Some Mutual Decisions

This post has some bad language in it, including gendered and homophobic slurs.

It Was a Mutual Decision's pitch is strong, incredibly strong, maybe the single best pitch for a game I have ever heard: you are in a breakup, as civil or toxic as you like, and one or both of you may be a horrible rat-human monster. Oh, and the game ends either when you've both gracefully exited the relationship, or one or both of you are dead. Also, it's a team-based game: all the boys play the girl, and all the girls play the boy. -- Every single time I have delivered this pitch, I see eyes light up. It's so obviously fun, funny, and resonant.

Cover of It Was a Mutual Decision with a thumbs-up representing my positive opinion of the game

Unfortunately for the reader, there are no digital copies, it is not currently in print, and the writer has no immediate plans to make it available again. I ordered a copy off ebay but it got snatched by porch pirates. Luckily when I was complaining about this online, Jon H offered to send me a copy! Thanks, Jon!

I've now played 3 separate sessions of It Was a Mutual Decision, one of them a complete game, the other two ending before the conclusion of the game. The first game was with Misha, Divya, and Ken. The second game was with Paul and Kyra. I'll call this the small group game. The third game was with Misha, Divya, Danielle, Ken, and Akshay. I'll call this the big group game.

Picture of the big group doing a rat pose. Unfortunately Ken fell forwards and blocked Akshay from sight. It's still a very good photo.

Rules tweaks 

I have made two tweaks to the game which I think have improved things. First, I call the black dice "rat dice". This was not a conscious decision; I simply found myself doing it.

Second, more consequentially, I have proceduralized scene-framing responsibilities, and divided them up between the teams. In the original game, scene framing is as follows:

• During Act I, teams take turns proposing topics for fights.
• During Act II, teams take turns proposing "conflict-situations".
• During Act III, teams take turns proposing humiliating situations, and then trade back and forth increasing the humiliation.

In other words, there are no genuine scene-framing rules; that is, no rules to say who says when and where the next scene is, who is present, and what is going on at the start of the scene. (Maybe you could read the instructions for Acts II and III to include this tacitly.)

Thus I added the following rule: whichever team does not pick the content of the conflict frames the scene. I found this rule pleasantly bouncy in play. For instance, when I proposed a certain argument, I had expected to play it out in a quiet, tense, and above all private domestic scene, so when the opposing team said, "And we're in the cereal aisle at 7 pm", I totally reevaluated my approach.

(How would this rule work for Act III? I don't know, I didn't use it in Act III. Act III has problems.)

Group scenario creation and intense personal content

We start by making up the couple, as human beings and as in their relationship to each other, and then we create a network of relationships around them. When we made these people and relationships, we seeded the scenario with all sorts of charged thematic material: race, drugs, class, feelings of inadequacy, dependence on parents, missing parents, different artistic pursuits and ambitions, strained friendships. Most of this material didn't get used much or at all. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with Eero, about actual practical techniques for narrativist play, in which he said something like, "This is what you do, you throw out all kinds of shit because you don't know what is going to stick, what is going to turn on the other participants creatively."

In the latter two games we played extremely close to home in scenario creation, but play quickly drifted away from immediately personal topics.

For instance, Kyra talked about her financial situation and her relationship with her parents. She said things that I found very intimate, intimate enough that I am not repeating them here, and which I would certainly not have revealed under the same circumstances. (Maybe this says more about me and my relationship to money and my parents than it does about her and hers? Paul or Kyra will have to judge.) Since I don't know Kyra very well, I didn't press for details in scenario creation, though I was curious, and I didn't push on that topic very hard during play.

Meanwhile in the big group game we seeded race heavily into scenario creation. This was familiar content for this group of friends, exactly as edgy as a group of woke POCs and their two closest white friends/partners can be. For instance, "Oh, my guy is a fuckboy, total swagapino" (derived from swag + Filipino, a 2010s stereotype whose name I never knew until this game). In play this didn't matter much, or rather, we chose not to draw on it.

