This week on the Dice Exploder podcast, Sam talks with Ema Acosta about Change The World, a move from The Watch by Ash Kreider.
Some topics discussed include:
The Watch: it’s depressing!
The Watch and its gender dynamics
A lot of people will never see this bit of design and that’s okay
Balancing misery with hope and beauty
“Just tell the players to do the thing”
Inducing emotions from technical language
“Rail shooter RPGs”
Crying
Games mentioned:
Stewpot (currently unavailable)
You can find Ema’s games at ema-acosta.itch.io
You can find Sam @sdunnewold on Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io
The Dice Exploder logo is by sporgory, and the theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and carefully pull out the stitches in its seams to see what the stuffing inside is made of. Or at least we normally do unless we get wildly off course and end up talking about the psychological experience of playing role playing games at all. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my co-host today is Ema Acosta.
If you will indulge a quick diversion: as you may have surmised from the past few episodes of this show, I like games that have been polished to an absolutely perfect sheen, real oyster pearl shit. This is why most of my games are like four pages long. It's such hard work to polish anything that's bigger than that. Anything longer, just so rarely gets to the same level of elegance .
And Em's work gets there. She puts in the long hours and has the talent and it shows in her work right now, that's primarily her whimsical duology of fairytale games Crescent Moon, a game where you play tweens lost in a strange wonderland, and The Exiles the same game, but now your late teens and the wonderland is HELL ITSELF and you're fighting your way out because you are angsty.
I was also lucky enough to get to work with her on the first issue of her Hedgemaze Mail, a Patreon where she sends you some cool shit every month, including a letter sized game by some cool and often extremely handsome guest author.
And as if I wasn't already gushing too much, Em went and brought in a beautiful mechanic from The Watch, a game designed by one of my best friends and future co-host Ash Kreider. But in the meantime, you can listen to Em and I talk about the watch and its PBTA move Change the World, a mandatory glimmer of hope in what is otherwise a horrifying game about the cost of war and the terrors of patriarchy.
This episode is the most wild and free range of conversation I've had yet on this show. Em and I start with The Watch and with Changing The World, sure, but we end up talking about how more rigid game structures can actually create bigger emotions in players and how rules and play culture are constantly influencing each other and how we love crying at the table and little guys (tm) and, I don't know, I just adored this episode. A plus plus, no notes. I'm gonna shut up now. Let's get to it.
Here is Ema Acosta with Change The World. Em, thanks so much for being here. So
em: having me.
Sam: You're welcome. So what mechanic have you brought for us today?
em: I have brought the move, Change the World from The Watch.
Sam: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about The Watch.
em: So The Watch is this military fantasy rpg, where you play as a group of women that have banded together to defeat the shadow, which is this corrupt forest that has turned the hearts of men into merciless soldier. So like the entire clan lands, because the world is like divided into clans, has been overtaken by this force and now the men are, are doing really nasty things as they sometimes do in the real world as well.
And women have decided that they need to fight back instead and eradicate the shadow in part because they don't want to die, but also because they want like their loved ones back.
Sam: Yeah. My favorite line in the text of this book is a heading that's like "pssst the shadow is the patriarchy." That like this game is not subtle about what it's doing, right? Like you're going to literal war with the patriarchy.
em: yeah, so. Why I like this game, which I really, really like. I played a very long campaign of it, like over 20 sessions. And firstly, as you might have guessed from the premise, it's really sad. It's, yeah, it's a bit of a heart wrenching experience. And what's interesting about it is that contrary to what you might expect, you spend most of the game on camp.
I don't know if this will hold true for you, Sam. I know you've also played The Watch a bunch, but on our campaign it was roughly like 70% camp scenes and just like about a third of the game just about to
Sam: that was about right
em: quick
Sam: the whole
em: Yeah.
Sam: the point of the game. It, it's sort of based on Night Witches originally, I think.
em: Which I haven't
played to be fair.
