Thinking about planning

Yesterday I had the joy of watching the Thirsty Sword Lesbians episode of Parlour Room (which is a new Dropout show hosted by Becca Scott, and is delightful). It’s the first time Parlour Room has hosted a ttrpg, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. But with Persephone Valentine in the GM’s seat I was pretty sure it would be a good one. I was far from disappointed, and in fact I was enthralled by it. Not just because the characters were fun and funny, and the mean girls' style premise created a wonderfully rich dynamic of barbs and bitchiness, but because the players were all in on it. The game was conspicuously for an audience in a way I feel like I don’t get much from Actual Play. So often, with actual play productions, what you hear is what happened. And that’s the case with this as well, but what stood out here was that the entire premise wasn’t really shared with the viewers until it was shared with the characters.

The characters, not the players. The players knew from the beginning, and had built the characters mechanically to the beats of the story that were upcoming. With this organised planning alongside the players, Persephone Valentine was able to tease out a story of magical amnesia, betrayal and horror-comedy expertly. You could have told that story without the players being in on it. I’ve been in a game where the player characters turned out to have been the gods they were searching for all along, but that wasn’t for an audience, that was my friend fucking with us. And the worry with fucking with your friends in that way is that the GM might override the agency a player has over their character. In a dynamic that often already feels unbalanced, that means tables will often avoid amnesia plots or secret backgrounds from gameplay entirely. Or, one character at a table will have a secret background, and they end up being the main character, or, the secret is revealed immediately to the table because it’s hard to keep your friends in the dark.

What the GM and the players being in cahoots provided in this one shot of Thirsty Sword Lesbians was mystery and dramatic reveals for the audience, without ever sacrificing the agency of the players over their own characters.

I don’t think the players had knowledge of the secrets of each other’s characters, but they all knew the secret the story hinged on, and could surmise that every other character was in the same boat as their own as part of that.

It really made me think about what planning looks like, and in what ways planning for an actual play should be different from planning for a home game. My friend, who told us he was being “loose with the rules” when he was really obscuring the fact our characters were basically incapable of losing a fight, had no real plan beyond the knowledge that our characters could do anything we believed we could do. He didn’t guide the story so much as suggest at a world and see what our idiots did with it. Imagine if we’d worked together, and crafted a story with a clear structure, based on the players knowing things the characters didn’t.

Would my bard who used a sea shanty to make a kraken seasick have done things differently if I’d known he could do literally anything? Maybe not. Making a kraken seasick was really funny. But I might have done something different with my character’s more somber moments. Leaned into the dramatic irony of his monotheism a little harder.

But it doesn’t matter. We played that game for fun, not for an audience. More recently, in a game that was for an audience, I played a game of Shadowrun in the Sprawl for KiwiRPG week. It was a great time, even if I was exhausted the next day. But there were a couple of moments where the GM and I weren’t on the same page. Part of that was on me - I should have actively communicated that I had an idea of my character being more of a behind-the-scenes reporter than an in front of the camera one. But watching Parlour Room yesterday I could only think, what if we’d all been in on what the score was, and the secrets had been from the audience and the characters and not also from the players. It’s a way of playing that hadn’t occurred to me before, but I think I’m a fan.

If you want to watch that episode of Parlour Room, you’ll need a Dropout subscription, or the password of a friend who has one. If you want to watch me play Shadowrun in the Sprawl, you can catch the VOD here.

Speaking of VODs, I also had a lot of fun on yesterday’s stream, collaboratively building a house and some terrible Sims to inhabit it with Greys. You can watch that on my youtube channel shortly (it’s currently being uploaded from twitch) or until next Saturday here.

That’s all from me for now, see you tomorrow in stream!