Digital Changeling

June 17, 2007

My Life with Master Thoughts

So the short game of My Life with Master that I was taking part in wrapped up this evening. I thought I would write a short post summarizing my feelings about the experience.

MLwM requires a lot from a GM. This being the first time that our group has ever been able to play the game we all struggled quite a bit. Since MLwM is overtly a horror game (although not in the "slasher stalking you in the night" sense) it needs the gradual build up from bad to worse to terrible as the characters begin to come to terms with what they have become and what sort of mad man/woman they are serving. The GM has to keep this building up in mind. Don't send your minions of to slaughter orphans as your first order. They're not going to be shocked/upset unless you build up to it gradually.

The players need to keep in mind that when they are creating characters they need a good clear idea of why this minion is working for their master. What is it that their place in the master's household brings them that they wouldn't have otherwise? We struggled with this a lot too. Unfortunately this meant that the weight of "convincing" us that we really belonged there fell heavily on the GM. This was (I think) a somewhat unfair burden on our GM. He tried, but by this point our master was beginning to fall to the clutches of his madness and couldn't pull it together to be quite as persuasive as the characters perhaps needed at that point.

MLwM can be very hard for people who don't have any background with inherently narrativist games. I'm not saying they can't do it, but leaping in cold turkey was painful for some of us. I think it might have helped us a lot to have read/heard/discussed an example scene before we began so that we had a clearer idea of what was expected of us.

We had some issues with the mechanics that were very non-obvious to us. The number of overtures allowed per order was a bit confusing and early on in the game some of us felt very frustrated and fatalistic about how we could ever reach a point where we might kill the master and survive. Ultimately our GM upped our overtures to two per order and more aggressively encouraged/framed overture attempts for people who were having a hard time dealing with the style of play. I don't think this would be quite so hard for us to deal with now that we have some experience with the system, but it seems like more guidance on the expectations of GM style in the book might have helped the first time around.

I really wanted to give my all towards making a more interesting and complex story, but at times the pure mechanics of the game seemed to get in my way. On some level it was very hard to do something that would overtly screw me according to the mechanics of the game. I found this frustrating, as I expected the game to in some way reward the players who reached for overtly narrativist goals (since after all this is the stated goal of the game...).

I would have liked my character to fail more often and be entangled in the dark aspects of the story in a more interesting way than purely carrying out the masters orders. I think part of the problem here might have been caused by the general self-loathing (more than weariness)bias among our characters, but perhaps after I have a few more games under my belt the balancing of the mechanics will become more clear to me.

Overall I enjoyed MLwM once I was able to accept my character as a deeply flawed and neurotic individual (these flaws having little to do with her stated "More than Human" and "Less than Human" aspects). I found this fun and interesting, but the game really didn't reward it in any way. I guess I just enjoy playing neurotic characters for their own weird selves. I do plan to play MLwM again and hopefully I will develop more and deeper opinions with more experience.

Our GM's thoughts can be found here.

posted by Eva @ 10:25 PM

1 comments links to this post

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Comments:

Heh, I just read an essay by the author of that one. I think there's a copy of the game at the end of the book. (I've got some beefs with some of the assumptions of the narrativists in Second Person, but I'll have to reread it before I can elucidate them.)

posted by  Michael Phillips : June 18, 2007 7:10 AM

 

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