Sam: Yeah, I mean, I've played like a one shot or whatever, like the, the structure of the game is designed so that yeah, you have to go out and like, go to war and like do battle, but like, we don't really care about that part.
We like care about the fact that your best friend died and now we want to go have a bunch of scenes where you're really fucked up about it. Like that's what the game is about. It's about the consequences of war, not the light going out there and doing the war.
And in that way it's also true that you never, there's never a chance that you're going to lose, like the, the game is not interested in a story that is so sad that you lose to the patriarchy.
Like you always defeat the patriarchy and the game is about what does it cost you?
em: Yeah. Like who are you after that? Who, who are your comrades after that? It's kind of like, and I, and I've heard this term used for Exiles, which like is very, very influenced by The Watch. But I think it holds up perfectly as well for this game. Which is, it's like a misery simulator in the sense that you go on these missions and you do terrible things and terrible things happen to you, but that's only like 20 minutes of the session and then you spend the rest of the session crying about it and then like you repeat that over every session.
Sam: Yeah. Like the game is about the crying about it. Like that's the whole point.
em: Yeah. It's not really about like the actual actions, although you, you get to explore their consequences. But for sure, I also find interesting that like the game after you, you, as you have already pointed out, you are going to win. It can also, like, that doesn't mean that the battle feels upbeat or easy, I think like especially you, if you're playing like a long campaign, like it really wears down on you, like the whole thing. Like, it, it feels really brutal.
And on our campaign at least, we, we really got into, you got some leeway about what exactly you want the shadow to represent within the context of patriarchal forces. But on our campaign, we, we really honed in on the theme that the fight is endless because the shadow can never be truly killed as it lives within all of us, right?
So there was always that sense that I thought we are doing this work, and, and we kind of had this explored even in the epilogues that like, it can rise up again anytime, right? So like, why are we fighting now? And...
Sam: Yeah.
em: You know, it's, it, it gets rough to deal with that every week.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I, I think it. We had several protagonist characters... there was one player at the table who was just like, I'm gonna get as many of my PCs fucked up and killed in horrible ways as I possibly can. And just like meat grindered through them at a certain point.
em: Wow.
Sam: like, like every, every single PC had just horrible, horrible things happened to them.
Like, like, yes, you win on a like societal level, but like every single person who is in the trenches dies or comes out with horrific PTSDs or worse. Like it's, it's real. There's plenty to cry about on the personal level.
em: Yeah, for sure. Also, I, I would like to quickly touch on the murky gender dynamics as well, because, and, and to be fair, although I adore this game, I haven't like actually sat down and read through the text. I was a player rather than a GM in that campaign. So I'm not sure exactly where it stands, but when we say women, like really the way we read that, at the very least was anything but a cis man.
So there was also like a lot of space for non-binary characters or trans characters.
Sam: Yeah, and that's very much the intent. I mean, the, the game was published in 2017, which feels like a generation ago at this point in terms of conversations about gender. And I know like I, to journalistically disclose, like the game that I played was GMed by the designer of this game, right? And they, I know, have a lot of updates that they are interested in making to the game's gender dynamics in particular, But yeah, that, that stuff is there. If you're reading the text.
em: Yeah, for sure.
Sam: So normally we get into the mechanic right away, but I felt like this one wanted a little bit more kind of background on the game before we dived in.
So, without further ado tell us about the actual mechanic. Change the World.
em: Change the World when you asell the shadow's lands, and again, when you defeat the shadow, your efforts have the chance to change the world. Roll with the number of jaded moves you've taken.
Sam: So to be clear, this is powered by the apocalypse game. So when you're rolling, plus the number of jaded booms, that's 2d6 plus your stat and you're kind of doing the like, 10 plus is good, seven to nine is okay, six or less. You fucked it up.
And then jaded specifically is this kind of parallel XP track that exists in the game that fills up when you do things that wear you down and kind of snowballs on itself. It's similar, similar to Ruin in Apocalypse Keys where if you kind of take it too far, you get too much of it, you get these cool special abilities because you've like, learned to be jaded. You can use that a little bit, but then eventually you've like retire or die or trauma out because she just got too sad. And that's jaded. So back to the move.
em: On a 10 plus tell the MC, which is the Gm, by the way, something positive that has changed within society through the efforts of the Watch.
