If you remember my last Designer Diary Post I set myself two challenges:
Goal number one: create a prep-less game which is emotionally charged, with full immersion and where people are completely invested in their characters.
Goal number two: design a game with no need for a mechanism to resolve conflicts either in or out of character.
I decided that both these goals hung on the right sort of game premise. So I took an old idea I had been playing with for years and revamped it.
I started with my favourite childhood books. I loved Narnia, Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, Five Children and It by E. Nesbitt and the Box of Delights by John Mansfield. All involved young children from mundane worlds finding magical people, lands and items and having the most amazing adventures.
But what happened next?
What happens when the dark is gone?
How do you go from ruling as a Queen in Narnia to wartime rations and maths homework?
I imagined a situation where a group of children (the players) enjoyed magical adventures in a mythical land and then understandably failed to readjust to “normal” life. All the children almost entirely repressed those memories and ended up self-destructing somehow. All of them ended up in a Group Therapy session together, trying to recover their memories, deal with their psychological disorders and heal themselves and their relationships.
I am a huge believer in strong story scaffolding for prep-less games. Indeed it is vital and WTDIG is no exception. Story scaffolding happens in two stages firstly the players agree their characters, their relationships (including how they have betrayed and hurt each other) and their psychological problems which have brought them to therapy. Secondly the players decide on a number of agreed details about the magical land. These details are the only agreed “true facts” of the game. Both the character details and magical land details are there to give the players inspiration during the session for creating their repressed memories as they go.
The aim of the game is for the players to resolve their psychological problems and relationships using the memories of the magical land as a tool to help them. The aim of the game is NOT to write wonderful stories about the magical land (although that may be a happy by-product).
How does this fulfil my goals?
Firstly the session is obviously and sharply focussed on their characters and their feelings. This is a game where creating emotionally charged conversations is the only thing happening in session. In case you didn’t know I run games mostly to find those interesting conversations.
Secondly the setting is a Therapy session. Verbal conflict is encouraged and mediated by the Therapist (standing in for a GM but a very different role as I’ll explain below), it is resolved in the same way that people resolve real world conflicts in therapy. By talking them out.
Sadly we don’t get to roll dice in arguments with our real life partners 🙁 (Hmmm… hang on a minute?)
If the players disagree about what happened in the magical land…well here is the really clever bit. They just disagree. Memory is fallible. The only truth that matter is your truth and how that helps your healing journey. The players talk through their mismatched memories and use the fact they are mismatched to create more story and more interesting emotional interaction (there was a wonderful example of this in the play test which indeed resulted in a better story and more satisfying experience for the players involved).
There are other advantages to the therapy session conceit in this style of game:
1. awkward silences (which occur more often in prep-less games where people can go dry easily) are perfectly normal for a therapy session and nicely amp up the atmosphere.
2. the Therapist role is a fascinating and easy way to help draw out the story if the players are having trouble. Rather than acting as a GM and dictating plot etc. the role of the Therapist is purely to reflect back at the players encouraging them to create everything. The Therapist asks questions (e.g. Lucy can you tell me how you feel about what Edmund just said?) and ensures that the spotlight is evenly distributed amongst the group. For this reason I think of the role as Game Facilitator rather than Game Master.
Right that was a much longer post.
Next time… results from the Alpha Play Test are in!
[Don’t forget to pick up a free copy of the game from here if you haven’t already.]
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