Hamlet, Fiasco, And Me

First, if you haven’t read Robin Laws’ Hamlet’s Hit Points and played Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco, do so immediately.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I can explain what went through my head on my morning jog. One of Robin’s theses in HHP is that in most narrative media, it’s rare for the protagonist to enjoy a string of unmitigated successes. The key to effective narrative is modulating the pass/fail (or hope/fear) cycle. The book offers some pretty compelling evidence for this, and for the sake of this post, I’m going to accept it.1

So in Fiasco, after the Tilt, you know whether or not success or failure is good for your character in the long run. The game encourages you to push for your character to have the same fortune throughout.2 In the Vegas game at GenCon, for example, I had two black dice at the Tilt, so the “best” thing for my character was to keep losing.3

What I ended up doing in our LA 1936 game, however, was pulling a reverse. My burlesque dancer, Holly, had been dominant in her early scenes, especially against other player characters, like when she faced down Will’s nightclub owner. The game told me that I needed to play for white dice. But Will, sitting to my left, also needed them, and by the time it got to my third scene, there was only one left. Will had just done a great, possibly redemptive scene with his character, and I wanted him to win. So I decided to take a dive, and played my next scene to fail, leaving the white dice for him to take.4 I ended up with a fantastic bit of drama involving the revelation of my impossible love for Ryan’s corrupt liquor licensing commissioner, resulting in what Robin would call a dramatic down arrow. And it worked. I felt great about it, and the rest of the people around the table clearly responded to it.

What this game and Robin’s book made me realize is that I love pulling these sorts of reversals5, both because they make the character deeper and more complex and because they make the story more interesting. So thank you, Robin, for seeding these ideas in my head, and thank you, Jason, for making me wrestle with them.

1 The book had such an effect on me that after I finished reading it, I started doing beat analysis on the in-flight movie on the plane I was on at the time.6

2 Excepting that the consequences of your first two scenes don’t play into this, but I’m going to ignore that for now.

3 And boy did I.

4 Which didn't work, because Ryan took it, but I had to try.

5 What I realized this morning is that I’ve done exactly the same thing before, like in the game of Shooting the Moon at Dreamation in 2008, where made my scumbag business unit manager turn a volte face in the final scene to make his wife’s decision to leave him that much more poignant.

6 Which in this case was Shrek 4.

Comments

[Matthew D. Gandy]

"What I ended up doing in our LA 1936 game, however, was pulling a reverse. My burlesque dancer, Holly, had been dominant in her early scenes, especially against other player characters, like when she faced down Will’s nightclub owner. The game told me that I needed to play for white dice."

I'm slightly confused. What do you mean by "dominant?" She was successful in her early scenes, garnering you white dice? But you give away those dice during the first act. Were *others* giving you white dice after *their* scenes? Or do you mean "the game told me" as "my early scenes resolved as white dice, so it seemed appropriate to keep being successful in scenes after the Tilt?"

[Paul]

The other players gave me white dice after their scenes in Act 1, presumably because I'd been so (fictionally) effective. So given that I had them, it was in my character's best interests for me to play to win in Act 2.

[Matthew D. Gandy]

OK, that's what I thought. It's one of my favorite "hidden secrets" of Fiasco: players "voting" on how they view other players' characters in Act One, and then using that to align player strategy for Act Two.

[Andrew J. Bonham]

I'm sure you're aware of this, but I thought I'd mention anyway that HeroQuest 2nd edition deals with this topic to a great deal, even providing structure to make the difficulty of current rolls dependent on the success or failure of prior contests in a way that encourages the fail-fail-succeed pattern common in so much media. Certainly, it moves the game firmly into narrative territory (which is still a little weird for me, since I originally was a simulationist), but more and more that seems like a good thing.