On a seven to nine. The change only occurs within your own clan.
On a miss, while as sailing the shadow land, the change only occurs within your own clan, but it enrages the shadow and it does everything it can to strive back at your people.
On a miss after the feeding, the shadow, the change of course, in your clan alone, but only as a result of deep cultural trauma inflicted by the shadow's occupation. Just a fun little move.
Sam: yeah,
em: yeah.
It's, it's just, it's just,
Sam: Well, I mean, you could, I feel like I spent like a minute talking about how like the game is interested in what it costs you to do war and then like the move itself has in there a much more elegant way of putting it.
em: Yeah,
Sam: but yeah, here we are. Great. So yeah, what do you love about this?
what made you really wanna bring this in in particular?
em: So the thing that stuck out to me about this move, the first time I saw it, is how a piece of the design that is so sparingly used, because if you're playing a short campaign, you might not ever see this because it only comes up on the third phase of the game. So it comes up when you are beginning the final act and you triggered it again when you finish the final act. So a lot of people will never even play this. And then if you're playing a long campaign, you only get to trigger it twice.
However, it's such potential to like, have an everlasting impact on the story because after so many sessions where you are just describing these terrible things and getting really, really sad about them, you finally get the chance to have both as players and as characters to be reminded of why you are doing this in the first place.
Right? Like you, you want to have a better world. And this move allows you to say all the sacrifice that you've made in some way will have impacted the world in a positive fashion, even if the shadow still still wants to kill you, even if it retaliates like the, in none of these options is like you don't do it.
It's just the shadow gets really mad about it, but like you still the thing.
Sam: Yeah, yeah. That sort of relief after session after session of terror and tears is, is really profound, I think. It's a, it's a nice moment. I, I think that there's something really interesting in all of that about how As a designer, if you want a particular story beat to happen in the game, you can just kind of tell the players that it happens now, just like make a mechanic where it happens now and force them to do it.
I think there are a lot of games that sort of like dance around things or trying to like construct a like set of tools that are gonna push people in a particular direction. And there's a lot of power in just saying "No. Now is the time when this is the thing that happens now."
And, like several years ago, I would've felt like. Ah, that's gonna feel really heavy handed. Like, I don't know, is that really gonna be effective? But every time I've run into a mechanic like this that just says, do the thing now it plays in incredibly well. It's so good. It just, it's so nice as a player to be, be given the story beat and then just to take the, you know, to take the story beat and you really make it your own.
You, there's so much detail you gotta fill in at this point about like your campaign and your people's details and like your mother back home, like who's still in the clan and how she's affected by all this. Like there's so much room still to explore that becomes so much easier to explore when you have this like, really tight "Okay. Like here's the thing that happens like very, very precisely on a structural level."
em: And I think that's the strength of PBTA. Really like just the doing the thing, right? Like just really explicitly calling out here's when you do this bit. I also feel like you're personally calling me out because I am very much of the kind of the designer that will like, create like all these magical framework for you to come into your own conclusions and like realize things and I think elements of surprise are funny. Or, or fun rather.
But on the other hand, just like a really obvious like point where like something happens... and especially as players, you might not know this is coming. Like as players, we had no idea this was coming, so it was just like, oh wow. Like we're getting to do a nice thing for once.
Sam: Yeah.
em: I, I also think it's, it's like such a good testament of how games have this power to, induce really emotional moments through really technical language. Which, which is something that I, I just find beautiful about games in general. Like, you read this and it's, it, it's just a bunch of instruction, right? But then when you get to apply them onto the story and onto the baggage that you have created, it can like result on like really powerful bleedy moments as well.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Big catharsis from frigging math, right? Like,
em: Yeah. Which is also like a testament to game text doesn't need to be pros heavy to be impactful.
