STAKES: a microgame about stakes-setting

[mneme]

drcpunk and I just had a rather amusing conversation. In the shower, like you care.

mnemex: I should come up with a microgame about stakes.
drcpunk: (not understanding) Ok. I want to eat a steak.
mnemex: Ok, and I want you to be happy.
drcpunk: But...I want my steak.
mnemex: What if you don't get get your steak, but you do get to be happy, is that Ok?
drcpunk: Sure!

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Stakes A microgame about stakes-setting.

Play:

To start: Start with two players. Designate one of them "player 1", and the other "player 2".

The play:

Each move should be ten words or less. Really it should be five words or less, but don't sweat it.

Player 1 describes a character, "I'm an ace pilot."
Player 2 describes a character, including a relationship to player 1's character. "I'm your guardian Angel".
PLayer 2 describes what her character is trying to do. Player 2 must be acceptable with both success and failure (both must be interesting to her). "I'm want you to give up war."
Player 1 describes what her character is trying to do. See above for rules...plus it must be orthoganal to player 2's goal; all four options must be acceptable and interesting.

Then, determine each stake separately, giving each a 50% chance. Flip coins, play RPS, roll dice, whatever. Each should have equal chances of success and failure.

Finally, whichever player wants to figure out what happened does so. If there's a tie, player 1 wins. This can be as little as "ok, so I give up the army and become a person of peace" to "after my best friend is killed in the war, I can't fight any more, and I retire, marrying a native girl. My side eventually loses the war and pays reparations, but I don't care; I'm happy living a normal life."

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I'll note that in play, the actual important part (the instant character creation and responsive stake setting) was actually much more fun than determining results -- we played three games (the ones listed above plus one involving my "teacher who fights crime" and Lisa's "your student who's actually a yakusza who wants you to take out his boss's rival" (the teacher wanted to marry the student's mother)), but in the first, protogame one, we decided the stakes by fiat (as above), in the second, we only determined the results while I was writing this because I thought we should finish at least -one- game, and the third is still unresolved...but imagine the -possiblities-.

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Variations:

If you find you want to contine the story, play another game of Stakes after you finish the first one, taking on appropriate characters to the continuation. Continue as long as you like...or translate the story into a medium that's more appropriate if that seems needed (you can break the turn limit rules if you're trying for an extended play game). Rotate who is player 1.

The play should work fine (but be more challenging) if you want to play with more than two players. Start play as above, but first go around announcing characters, each with a relationship to the previously introduced character (as well as possibly to other characters). When you get to the final player, before you start setting stakes (in the reverse direction), player 1 should figure out how his or her character has a relationship to the last player's character. Then going around setting stakes, with each player's stakes being orthogonal to all previous stakes (and player 1 having primary narration rights, then player 2, and so on)

Comments

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I didn't not understand; I deliberately misunderstood.

For the second game, you did a good double check of stakes. My original stake was "I wanna fly!"

mnemex: So, are you okay with not flying?

drcpunk: Er, no.

mnemex: Then, that can't be your stakes.

drcpunk: Okay. I want to win the war for my side!

And we did two "coin tosses": You got your stakes; I didn't get mine.

For the third, neither of us got our stakes, and we eventually decided that my PC's mother was secretly married to the yakuza my PC wanted your PC to take down, and your PC killed her when she pushed between the two characters. My PC either attacked yours but didn't succeed in killing him, or tracked him down and realized, as you said, "he was a broken man" -- no point in killing him -- and went on to a life of crime.

At this point, you said that the sequel had to be your PC coming out of retirement to take on mine.

Now, the next step is to write a sequel game that blends what we learn from Stakes with what you and I consider "actual" roleplaying. Lots of folks, including authors of games revolving around stake-setting, agree that the players should, well, roleplay what they just figured out, but the current games don't facilitate that as well as they might.

[avram]

Can we have a microgame about not putting a long string of equals signs without spaces that makes the whole page really wide? I predict that using an <hr />> tag will turn out to be the winning strategy!

[mneme]

Oops. Fixed.

Dinosaur <--

It's really confusing to take text emails that are actually written for a mostly HTML environment.

[avram]

This is why the good Lord gave us Markdown (requires Perl 5.6.0 and the Digest::MD5 module).

[mneme]

Cute. Not sure which lord this is.

OTOH, it's only marginally feasable for the application in quesiton -- making email->lj easier.

[jl8e]

Nothing involving Perl comes from anything holy.