As I branch out into games that are more thematically complex than “go on adventure, kill things that are different from you”, I am curious how others tackle these themes.
What I’m specifically talking about here obviously enough is the Watch. It’s a game about fighting against male toxicity/patriarchy as filtered through a fantasy lens. When you’re going to play with new people, do you give them the high level pitch (an all female army against a supernatural evil) and leave the rest to subtext? Or do you sit down and spell everything out and make it very much the text? Why or why not?
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Listening
I think it might be fun to get the sub text by emergent play, if possible! But I am super into the idea of emergent play lately, it’s a hit button for me.
I guess it would depend on who you are trying to sell the game on. If it is a regular gamer than I would keep at a high level of “You all play woman because the shadow”. If it is someone who wants to know you could tell them about themes.
I think it depends on your players. Sometimes it can be powerful to discover themes by experiencing them through play, and sometimes knowing what the narrative focus is means players are all driving toward the same goal. Both can work. We tend to do the latter, because then players can be consciously contributing to the theme — I feel like people were doing that in the game of The Watch that we played at Breakout.
Thanks for the comments, something more to think about. As Bill Templeton points out, if everybody’s on theme, then you get the players driving a lot of the play with those themes baked into them. But my issue is that I’m thinking of running this at the local meetup, where it’s first come first serve and a one-shot, and we encourage new people to come out. I have to balance the time constraint, teaching the rules, doing character creation and setup with spending time talking about patriarchy.
To be fair, at Breakout, neither Andrew nor Anna did more than give the high level pitch and we all got into it, so maybe this is not really a problem? And yeah, a part of me thinks that having it be emergent as a thing that happens during the game might make it stick more for people who would usually avoid such matters in game?
For a one-shot/con scenario, I keep things pretty high level and leave it to the play to bring it out; as you pointed out.
Yeah, I think that’s right. There is enough of the themes in the mechanical stuff that is intrinsic to the game that it’s going to emerge one way or another.
This goes back to the idea that is being given a lot more attention these days of “system follows story” vs “story follows system.” The Watch, whatever else it is, is a story about people in an organized military hierarchy fighting a large scale (non-individual) adversary. Literarily, it’s a War Story. The system functions in service of telling a War Story- the moves, mission structure, character design, etc. I’m usually of the opinion that primal archetypes (War Story, Tragic Romance, Comedy of Errors, etc.) are interesting in their nuance- by which I mean, give the high level pitch and let the players’ lizard brains adapt (“I’m in a War Story, so I’m going to have conflicts of individualism vs. collectivism, moral absolutism vs. pragmatism, etc.”) without being given explicit marching orders (pun intended).
I’m also a super big fan of “show don’t tell,” and I feel that the social commentary themes of The Watch are wasted if we have to say “THIS IS ABOUT FIGHTING THE PATRIARCHY.” Show me the Patriarchy, motivate me to fight it, and I’ll rate the experience a lot higher. Even if it takes me longer to figure out your subtext.
Thanks for the insightful and considered response, Rebecca W! I was already leaning towards sticking with subtext but having more points of view never hurts 🙂