Sam: Mm.
em: re, If there was a version of this move that was like all poetic and flowery like describing this, I don't think it would be particularly more effective than what this is. You know what I mean?
Sam: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I, as someone who makes a lot of art about emotional repression, especially, like that's, I, I really identify with that. Where I, I think there's, I can think of like Wonder Home has a much more sort of poetic sense to it. It, it has a lot less technical language in part because there's like no math in the game.
Right. It, it's, and it that, that poetry kind of layer brings a certain mood and like style and flavor to the game. Where I think you're right that the, this move in the watch like is very technical which in some ways like leaves more of an open canvas for you to bring your emotional thing to it, whatever that is.
Going back to that idea of you can just tell people what the story beat is and go forward, like I think you can actually get a lot more specific even than this pretty specific move gets like a lot of Firebrand games, especially. You know, the designer of this went on to make Our Traveling Home a few years ago, which is just like basically a screenplay for Howell's Moving Castle, like as a technical manual where just every scene is just laid out in two pages and you like follow along like a full two pages of instructions for like how you go moment by moment. It gets down to like, you are doing chores now. Here are your five options for chores. Pick one to do and describe how you do it. Like, that's how precise it gets, and there's still room for you to be like, well, I'm a scarecrow, so I'm made of broomsticks. So like, I'm sweeping, and it looks like the. You can still build all this filigree and like magic up around it.
And this works the same way, I think where where you, you can fill in there, there, I'm just saying the same thing I did before, but you, you have all this room to, to fill in details in a way that's really magical.
em: Actually let let me become the host for a second. How did that go for you? Like how does a game that's just made out of these types of moves feels in the sense of providing you still enough liberty to feel like you are putting your own spirit into it.
Sam: Yeah, when I started playing it, I was like, interesting. I, I don't know. Okay.
Let's
em: Um, sure.
Sam: yeah. But I, I found it to just work incredibly well. That, that really what I think we're looking for in any kind of story game anyway is basically emotional catharsis. And honestly like the, the tighter you fit to a like movie that's already providing that, like probably the closer you're gonna get like good movies are already good at that. If you just tell people like, walk through this movie, but like riff on it with your friends, like you probably get to that emotional catharsis pretty well. So, yeah, so for me like that game and you know, a game like Stewpot is another sort of that has a pretty rigid structure to it, like gives me really a lot of pleasure and a lot of and still a lot of difference every time I play it.
em: Yeah, I, I'm also thinking back on Wanderhome and how Wanderhome doesn't necessarily have a structure you create. As far as I remember, you create the location and then you explore the location until you decide that it's time to go on. However, it does have an implicit structure in the token economy. And in the way that your character, your characters moves, like, interact with one another.
So it sounds like you could either go for the macro, which is these are the scenes that this game is going to provide you with, and you're just cycling through those scenes collectively.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
em: Or you can take that same approach, but apply it to each individual archetype. So as the Dancer, I have these couple of beats that I'm always going to be doing, or I'm going to be like switching between, in like, let's say a three session cycle.
And then I, I get more things and I, and I can like, keep adding quirks to that core and, and that can, that's still providing you a structure. It just doesn't feel like there's a structure because every person has their own, every person is in their own little wheel essentially.
Sam: Well, and that brings us back to PBTA games kind of at large too are essentially that like every move is like, here's how, here's the little beat in a scene and how it's going to work. Like here's how fighting works in this genre, or here's how you can be weird and just appear in this scene because you're a weirdo. Like that's a genre thing about your character. And whatever moves you have are, as you're saying, like in Wanderhome, which is, I mean technically PBTA, I
em: Technically very
technically.
Sam: very technically.
