Thoughts on Reading Mark Diaz Truman's Cartel

​As with most of my reviews of game texts, this is a review of the text itself, not the game.  I haven’t played the game, and any meditation I may make about game play is pure speculation, extrapolating from the rules and imagining them in play.
 
I almost didn’t back Cartel on Kickstarter, primarily because it didn’t offer a softcover print of the book.  First, I prefer the feel and weight of paperback books, and I have no need for my books to be art objects on the shelf.  Second, I prefer the price of paperbacks, and Cartel’s hardcover was going to cost $50, way more than I wanted to spend on a game I didn’t have any intention of actually running.  Yeah, I could get the PDF, but my own policy for Kickstarters is that if I’m not willing to give shelf space to a project, I won’t back it—it’s a safety valve to keep me from backing projects just to be a part of a cultural moment.  In the end, I decided the hardcover was worth the money for three reasons. The first is that Magpie Games makes well-designed and well-produced games.  The second is that Mark Diaz Truman understands pbta game design at every level.  The third is that I listened to the episode of podcast +1Forward in which Mark was interviewed about the game, and the social moves he described exactly like the kinds of moves I was looking for in a game.  So I paid out for the hardback.  Having just finished reading my copy, I have no regrets.
 
As a physical object, the book is beautiful.  The art, the layout, the colors, the glossy paper—it all makes for a gorgeous object to look at and touch.
 
In introducing the game, the book’s biggest challenge, I knew, was going to be giving the reader enough information about the drug wars in Mexico in 2007 to feel comfortable bringing that world to life in the fiction of the game.  It’s no easy task.  Too much information, and potential players will balk at the amount of information they will need to be true too.  Too little information, and potential players will feel at sea and never attempt bringing it to their friends.  I’ve watched Jason Morningstar handle this same challenge with his historical games.  And just as Morningstar has a talent for giving players solid details, cornerstone concepts, and permission to stray from “reality,” Truman demonstrates a gift for boiling down the cultural and historical moment to a few, critical but handleable concepts.  He presents all the pertinent cultural and historical information in one chapter that can be read in 30 - 60 minutes.  At the end of it, I felt like I had enough of a grasp on the information to call my friends together for a game.  Yeah, I’d probably read it once more through and take a few notes before the actual game day, but all my concern evaporated after reading that one chapter.  Better still, all that information is reinforced in the playbooks and moves, making it an interwoven feature, rather than an acetate background on which play will animate a story.
 
There’s a lot in the game that Truman handled with that same deftness.  The playbooks have a lot of hooks to create and grab onto the fiction of gameplay even as they are slender packages of information.  Character llaves (like keys in The Shadow of Yesterday and “Lady Blackbird”), enlaces (like Hx in Apocalypse World), playbook moves, and playbook  extras all work to create characters who begin play in a powder keg of relationships, responsibilities, and secrets.  The PCs are tied to each other, but even when they have shared interests, they have conflicting self-interests, so that the characters can never fully trust each other.  Character creation looks like a quick and relatively effortless process that gives all the players a ton to work with and an exciting entre into play itself.  Truman even provides the MC with three questions for each playbook to serve as a starting point for them to start developing the opening fictional positions of each PC.  There is no handholding, but it’s clear that the game is here to make sure you launch as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
 
As for those moves that I was originally interested in, they did not disappoint.  Because secrets and the way they affect relationships lie at the heart of the game, a lot of the moves deal with the way that characters deal with other when they are both hiding things and paranoid about things being hidden from them.  So instead of having a move to charm or deceive someone, there is Justify Your Behavior.  Any time you explain what you are doing or what you have done, you have to roll the move, and the results tell you if your audience believes you or not.  So you might be telling the truth, but still you might not be believed.  On the other hand, there is a move for Getting the Truth out of someone, which is similar to Going Aggro in Apocalypse World, only you are rolling to determine how much wiggle room the person you are trying to get the truth out of has to lie.  The moves do a fantastic job of pinpointing those moments in an exchange that things can go haywire: making a deal with someone, trying to explain yourself to someone, trying to get someone to do something for you, trying to accost someone, trying to spend money you might not have.  The best pbta games target their moves carefully; they know that for this particular game, everything that is not a move is just talking, you saying what your character does, and me saying what my character does.  The move jumps in when you describe your character doing something that the game says is an important moment in the game, a moment that the rules will take temporary control of and give back to us with a bounce and new momentum.  There are plenty of moves in Cartel, but each one is placed with machined precision.
 
Cartel has a stress mechanic, which a lot of other RPGs have made a go at, but which I think Cartel is uniquely successful.  Those other RPGs use stress as simply a different harm track, a way to measure a resource.  While stress is definitely a resource to measure, Cartel makes a full stress track mean something, not by having the MC take control of the character or anything like that, but by making a full stress track limit the options a PC can make.  If you trigger Propose a Deal when your stress track is full, you have to take whatever they give you.  If you try to Justify Your Behavior with a full stress track, you won’t have any choice but to be truthful.  With a full stress track, you have nothing to gamble with, which puts you in a painfully vulnerable position, so players have excellent reasons to trigger their stress moves to keep their characters limber and capable.   And of course, triggering your stress moves means creating more drama and story to propel play forward.  With a lot of moves in pbta games, you don’t really mind missing or hitting, both are going to be interesting and fun.  With stress moves, I imagine you feel that desire to roll a hit—and a strong hit—more keenly than at any other time, because a miss means that you engaged in the behavior without getting any relief, and that means you’re going to have to something else that you don’t want to do.
 
Finally, the heat moves are another great set of moves.  They trigger when you are ever doing anything in public or potentially exposing yourself to the authorities, and given the nature of the drug wars in Mexico, you are going to be triggering these moves regularly.  The fictional triggers are fantastic: “when you avoid suspicion while handling business in public . . .,” “when you try to leave a messy crime scene before the authorities arrive . . .,” and “when you flee from los federales . . .”  The move and the roll will decide whether these moments are glossed over or become major elements of the fiction.  They are fantastic.
 
I don’t watch narcofiction, although I’m a big fan of the larger genre of crime fiction.  I haven’t watched Breaking Bad and don’t have much desire to.  That said, I would gladly play this game, mainly because it looks like genuine fun, and secondarily because I want to see all the gears working and listen to the hum of the engine.