Battlestar Galactica, X-Files, and RPGs
Battlestar Galactica is back for season three. I say this as literally and precisely as possible: this is the best television show I have ever seen. If you are not watching it, find a way to do so. It’s on Fridays on Sci Fi Channel. The miniseries-pilot and both prior seasons are available on DVD, but the seasons are the genius bits. Genius, and directly applicable to gaming.
This is why BSG rocks the genre world: every episode, and I mean every episode, picks a couple characters and the issue or conflict that most applies to them, and proceeds to stomp on it, applying excrutiating pressure on it, then adds more pressure, and then more pressure. It starts this process before the opening credits roll. There is no downtime in BSG, there are no throwaway scenes. Every minute of every scene serves the purpose of the episode as a whole, forcing the characters to explore every corner of their humanity, no matter how recessed, dark, forgotten, or difficult. The result is some of the most beautiful and powerful expressions of what it is to be human that I have ever seen.
I was talking with a coworker yesterday about BSG, which she hasn’t gotten to see, and she compared my capsule description of why it’s so good (above) with the X-Files. Now, I never got into the X-Files, mostly because it didn’t do what I described above. From my perspective, each episode of the X-Files presented the main characters with a situation to which the characters found a way to personally relate, there was some creepiness and bad camera angles, and then they resolved the situation by reinstating cultural norms (you’re a bad man for doing X). The X-Files’ slogan was “The Truth Is Out There” and indeed, the focus of the show was consistently out there and not, as in BSG, in here, in the hearts and souls of the characters.
The difference between the two is that the X-Files required the characters to relate to the situation. Imagine the characters thrust into a big white-walled room, with a strange thing in the middle of it. They poke it, prod it, and sort of figure out why it’s important. Lots of genre art works this way: I’m watching a lot of Stargate, which works in exactly the same way, as did every incarnation of Star Trek and about half of Babylon Five.
Contrast this with Battlestar Galactica, where the situation relates itself to the characters independent of the characters making an effort to make that connection. Instead of the white walled room and the object to be considered, BSG’s situation pops out of nowhere right next to the characters wherever they happen to be and proceeds to beat the shit out of them. There is no time for calmly figuring out the situation; the situation escalates, escalates, escalates, piling on the pressure until the character reacts to the situation, which may or may not actually resolve anything.
This is where I take a moment to point out that I’m not criticizing Dogs in the Vineyard, I’m just pointing out that it’s a different kind of animal than this other thing that I’m talking about. I happen to really like this other thing, but that doesn’t mean that I dislike DitV for not being this thing that I like.
You can probably see where I’m going with this, now. The typical ‘adventure’ for a roleplaying game presents the players with a situation, lets them poke it and prod it, figuring out how it works and why it’s important, and then once they figure it out, they apply their cultural norms (you’re a bad orc for burning down that village) and resolve the situation. The stereotypical dungeon works like this, yes, but so does Dogs. Here’s a town, figure out what’s wrong with it, in the process say something about right and wrong. Over time this develops the characters of the Dogs, yes, but it doesn’t hit that immediate, pounding-on-character-issues tempo that I find in BSG.
In order to replicate BSG’s framework, we need two things. First, we need situations that relate to the characters, not the other way around. For this we need hooks that are clearly identified as ways to relate to characters (what Chris Chinn calls Flags), and we need the situation to be directly built off of those hooks and nothing else. Primetime Adventures and its character issues may produce this kind of play, but I haven’t got to see it for myself yet. Full Light, Full Steam should provide this through Engineered Situations (a Town Creation like setup where the conflicts are based off of character thematic batteries and player expectations, and specific fictional elements are related back to the characters as foils).
The second thing we need is what the writers of BSG work under every episode — a time limit. I’m not talking about a time limit before which the characters must resolve the situation — most BSG episodes don’t resolve the immediate situation, and if they ever did stop the Cylons from chasing them, well, the show would kind of end. What I’m talking about is a time limit until the character must react to the situation, whether or not they resolve it. You do not get to ‘do the right thing’ and reinstate those cultural norms; you end up doing the human thing, and qualifying and complicating those cultural norms.
Rough system design example: the player writes down his character’s present impulse on how to react to the situation, and updates it as the game progresses (perhaps only at certain junctures). If the time runs out, the character acts on that impulse. If said action resolves the immediate situation, great, it’s one of those episodes with a happy ending. The next episode introduces a new situation.
If said action does not resolve the immediate situation, great, it’s not one of those happy episodes. The next episode introduces the same situation but in a different way that hits different characters in different ways. So the evil theocrat’s campaign to ostracize believers in the old faith was aimed at Character A’s brother; Character A acted on his impulse to shoot the theocrat in the head, which didn’t resolve much. Next episode, the theocrat has become a martyr and the crusade against the old believers has come to the city where Character B is a magistrate. They’re howling for blood.
The stickiest part right now is what constitutes a resolution and what’s just a reaction. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that judging which address of situation is valid is a moot point under such a structure. Hell, there could be like a target number of bits of information and benchmarks that the characters need to hit (and each time they do so they can update their impulse) and once they get enough, their impulse is automatically a resolution. Benchmarks from prior “failure” episodes can be brought forward to the next episode. Resolutions are earned, not figured out.
