Acquisition of the moment: Shock: Social Science Fiction

It looks like the big movement in gaming for the last mini-cycle of independent RPG releases has been an increased emphasis on "setting as mechanic," or the idea that the setting may be malleable but it's just as important to describe mechanically as any character, as it's just as important. This is not a bad thing if you're talking about the experience of play, since it means that the environment is just as mechanically described as anything and, as a result, the mechanisms for more things than just how you kill or screw a target get considerable page-count, and as we all know, you can write all the impassioned defenses of your game being about the subtle interplay between horror and eroticism you like, but if 64 of the 96 pages are about how to stick a knife in something before you fuck the hole, then that's what the game's about.

Shock is not about that. (That'd be FATAL, if we're being picky.)

No, Shock is about something a little more subtle than that. Shock appears to be a game in which someone said, "Hey, you know, the whole cyberpunk genre is about the collision between the social fabric and the ability to edit the Self, and a lot of good SF is really all about the conflict between the known and the expected, so let's generalize that." While 2nd/3rd generation RPG design was about generalizing the resolution mechanic across intentional models, this goes a step more abstracted and generalizes the question of what the essential tensions of the setting are and how they interact through the medium of the characters.

You might be getting the feeling that this is pretty heady stuff. You'd be right. If it's any consolation, the cover (and the website) are a sort of bright, cheery orange.

The problem with games that make the construction of the shared world one of the features of the mechanics is that it makes it damned near impossible to talk about in anything but the most abstract terms, unless you reify the experience into a simulated one, which leads to making the usual kind of category errors one makes when trying to pretend to be other people. It's hard. And not only that, it never sounds quite right.

Nevertheless, the quick run-down goes like this:

• Figure out what kind of game you're going to play.

Basic things. Era, general technology, etc. You want an ultra-far future dystopian nightmare in Space? You'd be playing Chronicles of Riddick, but you'd be playing a perfect setting appropriate for Shock. (In fact, it's so perfect we'll just use the Riddickverse as our play example.) Want 19th century steampunk? No problem. Just agree up front.

• Decide how long the story should be.

One-shot session or multi-session extended bit? You need to know this to set the number of Credits the Antagonist characters get, and since once your Antagonist is under 5 Credits they start going for the jugular on resolving your Story Goal, well ... There y'go.

• Put together The Grid.

This is where Shock goes off the map and into the setting-design mechanics for the social group.

The Grid is made up of Social Issues down the left and Shocks along the top. Issues are things that the group wants to deal with, behind, around, or on top of. Things like "slavery" or "corporate ownership of ideas" or "liberal group-think" or what-not. Shocks are pretty easily summed up as "how the setting differs from our universe." Aliens invading? Shock. Mind-transfers? Shock. Cybernetic enhancements? Shock. They're the "science fiction" part of the setting. Each Issue and each Shock has someone that "owns" it and essentially gets to have final say about the details of that thing in a general way if it comes up during play.

Somewhat implicitly, you need to have a number of Issues times the number of Shocks greater than the number of players because the actual Protagonists exist on the intersection of Issues and Shocks on the Grid. The text says that you can either have final say on an Issue/Shock or a Protagonist that confronts it, but that seems kind of impossible unless you want a different Shock for every player at the table, and that starts getting into a little too much shock for some kinds of setting. Worth keeping in mind, however.

So, for the Riddickverse, we might have:

Which sets us up nicely for an easy four player game. Where are the other major players? Antagonists. But we'll get there.

• Define your Praxis.

The whazzat? The Praxis are the at-odds ways that characters deal with the universe. They're, at heart, not necessarily what the events are about but they are what the characters tend to be about and set up a lot of the central decision conflicts. You get two opposed Praxis that the table has to agree on.

Examples, man, examples!

Sticking with our example setting:

The Praxis define the ways in which characters can react to conflicts. By defining your Praxis interestingly up front, you can define a lot of what the dynamic will be about.

• Create your Protagonist.

The part everyone has been waiting for, though, frankly, after having defined so much of the world, it's not really that huge a deal. By this point, you know what their hinge issues are likely going to be and you've got a pretty good idea where you're going.

Creating a Protag basically just means deciding what their ratings on the Praxis are (the Fulcrums, or how much they favour one side or another in terms of solving problems, and creating Features and Links. Features define how many dice you roll in conflicts and pretty much define things about the character. Links are things that the character's connected to, but as importantly things they can imperil or threaten in exchange for a re-roll on a challenge test.

