Chris asked me to write a few notes on what I was doing throughout this PBM. What I was thinking. and how I screwed with the rules, the intent of the game and my fellow players.
I should probably introduce myself by saying that I was the first test-player in the MG system. I watched it go from absolutely free-form to more structured, and then toy again with the free-form version of the matrix. I have been one of the major people trying to find ways around Chris' tempestuous affairs with more restrictive systems (I hate cards,) and, I hope, a major thorn to his neat little world from Day One.
The first thing I did for this PBM was to note that it was a PBM. Its dynamics would be very different from a face to face game. Players would not band together as quickly or play off of one another as they would in a face to face game. It made a difference in the way I would play.
The second thing I did was to decide on a murderer, or, in short, I had to commit from the very beginning how I was going to direct my play and the game. It was this choice of murderer that changed the rest of the game, for me and for you. The police may have been ready to haul Dr. Jones off to Newgate Prison prior to his hanging, but in my heart I knew the real murderer got away. If you haven't guessed the murderer was Hercule Poirot himself.
"What!" do you say? And "Gadzooks!"
Perhaps "Mon Dieu!" would be more appropriate.
Why Poirot? Well, in the first place, who in his right mind would suspect the greatest detective on the continent of committing so sordid a murder? It was just too tempting to pull a plot twist like that on my fellow players. It also gave me another enormous advantage upon which I shall elaborate below. If you don't think I'm the sort who's ready to use a new way to work the MG to my advantage, well then we need to meet some day, and I'll tell you what shit I've pulled in MGs you may have been involved in.
The third thing I did in deciding how to run the game was to muse upon the implications of this choice of murderer.
Consider the mechanics of our mystery, and as a visual aid, think of it as a sort of chess game with three kings in endgame. The intent of the game Chris gave us was for the black king to try to escape capture by the two white kings. Each player was given one move for the black king and one for his choice of the white kings, Spade or Poirot. In terms of the chess game, think of the number of arguments the piece can move.
What I did was to screw with the conceptual mechanics of the game. I denied from the beginning that there were three kings. My black king was the same as one of my white kings, so instead of a three-piece endgame, I was playing a two piece endgame. That made my murderer's odds a hell of a lot better. I also now had three arguments a turn, two for Poirot and one for the murderer, to use to frame my patsy and lead suspicion away from Poirot. At one point I was even able to turn the orders backwards, give the murderer's argument first and build YES AND arguments off that. In terms of the matrix game, that power is awesome.
Going back to our chess game to demonstrate, Chris' intended rules would have made it possible for the black king, moving one square at a time, to elude the Spade-king, also moving one square per turn, for the six turns of the game. It would have been a little more difficult to elude a pristine Poirot-king who would have two squares to move to every one of the black king's. If both white kings could have worked together (and that would have been nearly impossible to pull off given PBM mechanics,) they might likely have managed to capture the black king in the allotted time.
But my rules were different. On my chess board, I had one black king with three squares to move in a turn. The only possible pursuit was from the Spadeking, who I knew could be easily outrun, so long as I stuck to the center of the board. In fact, the hardest job I had in the entire game was making other people's arguments for Poirot the murderer fit into my game plan, trying not to find myself backing or being backed into a corner.
From that point on it was simply a matter of execution. (Pardon the pun.) So why did I do this? Well, aside from the trite "To see if it could be done," I reached the conclusion right away that six turns was far too short a time in which to capture a murderer, especially if as many players as we had were all pulling in different directions with no hope of coordination.
There had to be a resolution, and a neat resolution at that, by turn six or else the purpose of the game would be lost. In this case, what we were all after was that someone be arrested and drug away in chains. The best way to assure that the murderer (or a disinterested third party) would "come to justice" was to frame someone, and the best way to do that was to assure myself of more coordinated arguments than anyone else in the game. Any person on the list of suspects was worth hanging, really. In the beginning, I did not even know whom I wanted to hang. I eventually decided on the Doctor because he just started to fit the clues that were coming to light better than anyone else. So long as it wasn't Poirot, I did not care whom they came for, and once we all started throwing out clues that could be made to point so cleanly to the good doctor, he was as good as arrested.
The sad fact that the Doctor fell overboard was brought about by the rather annoying and insightful argument that Jones go to Spade. I had to waste an argument that could have tied the noose in convincing Spade that Jones was lying again. In that sense, I failed.
Now, aside form an overwhelming resolve among the Gentle Readers that I should be hit in the head with a brick for doing this to you all, is there a lesson to be learnt here? Oh yes!
When you start playing an MG, you decide what game you are really playing. It might be the GM's game, or it might be entirely different, or it might just look a whole lot like the GM's game but not recognizable as a different game until it is too late!
The mechanics explain it all. A MG is essentially a shared universe, but it is subject to control and manipulation. The realm of possibility is the only legitimate matrix, and the victory will go to whoever has learnt to make the best use of that vast possibility. Take it as gospel from someone who has found ways to pervert any hand of cards I get dealt in one of "those" MGs; who argued for amorphous evil and the imp of the perverse more often than not; and who put the river on the map of the featureless prairie in the first MG.
The point of the MG is to control that shared reality to suit your purposes. You can be nice about this or nasty, subtle or blatant (Remember, the more open you are the more likely it is that someone will figure out what you're doing and try to stop you,) but you must control reality. The minute you accept someone else's views of the world in a MG, you've admitted defeat. That other person now has control over reality, and that includes you. To some extent he will have already determined what plays you will allow yourself to make.
So, when you walk into your next MG think about what I did and what I've said, and see if you can find the homicidal Poirot in that game, or better yet make one.
Back to Experimental Games Group # 29 Table of Contents
Back to Experimental Games Group List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1993 by Chris Engle
This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com