I love this quote from Vincent Baker : “The purpose of a game isn’t to balance, but to fall rapidly out of balance and accelerate into an end state. Even an exquisitely balanced game like Go, in play, is an unfolding catastrophe, an inevitable disaster for one side or the other. When I design, whenever I find two players, two characters, or a situation in balance, I look for the most aggressive and expedient way to unbalance them. It’s usually a simple thing to do: just make somebody’s decision binding.”
All good stories are collections of Jenga towers and inevitably they fall – they must fall. How you collectively make them fall and the cool shit that happens along the way is what we call a game. The role of the MC is to be ruthlessly pulling blocks.
I am GMing a game of En Garde online and thinking about this RIGHT NOW. So good.
As roleplayers, we worry too much about ‘balance’. Unfortunately, the world isn’t balanced; life isn’t balanced. When two foes face each other, very rarely are they the same, very rarely are they equally matched. One of them will have an edge; better equipment, better skills, more experience, some knowledge of their opponent which gives them an advantage. I agree with Vincent’s statement 100%.
This is one of my favorite pieces as well – when we design, part of the tension is that our big mammal brains want symmetry and balance and stasis, because that’s where we feel safe. To design a game (or perhaps arguably a painting or a novel, etc), we have to fight that urge and desire in order to leave space for the player and the story. So as a designer, my job may be to make a starting situation so unstable yet so compelling that you feel engaged and committed to seeking out some degree of balance for your character. And then I get to unbalance the situation again and again until you retire that character to safety 🙂
I’ve been thinking about the “make somebody’s decision binding” thing a lot. I think it’s spot on. I think this is part of what’s lovely in Dogs in the Vineyard: escalation is binding (you can’t de-escalate) and the consequences can be binding too (even though there’s actually a slim chance of death even with guns out, if you push to guns and a character dies, you chose that and it is binding).
I’ve been thinking about that a bit in “smaller” stories. Do you know The Age of Innocence? One of my favorite books. (Spoilers for a book published in 1920 follow.) It’s the tragedy of Newland Archer, scion of a wealthy society family in 1870s New York. Supposed to marry May, falls in love with Ellen. Eventually makes the choice to marry May. This choice is so irrevocable that, in the last chapter, years later, after May’s death, he has a chance to meet Ellen again and see what comes of it—but he doesn’t. He can’t. Because there is no sequel to his life, no way to make that choice again, and choose love this time.
Which is to say: decisions can be binding as well when the tools are words and the stakes are feelings as when the tools are guns and the stakes are lives.
Perhaps even more binding, as what is of the heart is sometimes deeper than what is of the hand.
YEP.