120. Read a Person

When you read a person in a charged interaction, roll+sharp. On a 10+, hold 3. On a 7 - 9, hold 1. While you’re interacting with them, spend your hold to ask their player questions, 1 for 1:
• Is your character telling the truth?
• What’s your character really feeling?
• What does your character intend to do?
• What does your character wish I’d do?
• How could I get your character to - ?
On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst.

Reading a person is an investment in time. It means studying them carefully through the whole conversation, noticing changes in their tone, the movements of their eyes and hands, their most fleeting expressions. In play, have the player roll this move only (a) when the interaction is genuinely charged, and (b) when you’re going to play the interaction through (145 - 146).

I love this move.

Anyone who has had a difficult conversation is familiar with the need to read every available cue in order to navigate the conversation safely and productively. Was that joke a stab at you or a lighthearted remark? Should you push against what they are saying or quietly listen without comment? Do they want you to agree with them or challenge them? I love that this move captures that experience so beautifully.

But the designers want the move to emulate more than just real-life experiences; they want it to emulate the kind of conversations we see in novels, movies, and TV shows. The secret to that latter goal is this instruction: “roll this move only (a) when the interaction is genuinely charged, and (b) when you’re going to play the interaction through.” It is only by playing the interaction through that the move can achieve what it is truly meant to emulate in well-written dramas: subtext!

Two characters with emotional stakes in a conversation can talk about the most mundane things on the surface while communicating devastating blows with their subtext and cues, both verbally and non-verbally. That’s what this move strives for, and that’s why the interaction needs to be “genuinely charged,” why the player isn’t supposed to ask all her questions up front, and why the interaction is meant to be played out in full. If the conversation is not genuinely charged, then there’s no room for subtext. In a genuinely charged conversation, the people speaking are not free to speak their feelings and desires plainly, either because of internal or external pressures. If a character can’t speak their feelings and desires plainly, they are forced to talk about other things, but those other things float on the surface of those unspoken feelings and desires, and in floating on the surface they are – consciously or unconsciously – shaped and distorted by them.

With this move, you don’t have to be an incredibly clever writer of dialogue in order to get the same impact that skilled dramaturgists achieve. No matter what the two characters talk about on the surface, the player can ask questions like “what’s your character really feeling?” or “what does your character wish I’d do?” and get the answer before returning to the conversation. As an MC, you have the opportunity to create cool details that explain those deeper meanings. Throw in all the gestures and undertones you want and give them meaning – that’s the meat and the joy of this move.

If it’s two players’ character interacting, they can totally read each other at the same time. Both roll, both hold, both ask, both answer, no prob.

You see the possibilities of this move here, yeah? Quinn Murphy has an excellent essay called “The Talk: Better Conversations in Your Games” (it appears in the Indie+ 2014 Anthology, pg 2), in which he gives advice about creating a conversation between two players that has all the rich subtext that we see in our favorite dramas. This move doesn’t obviate Murphy’s technique, but it allows for so much more, and it does so mechanically rather than through coordinated planning. With read a person, we can conduct a conversation between two PCs that are ostensibly about one topic while we reveal all the turmoil and desires underneath. We no longer have to have our characters’ conversations be on the nose.

Cool.

I think of this instruction to trigger this move “only . . . when you’re going to play the interaction through” as a sort of Easter egg hidden in plain sight. I say that because it’s easy for players in the heat of the moment to skip the full conversation and jump right to the questions and answers. After all, there is nothing in the move itself that forces the players to “play the interaction through.” The rules certainly demand it, but the game doesn’t enforce that demand. If a player wants to say, “I talk to her, and I’m just trying to figure out what she intends to do about X,” the MC can just give the answer and play can move on without so much as a hiccup.

Back in posts nos. 100 and 101, I talked a fair amount about “self-enforcing” RPG design that forces the players to make the fiction clear. The loosey-goosiness of the instruction to “play the interaction through” makes me think of the same “anyway” blogpost I referenced in those earlier posts: “2009-06-15 : Lazy Play vs IIEE with Teeth” (http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/456/). In that post, Vincent says:

So now, if you're sitting down to design a game, think hard. Most players are pretty lazy, and telling them to do something isn't the same as designing mechanisms that require them to do it. Telling them won't make them. Some X-percent of your players will come to you like, "yeah, we didn't really see why we'd do that, so we didn't bother. Totally unrelated: the game wasn't that fun," and you're slapping yourself in the forehead. Do you really want to depend on your players' discipline, their will and ability to do what you tell them to just because you told them to? Will lazy players play the game right, because you've given your IIEE self-enforcement, or might they play it wrong, because the game doesn't correct them? Inevitably, the people who play your game, they'll come to it with habits they've learned from other games. If their habits suit your design, all's well, but if they don't, and your game doesn't reach into their play and correct them, they'll play your game wrong without realizing it. How well will your game do under those circumstances? Is that okay with you?

Take Dogs in the Vineyard again: not everybody likes the game. (Duh.) But most of the people who've tried it have played it correctly, because it's self-enforcing, and so if they don't like it, cool, they legitimately don't like it. I'm not at all confident that's true of In a Wicked Age.

You could blame the players, for being lazy and for bringing bad habits. (As though they might not!) You could blame the text, for not being clear or emphatic enough. (As though it could be! No text can overcome laziness and bad habits.) Me, I blame the design, for not being self-enforcing.

Anyway, you're the designer, and maybe it's okay with you and maybe it isn't, that's your call. (It's my call too for my games, and for the Wicked Age, yeah, maybe it's okay with me.) But I raise the question because from experience, slapping yourself in the forehead when people don't play the way you tell them to gets pretty old. If you don't want the headaches, do yourself a favor and make your game's IIEE self-enforcing.

Obviously, Vincent and Meguey are clever enough designers to know that this rule to “play the interaction through” is unenforced, which means that they are fine with some players skipping past the interactions details straight to the answering of the questions. I can’t think of a way to make the move self-enforcing without also making it cumbersome and potentially unpleasant. So even though they know that some X-percent of their players won’t play the move that way, it is worth it to them not only to keep the advice in there, but to state that advice as a rule. I don’t know about you, but that says to me exactly how important they think that instruction is.

If you don’t play the interaction through, you’re cheating yourself of the experience of the subtext-laden exchange between characters. Your game won’t suffer if you don’t do it, but it will be greatly enhanced if you do.