Sex and edgy content in play 

These games freed the big group to play out politically incorrect fantasies, like a toxic friendship between two women who greet each other by saying things like, "Hey there you stupid fucking cunt!" and "Oh my god, I hate you so much!" but swear up and down that they are friends. ("Fantasy" here means something Freudian, not something actively dreamed of and consciously desired. But don't ask me to explain any more.)

Misha got to hear me say "faggot" for the first time in 15 years, which she greatly enjoyed. (Misha belongs to the group of gays who think that word should be reclaimed, whereas I think it's an awful slur and ask her and her friends not to say it around me.) Admittedly I was in character and attributing the word to her character: I said something like, "Oh, you want to go back to streaming your little games and screaming 'faggot' at everybody who kills you" or similar. I wouldn't use the word directly, even in play. Not right now anyhow.

We played sexual content differently in both games. In the small group game we once faded to black after one character invited another to their apartment. In the big group game, and the prior game with Misha, Divya, and Ken, we played out sexual content explicitly. For instance, in the prior game, we played out my were-rat having sex with a waitress and murdering her, discussing specific positions and toys used. (Since it was our character who won the relevant dice roll, it was Ken and me doing most of the talking. I do not think Misha or Divya would have brought this extreme sexual content into the game on their own. But I am very confident they were comfortable with this content once it was introduced.)

It's easy to get carried away with this stuff and reveal more than you mean. I play sexually dominant women. (The fantasy is not, "I wish a sexually dominant woman would step on me", but "I am like this woman".) One player, who I am leaving anonymous, has leaned into playing a sexually dominant woman, hard, maybe going further than he intended. For instance, during a fight scene with no prior sexual content, he said, angrily, "Why don't you whip out your..." and trailed off when he realized where he'd got himself. We egged him on to finish the sentence, of course. It's odd to hear someone you know well talking about sex in a very particular way, and wonder what relation his play has to his sexuality.

Multiple people playing the same character

This is a quirk of the game. You share authority of your main character with your entire team. The game pointedly does not include rules for adjudicating intra-team conflicts. Luckily I have almost always been on the same page as my team in every situation, so few such conflicts arose.

Here is one conflict I remember: in the big group game, Ken had our character say something blatantly anti-feminist, and I said, "No, definitely not, we're not an anti-feminist". (Later I went back on that.) It was enough to say, "I disagree", and the other person acquiesced.

Usually we either take turns talking, or all add details, one after another, unprompted, feeding off each other and raising the stakes higher and higher. That was abstract; I'll say how it works in practice.

• When we take turns, usually when we are playing a relatively quiet moment, one person on a team speaks for a full exchange, or maybe several exchanges, with the other team.
• When we all add details, usually during a heated moment, we pile on after each other, saying things like, "I didn't like the way you looked at her", "You were totally oggling her ass while I was right there!", "If you want to fuck her so much, then why don't you fuck off and fuck her!". This is totally unprompted, not organized by anybody. You can see how each statement is more extreme than the previous. It builds on the prior statement in both content and intensity. It's easy to wind up going really, really hard if you cycle through these heated moments quickly.

I have a treasured moment from the big group game. I realized that I had been talking solely as our character for a while, and the other two people on my team were looking at me, rather than the other team. I apologized for taking up so much space and asked if they had anything to offer. They rejected my apology. One (I don't remember which) said, "I'm enjoying just listening to you", and the other agreed. Woohoo! 

Creative agenda?

Were we playing with a narrativist agenda? The game is definitely designed to facilitate narrativist play. Were we doing it, in any of my sessions? Did we have any recognizable theme in any of these games?

I am not sure. I'd like to hear from Paul and Kyra about that. Nobody in the big group game knows the phrase "creative agenda" so I do not think they will be much help.

I know I'm laughing a lot and having a great time. We're definitely "playing on purpose", how could we not, when the game is so focused. We're turning each other on (not in the sexual sense), getting those social rewards. So it can't be zilchplay, right? Or is zilchplay potentially fun? Or maybe we're (gasp) simmy? Exploring the situation and characters, but not premise?

I really do not know, but I'd love feedback!

