... and Back Again: or, How adventurers pay the rent.
Last night, we playtested.
Adam Dray, spoilers here for a game you're gonna have to judge. Use your own judgement on whether you should read.
I warned my friends that this game is not safe, and that it may be emotionally harmful.
I decided up front that agender dwarves with visible prosthetic would be the most privileged group. For each axis you aligned, you got a bonus -- you needed to pay less in upkeep. For every point you were not like the privileged group, you had a minus -- life was more expensive. If you were not matched up on all of them, you got an even worse minus.
If you matched up on all three, you got a bonus.
That is, if you were an agender dwarf with prosthetic eyes then you got an effective -2 to each poverty stat. If you were a male dwarf with prosthetic eyes, then you get a -1 to two poverty stats stats.
(lower poverty is easier.)
I told them none of this, and let them decide. My players have grown pretty accustomed to choosing from six gender options and maybe a dozen prosthetic. Because I often think such things are cool, and make for more interesting conversations and characters.
One player chosen to be an agender dwarf with aforementioned eyes. Their rent due was zero.
Another player chose to be a male human with no prosthetic. He had to pay 2 resources of each type. That is, he had to pay six resources to get the same thing the other player did from nothing.
This went about as well as could be expected.
By which I mean the character who had to pay so much thought it was incredibly unfair. He's not wrong, but that was kind of the point.
He thought he should be able to chose, because its a game. I empathize, but the eye rolls from folks who aren't straight white men was kind of fantastic.
The character who didn't have to pay upkeep was all "why should i bother doing things? life is peachy"
I'm going to change things around a bit, make it a random draw table, and change prosthetic to origin -- essentially, immigration status.
Oh, and I'm going to get it to ten pages. Somehow.
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I am asking this with sincerity, as the question probably obviously shows I do not get it, so I am curious what you are the writer see the point of the game as. How would you sell this game to people as something they should play?
ReplyDelete(I've tried to reword this because I really don't mean this judgmentally, but I am probably coming off that way... :/ )
Matt Johnson Confronting privilege and poverty through a familiar lens. Its a poverty simulator.
ReplyDeleteDo you think people - particularly privileged players with unprivileged characters - eventually got a sense of the unfairness of the game being comparable to the unfairness of life?
ReplyDeleteSarah Shugars I'm not sure yet. I sure hope so, as that's a huge part of the point of poverty simulators.
ReplyDeleteI think that one needs some pretty great facilitation skills to get the point across in the moment. I hope that, through time of playing the same character or seeing how such irreievent issues affect the long-term consequences of others, that we'd get it.
But, I'm also not sure I get how privilege effects things. Its hard for me to see, and I do try.
Matt Johnson Oh, how do I sell it? OH, that's different!
ReplyDelete"... and back again is a game of fantasy heroes in a stratified society. You'll loot dungeons, slay monsters, and confront issues back at home. You're part of a society, and folks depend on you. Can you pull them up, or will it all come crashing down?"
William Nichols ha, fair point. But there's getting it and getting it…I mean, no person can really understand the experience of another, but at the very least a poverty simulator should get people to realize that there's a whole world of experience they know nothing about and that they need to listen to and respect the perspectives of people who have that experience. Basically, if you're saying "I'm also not sure I get how privilege effects things. Its hard for me to see, and I do try." Then you're probably doing it right 😀
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