Delving deeper into the marginalia of yesterday’s review, I’ll try to explain my anxieties about the game’s text. Before you read on, bear in mind this caveat: This is just me talking.

The text left me with a sense of anxiety stemming from three sources: a feeling that the game was incomplete, a feeling of confusion on some of the rules and a fear of performance. To explain those sources, we’ll need to dabble in the game rules. So here’s an overview:

Rules

There are three player roles: Gun Thief, Law and Jagged Women. The Gun Thief controls the protagonist, the Law controls the environment/NPCs, and the Jagged Women, well, she sort of objectifies the women. The Law presents a problem for the Gun Thief, the Jagged Women adds a twist to the story using a selection of criteria, and the Gun Thief reacts. After a bit of narration, a conflict is determined and the Gun Thief has to choose three of five positive results (implying that the other options he omits will negatively colour the outcome). This is the process for building scenes. You do a few of these (it’s up to you how many) and then you end the game. The system is diceless.

That’s the game, pretty much. I know some people will love the loose structure.

Incomplete?

To surmise my reaction properly, I need to tell you about the three sources of my anxiety. The first is the incompleteness of the text, or, more accurately, the parts of the book I felt were incomplete. For example, in the section on Framing the First Scene, I felt that the sentence, “your job is to make things awful, right out of the gate,” as the overview of the scene framing function made an uncomfortable assumption about the reader’s story gaming background—followed up by vague pointers like “roll with it” and “breathe life into (it).” If it were up to me, gaming products would support the gaming paradigms they rely upon. That’s a personal backlash against my own frustrations as a newbie when I tried to understand underwritten games. So, when I read a game that talks about framing a scene, I’d like a little background about that (and maybe even a few hints about how it’s done). Or else a reference. Otherwise, when that paradigm shifts, the text can become difficult to absorb.

That’s part of what made the game feel incomplete. In addition, and this ties in to the other foundations of my anxiety, I found it really difficult to understand who exactly was in charge of the different parts of narration and how to evoke the moods and themes suggested by the game text. I prefer games with lots of extensive examples.

Ambiguous?

To highlight the ambiguity issue, let’s look at some of the confusion I had while reading the rules. Take this paragraph:

As The Jagged Women, it’s not your job to antagonize… it’s your job to tempt and problematize. You can play whole scenes where everything you do works out in the gun thief’s favour, or you can drag them through the mud. That’s your perogative.”

To me, the beginning and end of that paragraph contradict one another. Don’t they? I mean, if it’s your job to problematise, then isn’t it a failure if you give the gun thief an easy ride? It makes me feel stupid, like I’m missing something easy, and that’s not ideal.

During scene resolution, I don’t understand when narration is supposed to happen. For example, let’s say that “a kingpin has kidnapped a girl in order to persuade me to pay my debt.” Do I say that “I shoot the kingpin and get the girl? And run down the back steps?” Now what? Do we describe the shooting as something that has happened, something burnt into the fiction? If so, when do we roleplay? When do the other players contribute? It seems to me that the Gun Thief describes what he wants and then the other players come in and use the remnants of the scene to describe their sloppy seconds. I don’t get it.

After the scene ends, what about the options the player didn’t choose? Aren’t they the most important options? Who controls those? I see that the The Jagged Women takes control when the Gun Thief omits the “get the girl” option. But what about the other options? I presume the Law takes control…but I don’t know for sure.

Too much pressure?

The last part of my anxiety for Joe McDonald’s Gun Thief stems from a fear of performance. To me, the text is riddled with tall orders. That is, after reading it through over and over, I kept asking myself “will I be able to deliver that kind of performance?”

For example, as The Jagged Women, your job is to tempt the Gun Thief. Introducing sex and temptation into a game session scares me. Being the only person introducing sex and temptation into a session, and having that judged by the rest of the group is fucking terrifying. I’m anxious that my seductions will be futile. Maybe if I got some concrete examples of how that might be done, I’d be okay with it.

To illustrate what I perceive as a lack of support, here’s an example that didn’t work for me: If the Gun Thief player does not “get the girl,” the Jagged Women player gets told to turn the sacrifice into a rejection and make it “the worst rejection (he’s) ever tasted.” Surely, if the Gun Thief player has sacrificed her, he has already announced that his priorities lie elsewhere. What can the Jagged Women player do now to make it hurt? That’s a lot of responsibility without any examples to support it. What about this one, also for the Jagged Women player: “Frame a scene, or a moment, and make it ooze with sweat and rush and make him powerful. Give him rough sex, or lips brushing for a fleeting moment, or whatever the right thing is.” That reads nicely, but it scares the shit out of me. How will I make a scene “ooze with sweat?” Help!

The Law player suffers similar, unsupported advice. The text tells him “the important thing is that new problems be pregnant with unfairness, risk, the potential for messy outcomes and the potential to get even worse.” The game mechanics don’t seem to support this stuff, so it looks like it has to come from the Law player’s imagination. If that’s the case, and I’m playing the Law, I’d like some help. I’d like some examples. I need it broken down into components. What does “risk” mean, for example? It’s okay for great storytellers, but what about me? What if, while trying to create a problem that is “pregnant with unfairness,” I get brain-freeze?

Summary

It’s not bad that Gun Thief omits hard narration advice or even that it asks big things of me during play, because it gives me freedom to tell things my way. The problem is that I don’t know if I’m going to play a game by Joe McDonald. I feel like I’m standing on broken ice and the only thing keeping my upright is an awareness of what I think he was trying to get at. I keep asking myself, could a bunch of non-gamers play this after reading the book? Would they be playing Joe McDonald’s game? Will I struggle when it comes time to play? Even after reading the game three times, I’m anxious about what I’m supposed to do at the table. And when I get there, I’m terrified that I won’t be able to live up to the game’s commandments. Scary, scary stuff.

Check out yesterday’s Game Tasting for a look at my reaction to our first session.