But it, it is you, you have that same sort of collection as you're saying of like, here are the beats I could bring to any given scene, and it's mixing and matching those beats that gives you your particular story.
em: Yeah, I'm also thinking if, if there's like, if, if every movie the Watch is in this style or if there's like pockets of space where you have more freedom. And then this is a contrast to that because the Watch is also like really formula in its mission structure as well.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say is that the mission structure feels a lot like this. Like you, you, there's four moves and you assign one of them to each person and you go through them in order every time. And like the, the mission structure is very rigid to like get that emotional meat you can cry about.
em: And surprisingly, it doesn't get old. I don't. What Ash did, but it doesn't get old, even though you're literally doing the same thing over and over and over and over. Every session.
Sam: Yeah, I mean, like Blades in the Dark doesn't get old for me either, right? Like the, and like, you know, it's not, it's not as rigid in the same way, but I think that there's a lot of room for different kinds of missions at different flavor you can fill into the given structure, even if the like, overall idea of like, we are gonna go fight the shadow or like, we are gonna go on a heist now or like, whatever.
Yeah. It's like a, a procedural TV show, right? Like Colombo every week just solves a frigging another murder mystery. But it's great every time, even though it's got that same kind of structure to it. And Watch missions I think are, are pretty similar. But then the downtime is then kind of the other version of this that we were talking about where you have a bunch of different moves like your playbook, you've got jaded moves, which are a certain set of beats that tend to be a little bit more jaded. You've got a bunch of like regular playbook moves, which again, are, are a certain set of beats. And then the basic moves that everyone can do, just like any standard PBTA game.
em: I would say it is precisely during the camp where you get that sort of like open, like recess is what I would describe it as where like you still have the moves, but like not every move will get triggered every camp in the same order. So it, it can like open up to player your expression a bit more easily.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
em: I will also say that with the missions it might sound like they are very constraining, but what I found was those constraints-- I was also like the GM I had when I was playing this was mental and they would not allow for any like, like divergence from this structure, which I, which I think really works to the strength of this game. Because if I was running this game, I am too chaotic to like say that we are going to do an entire mission and an entire camp phase, like every session.
I would maybe try that once and then like the rest of the campaign would go off the rails. But with this GM, he was "no, we are, we're going to do the exact same formula every single time. And there are no, there are going to be absolutely zero exceptions." And what I found over time with the mission structure is that that really forced us to create these very interesting situations where, Because the missions had to be short because we needed time for camp.
So the mission couldn't be longer than 30 minutes. Really. And there were already like these four roles that we feel and, and we body. Then it became about how can we make, like what are the hooks or like the beats or like the specifics of this setup that make this different from all of the rest? And the book does provide some guidance in, in like, you have like a list of scene of like mission ideas.
But, but that really created an environment where like, I can think still of several missions and like what made all of those special. And that was a US because the game didn't really like give any leeway to create that mechanically.
Sam: The other thing that that lets you do is jump over all the parts in every mission that are going to feel pretty similar. Like, you know, I, so I was playing a version of this game set on Mars where you're kind of fighting aliens and You know, I, we just like, who cares about just like mowing down another crowd of aliens? It was like, yeah, yeah. Cool. We get, we get the action sequence where we like mow down some more aliens and then someone been stabbed through the heart and like that's the part that we can like, dwell on for this particular mission. It's the part that sort of breaks the structure becomes the interesting part that you, you actually give screen time to.
em: Yeah.
Sam: There's a phrase I have come up with that I'm very proud of that I don't want to get through this discussion without saying: rail shooter rpg, where I feel like you know, the kind of really structured story beat that we're talking about feel like you're being railroaded to some extent. Like with change the world, like it's, it's very specific as we have said about what the next beat is. It can feel like you are being forced into that track and you are. But you know, as I was playing Our Traveling Home especially, which is entirely that it felt like playing a rail shooter, like one of these games where you're on a track being guided to the next place where you're gonna shoot some more aliens or whatever.
But that doesn't make it not fun. Like it, it's totally fine. I, I feel totally fine and excited to be on the, the ride of whatever story the game is setting up for me, as long as I have that interactivity of being able to stop and like, point in this direction and fill in this thing and like, kind of like, you know, kibitz with my friends along the way.
