Help Me Lighten Up

[AviatrixCat]

A thing I did for a while last year was play a series of characters really sincerely. That is, they were what they said they were; it wasn’t that they lacked substance, but their substances wasn’t particularly obfuscated. I found that really helped me get into the space of all kinds of different characters, good and bad. That might be a thing to try; if you have good characters, make them good, not good by convenience but for reasons, reasons that are hard to corrupt. And if you have evil characters…well, they should have reasons too

There was a thing I noticed back when my meetup did Night Witches. We did the entire run of the game, from training to the end of the war. One of the GMs was pretty cognizant of how terrible the Soviet system was and so we lived in a crapsack world of constant pain from outside. Now, this can be fine: the queer reading of NW is about building your own community in the face of an outside world. But I had been reading “A Dance With Death,” a book of interviews with the actual Night Witches and what stood out to me was that they were a phenomenally high-morale unit: they did a grind any pilot would find overwhelming and did it night after night. So when I rotated into the GMs chair, I made a couple of characters that weren’t so…dark. The new Chief of Staff was an officer of the “my job is to keep you alive and flying” persuasion who was on the characters’ side as much as possible. And the new politruk was…an inexperienced woman who’d have been a better Komsomol camp counselor than hardcore commissar. She really believed in socialism and education. (I modeled her off the political officer interviewed in “A Dance With Death.”) I think having those two around helped; certainly at the end of my run, the PCs organized an off-the-books raid on a German prisoner train with the help of some sexy partisans to rescue the captain

Glimmers of light and hope are why we can stand in the grimdarkness, I suppose.

[Alun_R]

Someone who worked for me, and was worried he always managed people a little too roughly, had a block of wood made with a variety of leadership styles on each of 8 faces: confrontational to collaborative. After every interaction with someone he managed he’d rotate the block as a reminder to respond differently to the next one. I hadn’t thought about applying this on an RPG context until I read this thread.

[Paul_T]

I really like that, @AviatrixCat. I think seeing characters as tools for tone is a very, very important technique.

I dealt with this recently when running My Life with Master. I wrote a fair bit about the game here:

My Life with Master: Yukon Gold Rush

I’ll add some more commentary here, and mention that comments, questions, and so forth are very welcome! … I found it very difficult to play the Master: always walking a line between portraying the villain and running the game in a fair and generous way. This game, like Dog Eat Dog , blurs the line a little between the character and the player, and given the amount of power the Master has over the Minions, could easily become a pretty twisted power fantasy. I found it hard to be appropriately…

As you can see, I struggled with the incredibly dark and heavy-handed portrayal of the Master the game demanded of me. While it was occasionally exciting to consider twisted, diabolical plans, it was also emotionally wearying. So I found tremendous relief in the “overture” or “Connection” scenes. I made the Connections (human locals that are dear to the Minions) sympathetic, kind, innocent, and I played the scenes with them in warm tones and in a gentle key.

I also combined this with greater freedom for the players to contribute to the narrative. When the Master was involved, I framed hard and controlled the narrative. In Connection scenes, the players had freedom to frame the scene themselves and I tended to ‘say yes’ to whatever they offered.

Putting all that together, it was great to find relief from the heavy, dark, sadistic Master scenes in more warm-hearted and gentle Connection scenes, and a big part of that was the way I chose to play those characters. That balance between the dark and the warm really made the game work for me.

I hope that might be a source of inspiration for you, Jason! Perhaps it will spark a thought or an idea.

[Rickard]

Try something new and silly as a one shot, and then get inspired by it. Some Dungeons and Bananas, some Dr. Magnethands, a little InSpectres, or dig into Danger Patrol.

[Jason_Kottler]

Followup: Results

Hey everyone, thank you so much for your help - I just wanted to post a quick followup about what I tried and how it went.

I tried three things:

1. I prepped light. Making a planet for their first proper session of Apocalypse Sonata I chose a confusing planet, and made it deliberately lighthearted.
2. I opened the game telling them I’d been thinking about this and asking for their help recognizing when things had gone too dark. I didn’t want to get as formal as an X-Card because this was explicitly not about not having to talk about what was edited out - it was about giving me feedback and that requires talking. So I asked them to just make a “time out” sign if anything was too much.
3. I put an index card on the table and wrote “DARK” on one side in black sharpie. I said, “When I go to the dark side, we’ll flip this card so the DARK shows. I can’t go dark again until we’ve flipped it over by doing something lighter, OK?”

It went really well. The players expressed their gratitude that I was trying to change things and we ended up only flipping the dark side card for something a player contributed. We didn’t want to edit it out, we just wanted to vary the dynamic. Nobody called a time out on me and I felt like this was a change I could make without ruining my game for a year as with my transition to more narrative and player-facing play.

[Curubethion]

Any particular really positive moments you enjoyed during the session?

[Alun_R]

Congrats - glad it went so well

[Jason_Kottler]

@Curubethion - yeah, the standout for me was when the players realized that the amorphous, amoeba-like aliens thought that they (The PCs) were inferior life forms (kind of disgusting, but also kind of cute - like the way I feel about snakes) because they were a solid, unchanging shape. Then the shapeshifter in the group shifted into an amoebic shape and the aliens fell all over themselves apologizing. They then presumed that the others were the shapeshifter’s pets.

It had some drama, but it was funny. The PCs got caught up in the confusion as I wanted, pieced together the problem, and solved it, but nobody got like…imprisoned or anything.