exactly do you start hedging it with some 'no, actually'?
I think 'sooner than is strictly necessary' would be a good answer for me to use if similar things happen again. But in this case the 'yes and' was a good choice, or at worst a fortunate fall. I found the rest of that session tiring rather than energising, but really enjoyed the session after, where we could negotiate the consequences. Now, with those documents destroyed, the Lady Oubliette has gained power over us, filling our thoughts with soothing simplifying winter snow; but at the same time, an act of unsupported and unsafe remembering has grown the Lindworm a coral island of bones in the middle of the lake. Next session we're going to need to find a way to deal with both of them at once. (Coming up with numinous and appropriate magic on the fly is a lot of fun, and much easier to do in a group, where ideas are tossed back and forth until one of them chimes).
This is the fifth or sixth game I've played with this group, and I've enjoyed all of them -- being vampires and googling the haunted houses of Auckland; being dwarves on a spaceship -- but this is the first one that feels real, feels like it's still there between sessions, waiting for us to come back to it.* In session four we started following the principle that dead air should always be filled as quickly as possible, which makes half-formed ideas jump forward in a way that's much more fun than silence. Since no one's running the game - we're all equal collaborators - we're free to ask questions like, "I think our characters had an argument. Any idea what it was about?" or "I feel like something needs to happen with the Baby Boomer camp owner. If I go to confront him, what do you think happens?"
*The other still-there-betweentimes roleplaying world is the one I created, with the divine Tree in the centre of the disk of creation -- but then during lockdown I made my character's 'bungle something you thought was straightforward' weak move and let the air go dead, because every time I looked at its server I'd think, 'Oh no, what would happen next, too much worldbuilding, do they even have taverns,' and look away again. This is why it's so useful to set roleplaying games in worlds about which there's consensus. The D&D universe may be generic, but it's also endlessly flexible, and it definitely has taverns.
My first roleplaying experience was D&D, which pretty much assumes that characters will stay in a group and make sensible choices. I've played several D&D games where characters behaved less and less characteristically with time, because if they'd gone on as foolish/stubborn/zealotic as they'd begun, we'd have had trouble simulating the results using the D&D rules. Sleepaway, instead of assuming that characters will act pretty constantly sensibly with occasional heights of heroism, is built on what I think of as an Aubrey-Maturin seesaw mechanic: actions which express your characters' weaknesses earn points you can spend on actions which express their strengths. The seesaw is always interesting, and it softens the impact of choosing to roleplay mistakes without softening the consequences of any individual mistake.
Sleepaway isn't the only game I've seen use this, but it's the best, because each of its character templates comes with a different set of 'strong moves' which cost tokens and 'weak moves' which grant tokens. In most roleplaying games, I find it difficult to think like my character in real time, meaning that I often act neutrally -- but in Sleepaway there's almost no such thing as a neutral action. Unless I'm 'taking action, leaving myself vulnerable' (which anyone can do) each of my actions is particular to me. The Athlete can only talk about their feelings as a strong move; the Fresh Blood can bungle something they thought was easy as a weak move, or achieve something they thought was impossible as a strong move.
(I'm playing the Fresh Blood. At a certain point in character-creation someone said, 'I think this will work better if I choose a character who reflects my actual vulnerabilities,' and I agreed that that sounded right, then looked down the list of characters thinking, "They're all so interesting! I could be any of them. Except the Fresh Blood, because it's a bit close to home... Oh. Drat." The game definitely works better with me as the newest camp councilor still unsure of their place than it would have with me as the Athlete, an emotion-bottling death-machine. I do not know how to operate emotion-bottling death-machines, but I got handed an incomplete manual for 'Naive youth unsure of place in world' a while back).
The game's other two key features are its map and its enemy. The map is drawn collaboratively by the players - we each select one location which still exists and one memory of something that used to exist, which helps to convey the atmosphere of a place we knew as children and have returned to as adults. I chose the mud-castle creek and the place where frogs croaked, thus creating an eerie nexus for half-remembered bad events, and I also drew the lake, which is both a place and an entity with its own motives. As well as taking their own actions, characters can act as the places they're close to. If you're by the lake you can make secrets deeper. If you're on the field, you can resolve tensions through play.
