Jonas Ferry’s blog

I ran One Can Have Her on A Con of You this Saturday and just posted an actual play report on the Forge.

Chris Chinn (Bankuei) has restarted his blog Deep in the Game as Deeper in the Game. In one of his posts he talks about dangerous characters and this got me thinking about One Can Have Her. Granted, I relate almost everything on roleplaying game I read nowadays to One Can Have Her.

So are characters in One Can Have Her safe or unsafe? Safe for whom? For the audience and the creators, and no, they’re not safe. I’ll explain.

The audience of the story in roleplaying games is the game master and the players. At the same time they create the fiction of the story. Players are usually, not always, mostly interested in their own player character. They invest a lot into that one character and channel their hopes and wishes through it. What’s possibly unsafe about characters is that they can betray the player’s trust, they can let them down, or turn out in ways the player didn’t expect and maybe didn’t want.

In One Can Have Her the player of a character makes all decisions for that character. You can’t be forced to have your character kill another character or fall in love with someone unless you decide to. The character can be suspected for the murder even though he didn’t do it, and he can be chased by a jealous husband even though he has no interest in the husband’s wife. But the heart of the character belongs to the player. The ultimate fate of the character is always up to the player in the form of an epilogue. The characters don’t always turn out the way the player want to. Sometimes the player want the character to reach his life goal, but someone rats on him to the police and he dies. But the player still decides how he dies.

The shared story, on the other hand, is clearly out of the individual player’s control. That’s obvious, since the story is created collaboratively with the other players. The other players can have their characters do things that put your character in a totally different light. If he rats on them and their players portray them as stoic heroes that takes the punishment, that doesn’t make the squealer look very good. He’ll get his life goal and maybe the femme fatale, but at what cost?

When I played at OmniCon and my aggressive doctor actually reached his life goal I was both happy and disgusted. He was a rotten man, and he used his new-won fame to crush the only person connected with his old life, the young femme fatale.

If the story is unsafe and the story is made up of the player characters and their actions, they become unsafe too. When you start playing One Can Have Her you know your character has committed a crime, but you don’t know if he’ll somehow make up for it. Will he pay for it with his life or the rest of his life behind bars, or will he get away clean but undeserving? You don’t know until you’ve finished the story.

Cover of One Can Have Her.

On 24/7 I published my game noir One Can Have Her. This coincided with an article in the Escapist called Girlfriend, Rat by Russ Pitts.

In One Can Have Her you play male noir characters with a crime each in their past, a relationship to the same femme fatale and a possible wonderful future. The only thing standing in the way of that future is the other characters.

You can look at previews of the game or, if you like, order the PDF for $10. Kalle Bergman posted the first review.

The new website of my noir game One Can Have Her is up! The illustration is by Tobias Radesäter, the man behind the comics super hero game Supergänget, who’ll do all of the illustrations to the game.

Both Anders and Peter have written play reports on the One Can Have Her game at OmniCon. Anders’s report One Can Have Her på OmniCon is on Rollspel.nu and Peter’s thread is on the Forge. Thanks guys!

For those of you fluent in Swedish, Anders Sveen has posted his thoughts on the game/playtest of One Can Have Her at OmniCon.

He enjoyed how getting the cards at the start of the game makes you able to somewhat plan your character’s story line, how the list based character creation got him into the genre and how resolved conflicts actually are resolved and not returned to.

He also ponders whether you have to play to win for the game to be fun and if having to play cards that makes you lose conflicts can lead to the problem of introducing conflicts and resolving them yourself.

One Can Have Her is back. Peter Nordstrand rekindled my interest in the game a while back, so now I’m playtesting and writing again. I’ve asked some people whose opinions matter to me to do external playtests, and I continue doing my own.

I’m confident the game works after playing this Saturday at Peter’s mini-convention OmniCon. Actually playing this time, with Peter as game master. That helped me identify a couple of things that need clarifications.

Oh, and I won. I guess you can talk about winning in a roleplaying game about making the others take a fall for you to reach your dreams and get the girl? My aggressive doctor managed to become famous and work in high society. He originally wanted to become famous for legalizing abortion in 1960s California, but had to settle for the fame of paving the way for a legislation. He then rejected the femme fatale, because she reminded him of his former life.

The two other player characters, a paranoid government agent and a conflicted nightclub singer, ended up in jail for 30 years and dead by suicide floating in a swimming pool respectively.

