#Claytalk 4

#Claytalk continues with a look at play advice in The Clay that Woke.

(My last #claytalk post is here, if you’re interested: https://plus.google.com/102721916927145169256/posts/W1jRsDenCdS)

RPGs are somewhat unique in the world of tabletop games insofar as there is usually a layer of instruction beyond the rules of the game themselves that guide players in how to approach the game to get the most out of the experience. It is somewhat analogous to strategy tips in competitive games that tell players how to think about the game to increase their chances at succeeding. Only, succeeding in an RPG means having a particular play experience that the game is designed to create.

This play experience is related to but different from what you are playing to find out. In The Clay that Woke we are told that we are playing “until it’s clear whether the watchers will frondesce and bloom again for society’s entrance into a new age of greatness or not” (22). Players are also told that they will “try to uphold the difficult, stoic minotaur philosophy of silence” and “earn a name” (16). Those goal posts tell us about the larger narrative that will unfold through play and the smaller play goals that get us there. What I want to look at instead is the particular philosophy of roleplaying that underpins the playing the gets us to those goals.

In The Clay that Woke, Czege lays out his particular philosophy through the parable of the Chimera and the Gargoyle:

“[T]he Gargoyle is a moment in time, a fabricated thing. It fights time for its existence. The Chimera is time. The beasts come together as an expression of shared self-imagination, self-realization, heterogeneous but gloriously, committedly permeable throughout. The beasts test and prove the identities of one another, penetrate and define each other. And the secret is we can all do this. We can bring into existence a shared self that expresses more about ourselves than any of us could say individually. It is a triumph of becoming time. Consider the Gargoyle and the Chimera. The Gargoyle is a made thing that fights time for its legacy. It must be perfect to even exist. We aspire to its perfect fabrication, but we cannot achieve its lofty, impossible perfection. The Chimera brings itself into existence and has no shame for its imperfection. At any given moment in time the Chimera is a triumph. Its imperfections are throughout its existence, and throughout time before and after, and not within any moment of its triumph. You might say the Gargoyle is an artifact of a triumph, and the Chimera is the anecdote of its triumph” (97).

We are told on the following page that “[t]he goat, the lion, the snake, and the flames [that merge to form the Chimera] are like a group of roleplayers coming together to play The Clay that Woke” (98). The power of the Chimera, the power of roleplaying, is in the “com[ing] together as an expression of shared self-imagination, self-realization.” Whereas the gargoyle is a thing complete and unchanging, the Chimera is the process of discovery. Specifically, what is discovered is about the players who have come together to roleplay. While the process of playing The Clay that Woke reveals things about the world of the narrative and the minotaurs and gamemaster characters we play, the true act of discovery is of what’s within us, according to this passage. As Czege says, “Your starting minotaur character seems undefined, but he’s really not, because you the player are present within him, just the way the essences of goat, lion, snake, and flames are present in their play among the jungle slurry of history and culture. Your interests drive his actions” (98).

Character creation is rather sparse in the game. The character sheet tells you what tokens you begin with and what actions your character can take to refresh their various tokens, but there is nothing on the character sheet that makes your character unique. The character sheet gives you an archetype, and who your minotaur is is discovered only through play, and according to the parable of the Chimera and the Gargoyle, that discovery necessarily involves revealing something about yourself, the player. You’ll notice there are no background establishing questions or ways to define how one minotaur character is related to another character on the sheets or any part of character creation. The game is not interested in creating and character full of charged connections and backgrounds the way a lot of currently popular RPG’s manage character creation. As the text says, the game “isn’t about unwinding drama from a made snarl of inter-character stress” (98). Instead, your minotaur character begins as a seemingly clean slate so that you don’t distance yourself from your character with all these fictional features. The game wants you the player to be “present within him” and your the player’s interests to “drive his action.” Only by doing so can the process of play be a tool for “self-realization.”

And play is not just a process of self-discovery as an individual, but about the greater discovery that can be achieved by everyone at the table roleplaying together. The game is “about submitting to the mechanics of an alien world and engaging a primordial ability to communicate across the boundaries of your human differences with other players to find progressively the mutual incitement of your essences” (98). Damn. That’s a lofty and beautiful expression of the end goal of a successful session of roleplaying The Clay that Woke. Just give yourself over to the mechanics of the game and the fictional setting of the world and we’ll be able to reach out beyond ourselves to a true connection with each other that will “incite[]” our “essences.”