Then there's our enemy, the Lindworm, an infallible spirit of manifest trauma. Each session a different player will channel the Lindworm, putting onto the map playing cards whose tarot-like meanings the group as a whole interprets. The rulebook instructs us to define our limits of comfort, and then be vicious within them. We have already decided on a flayed frog, dead birds lying in runic patterns on a blanket of frost, and old lovers' graffiti erased at just the right moment to cause mutual misunderstanding. As the game goes on, and the weighting of the deck of cards is changed, bonds will break and humans will die. But the book also reminds us, over and over, 'Never roleplay as the Lindworm." No one is to become invested in, or associated with, our destroyer. The game is to resist it. We can't prevent disaster, but we can make it resonant, and we can choose what to save and what to sacrifice.
I wrote this description after the first two sessions, but then thought I'd better wait for some of the story's more horrible events before recommending it as a game that mediates horror well. After four sessions, I still think it does. The third session was an interesting case, since I found it much more emotionally difficult than the others, even though what happened was 'camp records burned', set against the fourth session's seemingly-more-intense 'we each narrated our character's deepest regret and were then attacked by gruesome bone creatures.' In the third session, the Lindworm acted to make us choose some resources to destroy, and the rest of the group wanted to destroy the camp records, which had offered puzzling evidence about lost memories and non-linear time. The card hadn't particularly seemed to resonate with what had just been happening in the first place, (which turned out to be because the person channeling the Lindworm had confused spades with clubs), and this interpretation of it hurt my character (who'd been studying the records) while also seeming to me like a less interesting story-direction, (because my character and I had both been relying on that evidence to ultimately make sense of what was going on). The doubleness made me unsure how to react -- we had a safeword mechanism in place where anyone could, anonymously or otherwise, require that the current chain of events cease, but I didn't want to use that mechanism to not just increasing my emotional comfort, but to override the group's taste in storytelling with mine. I suppose navigating that combination of feelings is one difficulty with the game's format: since saying 'yes, and' is such a good principle of collaborative storytelling, where exactly do you start hedging it with some 'no, actually'?
I think 'sooner than is strictly necessary' would be a good answer for me to use if similar things happen again. But in this case the 'yes and' was a good choice, or at worst a fortunate fall. I found the rest of that session tiring rather than energising, but really enjoyed the session after, where we could negotiate the consequences. Now, with those documents destroyed, the Lady Oubliette has gained power over us, filling our thoughts with soothing simplifying winter snow; but at the same time, an act of unsupported and unsafe remembering has grown the Lindworm a coral island of bones in the middle of the lake. Next session we're going to need to find a way to deal with both of them at once. (Coming up with numinous and appropriate magic on the fly is a lot of fun, and much easier to do in a group, where ideas are tossed back and forth until one of them chimes).
This is the fifth or sixth game I've played with this group, and I've enjoyed all of them -- being vampires and googling the haunted houses of Auckland; being dwarves on a spaceship -- but this is the first one that feels real, feels like it's still there between sessions, waiting for us to come back to it.* In session four we started following the principle that dead air should always be filled as quickly as possible, which makes half-formed ideas jump forward in a way that's much more fun than silence. Since no one's running the game - we're all equal collaborators - we're free to ask questions like, "I think our characters had an argument. Any idea what it was about?" or "I feel like something needs to happen with the Baby Boomer camp owner. If I go to confront him, what do you think happens?"
*The other still-there-betweentimes roleplaying world is the one I created, with the divine Tree in the centre of the disk of creation -- but then during lockdown I made my character's 'bungle something you thought was straightforward' weak move and let the air go dead, because every time I looked at its server I'd think, 'Oh no, what would happen next, too much worldbuilding, do they even have taverns,' and look away again. This is why it's so useful to set roleplaying games in worlds about which there's consensus. The D&D universe may be generic, but it's also endlessly flexible, and it definitely has taverns.