I’m thinking this is about one twentieth of a system that might reliably provide a structure for episodic play — which is what 90% of roleplaying is — that has that immediate, hard-hitting power I see in Battlestar Galactica. Other parts might involve a PTA-like screen presence, a season structure as in Buffy, et cetera. In fact I’d even go so far as to suggest that this system would need to reach down and dictate the sequence and impact of scenes, so that you cannot frame a scene that does not somehow increase pressure.
This would not be leisurely gaming, where the players amuse themselves with toying with a collaborative fiction, this would be some desperate scrambling to beat the clock and resolve a situation before you only succeed in making the situation worse. This is, in short, gaming that lots of folks (including my wife) would hate. On the other hand, can you imagine, after running a sequence of four or five sessions/episodes where the situation is complicated instead of resolved, how gratifying it would be to finally nail a resolution?
January 8th, 2006 at 11:36 am
Agreed! This is exactly what I was talking about when I said, “No more than 10 minutes ought to pass without something interesting and hard hitting happening” You can have very intense and fun games in 2 hours, if you nail the conflicts hard and fast and keep them coming.
Also in brief:
You do not get to ‘do the right thing’ and reinstate those cultural norms; you end up doing the human thing, and qualifying and complicating those cultural norms.
I find that this happens a LOT in Dogs. You often end up messing up as much stuff as you fixed, and well, people are usually dead in the process. It’s sort of a sullied feeling. I think what produces this is the setting of stakes, and sometimes just being forced to give or committing more violence than was probably right.
January 8th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
I’m totally on board with this one.
As a sidenote: the cylon fleets? They’re exactly the same thing as the Others in Lost.
Outside forces that increase the pressure and establish time limits.
January 9th, 2006 at 7:59 am
Nice. I have run head on into this particular clash as GM - presenting a crucible (BSG-style situation) to players who expected and were comfortable with a puzzle (X-files style situation). A lot of the feedback I got on that game was of the form “What do you mean, no right answer? You never gave us enough information to make a decision!”
This is one of those stylistic clashes that I don’t think gets talked about much and certainly a lot of gaming - even self-consciously Narr-supportive gaming - assumes one or the other story structure without making it explicit. Dogs is tricky, though. It looks like a puzzle, but one of the things that tends to happen with it is that the characters’ norms start to fray under the pressure of actually being applied.
January 9th, 2006 at 9:29 am
If you say so, Christian. I haven’t partaken of the particular flavor of crack cocaine that Lost appears to be… ; )
Yes, Mark, there is very much an assumption that players will have the leisure to poke and prod until they’re satisfied that they have all the information that there is to be had, and then apply that information in order to come up with the ‘correct’ solution (which is assumed to exist). That’s one of the reasons why I suggest that judging address of the situation be a non-issue in this type of game — if a player can say, “I have twenty resolution points, so my response will now resolve the current situation,” they won’t worry about answering “correctly.”
January 9th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Joshua, have you watched Six Feet Under?
“… every episode, and I mean every episode, picks a couple characters and the issue or conflict that most applies to them, and proceeds to stomp on it, applying excrutiating pressure on it, then adds more pressure, and then more pressure.”
This is exactly the structure SFU uses, and your comment about the situation relating itself to characters regardless of what they want–it does that too. There’s no “oh, this man is dead; let’s look back at his tragically short life and try to apply its lessons to our own.” It’s all “okay, here’s another dead guy, he’s showing up when I’m alone and pointing out my flaws, and I’m pissed at him about it, and shit! I left his arm at the morgue, and I have to go get it so I can’t make time for my wife or his widow, whoops, slept with her, mind your own business, dead guy, fuck! My relationship is crumbling and it must be YOUR fault!”
The conceit in SFU is that its principals are a family with a long history of self-repression; when they can’t take the pressure anymore they explode and lash out at the rest of their family, who just sit and take it and charge up their own pressure cookers. I know PTA cites the show as one of its exemplars, but I don’t think it provides the kind of irresistible ratcheting episode structure SFU (or presumably BSG; I’ve only watched the miniseries) needs.
Anyway, here’s how I’m taking SFU and applying it to the mechanic you sketched above: the likelihood is that, if your character resolves a situation, it’s going to make things much harder for her. You shouldn’t be trying to get bookmarks from the pool yourself–you should be actively avoiding them, by pushing them off on someone else. That push-off is the only way you’re allowed to change your impulse. You should be constantly jabbing at the other characters, trying to make THEM be the resolvers, and they’ll be pushing at you, and finally somebody gets shoved over the threshold. That character has to resolve with her current impulse. The player with the fewest bookmarks gets the most control over how it happens–so if one person has decided to be the nice guy that episode, the one who decided to be bad gets to fuck him ALL up.
January 9th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
I’ve only seen the posters and billboards for Six Feet Under, but it sounds intriguing. Your take on it, with the codependent family structure and no one wanting to actually address their problems, sounds like some intense roleplay. Reminds me of the Hollow Men (not the teevee comedy show, the poem). I’d say BSG is a slightly different animal in that the characters generally do want to address their problems, they just don’t know how or aren’t to the place where they can effectively address their problems. But it’s interesting to see how something can start with a similar pressure-cooker-like structure and then take it in two different but related directions.