I purchased Ron Edwards’ S/lay w/Me a couple of years back. It impressed me instantly, but I was afraid to try it out. After a year of improv classes, I booked two sessions of it to Ropecon (and ran a third ex tempore). I’m glad I did. It’s a very special little gem, a two-player game of sword & sorcery that usually plays in an hour or so. I’ll go so far as to say it’s pretty much the essence of what I enjoy in roleplaying.

One player plays an experienced adventurer, described in a couple of dozen words. He also picks where the adventure takes place and declares something supremely important that he’s after there.

The other player then comes up with ideas, visuals, and people based on what the other player decided. He also creates a Lover and a Monster, who can be the same person or thing.

Then they start playing. It’s very light on mechanics, and although you roll dice, they only affect the final outcome of the game, not the task or conflict at hand. The game is played in “Goes”, which is pretty much another way of saying “turn”, but sounds a little less like a board game. On your Go, you describe things and end your Go by narrating a forward-moving event. Not “I search for the sword”, but “I enter the temple and I go through rooms of varying, vivid colors, until I finally reach a small, crimson chamber. On an altar I find the sword.”

In its most rigid form the narration turns resemble the typical player–GM split: one player says what the adventurer does, and the other says how the world reacts. However, they can and should play the game as loose as they are comfortable with. Rather than following clear rules about what each player can and must say, the players should feel out how far they can go – how much they can about the other players’ “realm”. I’ve often heard said that, for example, it’s not kosher in RPGs for the GM to say what the player characters are feeling; and it’s definitely out of bounds for the player to say how the monsters react.

In S/lay w/Me, the only limits are what you two as players establish. It not only applies to narration rights, but also to the content: since the game is about lovers and monsters, you have to include love and/or sex and violence in the game. One inhabitant of the internet, not well-disposed towards the game, said that the game seems like an awfully contrived attempt at foreplay. (The game’s highly sexual art might have provoked that reaction.)

But it’s not about foreplay (although you probably could use the game for it, but how is that different from any other RPG?). Instead, it feels very special to just play face-to-face with one person, and come to terms about all kinds of things without ever explicitly discussing them. It’s about connection, about jamming – to use Ron Edwards’ music metaphor for roleplaying – about learning cool things about yourself and your friends. It’s sitting together, forgetting everything else but the game, focusing on the fiction you’re creating. It’s like immersing yourself in a Robert E. Howard story, except you tell it together with an interesting person, and if that’s not high praise, I don’t know what is.

This might be old news to some, self-evident to others. I realised something quite nifty. Maybe it isn’t extraordinary, but it clarified things, and things clicked in my head.

At Ropecon, I listened to Vincent Baker talk about game design. He’s a veteran of the Forge, which to some equals obscurity and “theory jerk” – actually he has referred to himself as such – but to me his theoretical stuff is very lucid and interesting. His thoughts on game theory and especially the terms he uses strike me as relevant. That is, they help me think about roleplaying games, their rules and what’s happening at the gaming table.

One of the things he talked about was the interaction in roleplaying games between 1) people, 2) the physical game components, and 3) the conversation among players. Not “the imaginary space”, mind, but the conversation. What we talk about at the table. In chess, for example, the conversation doesn’t matter. People might talk about the game, but from the standpoint of what chess as a game is about, it doesn’t matter. In roleplaying games, said Baker, the conversation is the thing. And here’s the thing that actually made me think “mind = blown”, and I actually hate that expression, so it’s a big deal to me. I hope I get it even approximately right.

The rules of the roleplaying game are there to modify the conversation we’re having, to ensure that what we’re talking about is relevant to the game.

In Apocalypse World, and other games using the same engine, the rules direct the conversation by asking questions (among other things). For instance, if you try to notice stuff about a charged situation, the roll isn’t a binary situation of pass/fail. Instead, you get to ask stuff: “what’s my best way out of here?”, “what’s my enemy’s true position” and so on. The MC (the fun name for the GM in this game and one that I’m proud to sport) is supposed to invent the answers on the fly – that is, to engage in conversation. (If you fail, the MC brings forth other interesting stuff into the conversation.)

Compare this to the way I’ve run Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies (both of which I love, so please refrain from using your internet equivalents of 88mm’s): if you as a player succeed in your roll, I give you a pre-made answer – if you don’t, I’ll move on. I might be wrong, but in a roll like that you kind of roll whether you get access to the GM’s mind and notes. The GM’s task is to withhold stuff and try to covertly run the game in a direction only he knows – a sort of Grey Eminence. (Now, I always wanted to run Unknown Armies in another way, but I didn’t know how ten years ago. There are a lot of ways to run CoC and UA.)

In Apocalypse World, you roll to see which direction the conversation and the game is going. It’s creating stuff together, getting the conversation flowing.

In some respects, Apocalypse World isn’t very far from structured freeform. Sure, AW has dice to randomize stuff, but the main thing is the conversation you’re having among friends. You bring forth stuff and riff on other people’s ideas.

More on Ropecon later.