I, I think there's just a lot of fun to be had with that kind of storytelling or, or game playing rather.
em: Yeah, and I think like that clashes with some, especially in more traditional circles, right,
Sam: Yeah.
em: where it's all about, like player freedom is really valued and I think there's still a lot of freedom to be had in these games. It's just structured differently like the indents that are there for you to feel are different than the ones that would conventionally be thought from an rpg, which
Sam: Yeah.
em: could be more of like, the world is yours and you can do whatever you want. You cannot do that in The Watch. You cannot just like run into the woods and say, actually, I don't want to go to war anymore. Like, you are not doing that.
Sam: Well, you can, your character can run and do that
em: and max
and then you make a new one
Sam: out their jaded, but like, we are not gonna follow that story. Like, goodbye, let's,
em: Yeah. And I remember the first time I played The Watch, it was it was one of the first like PBTA games that I really got into. And, and that was difficult for me at first because it was like, Well, but what do you mean that we have to like, follow this structure? It took, it, it definitely took some adjustment to adapt to that style of gaming where you are not so much thinking in terms of what can I do? And it's more about how can I flourish this narrative in a way that's thematically resonant with the people that I'm playing with.
Sam: It's almost like the, the sort of freedom you have as a player is just happening at a different scale. It's like you, instead of operating on that global, like Dungeons and Dragons fantasy, I can wander around anywhere on this disk that the world is you know, instead it's "okay you can, you can play however you want, just like play in this particular sandbox," you know, play in the sandbox of the, The Watch back at the base.
You can, you can go talk to anyone on your downtime, go do whatever you want. Like, there's still that freedom, but we're, we're setting bounds on the story a little bit. Even as we're still playing to find out.
em: Yeah, definitely.
Sam: I also wanna just say like, there's absolutely, I'm not shitting on open world games either. Like sandbox games. Yeah. That kind of plays awesome. I love it still. But I, there's something that you gain, as you were saying earlier, like from restrictions. There's something to be gained from putting bounds on this particular story.
em: Yeah.
Sam: So going back to the like very basic text to the move, there's a, this corollary to to the fact that you always succeed on this move that it would be. Bad and break the entire game if a failure on this kind of move meant that the story beat didn't happen.
Like if you have one of these games set up where you're designing a game, like kind of along the lines that we're talking about, and it's really important that like the players do defeat the shadow or like whatever the thing is that we're doing, you can always just make it so that that happens, like the, this move is very smart in that even on a miss, you do make some kind of change because it is important for the game and for your story to get that little bit of of success and then how well you roll is about the scale of the consequences that you end up having to.
em: That said, I could definitely envision a version of this move where you cannot accomplish anything.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
em: And that could really hone in which, which I don't think The Watch particularly is interested in exploring this, but there's a point to be made about stories about war that portray war as something that is quite pointless and a really shitty time for everyone involved and the only thing that they create is more war. I can, I can see a version of this move where it's like, well, you didn't accomplish anything or you just made it worse. But if that was there, that would be still creating fiction and it would be a very deliberate choice instead of it being, oh, let's add a miss condition because all moves have miss conditions.
Sam: Yeah, exactly. Like the, there's even a game to be made about war where you never win. Like where the, the, the point is that you never defeat your enemy because like, war fucking sucks. Like that, that's the story that we're telling. to, to quote Ash the designer of this game from a different design, like that would be a very interesting game, but that is not this game.
And I think that I love that sentence because I think as a designer, it is really, really helpful to know exactly what you want your game to be and knowing what fits into that and what doesn't, even if the like doesn't fit in thing is really interesting, knowing that it doesn't belong in your game is a really tough thing to realize sometimes and have really valuable thing to figure out.
em: Definitely. As you're making a game, you get flooded by all of these interesting possibilities, and sometimes it's worth to chase some of them, but there's a very real risk of diluting what you are making just because you went on a bit too many tangents, so you end up not having as strong of a delivery on the core.
