Oct 28
players: Caroline, Cy, Brian

Starting with Mass Media, Identity, and Privacy as issues, we came up with a Shock of Downloaded Memories. The result was a jaded near future LA, populated by a rich socialites who consumed memories instead of watching media. The three characters were:

Murdoch (Caroline, Mass Media issue) - Media mogul trying to bring manufactured memories to the masses. When she wasn't attacking protesters with water cannons, she was getting LA's upper class to addicted to actual memories of victims being murdered. She bypassed a ban on private usage of memories by getting her pet politician elected President, and by moving manufacturing to China was able to hook the entire country on cheap memories.

? (Cy, Privacy issue) - NSA Director who wanted to perfect uploading memories secretly, and make that the cornerstone of state spying. He implanted false memories in people so he could extract confessions, and funded his agency by using his prototypes to steal corporate secrets. When he discovered that stealing memories from someone erased the existing memory, his agents used his remote memory extractor to turn President of Iran into a vegetable. He ended up taking the fall for his agency's terrible actions Oliver North-style.

James Rothschild (Brian, Identity issue) - Wealthy dilettante whose addiction had reduced him to a bucket of other people's memories. Addicted to snuff memories, he was a serial killer for the media firm headed by Murdoch and Samantha Gates. He recorded the memories of his victims and sold them to the media moguls to distribute. His turning point was a victim who was so generous and selfless that the downloaded memories overrode his own nature. He spent his family fortune to subvert the manufacturing process and make sure that the other memory junkies also got exposed to the same set of life-changing memories--most people changing for the better, some committing suicide. But James ended up on the street, unable to separate what really happened from memories he'd just sampled.


Pros: Shock covers a lot of ground quickly, so we saw a lot of good ideas go by. We spent a surprising amount of time on world creation because we were enjoying creating Minutiae. I still dig Cy's idea for the memory injection process, which evoked the image of drug paraphernalia.

Cons: One, the players were villains and it went Gonzo very quickly. I think we lost good opportunities for hard moral debates. Cy's antagonist was a hotshot ACL lawyer, but I think I'd have hit him a lot harder by using a sympathetic antagonist like his wife--someone who cared about him, and didn't want to see him becoming a monster, rather than someone who could have been easily written off as The Enemy. Or we could have spent more time establishing a credible threat which necessitated violating privacy, and given Cy's protag some room to show regret. Similarly, Murdoch was a whirlwind of evil, and I didn't get to see any scenes which explained more on her motivations.

Two, I think we really wanted to play Polaris instead of Shock. Antagonist challenges failed to hit hard--usually they were in the form of complications that made the protagonist's story more interesting, so people were happy to accept them in exchange for what they wanted. You could have easily said "But Only If..." in front of most antagonist goals, and Polaris would have allowed us to pile on more negotiation rather than how Shock allows one goal per player per conflict. We may have been coupling protag and antag goals too tightly?

It's also important to remember that the conflicts you set don't have to be things your character is doing (whether you're the protagonist or antagonist). They can just be consequences of what's going on, even if they don't seem to be directly related. So when the evil NSA "protagonist" says his conflict is to break the terrorist cell (or whatever), the antagonist could create a conflict like "your wife leaves you because she doesn't like what you've become," even if the whole scene is playing out in the interrogation room and the wife isn't even there.

The big limit (compared to Polaris) is that you have to suss out what the other player is actually opposed to before you go to dice. But honestly, the other player shouldn't be trying to fake you out. It's cooperative. If they're not even slightly opposed to a conflict, they should just say so and let the other player pick something else.

You're totally right (as we discussed a little after the game) that when protagonists go dark, the best antagonist move is to swing around and be sympathetic. Save them from themselves, etc. That's what happened in Visions of Lithius. The Price is Rights, and a bunch of other games in the past. But it is also entirely the protagonist player's job to make the protagonist sympathetic to the audience in some way (i.e. an interesting character to watch). Just black & white evil with no tension usually won't work. As the antagonist you can help by making sympathetic antagonists that push the protagonist back to dealing with the personal issues and confronting what they are. Or to put it another way, a good story game isn't about whether you win the gun fight, it's about why you're willing to shoot someone, or how it feels to live with having shot someone. Which I think is totally what you're getting at.