You can now get my Noir GothCon story Dold kärlek (”Hidden love”, in Swedish). Don’t forget the quick rules (also in Swedish) if you want to play the story without flipping through the main rule book.

The story was well received at the convention. We had almost 150 players divided between three sessions.

Some comments published on the web by players and storytellers (in Swedish, because I’m lazy):

• papylon: “Det är inte ofta spelare i ett scenario vilt bankar på väggar och bord för att illustrera specialeffekter och dyl, det lyckades Dold kärlek framkalla och dessutom på ett grymt sätt foga in homosexuella aspekter i en genre som hittils varit befriead från seriösa försök att tackla denna fråga.”
• orn72: “Som SL/berättare tyckte jag det var en höjdare, jag ledde två pass och fick känna på två mycket inlevelsefulla lag. Som tidigare nämts så var det intressant att homosexualitet kom med i berättelsen på ett naturligt sätt, och det tog sig båda lagen an utan att förfalla till parodi.”
• Gorger: “Jag gillade skarpt optningsforge:andet, som skapade flera riktigt otippade och intressanta situationer.”

Ron Edwards likens thematic game mastering with playing bass in a band. The game master lays the beat, the tempo and the uniting ground work the players can use to provide their contributions to the whole. The players play the lead instruments, but has to listen to the game master’s pace and key to know what to do.

So I’m reading the autobiography of Ray Manzarek, keyboard and bass player of The Doors. He put a bass keyboard on top of the regular keyboard and played it with his left hand.

On learning to play blues/rock piano, he says:

And the way was in the silence. The space. Here’s what you do: You leave space for the guitar player to make his statement; maybe you comp a little behind him, play a little repetitive pattern as a foundation for him to float over. Allow him to make his musical statement… and then you answer him. You follow the same procedure with the singer. But when it comes time to do your own solo the you become the lead. The psychic energy is all yours. When I solo, I am the lord and the master. I control the destiny of the song. All must obey me. I have a paroxysm, I go manic… and then I acquiesce. I harmonize again with the energy of the group. The collective energy. I become a cog in the gear again.

And the secret is to listen. Listen to the other guy, give him his space, complement what he’s saying with a few little punctuations, and then answer his statement with your own statement of wit and profundity. And… “practice, practice, practice!”

Something about time travel has always fascinated me. I’ve read books, both fact and fiction, articles, played roleplaying games and even written a small game about it in Swedish called Tempora.

I enjoy the mental excercise of spotting paradoxes, even if paradoxes increase my enjoyment rather than detract from it. I suppose there’s some wishful thinking about changing the past, and a certain sense of exploration. Our three dimensions are mapped out, at least around Earth. Exploration of parallel dimensions can be fun, but are usually too removed from our reality too really have an impact on normal life. You always experience time, so it’s fun to think about what would happen if you could alter it.

There are a lot of films about people manipulating time. I’m going to list my five favorites. I’ll have to exclude a lot of great films. Anyway, the list:

1. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001). Donnie is a disturbed young man who meets a giant bunny that announces the end of the world. The film doesn’t say if Donnie has schizophrenic hallucinations, if the whole film is a near-death experience of if he’s actually in a timestream broken off from the normal. Watch the director’s cut, as it explains a lot more. One thing is that you get to see pages from Grandma Death’s book The Philosophy of Time Travel.
2. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993). This Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell comedy is an excellent take on time loops. A news anchor gets stuck reliving the same day over and over. At first he’s excited, later annoyed and finally tries to break the loop. For romantic comedies, this is about as good as they get.
3. Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004). A down-to-earth take on time travel, if that’s possible, where two friends build a time machine almost by mistake. When they carefully try it out things spiral out of control. The viewer follows one time stream, which is visited by multiple versions of the time travellers, so you could spend some time trying to map exactly what happens when, and why. People have, of course.
4. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984). A killer robot is sent back to stop the birth of a future resistance leader by killing his mother. A neat cause-and-effect loop is created when the man sent back to protect the resistance leader’s mother becomes his father.
5. Returner (original title: Ritana) (Takashi Yamazaki, 2002). A woman comes to the present from the future to stop the start of a devastating war between humans and aliens. She brings a neat time-manipulating toy that can slow down time, creating stunning matrixesque action scenes. The most sci-fi of the films on my list.

Do you have a favorite time travel film I didn’t include?