I would also add to that, that you don't owe anyone a specific format, so long as it's structurally consistent. You don't need to make every move work in the same fashion. You could even, like this move could have no rolling and it could, and it will still work perfectly and it will still be a move. Like, because you should always put the themes and the experience that you want to deliver at the table before any sort of convention that, that you feel you need to stick by.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point.
em: But don't do it like Blades where like every single procedure is different. Don't do that. That's bad.
Sam: God, right now my, one of my groups and I are doing this, campaign where we were like, we love Blades. We, but we also, like, we don't wanna keep playing in Duskwall. We've done that too much, but we're not excited about any other particular, like, forged in the dark game right now.
So we're gonna just like pick a setting and go do that and like, hack together rules on the fly, like using blades as a baseline and we're doing just like a pirates game where like, yeah, you like have some traits and you reel some dice sometimes. I don't give a shit or whatever. And like I gotta get someone from that group to like, come on and talk about like the mechanic we threw together on the fly to like, to like solve the problem at the table.
Cuz that, that kind of like freeform thing is really interesting
em: it's
Sam: to me, too.
em: It's so good. It's also very funny that we made the same game around the same. Because I, I made Crescent B/X and then you looked at Crescent B/X and you told me, oh yeah, this is what we did.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. uh, it's cool. All those things are cool how, uh,
em: are
Sam: I games are cool. I, I like it when, parallel evolution, that's what I'm looking for.
em: that sounds
Sam: like, you know the meme, like evolution's just like another crab. Uh, like the crabs just like keep evolving, like, from like different, paths. Like, I love when different people end up at the same spot because it, for, for different reasons.
Anyway. So we've talked a lot about like the narrowness of Change the World and like the strengths of that. But I also wanna talk about the scale, which we, we touched on a little bit. This is a move that is happening, like you, you know, you're only rolling it twice and it's happening at this like big cultural scale that like you as an individual.
em: completely detached from your characters. Your characters are not in this move. They're not going and doing the thing. This just happens as a consequence of the Watch as a body rather than as your individual little guy.
Sam: Yeah. I think that is one of the coolest parts of this. That you can, like just the, the freedom to think that you can design a mechanic that's operating on that scale of storytelling instead of down at your player level, like, that's so cool and so smart. Like we're just gonna go do a little bit of Microscope.
That's not, that's not like, it's mechanically not at all like Microscope, but like at that kind of scale. You can do that. Like it makes sense for the story. It feels right. You're almost like playing with time too, in an interesting way because you're just making one die roll. But then, you're, you're sort of like dealing with the consequences of your entire like months or years long campaign and the consequences are gonna echo out for generations. And that's so great. I don't know what else to say. That's really cool.
em: Excitement noises! I think it's also really empowering for the players to feel like they can for a second just take the reins of the story and say, oh, this thing I'm still thinking about from five sessions ago. That was really important and I want that aspect
Sam: Yeah.
em: That cultural heirloom that I got from one place and I took to another. I want that to become a tradition in this other place. And it's a way of connecting what you individually, because every player roll his move by the way, every player gets to decide what is something that is positively impacted. And it's really rewarding for the player to be able to take those individual standout moments, those individual highlights, and say, "and now this is a part of the world, of this game." Like now this thing that was just a missing, we all get to enjoy in our collective understanding of this world
Sam: this is, I'm, I'm getting chills again.
em: I cried, I cried the first time I, I, we, we did this, I literally cried in the session.
Sam: I know we said this earlier, but I just want to say it again. That after such a long campaign of misery, like having this moment of "oh, it actually was for something like we did manage to get some change," it really is just, it's a really powerful moment of opening up and, and looking at that greater scale.
em: It's literally psychological aftercare. Like the game does this very intense scene on you where it's just beating you down, but then you get to like cozy up in the sofa for a little bit.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. yeah, the other thing that this does, sort of going off of that on a, on more of a technical scale is it provides a really great framework for wrapping up the campaign because the first time you, you make this move, it is sort of right as you are about to go take the fight to the shadow and like defeat the shadow.
em: Yeah. So to be clear here, just to provide some context, the game is divided into three main campaign phases. So during the first phase, you are defending what little clans remain untouched by the shadow. You are stopping the shadow's advance.
