My Life with Master (30-01-21)

 

I’m not really ready to write anything about this but unless I play it my recollection will just get worse, and right now I'm unlikely to play it so...

I picked this up as I had seen people raving about how original and influential it was, I tried to purchase it from its own site, but its so old (2003) I ended up being sent the pdf by the actual author! The thing it reminds me of the most is Sorcerer and the designer (Paul Czege) cites Ron Edwards as his big inspiration.

The player characters are the minions of some evil genius type like Victor Frankenstein, and the few rules that there are serve to shape a story that will end in the master’s death at their hands. 

The Master is mechanically represented by a Fear value, the environment’s ability to resist them is embodied as Reason, the Minions have Self Loathing and Weariness and their one saving grace, which will cause the master’s doom is Love. The players and GM design the master and their characters in a collaborative fashion with a few elegant rules for defining abilities and character.

The game is then played in Scenes with each player taking one in turn, these tend to end on a dice roll (which will push up at least one of their stats) before moving onto the next player. The balance of stats dictates much of what happens - indeed it's when someone manages to resist Master’s command (which wont happen till their Love has increased) that the end game begins.

It feels like a cleverly calibrated story machine, based on an analysis of these kind of horror movies. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a meaningful set of rules before, as in so intentionally expressive of a take on the world.

Oh and its worth saying, the game makes no effort to tell you what the rules mean, it just hits you with them.
 

Greg Costikyan's MLWM blogpost  is also really interesting…

“To put it another way, a standard RPG is character-centric; its rules define a set of abilities that each character possesses, and the rest is up to the gamemaster and players to negotiate. Master is, by contrast, narrative-centric; its rules define a narrative arc from which there is no escape, and the rest is up to the gamemaster and players to negotiate.”

The full thing can be found here and his actual review which is equally as interesting is here.

I seem to have spent much of my evening reading around MLWM now (including tangentially finding out much more about GC and ordering his book on Uncertainty In Games) - this is from an interview with Paul Czege:

I think intentionally designed RPGs can be better at changing people’s behaviors and beliefs than other media. Playing an RPG imprints its template for how the world works deeply into your brain. My Life with Master infects players with its understanding of the workings of controlling relationships, and how to get out of them. Imagine the social and economic impact of a truly fun roleplaying game that infects players with an ability to resist powerful advertising messages and more consistently make purchasing decisions they feel good about in retrospect.

The full interview is here

Fascinating stuff, I definitely have to actually play this one day.