So, continuing with Riddick:

Features: Shined Eyes, Unmatched Agility

Links: His Freedom

Story Goal: Shake the Law

Which means he's heavily biased toward violence, pretty heavily pushed toward rebellion and has 3 Features (and thus, rolls 3 dice). The text suggests only defining two Features and one Link at the start of play and pick one more soon after play starts. I think that's good suggesting.

(Of course, we know that Riddick accomplishes his Goal, but only after blowing enough things that he has to essentially give up his freedom to make it happen. Such is the fate of the tragic protagonist.)

• Create the Antagonist.

Big hook here? You don't create your Antagonist, the person on your left does. You get to name them but the person on your left sets their Praxis and defines their Features, though generally informed about what you've said you'd like to face. And the person on your left plays your Antagonist, reminiscent of the Shadow rules in Wraith.

Riddick's Antagonist might be the Lord Marshal, but it certainly would be more interesting to define it as the Necromongers as an entire group. Nothing keeps one from doing so, and thus the Lord Marshal and the Necromonger fleets could just be story elaboration (or Minutae, which are just game-mechanic created bits of info about the greater setting or Shocks). Vaako's Antagonist is clearly Dame Vaako, the conniving bitch.

Antagonists get Credits with which to buy dice during conflicts, so they don't get Links. They do have Features.

And that's pretty much it. You have a Grid, you have the Praxis Scales, you have a Protagonist and Antagonist (abbreviated to *Tagonist in the text, much to my amusement), and you're in.

Conflict resolution? Oh, yes, I suppose it needs to be discussed.

Conflict resolution in Shock is built on the double-active intent-declaration model. That is, it's not a to-and-fro action-declaration system, ie. "I hit him," but rather the player declares the intent of the entire confrontation up front ("I want to humiliate Lord Vaako in public" or "I want to kill the entire mercenary group") and then it's resolved. Both characters (usually Protag and Antag) declare active intents, and it's textually limited that both have to be possible outcomes, or neither, or one and not the other; declared intents cannot directly conflict. Likewise, it's limited that the intents cannot resolve the Story Goal of the Protag until and unless the Antag has 5 Credits or fewer ... in which case they have to try and resolve the Story Goal.

In the scene where Riddick faces the Lord Marshal in combat, his intent may very well have been "I want to revenge Kyra on the Necromongers" and the Necromongers' intent could well be "Riddick should be under our control." And in the ensuing dice nightmare, both win.

Once declared, you pick up a number of dice equal to either your Features or the Credits you (as Antag) want to spend, divided between d10's and d4's. d10's are your active boost to yourself, d4's modify your opponent's roll. Decide which Praxis Scale value you're trying to aim for (violence versus negotiation) and try to roll over your fulcrum for that Praxis if it's on top, under if it's on bottom. And if it's equal to the fulcrum? The stakes escalate, becoming more important or more intense. A mild beat-down might go to maiming, or murder. Public humiliation might lead to long-term social scorn, etc. The volume goes up. Reroll your d10s and the opponent's d4s.

Lose the conflict? Gain a Feature from it, which adds to the dice you'll roll next time. Not involved in the conflict? you can toss a d4 at either side for the cost of creating Minutae which bear on the current conflict ("The Lord Marshal can warp time in his passage") or call on one already established ("Riddick's a disgustingly able knife-fighter"). Lose and really didn't want to? Call on your Link and get a total re-roll -- at the cost of transforming your Link if the roll goes sour. Risked your Faith in God on that? Maybe you're an atheist, or you decided another deity was for you, or the loss was too much to take and you become a hyper-fundamentalist just looking for a bomb-belt to strap on to prove yourself.

And that's it. No detailed damage charts, no hundred pages of left-handed earspoons or grain-to-cartridge-to-stopping-power lists. The text is spent on focusing on the issues and pillars of the experience, on shaping the tone and intent of the play to a desired end.

As is stated at the beginning, there are only two static situations in Shock play. The first is at the beginning of the game, which the Antagonist immediately pushes the Protagonist out of (the ship is boarded, aliens invade, your wife is disappointed with your political acumen), and the other is at the very end with the Story Goal staring you in the face. Everything else has to be dynamic, has to have intents driving the situation to be something different. Intents are never defensive, they're always active, never "I dodge his fire" but "I leave this part of the city" with all that entails.

It's a good dynamic.

Final rating: A+ (the layout and typography were fantastic)