During the second phase, you're reclaiming some of the clan's lost territory. And then you get to trigger this move as you move into the third phase where you go to asail the shadow's land. So you go into the stronghold of the shadow to strike it down.
Sam: Yeah. And then the last time you make the move is after you have struck down the shadow and you're like wrapping
em: Mm mm.
Sam: So you you get this big emotional release of like, oh my God, we actually have been doing something like at the beginning of that third phase as you go in. But at the end, like this is a really great framework for essentially like a closing montage for a campaign.
It's like
em: the camera zooming out
Sam: Exactly. You're going to that like closing montage at the end of a season of the Wire, or you're doing the like, end of the movie and we're gonna just like pan across everyone that we've seen so far, like over the course of the whole movie and like where they ended up. Or even the, you know, the end of Star Wars Return of the Jedi. Were like seeing everyone partying after the emperor has been killed.
Having some sort of structure for that process I think is super helpful and super smart, and a tool that not enough campaign games include. I think ending campaigns is really hard to do and more games should think really carefully about how they do so.
And also everyone should pick up Everest Pipkin's World Ending Game, which is a whole game about doing this.
em: I am very intrigued by all those games that have been coming up lately that are just like, this is just a little plug-in for whatever you are playing. I think there's one, I think I once saw one where it was like, this is a game for if all of you died. And now you are ghosts and you can play this game if you want to.
Like something like that. You know, like just like these very specific use cases. I think also like the Watch because of all these railroading, right? I think when you play through a campaign of the Watch, either as a player or as the facilitator, you end up more skilled at role playing because you had all these tools explained to you and like really clearly telegraphed, and now you can go on and employ them without these guides.
Sam: Yeah,
em: I think that's kind of like a feature that a lot of story games implicitly have. Like if you play a lot of Blades, eventually you're going to be able to just do position and effect in your head. You don't really need position and effect after you've done it a thousand times, but you need the mechanic in order to get there in the first place.
Sam: Yeah. Or the, the mechanic is certainly helpful for getting there in the first place and. you know, I have a lot of friends who've taken the idea of devil's bargains and brought them to PBTA games just cuz they like the mechanic of devil's bargains. Like that, that, yeah: let's, let's find more consequences for us. Which, a previous episode I talked with, Michael a lot about how getting into trouble is fun and for a story and like, makes the story move forward better. And games that teach you how to do that, as you're saying, are great.
em: Yeah, because, oh, I'm, I'm going to get a little hashtag deep here, but games like are an oral tradition really because you are doing shared storytelling and you are coming up with these techniques that you develop in your journey through whatever you want to call it, like an art form, performance, uh, psychological tool, way of life.
So really the texts are just guidelines that you can use to enforce that, like oral core. So in a way they are things that like, are very, very, very useful to have written down. Or like a scene context of like me and the people that I play with, and that I will maybe continue to play with for the years to come.
They kind of just get absorbed into how you approach role playing in general. Do you know what I'm
Sam: you Yeah, yeah. Like I'm thinking about my two long running weekly games and how both have like a very particular table culture that has kind of evolved with and alongside the games that we've played. But also means that in both cases now I know really, look, we are, I know we're going to make whatever system we bring in, like more about our table culture than whatever the system is.
em: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sam: but only by using all of these systems with pretty rigid structures that we were playing around in, were we able to find that, which I think is what you're saying.
em: Yeah. I mean, yes. That's part of what I'm saying.
Sam: yeah. All right, well, on that note, em thanks so much for being here.
em: Definitely.
Sam: Thank you to M for joining me. You can find Emma's games at ema-acosta.Itch.io and on Patreon at patreon.com/spookymeal
As for myself, you can find me at sdunnewold on twitter, dice.camp, and itch.io.
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