Struggling With the Morality of the PCs in the Adam Koebel Roll20 Games Master Series Apocalypse World Game
Spoilers below…
So there’s this scene in episode 9.1 of the Adam Koebel, John Harper, Andrew and Avycyn Roll20 AW game where John’s character, Frankie pulls out a gun and shoots an unarmed woman to death. It’s a brutal killing, played up in the fiction: execution style while the father of the victim watches.
Realize this is around 30-40 hours into the game at this point, and I’d listened to every episode, meaning I had really been enjoying it. But at that moment I pulled out the earplugs and quit watching, without any real desire to find out what happened next.
Before saying anything else, I realize this is potentially an emotional topic, with a lot of real world feelings in regards to the players involved as well as the PCs and fiction of this particular game. So, to clarify, I’m not saying John, or Adam, or Andrew, or Avycyn is a bad person. I’m also not saying that they played the game wrong, or that anyone else who watched that same moment is required to have the same reaction I did. I’m also not saying that it was a bad game: as I mentioned earlier, I had really enjoyed it up to that point. I enjoyed it for the quality of the fiction and I learned an immense amount about AW and role-playing in general from the series. If anything, the fact that I had such a visceral reaction to the fiction should indicate how good the prior material had been.
But I just couldn’t get past Frankie killing Mercer like that (or, now that I think of it, the way the crew of the Vixen signed up to murder everyone in Mercer’s Hold).
Reviewing my mental record of the previous 8 episodes, I can’t think of anything that set up this level of moral desolation. Yes, Frankie and the others had killed before, but it was always contextualized as either self-defense, or deeply morally troubling (when Frankie kills Tao). And yes, we had the “kill anything that moves no sense of right or wrong” character of Navarre, but prior to she had been positioned in contrast to Frankie who provided some sort of moral backing. And yes, Gritch was nasty, and scary—like, legitimately scary—but again, he was contextualized and counter-balanced by Frankie (I think one could make an argument that the real heart and moral ballast of the group was Austin Walker’s character who bowed out early on, but not sure what else to say about that).
So did anyone else get to this point in the story and have a similar, or different, reaction? Is there something I’m missing? Like, why did Frankie do it after agonizing over the death of Tao for 6 episodes? And maybe more broadly, does anyone else find that these sorts of over arching morality questions as critically important as I do to the enjoyment of a game or piece of fiction?
Best regards,
Tor
ooooh, i am so super curious
I will have to watch this to let you know, however, vaguely related. A game I was recently in of ConspiracyX, the GM knew I had issues with player death (I don’t like it unless it is absolutely needed, or wanted) so instead of killing me he killed my wife (an alien who was mind controlling me, but the emotional impact was real), our 20 spawned alien children and then my human partner. A couple of days after the last death I was thinking about things and it suddenly hit me that I didn’t want to play that character anymore. Partly it was that the GM seemed to be trying to make a point off me, and partly because all the characters built around my character were dead. And very likely any more would also die. So, despondent, I think I have retired the character.
I’ve been told I’m terrible at empathizing with characters in table top sessions. My first Dogs in the Vineyard character was a young man, imbued with a black and white view of the world and handed an obstinance ending revolver. People got hurt and a family was destroyed, and it all happened with alarming speed. Part of it is an inability to remember a sweeping cast of NPCs, especially when it’s a single friend voicing the cast. Combine that with a drive to ‘win’ and it can make me a shitty player.
I’m great with faces and can forget your name in the span of three minutes, so I’ve been thinking about a big collection of faces on cards. They would be laminated so you can whiteboard names onto them as they lope out of nowhere, and the MC could even write their simple interests on the back. If they paperclipped them to the top of a GM screen they’d be automatically reminded of it as they presented the complications. This way when an NPC shows up I have a face to anchor me to them and I’m immediately more invested.
I’m no longer certain I’m on topic…
Kevin Flynn That’s an interesting story, and touches on one of the issues that made me uncomfortable with the killing of Mercer. In both the Mercer case and your ConspiracyX situation, the person being killed is something other than human but is still acting human with human connections that matter both in game and (possibly) out of game as well. In other words, technically not a person, but, like, that feels like a pretty technical argument to make.
Darrin Michelson Hm, I think maybe that’s a different situation. Also, I think what made me uncomfortable with Frankie killing Mercer wasn’t so much that she did it (though I have to admit, I really didn’t want Frankie to do it for Frankie’s sake), but that it felt like the action happened in a bit of a moral vacuum.
Adam Koebel Re-reading my title for this post it maybe sounds like I was calling you out: really not my intention. Genuinely engaged with the fiction you guys were creating on a level of total enjoyment for 99% of the game. And to repeat, the fact that I’ve taken to the internet to express my feelings on the subject is hopefully proof that you guys created something powerful.
Tor Erickson not at all! no worries.
