Thoughts on Drowning & Falling

This is a textual review only. I have not been able to play the game itself.
 
Drowning & Falling, published in 2006 by Jason Morningstar, is a short satirical text and a distinctly indie RPG that pokes loving fun at certain traditional games.
 
In the “designer notes” at the back of the book, Morningstar recounts the inspiration for the game, a comment made by Andy Kitkowski in a story-games.com thread:

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“. . . ‘falling and drowning’ is my summary for the gamut of WorldDooms: falling, drowning, poisoning, electrocution . . . and further from there, things like ‘bullet tumbling effects,’ ‘blunt weapons with piercing nubs on them,’ ‘shock due to internal trauma,’ etc.
 
“Some people don’t consider a game a game unless it has specifically defined how these things should work.  I think it’s a combination of ‘All Games Have this Stuff’ and ‘All Games Should Model Reality At Least A Little’” (60).

Morningstar “took it as a design challenge, setting out to craft a game that was focused on nothing but drowning and falling with the tenacity of a pit bull” (60-61)
 
The game text pokes plenty of fun at D&D and its ilk (or at least I feel safe in assuming it’s D&D, since Morningstar never names the game, only refers to it as “the first RPG I ever played, which came in a white box and changed my life for the better” (61)).  It makes fun of our desire to break down a character into a number of traits and our desire to roll dice by creating characters with 15 traits total, all of which are generated randomly with dice: “If you have fifteen dice handy, you can roll all your traits in one gigantic mega-throw!” and “If you want to have some kind of equitable and balanced point-allocation system, go ahead and get your friends’ buy-in and make one up—but know that you’ll be missing out on rolling a bucketful of dice” (10).
 
The game pokes fun at the notion of alignments and the idea that they simulate anything in real life, or that they are mandatory in “a complete role-playing system”:

“Just like in real life, there are two alignments in the DROWNING AND FALLING ROLE-PLAYING GAME.  Each character you make must be good or evil. This choice will guide your decision-making in play.  As a guideline for appropriate play, good characters normally do good things and evil characters are more likely to do evil things. . . . Playing an evil character is obviously wrong and bad, but in the interest of presenting a complete role-playing system, rules have been included for it” (14)

​​Similar themes can be seen in the explanation for why there are rules for stealing your fellow players’ characters’ stuff: “The whole thing is tremendously counterproductive but, in the interest of maintaining realism, rules have been provided” (46).

The game pokes fun at contradictory rules and explanations as they appear in texts:

“A FINAL WORD ABOUT WINNERS AND LOSERS
 
“Role-playing games are all about imagination, and camaraderie, and telling stories together.  It isn’t about competing; it is about collaborating.
 
“When the dungeon and its monstrous denizens and savage dangers have finally been bested, take stock—who ground up the least number of characters?  Who emerged with the most treasure?  These players win.
 
“Who lost the most characters?  Who emerged with the least treasure, or tried to slip some immolation in? These players lose.  Whoever the majority feels did the worst job is responsible for providing snacks--good snacks—the next time the DROWNING AND FALLING ROLE-PLAYING GAME is played.”

​But as humorous and as fun as the text is, it’s not technically a satire because satire is not typically born from a place of love, and Morningstar approaches this topic as he does all the topics he approaches in his game design, with love.  Moreover, the game is not just humorous.  Drowning & Falling is a bona fide playable game, full of goofiness and laughs, but a genuinely entertaining and well-designed game, and one that is systematically about as far from traditional D&D in play as you can get.
 
Drowning & Falling is a GMful/GMless game, in which, after each player creates a disposable character to drown and drop, each player is dealt a set of playing cards, which they then use to create between two and eight encounters of varying difficulty.  Each encounter of course must involve a danger of drowning or falling.  Players then use a set of their character’s stats to try to overcome the challenge.  The process of deciding on stats at first seems ludicrously laborious, but it calls on three of the people at the table (including the player of the character facing the challenge and the player who created the challenge) to arrive at a final number in a way that is interesting and communal.  In play, that decision process becomes part of the fun rather than a laborious task and it’s all a source of the jokes and laughter that result from the game.
 
While drowning and falling sounds like it may get repetitive, the structure challenges the players to come up with new interpretations of those acts, which can push the game in all kinds of unexpected directions.  The text gives the initial inspiration talking about characters having a falling out, or drowning in self-pity, or falling off the wagon, or drowning in guilt, or falling in love. 
 
In some ways the game throws shade in two directions, as it is a fiercely indie game.  While it wears its joke about D&D on its sleeve, it also pokes fun at the hyper-specificity of indie designs.  There is a sidebar, for example, that asks the question “What if a character gets strangled or burned?”  Here’s the answer:

​“Then, quite frankly, you are playing wrong.  The DROWNING AND FALLING ROLE-PLAYING GAME is about the horror and sorrow of drowning and falling.  It simply does not support ‘burning’ or ‘strangulation’ and more than it supports wizards flying airplanes.  In a game that strives for focused realism, these extraneous elements have not place.
 
“If this sounds strange to you, perhaps you are not ready for the DROWNING AND FALLING ROLE-PLAYING GAME” (28).

​I picked up the book expecting to laugh, but I didn’t expect an actual playable game for some reason.  In hindsight I should have known better.  It is a fun text, with a fun game, with fun art.  The PDF and copies in print are available on Lulu.com.