Gender in life and play

I'm nonbinary. So far I've always played on the boys' team. I'm comfortable doing that in groups I'm comfortable with, because I know they won't view me as a boy for that reason. But I wouldn't be comfortable doing that with a group of strangers. I wonder if this means I can only play the game in private groups.

I've noodled over two possibilities for opening up the game to queer content. Maybe we say each team plays a/the gender the other team all identifies as. (I think identifying with the other side is more important than being attracted to your own side.) Alternatively, play groups could randomize gender. Maybe you have everyone on one team write down their gender and put all the genders in a hat, and then the other team draws a gender from the hat? You could randomize teams, too, while you're at it.

Or maybe the game is too structurally and thematically focused on heterosexual relationships, and we can't modify it in this way without doing damage to it. Hard to say!

Act III

I only got this far in the small group game. In the first game and the big group game we called play off early, as we were all tired. So I've only got one data point. Even so I'm confident saying act III is broken.

In act III (direct quotation):

1. One team proposes the general situation, such that the characters must interact.
2. The other adds details or clarifications that make it more excruciating for everyone.
3. The first then states how their character might humiliate himself or herself.
4. The other then states how their character might humiliate herself or himself.

Then we go through the dicing procedure, and then play begins. In this act, we pre-narrate way too much. We're talking and plotting, not playing.

During the small group game we actively observed that play took a lot of effort, and wasn't fun. This was surprising after an afternoon of easy fun!

My easy (lazy) fix for act III: just cut it entirely. The game can end, abruptly and without being totally satisfying, but that's ok, life is like that. (My games are like that, fragmented.)

Otherwise you need to get some actual play back in there. Maybe if the characters had actual goals aside from avoiding humiliation? -- Humiliation is often a mere trick of fate, not something you can actively fight. -- Maybe they're trying to resist humiliating the other, for instance. A lot of testing is needed.

Expressive dicing and mixed metaphors

You have three stats, all between one and six: needy, stubborn, and trust. (It bothers me that trust isn't an adjective like the other two five.) Before a scene, you'll decide if you want to roll with needy or stubborn in that scene. Then, you either have to be needy (or stubborn) or resist your neediness (or stubbornness) -- up to you. Being x and resisting x are formally the same.

Once per scene, you can also choose to spend down your trust by 1 to increase another score by 1 permanently. You might say this represents the character using up trust in the relationship. That works in the first act, at least, where losing a conflict means losing a fight. In the second act, though, losing a conflict means leaving the relationship. Since spending trust makes you more likely to win a conflict, it means you're more likely to stay in the relationship. Similarly, in act III, winning a conflict means that you avoid humiliating yourself. So it's not really clear what it means, in the fiction, to lower your trust there.

As you roll rat dice, you bring rat content into the game, and possibly change your stats to greedy, cunning, and murderous, respectively. (Unlike trust, murderous can be used in conflicts. I'm not sure if you can sell it down like trust.) Then you use or resist those attributes instead. There are 4 rat dice, and the team with the lower stat in the conflict gets to take them (none, some, or all) first. If any are left, the team with the higher stat can then opt to take none, one, or all of the remainder. Neither team gets to discuss or veto their team's choice. If somebody wants the dice, they take em, no consulting with anybody. 

So you have to make a few formal decisions, each of which expresses your values:

• Whether to use a higher or lower stat in the conflict, that is, do you want to win or lose, and do you want first dibs on rat dice
• Whether to spend 1 trust, making you more likely to win the fight, possibly becoming murderous
• Whether to use any rat dice, making you more likely to win the fight, possibly becoming greedy, cunning, or murderous

And that's on top of the direct in-fiction choice of approach (needy or stubborn) and the decision to play with or resist your stat. Tons of expressive opportunity here.

You might find, for instance, that you're choosing a weak stat, say, stubborn, because it's important to your understanding of the character to be stubborn rather than needy here. But you still want to win the conflict, so you sell down trust and take rat dice.  Or you choose a high stat, and decide that this argument isn't worth burning your trust in the relationship. You might pick a low stat and intentionally lose the conflict, because you want the relationship to fail sooner rather than later. Etc.

Rat content

Always lovely. I cannot get enough rat content from this game. I recommend taking rat dice most of the time.