I've been trying to explain the magnificence of The Watch for a year. Tony explains it after a weeks thought.

I've been trying to explain the magnificence of The Watch for a year. Tony explains it after a weeks thought.

As is becoming usual, I am stupendously glad I get to game with Tony Lower-Basch on a regular basis.

Originally shared by Tony Lower-Basch

The Watch, Dreamation Long Con, Pt. 1 (long)

I usually do my write-ups closer to the event, while the little details are fizzing and popping in my head. The Long-con (three slots, each slot four hours, telling one long arc) of Anna Kreider's new RPG The Watch (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/medeiros/the-watch-rpg/) is an exception for the best reason: I've had to think and digest on all of the cool stuff that happened, and each day I've found better things to say than the previous. I'll probably be better able to tell this story a month from now, but I've thought enough for a write-up, so I'll get it out there before Dreamation is just ancient history.

The first thing you will always, always, hear about The Watch is that it is a story of women and non-binary characters. And this is true! And it's a great thing to talk about, because representation is soo important. I'm going to let someone else talk about what that means. I want to talk about something that is (to my mind) equally radical that Anna is doing, and not even calling attention to.

We did the usual: Got our eight players together and learned the system a bit, absorbed the setting (tribes put their past history behind them to unite against The Shadow that threatens to consume them from without and within), and worked up past connections. I wanted to avoid, as much as possible, playing "A woman," as if that were the end of a conversation about personality, rather than the beginning. You know how it goes "This is Dirk, he is brooding and sad, but with a core of insecurity, this is Paldrin, he is bright-hearted and open, sometimes to a fault, and this is Lindelle, she's a girl." To give myself a creative constraint to force me to dig deeper than that, I sat out selecting play-books, and got the one that everyone else passed on: The Eagle is a vain, bragging, up front character specialized in two things ... kicking ass at the front of a charge, and being brave about opening up to people between battles. So, naturally, I mini-maxed the heck out of her ability to do those things. From the table discussion I gathered that other people were likewise finding where their character strengths were, and honing them.

This gets to the bit that I think is particularly brilliant about The Watch: There is not, as best I was able to discern, any dichotomy in the game between Fighting Stats and Interpersonal Stats. Everybody is going to have a particular way that they're good at fighting when swords are out and blood is flowing. And everybody is going to have a related way that they're good at the emotional work that binds a unit and a community together. Some people build their friends up. Some people get sloppy drunk and drag your shy self on to the dance floor. Some people call folks in. Some people keep other people's hard secrets. Some people are steady rocks that everyone knows they can count on... and just as in combat, the team works when people play to each other's strengths and tailor their moves toward setting the volleyball for other team-members to spike.

I'm getting ahead of myself though ... this is what I learned during play. What actually happened next is that they took the two people who had chosen to have their characters be Corporals, and lined the rest of us up against a wall, and had the non-coms take turns picking us out, like pickup soccer. Then each group of four went off to their own table (and not knowing what happened at the other table was maddening, let me tell you!) Our team was:

Our corporal, Laustec, who was amazing at taking on other people's secrets and hurt. Played by Albert D.
Spooky priestess-reconnaissance girl Peyma, who kept everything under wraps (literally!) until it was time to cut loose. Played by George Austin
Natural-born XO Tabak, who was sooo strong and reliable at lending support and backup when people needed. Played by Christo Meid

We got the inimitable Aaron Friesen as MC, and they threw us straight into a mission: Take back a fort! The dice did what dice do, and we had an overall success but with pretty severe complications. During the battle Tabak got cut off and did terrible things under the Shadow's influence (and we ended up with three more bodies to bury, rather than three rescued hostages), and we also had a "Shadow-problem to be named later."

Laustec, being the non-com, ended up absorbing the brunt of both of these brilliantly. Tabak came to her to confess, and Laustec took on the responsibility and covered up the crime. Then one of the NPCs came up and straight out tried to knife Laustec, her eyes blank with the Shadow's influence. Laustec's priority was "conceal what's happening with my cloak, so nobody knows." So she gets stabbed and is hugging this girl until the shadow passes and the girl breaks down. As far as any of the rest of us know, the NPC (whose name eludes me, and it's killing me!) just went up and got swept into an embrace, then broke down crying. Laustec discreetly pockets the knife, pats her on the shoulder, and goes off to bind her wounds.

We loved our corporal.