“Submitting” seems like a key word in that sentence. You cannot fight the system. We are told not to “hack[] together a narrative within some defined story structure” (98). Let what happens happen and don’t work towards a story, and that goes for the minotaur players as much as for the GM. Players are warned not to “come to the game as a player with a goal of authoring a drama with your minotaur . . . . Come to it to discover your minotaur in the context of the game” (107). Play is first and foremost an act of discovery (of both the character and yourself), not the creation of an authored drama. That authored drama is the Gargoyle, dead and perfect, not the Chimera, living and an expression of shared self-imagination. Further advice: “If your scenes don’t seem fun, try to make gamemaster characters important by the things your character does” (107-108). That, to me, is the surprising bit of advice that sent me back to the instruction to submit. We are used to playing characters who are the center of the stories that unfold, and it many other games, I have read instructions for the GM not to get caught up in their own NPCs, to remember that the game is about the PCs. Yet here is an instruction to the players to use their characters to make the gamemaster characters important!

This importance of submission is directly related to the minotaur characters being second-class citizens in the Degringolade. You play menial laborers whose rights in the city are never made clear. At times you seem like laborers and at other times like slave labor. There is the story in the book about the duel two minotaurs fight on behalf of their “psychotic employers” (88), but the minotaurs only just met the men in the jungle and were drafted into service to fight a duel to, potentially, the death. Truly free members of the society could have told the two men to go fuck themselves. In this context, it becomes clear that “employer” is a kind of euphemism. Minotaurs must submit to their social situation. To not do so is to break silence. And as the minotaurs must submit, the game wants the players to submit. The advice the GM gives to the creation of situations in which the minotaurs are placed focuses entirely on the interests and observations of the GM. The situations are created without thought about who the minotaurs might be or which character plays which minotaur. The minotaurs themselves, at least at the start of the game, are completely interchangeable, and any minotaur can be assigned to any employment opportunity. There is some allowance made for the archetypes of the minotaurs in play, but that’s where the consideration ends.

This is not to say that the GM is like the human masters and the players like the minotaurs. The GM and players are clearly working together through play on the path of discovery - discovery of the world, the unfolding story, the characters at play, and the players themselves.

I was saying to Slade Stolar in the comment sections to my last post that I was surprised that the GM section of the text didn’t give explicit commands to the GM to push at the boundaries at which the minotaurs would and would not break silence. Having reread that portion of the book, I see now that such a stance in unnaturally aggressive to meet the author’s end. The text tells the GM to create situations born out of their personal irritations and experiences with their culture and society, translated to fit the Degringolade. Then you place the minotaur characters in a position to be a part of that situation, receiving requests and commands from the gamemaster characters. In responding to the situation, the character may or may not break silence; the game doesn’t really care. The strictures of silence put productive boundaries on the behavior of the PC and hardwire inner tensions into the minotaur characters very existence to ensure that whatever response they have will necessarily be thoughtful and interesting.

A lot of important features of The Clay that Woke run contrary to the way a lot of other RPGs are run. Let’s take Apocalypse World and games that are inspired by it. Those games set up a “snarl of inter-character stress” from the first session and then let the players drive the action of the game, with the MC playing the world responding to those actions. The unfolding narrative centers on the PCs, and the NPCs are there to play against the PCs to show off how awesome they are. In The Clay that Woke, it is the doings of the gamemaster characters that drive play, even as the individual minotaur characters’ actions are driven by the players’ interests. The PCs are responding to the actions of the gamemaster characters rather than the other way around. Certainly, once things are in motion, everyone is responding to each other, but the focus is on the doings of the gamemaster characters. Czege even warns the GM that players “are often noncommittal in their early interactions, and also often interpret silence as calling for disinterest or outright rejection of the doings of gamemaster characters, so you’ll have to work a bit and use various methods to provoke them to get involved” (123). That puts a lot of the initial onus on the GM, but once things get moving, once situations are established and the minotaur characters are invested in the goings on of their human employers, I imagine the game moves along smoothly and creates fascinating moments.

There is more to say, but at the moment I have neither the time nor the energy. If I were to go on, I would look at the role of the jungle in the game, as compared to the city. The city is where the GM prepares social and culture problems for the characters to explore, but preparation for the jungle is much lighter, involving the Voices and a few exciting encounters covering all four inflection types. I would want to explore the language of the game, especially words like “inflection,” “intrinisic,” “Voices,” and “externals.” I would want to explore the Krater and the unique nature of tokens as bids on possible outcomes rather than economic unit that can be spent to achieve a desired outcome (and the unique exception of name tokens being spent that in the one condition that allows it). So much to discuss and so little time. If you discuss any of these things, I hope you tag me so I can be sure to read it.