Category: Monsterhearts

This is going to bear some explanation. I was curious about the internal economies of the game, so I made a diagram that shows the relationships between

Ovals are moves, rectangles are tracked quantities, and dotted ovals are fictional situations.

An arrow means ‘leads to’, either because a move creates that quantity or fictional situation.  Strings lead to advantages, for example.

More subtly, arrows can also mean ‘consumed or becomes’, as is the case when Conditions are removed by Share the Pain.

Double lines indicate a subject switch. So the single line between Fear and Hold Steady means your fear becomes a need to hold steady.  The double-line between a String and Fear means your String turns into someone else’s fear (the need to hold steady).

What the hell?

I’m doing this just to understand the interplay between moves, quantities and fiction.  I’m noodling on a hack of my own, and I wish I had a diagram like this for it, so I thought a diagram for a game that works well might help me along.

Caveats:

Forgive the arranging, I know it’s hideous right now.

This diagram obviously leaves out the enormously important role of “da fiction” which surrounds everything.

There are probably several errors.

Useful, Infuriating Adults

Been thinking about using adults in the way they show up in Buffy and slightly more mundane teen stories, and how that can serve the principles.

* adults care about you and neglect you, randomly

* adults mean well, but their interventions are blind

* adults sometimes disregard the PCs’ boundaries and the rules of the world of their peers as secondary or trivial concerns

* important adults (parents, the principal) can easily apply pressure that forces PCs to hold steady, just by weight of their authority: they are powerful gatekeepers of acceptance.  (The weird duality of teenaged life: you can’t go out and fight vampires tonight, you’re grounded.)

* accordingly, adult authority figures are great at putting PCs together or pulling them apart: the principal grabs two mutual enemies, innocent of any crime, and has them spend two nights’ detention scrubbing their supposed graffiti off the gym wall.  Mom forbids you from talking to that Samantha girl (she seems depressed.. she’s not good for you).

After playing a few sessions now, I think I like Monsterhearts when the move triggers are considered for even the subtlest of actions.

I love the way that MH sends a bunch of teens out into the uncertain world of trying to find acceptance, but not giving them the tools.  Shutting someone down could be as simple as, “Nah, that’s stupid,” minimizing them, pretending you don’t know about Seth’s party; turning someone on could be as simple as a hair flip, or wearing that daring t-shirt.

While games like Burning Wheel excel at taking knock-down, drag ’em out physical or social conflicts and integrating them back into the fiction, MH seems about people who can’t help but hurt each other, often without realizing it.

It’s not all like that of course, there’s a definite role for malice, venom, for the excruciating flirt – but I think that waiting until the tension has been raised to the point where you can no longer ignore the move triggers misses out a whole world of private pain.