thoughts on mobile frame zero: firebrands

My I-only-read-it review of +Vincent Baker's Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands:

In many ways, Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands is a typical GMless/GMful RPG. Each player controls a single character. Play proceeds in an orderly fashion around the table, each player calling for and creating a single scene to be played out during their turn. There is no prep—conflicts and tension are built at the table through play and discussion. All pretty standard stuff by now.

But everything about the way that scenes and play are structured is unlike those other games. If you’ve played or read other RPGs by Vincent and Meguey, then you are familiar with their preference for guiding play through lists and options that are simultaneously restricted and open ended. Firebrands uses that same technology to great effect.

As usual, let me clarify that I have not played the game, only read it.

There is very little established setting for the game, but it gives you everything you need for rich situations. Characters play romantic ace pilots of battle mechs on a planet going through a great deal of unrest. The planet of Bantral was colonized long ago, but it had never been worth anything. Lately, one of its natural resources has been discovered to be profitable, so the various powers and people involved are wrangling for control. There are three basic sides in the conflict: the offworld moneyed interests who “own” large chunks of the land; the long-term colonial occupiers who are essentially nobility on the planet, having lived there for generations; and the native inhabitants who have been occupied and work under the colonial nobility. Each player’s character is aligned with one of these three factions, and all three factions need to be represented in the game.

But Firebrands is not a game of war. If war breaks out, big government bodies will get involved, so everything is kept at the level of manipulations and skirmishes. The game focuses on the interactions, social and romantic, between the PCs as they meet on the battleground and at social functions. What are you playing to find out? “The object of the game is to create messy entanglements. Fall in love with your enemies, ally with your rivals, fight with your friends” (3). As a player you need to embrace the messiness and gleefully maneuver your pilots into these sticky situations. How does the game help you do that?

Scenes are set up as a series of “games,” but you can think of them as specific types of scenes. There is a solitaire game that gives you a fictional situation that your character has recently engaged in (you pick from a list, of course) and pick what the general outcome of that situation was. Everyone begins by playing a game of solitaire, but you are free to play it whenever you like; for example, during someone else’s scene that doesn’t involve you at all. Whenever you play, you do not tell others what happened. Instead, at the beginning of all the other games, you are prompted to tell the other players what they “notice” about your character or what rumors they may have heard about your character. That’s how you bring this background material into the shared fiction developing at the table. It’s a cool way to allow players to find whatever messy background material they need to help them determine how to interact with the other factions during the other scenes.

So here are the games and scenes you create with others during play: you can engage in an animated disagreement with one other player’s character, an argument that is moderated by the non-participating players; you can have a chase of one character by another, in or out of their mechs (called “mobile frames”); you can have a casual conversation over a meal with another character, focusing more on the social give and take of the conversation rather than the substance of the topic; you can share a dance with another character to explore the characters’ feelings toward each other; you can play out a giant free-for-all battle with everyone in their mobile frames; you can meet with another character in a duel of swords, exploring the relationship through the metaphor of combat; you can have an intimate moment of one-on-one interaction, fraught with romantic and possibly sexual tension; and you can meet on the field of battle as parts of two units of soldiers exchanging fire and death.

All of the games are designed to give players the opportunities (and encouragement) to create those messy entanglements, as each game is really about the relationships between the characters, even the games about battle. And all the games are designed to structure the interaction between the players to make sure they are aligned with each other no matter how the characters feel about the other characters. Who creates what part of the fiction is carefully controlled, and the games let you choose in what ways your character will be vulnerable to the other characters by letting you choose which questions you ask or what demands you make. Some examples:

In the dance, you can ask questions like: “My face is close to yours. Do you turn subtly toward me, or subtly away?” and “When the dance ends, will you stand with me or rush away?” and “This moment in the dance allows me to step close to you and linger very near. Am I welcome?”

In the conversation over food, you can ask questions like: “I make an ignorant social or diplomatic blunder. Do you let me recover gracefully or do you hold it against me?” and “I hope you don’t bring _ up. Do you?”

In the meeting over swords, you can ask questions like: “I overreach slightly and you have the opportunity to slip in a dirty little cut. Do you take it?” and “You knock my sword rattling out of my hand. Do you allow me to recover it, or must I submit?”

The one that I currently love the most are the exchanges in a tactical skirmish, where you make demands like: “Submit now, or my forces spreads itself too thin and you pick off_____, who is straggling” and “Withdraw now, or you ambush and capture __, my scout” and “Submit now, or you catch __ in a sharp crossfire and tear them apart.” I think the structure of this is brilliant. You demand the submission or withdrawal of the opposing force or force them to reduce your soldiers one by one. And each soldier has a name and a position, and is just a poor kid trying to support their cause. Are you comfortable destroying them slowly to win the battle? And in the next scene that these two characters meet, this spilled blood will be between them, both their willingness to kill and their failure to protect their own soldiers. How can that not create messy entanglements?

Once the gameplay goes around the table once, any player can call an end to the game after a scene finishes. In the end, Firebrands is about consensual interactions, the respectful give and take that creates not only a conversation but every exchange we have as players and people. The game encourages you to make yourself vulnerable through your characters, and it urges you to explore the messy aspects of being human with other humans. It’s a sharp design.