I adore RPGs about voluntary families.
Jay Treat's A Pirate's Life did this well; my own pbta space pirate game is angling towards it, though without the purity of focus of Jay's work.
I was reminded of this at, of all places, the Lego Store. They've got a 6-legged Star Wars walker that I did not recognize; it is apparently from Rebels, about a small group who take over a walker, and turn it into a permanently moving home.
Firefly is precisely this; a small group who live together voluntarily and try to make a life together. Each with foibles and strengths, and either genuine fondness for each other or respect.
Both of these are what I want from my rebellions, rather than the hierarchy we see in Rogue One; small groups opting out of the Machine, fighting it when they can. Most importantly, keeping their own moral code rather than ceding it to their leaders.
I've tried doing this in Apocalypse World, usually to dismal failure. I don't know if that's me, poor communication, or, as I suspect, if AW doesn't lend itself towards it.
Advice appreciated.
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How did you try to achieve this in AW? With world-building questions? "Why is this group your family?"
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteAW tends to do whatever the players want it to, whether they realize it or not. Did the players want to play members of a constructed family?
ReplyDeleteHow could you mechanise the benefits of Family?
ReplyDeleteThe challenge in game would be putting the family before yourself, probably spending your character's time maintaining the family status quo than going off drinking/gambling/joyriding.
Maybe there would be an aspect of doing what you are told, which could certainly lead to some interesting situations when the person doing the telling is wrong.
Not a lot of help really. I'm just thinking out loud.
So, I mean, Legacy is all about putting Family front and centre in a pbta framework. Each player's particular family is their throughline as the game jumps across generations, and I tried hard to sell that families can be brought together by blood, ideology, philosophy or circumstances and be just as important a unit.
ReplyDeleteThe game as written assumes player characters belong to different families, but little ends up breaking if you have a shared family that everyone comes from! Legacy 2e is actually beefing this up with characters picking a particular role they play in the family.
There's also room for different interpretations of 'family'. Are you talking parent-child relationships? Siblings? Extended cousins?
ReplyDeleteChristo Meid Essentially. Questions to set things up for people to be with each other.
ReplyDeleteAdam McConnaughey I think you answered your own question, and pointed to the problem.
ReplyDeleteBrian AshfordYeah. The mechanics are relevant. Perhaps some sort of resources that need to go into a family pot. One analogy -- repairing Serenity.
ReplyDeleteJames Iles You are always interesting. What structures are in place to keep people as family?
ReplyDeleteMisha B All of those and none of those. :-)
ReplyDeleteThose who live together, with communal resources based on love and need.
More thoughts: Each family comes with benefits and responsibilities.
ReplyDeleteThe benefits of the family on the Serenity are:
Good meal times,
Support when you need help,
Every job slot on the ship is filled.
The responsibilities are:
Keep a civil tongue,
You have to do your Job,
You have to do what Mal says,
You rarely get a day off,
You are all criminals.
If life was simple, this wouldn't be very interesting. All the players would be working towards the same goal and the players would lose some agency. But life in the 'verse isn't simple.
River doesn't have a job and can't pay her way, is also occasionally dangerous.
Wash desperately wants Zoe to himself, is constantly worried that her luck might run out and she might get killed.
Jayne is always on the lookout for a better offer, doesn't realise the value of his current home.
Mal only wants to do what's best for his family, but he often has to choose between the safe job and the profitable job.
This is interesting. Hmm.
ReplyDeleteI could imagine choosing first session the rules and responsibilities of the family.
Maybe that's: we share all income equally, we all clean up our own messes, and bring jobs to the Captain.
I'm not sure you'd need this in the playbooks. Though, the Waterbearer gets close. And makes the Waterbearer into the boss-type.
But, I dunno. This is possible.
You could do it with two questions:
ReplyDeleteWhat is it that you value most about this family?
Why does the person to your right struggle to do their bit?
William Nichols The 2e playtest playbooks should give some idea: dropbox.com - Legacy 2e Playtest sheets.pdf
ReplyDeleteBasically every player has a Family playbook - it defines what sort of things the family's good at, what motivates them, and what they're lacking. The Family's a more weighty element than characters, who are meant to spend only a few sessions or so on screen before you move to a different representative of the Family a generation or so down the line.
As part of making your family you define what brings people together to make the family, how it's lead, and their distinctive fashion, but when you go through those time skips the Turning of Ages move triggers and can cause all sorts of changes to the family's structure, position and membership.
For example, the 'take a move from another playbook' equivalent has your two families intermarrying if you rolled well on the Turning of Ages move, or the other family subjugating/enslaving yours if you rolled badly on it. Either way you're now free again and have learned something new, but it has big consequences for the age you now find yourselves in!
I prefer involuntary families, so that nobody ever feels a hundred percent free to leave.
ReplyDeleteJason Corley That's interesting! Do you have any examples?
ReplyDeleteJames Iles This is kind of remarkable. You've got Families like playbooks, and they are really evocative.
ReplyDeleteThere's a similarity here with what I'm doing with Solar Wind & Sails, my game about space pirates. In that, the the family is the ship and we define it (and it's stats) at start of session. I also removed player stats, so you only use the ships stats. Lastly, there is a whole host of NPCs who live onboard the ship.
To spitball a little, it might be interesting to expand from space pirates to a variety of possible ways of organzing a couple dozen people, from the militaristic to the cultist to the mercantile. Give those different sample stats, and build out family moves.
This is given me some cool stuff to think about, which I adore.
William Nichols Regular families. I ran a game about a crime family and trying to oust a shitty cousin without murdering them was a big deal. In a voluntary family they would never have allied with him in the first place.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols always happy to inspire cool thoughts :D
ReplyDeleteHuh. This is actually close to an idea I'd had and nibbled at a while back: Changes to Dream Askew to use the structure but allow for a variety of content.
ReplyDeleteI'm much more comfortable with this, as what made me not do anything with changing dream askew is I figure it's kind of shitty for me to erase the queer content of DA with my own straightness.
To answer the OP, I'd say start with a game that's intrinsically about oppression rather than one that's about resource scarcity. I'm not sure if any PbtA games have that focus; maybe The Watch?
ReplyDeleteI'm not in a good place to try hacking the Watch.
ReplyDeleteBut maybe, instead, a family playbook and you can totally trigger moves from that.