Adam Koebel cheers, then 🙂 I want to see if anyone else from outside the game jumps in with feedback and then I definitely want to ask you how this moment tracked on a narrative and emotional level from inside the game
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It sure seemed to me that by that point in the game the characters had seen so much weird shit that they could no longer be sure about who was human or what that meant or what they should do about it. They were having to make decisions based on incomplete information and guesswork, and having any sort of decent, human empathy wasn’t doing any of them a whole lot of favours.
I thought John played Frankie’s emotional collapse pretty well, actually (as I remember it, anyway). The jarring thing for me about this campaign was when they all agreed, in the first session, to play a “low-weirdness game,” ha ha ha.
As a Christian gamer I often feel in games that a moral line has been crossed beyond which I could not enjoy it any more. I am sure other people experience the same.
But it is definitely not mere moralizing. It is far more complex than that.
I often play amoral characters in games, specifically thieves. The reason why we often play characters that have other world views than ourselves is because games, like stories, are simulations of reality. I can explore the consequences of poor moral choices in a game without ruining my real life by making those choices in real life.
That is why there is probably little relationship between videogame violence and real violence.
If someone plays Grand Theft Auto, which is partly about murdering good people (the cops) in cold blood, it does not mean that that person would be a cold blooded cop killer in real life. It may. But it more probably means that the player enjoys exploring the moral choices of an in-game character that does not necessarily share his own morality. What happens to the in-game murderer will either prove or disprove the player’s worldview about those moral choices.
This is basic story theory, at least partly described by Lajos Egri, whom I believe all story game designers should probably read.
So if a player plays an evil character it does not necessarily make him evil.
But, having said that, there are boundaries where I personally stop having fun. I can’t have fun with cold blooded murder, rape of any kind, cannibalism, etc. (Edit: meaning the protagonists doing those things. Of course the antagonists have to be as evil as possible!) Those are my boundaries. Other people have different boundaries, and I respect them without assuming that they are cannibalistic murdering rapists in real life.
So how do I handle this? When I am the GM I expect the players to stay within the boundaries that the whole table finds comfortable.
When I am a player and the table has different boundaries than me, I simply walk away. Not because I want to force my morals on them, but simply because it ceases to be fun for me.
Johnstone Metzger
I have not watched the series, but if cold blooded murder is the consequence of a valid character arch, then it probably should happen.
Johnstone Metzger Wynand Louw I think this response addresses both of your comments, though I’ll specifically be talking to Wynand.
So, I stated this in my original post, but it’s possibly worth repeating: I am not at all, even a tiny bit, suggesting that because Frankie did something that I found morally objectionable in the game, that John, or Adam, or anyone else involved is a bad person. That said…
Okay, so yes, I do agree that part of playing these games (or watching movies or reading books or whatever) is about experiencing the natural consequences of the characters actions and seeing how it plays out in the fiction except…. well, except that’s the difference between Grand Theft Auto and Apocalypse World, isn’t it? GTA allows us to conduct these actions as a sort of moral tourism (what would it be like to murder a bunch of cops?); AW asks us to provide commentary, and yes, possibly judgement, on those same actions.
And where I got hung up was that when Frankie popped Mercer while Mercer’s father looked on in horror, we lost the ability to provide effective moral commentary in the game precisely because Frankie was the moral lynchpin of the story.
Like, look at it this way: a piece of fiction is a closed circuit, we have to take what is provided within the walls of that piece of fiction as the totality of what it has to say. We can’t step outside of it and add in another piece from somewhere else to justify or reinterpret what happened. And within the boundaries of this particular AW game, the last character or thing able to provide effective moral commentary was Frankie herself.
I remember a similar thing happened for me around season 4 of The Sopranos. By that point Dr. Melfi had been kicked around so much by the writers—it really felt like the despised her—that any sort of moral commentary she was able to provide on Tony’s actions just came off as a cynical joke. And without her, I felt like the show degenerated into an extended male power fantasy (and please, let’s not digress into a Sopranos discussion except as it touches on the AW game at hand).
An interesting discussion.
Best regards,
Tor
Sure. It sounds to me like you’re saying (essentially) that this murder marked the point where you no longer had any characters to identify with. Of course, without that, it’s just watching characters do things to see what happens, and in this case, you found that you don’t have any interest in that, yeah?
That seems pretty normal, really.
Tor Erickson I totally get what you say. I watched the first episode of the Sopranos and could not watch a second, simply because I could not identify with any of the characters, because of their morality.
+Johnstone Metzger That’s probably a lot of it. I think the exception would be, though, is that I can think of examples of fiction that I find watchable/readable with no characters I can identify with as long is there is some sort of moral core that the fiction references back to.
Adam Koebel So, another thought. Been listening to the Blades in the Dark series (which is utterly delightful) and fully able to enjoy and revel in the cheerful psychopathy of Canter Haig because he has that nice counterpoint of Sean Nittner’s Arcy there to act as sounding board (on Episode 4 right now, the big fight in the brothel). It’s a great dynamic, the action’s of each character emphasize and highlight the other.