This is part five of a series. The first post can be found here: Gender and Game Mechanics Series: Part 1 – Introduction and the previous post here: Gender and Game Mechanics: Part 4 – Care in Action?
Last time I talked about Nordic larps and provided an example of a game (Mad about the Boy) that had a care mediation bias, though did so not because it expressly provided support for care mediation, but did not constrain care-mediation values and did constrain justice mediation values.
This post will look at some mechanics in games Powered by The Apocalypse and how they are using interesting hybrid models that provide at least partial support to both. By Powered by the Apocalypse, I mean games such as D. Vincent Baker’s open source system Apocalypse World, and some of the other games that hacked its engine: Joe McDaldno’s Monsterhearts, Gregor Vuga’s Saga of the Icelanders, and Jason Morningstar’s game (in development) Night Witches.
The Apocalypse World engine and all of the various hacks have interesting design elements in them that manage, articulate and govern relationships between characters in the game. As relationship management is a core component of care mediation, it makes the suite of games a fruitful cluster for evaluation. In the original game, player characters earn Hx (history points) with other PCs whenever they engage in emotionally intense activity (E.g. sex, healing, harming etc.). You can use Hx as a modifier in certain rolls to help or interfere with their actions in the game, and earning Hx with others is a vehicle to earn experience points. In addition, through special mechanical moves on your character sheet, you can earn Hold on another character (PC or NPC) which allow you to influence mechanically them in play.
This is interesting, because it clearly combines several elements of both care and justice mediation. There is an external system that is built to support the resolution of dispute (justice), and provides tangible tracking for how the relationship is affected (care). It provides mechanical incentive to invest in relationships in the game (care) and mechanical incentive to build a sense of reciprocity when making others do what you want (justice and care).
Notably, while Hx tracks changes to a relationship and creates an idea of providing mechanical support for relationship development (and this seem likes care), what it actually doing is systematizing the relationship. This can actually be used with justice-oriented playgroups to shortcut over relationship management altogether. At the same time, the mechanic does not necessarily constrain care-oriented playgroups from deeply engaging in relationship management. So this mechanic may not interfere with each orientation individually, but by it’s nature it could create cohesion breaks in mixed groups. Also, I am willing to bet that many care-oriented individuals might conceptually struggle with the way Hx gets turned into XP (+3 Hx with a player automatically pays out in 1 XP but Hx returns to 0 as a result) because it conceptually violates the way relationships work (I know you better, it pays out, now I don’t know you at all.)
In Monsterhearts, Joe McDaldno’s “storygame about the messy lives of teenage monsters”, the relationship mechanics are changed. Hx and Hold are gone. Instead, player characters earn “Strings” on each other through a wide variety of interactions (that are served by mechanical moves) and those Strings can be spent in a variety of ways. You can hinder their actions, you can reduce their successes when they try to hurt you, when you successfully hurt them you can intensify the harm you do. You can use them to put conditions (which can act like hindrances or social stigmas) on others. There is no mechanic in Monsterhearts to manipulate another into doing something, but you can use your Strings as pull incentives to get the other player to make choices you want to see (note that this is both fair and reciprocal). Unlike Hx which is a feature of Apocalypse World, Strings are the driving force behind Monsterhearts. They drive drama and focus into the relationships at the table. It’s a really interesting mix of care and justice sensibilities, and as a care-oriented player, I love the tangible effects that Monsterhearts’ system gives relationships in play – especially as a GM.
In Saga of the Icelanders, Gregor Vuga does some interesting thematic things with gender that I’ll likely explore in another post outside this series, but for the purposes of this article, I’m concerned with the care and justice elements – again, around relationships. In SotI, Hx and Strings are all replaced by “Bond” (Hold is still present, acting as a measure of influence). Bond expressly represents intimacy and social connections and are intended to give the relationships mechanical weight. You get bond by time passing with characters, making moves that focus on your relationship, gaining leverage, giving them gifts, etc. The system asks you to define what about significant relationships are important to you, and asks you to update it with the fiction. This draws players to evaluate and reevaluate relationships over time.
Also, the system has mechanically driven incentives to use moves – essentially hard actions – against the characters that you have relationships with that will put pressure on them and drive social action and relationship change in the game. And while all of the AW hacks have community in their thematic core, SotI manifests it most cleanly. With its saga era settings, players are not just asked to build and maintain relationships with other individuals, but to maintain status, face, and relational standing with the community as a whole. In AW or Monsterhearts, threats and menaces that serve as your situation catalysts are outsiders, often monstrous. They demand your players stand together against the external threat. In SotI the community itself is the threat. It is the life and lives of the people that you live with, who themselves decide your fate and who you must mitigate conflict with.
Night Witches, by Jason Morningstar, is a hack that is still in development, so anything I say about it now may change by the time it gets to publication. Jason shared a copy with me due to our mutual love/obsession with the Soviet Female Fighting Aces of WWII. In the system there is a Bond mechanic which powers relationship management that is similar to SotI. However, what I’m interested in for this article are two differences he’s introduced. Like SotI, Bond is associated with significant relationships in the character’s life. In Night Witches while that includes other characters it also includes the plane you are invested in. Second, the menace/threat positioning models something closer to Apocalypse World in that threats don’t come from inside your community but from outside of it. Here though, a new mechanic is introduced which couples directly with Bond: Stress.
Stress is a measure of your relationship to your environment. For the night witches in WWII that means a charged, often oppressive and unbearable relationship. Characters get stress out of battle, when their close comrades or planes take harm, but more fascinating in the context of gender: they take stress when they act like a lady. This mechanic is set up specifically to underscore the struggling dichotomy that patriarchy exerts on women living and fighting in a world traditionally dominated by men, and (I hope) will serve to illustrate one of the reasons why relationship management is a core value for most women. Stress is relieved through intimacy, contact with family, by fulfilling your story (and also by acting like a hooligan). I don’t know if these extensions to relationship management (the plane, the environment) technically “count” as relationship management for the purposes of care-orientation, but they conceptually and emotionally line up for me on a personal level.
So yeah! I am loving on these games that all really put an intensely satisfying and system supported emphasis on care-oriented values, while respecting justice-oriented resolution. One day I plan to write a series on Gender and GMing, and I will come back to these games to talk about some concepts that are related to this post. But in the meantime: Onward!
Next up: Some of my personal experience around how Care and Justice can interact, in both not so bad and not so good ways. I’ll talk specifically about non tabletop forms of White Wolf: in Mind’s Eye LARP and MUSH play.