Looking Up & Down

Thomas Manuel

I. Dear Reader,

Last week, I talked about a technique we’ve been doing while paying the delicious folk horror game, Harvest. Looking back, I was using the word “freeform” to refer to the unstructured nature of the roleplaying as well as the unstructured nature of the game. The scene-planning technique is probably more about the game being GM-less than the game being freeform.

This week, I’m thinking about the actual roleplaying part of Belonging outside Belonging games.

A while ago, I learned an interesting idea from Brand on the Indie Game Reading Club slack. There was more to it but let me communicate it as ‘looking up‘ versus ‘looking down‘. When you’re looking up, you’re looking at your fellow players, your eyes are meeting their eyes (at least metaphorically). When you’re looking down, you’re looking at your sheet or other aspects of the game materials. You can analyse games based on when they ask you to look up and when they ask you to look down. You might also have a preference for one mode or the other. The oft-repeated “we never touched the dice all night” can be seen as “we never looked down”.

I’m bringing this up because I find that I’m very conscious of the way that Belonging outside Belonging games make me look down. In many games, when you’re stuck, you look at your character sheet for a button to press. Maybe the GM just described a problem and you’re scanning for what might help: a power, an item, a contact, something. This is true in Belonging games as well. In Harvest, when you’re stuck, you can look down and scan your moves for ideas, like “oh wait, I can use one of my cool Occult moves to magick my way through this, cool, let’s do that”.

Of course, like in most RPGs, in Belonging games, your character can do a thousand things at any given moment. The character sheet or playbook isn’t an exhaustive list of “things you can do”. It isn’t a restriction… except when it is. You’re not supposed to do any of the “strong moves” without spending a token. So unlike in fully freeform games, you also look down to check if you can’t do something. This is something that feels weird to me. It is taking some getting used to.

(In an ideal play state, you know all your characters stuff: their moves, their relationships, etc. So you don’t have to pause the game while you scan through your notes. But RPGs are often messy and scrappy. And that’s mostly a good thing in my experience.)

One thing that specifically happens with Belonging games is that you look down because the moves are ideas for whole scenes.  You think, “I want a scene where I use this move that let’s me kill anyone who disrespects the old ways”. Sometimes you don’t know who you might use it on. But as the story goes on, it might become clear exactly who deserves this. And then you could pitch it to the group as a scene. Of course, you could also just wait quietly until the opportunity presents itself, holding the move behind your back like a knife. (Harvest is a dark game. This is the vibe.)

I think looking up and looking down is one of those ideas that helps me diagnose my own feelings. For example, sometimes when I don’t quite feel comfortable with the game, with the story, with the table, I find myself looking down more. This might mean that I don’t understand the rules (maybe it’s the first session) or don’t have enough of a grip on what’s happening in the story.

Alternatively, when I spend a lot of time looking up, I do make a note to check how much credit I should give the game for that experience. Because those moments are uniquely crafted between the people right there in that instant. I’m someone who talks about games and recommends them a lot. If all of my best moments were bespoke creations, I have to think about how the game contributed. Sometimes they have. But sometimes they simply haven’t and all the credit goes to my friends for being brilliant.

Yours looking up and down,

Thomas

II. Media of the Week

  • Dungeon Master of None have an episode where they discuss Zephyr, the anarchist fantasy game from Araukana Media. It’s a unique game of politics and identity and statelessness. It’s a big game and I’ve been meaning to make time to check it out and try to get it to the table.
  • On Dice Exploder, Sam Dunnewold is doing this mix of fiction and non-fiction with his series called Afterimages. The latest one is about the scroll-based storytelling game, City of Winter.

III. Links of the Week

  • On Rascal, Chase Carter reports on Roll20/DriveThruRPG censoring a game called Rebel Scum for its anti-Republican language. (Free to read.)
  • On Old Men Running The World, Kieron Gillen writes about playtesting jay dragon’s baroque wizard game Seven Part Pact with some other RPG luminaries: “The Seven Part Pact is a GM-full game. I think it’s the only GM-full game.”
  • Was very cool to see this reddit thread asking “what obscure RPGs are your playgroup keeping alive“. There are a lot of licensed games that just aren’t available like Marvel Heroic as well as games that were just never very popular like Bushido and Buck Rogers.
  • Continuing his thoughts on Daggerheart, Rob Donoghue (FATE) writes about the generalized problem of having a wide open play space (like many trad and generic games) and then having to figure out what to make this particular campaign about. Daggerheart doesn’t have any adventures ready to go as an answer to that problem.
  • Geek Native has an interview with designer Sebastien Yue about their adventure for Spire called The Model Minister.
  • At Origins Game Fair, Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast was honoured as RPG Product of the Year and Mike Pondsmith was recognised for his life’s work.
  • The Ennies award judge applications  are open and anyone and everyone should feel empowered to apply.
  • A nice report on UK Gaming Expo’s event for promoting more people of colour in games from one of the attendees. In the same vein, there’s a similar event being organized (signup form) at GameHole Con which is in October.

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

  • Nothing this week!

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One response to “Looking Up & Down”

  1. juddthelibrarian Avatar
    juddthelibrarian

    Oh, Marvel Heroic…sigh.

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