There was hugging and crying freakin' everywhere... because that's a game move. You can gain camaraderie (and other bennies) by opening up and being vulnerable, or arguing, or carousing, and we certainly had plenty of opportunity for all three: My character (Presti) came to Peyma and choked out "These were our people before the Shadow ... I knew that guy (points to corpse), I played with him by the river, and now I've >choked sob< I've killed him! I don't know how everyone else can seem okay with this! Peyma, I know we have to be strong, but I'm n-not okay-ay with thi-i-i-isss!", and we both hugged and cried it out, and collected Camaraderie (the "help your team-mates" currency). I quickly realized that if my vain, bragging Eagle was not going to be a complete twit, she would need to be bragging about how awesome her team-mates were, so I went around assuring people that they were the best thing ever. We had a funeral for those we slew, and during my flubbed attempt at a eulogy we got attacked and kicked some more ass ... then more emotional work, with Peyma reaching out to Tabak, and everyone closing circles to make sure nobody had failed to connect with anyone.

The emotional-work scenes ripped away the unreality of the battle we'd just fought, and turned it from something we could imagine as a tactical exercise into, retroactively, a heart-and-guts trial of trauma and bravery. It made perfectly clear that the only way we were going to get through the battles to come would be by counting on our sister warriors. And then it backed that up with very concrete game currency. So good.

At the same time, the emotional work was advancing our tactical options: Tabak was emotionally in ruins about what she had done, and was confiding left and right. As she looked for redemption, she concluded that she needed to make some way that the Shadow could never get to her again. And, of course, Laustec and Peyma were ready and willing to help, though they argued over the best way to do so (Tabak confessed to Presti and got a forgiveness so complete and unconditional that she then couldn't talk to Presti about her need for redemption ... it was bizarre and cool). So when a group of Shadow-held tried to take the fort back, our unit jaunted through the spirit world to pop up right in their back ranks, and disrupt the heck out of their formation, to seize a shadow artifact for Tabak's plans.

Now I heard a lot about the difference in dice between the two tables ... I don't know, I wasn't at the other table. But I'll tell you what I saw in this second battle: We had some good and some crummy rolls, again, but now we had a huge bank of camaraderie points from the emotional work we'd done between battles. So when something went wrong, we had the in-game resources to mitigate the damage, and could narrate our team-mates swooping in to save the day. We did that a lot and it made a huge difference in how the second battle turned out (pretty much flawless victory, post-camaraderie-spend, which would be our trope going forward).

While Peyma and Tabak used the shadow-artifact to make an awesome amulet of shadow-protection that saved the day a ton going forward, Laustec went to report to our higher-ups. And when she did so, she immediately totally confessed that under her direction the unit was meddling with shadow-stuff, that she wasn't going to tell our superiors who was doing it, because it was her responsibility as corporal. She insisted that any consequences that fell upon the group fall upon her. The higher-up (whose title eludes me) commended her for her honesty, sentenced her to ten lashes in front of the unit, and promoted her to sergeant.

And, of course, with the drama ratcheted up that way we flipped the heck out on hitting our distinctive ways of doing emotional work. Tabak argued with the higher-up, then went and comforted Laustec. Presti was all guilt-prone about having caused this (she had her contorted logic, it was not sound logic, but she clung to it). Peyma was kicking over stuff and shouting that this wasn't right, the sergeant stood up for us ... and yeah, maybe Presti got a little breathless at Peyma's unleashed passion. There may have been some lip-locking there. Camaraderie all around!

That's the thing, see? Throughout that session is became clear that there wasn't a distinction between fighting with a sword on the battlefield, and giving each other high-fives afterwards. They were both essential acts in the overall struggle. That is so freeing! It's way more than simply saying "Women can swing a sword too!" (although that's important). It's saying "There is more to fighting for your people, and for justice, than some toxic vision of unending combat. It's something you bring your whole personhood to, and we're going to tell a story of the whole thing." I think that is radical. I want to do a ton more.

A lot of discussion of The Watch is going to center around gender, but for me this distinction isn't a gendered one: I've played to these exact stories (in far less supportive systems) with character names like Spencer, and Forzy (4Z-LX). This is something that comes up (for me) whether I'm playing a guy, or a girl, or a genderless droid. The emotional work of drawing a group together? That is my RPG jam. It was so very, very cool to see a rules system that recognized that not merely as an alternative to combat and conflict, but as another piece of the jigsaw puzzle. It was great to see a system where you could approach each other with your fists clenched, or your arms opened, and neither was wrong, neither had priority over the other, they were all part of a big complicated emotional world.

And that, my friends, was session one.

In case you're wondering, yes the Kickstarter is still open. And it's in Canadian dollars, so, y'know ... all the jokes about currency exchange rates. It's a terrific game. I'm looking forward to eventually seeing how it plays in a Play-by-Post or Hangout format, because I think it really benefits from being more than a one-shot ... folks were visibly digesting their experiences, and they came to the second session with new insights and building excitement. But that's for Part 2.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/medeiros/the-watch-rpg/