The Moment of Play
During a recent game of Songs of the Dusk, my character Left Field was suddenly exposed to the cacophonous rage and sorrow felt by thousands of ghosts captured and bound against their will into the building he stood in. I as his player needed to figure out how he would react to that. So, I grabbed at what I knew about my character, and, in a rush of realisation chose fury.
Back inside Field, I turned on a particularly condescending/threatening NPC, Exilia, who my party and I had previously been trying to conciliate, and shouted at her, swore at her, tied her up, took her pistol, and crushed it, while my ally Even kept the other members of Exilia’s crew (Helix Nine) from attacking me back. The mission ended soon after, but my choice of fury hung across my shoulders for the rest of the game, the remainder of the evening, and into the next morning. I’m still thinking about it.
And that rules.
The Joy of Play
I really like Sam Sorensen’s Three Question Taxonomy blog, and in particular, his pulling apart of players based on whether they would prefer to make the ‘dry and effective’ choice or the ‘foolish and dramatic’ one. But what I find odd about his piece is, when he writes about what a more dramatic player is trying to do, I don’t recognise myself at all.
Specifically, when Sorensen describes dramatic play, he frames it in terms of ‘crafting’. ‘[To] craft a compelling set of events for myself and the other players’ and ‘craft[ing] an engaging and compelling narrative.’ And like, I recognise this is the splitting of the finest of hairs, but in TTRPGs I do not ‘craft.’ I discover.
The core principle of TTRPG play, for me, is that character responses to world events must not be planned. How a character thinks and feels, and therefore what they will do must be discovered in the moment of play. The dramatic choice is spoken immediately after it is realised.
Note: this is not me saying “I love doing the first thing that comes to mind”. Instead, I’m saying “I love doing the first fiction-justified thing that comes to mind.
Why do I love this? Because these decisions are, by virtue of being rushed and sudden, also underdetermined. There is a vacuum in their rationale, a precious empty space, about which bright possibilities dance like the corona of a star. Beyond TTRPGs I much prefer art that leaves space for the reader. No surprise that in my play I would try to give myself that room.
Reflection
Thinking back about Left Field’s burst of fury, I remember the source of my decision being that, as a person who has fought the constraints of his culture all his life, he would be infuriated by the sudden immersion in the experience of mass imprisonment, and direct that anger against those suggesting they should further exploit the imprisoned.
But what on reflection I also remember is that Field’s robot body (he’s a fungus-animated robot, a MISO) is a security droid. And I wonder if his switch to violence was possibly also a fall into patterns established in the programming of his pre-fungal self. I wonder how he feels about that possibility. I wonder how he feels about flipping so fast into violence. I wonder how he will react when violence is once again presented as a means to solve a problem, and how he will react if violence is ever forced upon him. I wonder, and I wonder, and I cannot wait to play again.