AAR: Don’t Rest Your Head; April 5, 2009
So I did it. I played a player narrative game of Don’t Rest Your Head. I used the system from my previous post and it worked wonderfully. It was very fun and definitely a learning experience. Here are some of the things I learned:
As I had previously suspected, it takes a lot of creativity and energy to run a game like this. The good news is that the GM is not 100% responsible to front that creativity and energy. The expenditure is definitely rewarded, though. I think I can safely say that everyone had a good time.
It is terribly liberating, as a GM, to be able to have a player come up with an answer. At one point during the session a player said, “I find a message with a clue on the bad guy.” There was a pause at the table while people were waiting for me to respond. I had nothing, so I said, “You tell me what is on it.” After a moment the player said, “It says they were supposed to capture us and take us to the Empire State Building.” An excellent answer and an interesting new location to explore, and I didn’t have to burn one GMing braincell!
The goal and prop cards did exactly what I hoped they would. Players would pick a goal to frame a scene around, and we would make sure that the scene moved forward on resolving that goal. (The Empire State answer from above was one such moment.) The prop cards were also used often. In some circumstances, it was fun to try to work a card in. In other situations, a player would be asked to frame a scene and use the cards as inspiration if they didn’t have an immediate idea. I made sure that the prop cards I created were interesting and though provoking, but the players provided some good props as well. (Players provided things like, “Ninjas”, “Secret Message”, and “Sanctuary”, while I tried to unhinge my mind a little and provided things like, “In the back of a wrecked ambulance, covered in fluid”, “A bag full of regretful memories”, and “Your ex-girlfriend (who is now a whore and a meth junky)”.) Many of the prop cards didn’t get used, but that was expected. They were just ideas, and I tried to make sure there were enough to provide variety.
The system itself was an interesting vehicle. The premise is that the characters have forgone enough sleep that they have cracked and reality has become mutable. This usually means that characters have some sort of darkness that has been keeping them awake, often resulting in mental problems. This also means that players can basically introduce any scene or idea they want and it is totally within the purview of the system. There were fights with pirates, nightmare killers that ate eyeballs, and clockwork SWAT teams. Obviously a player narrative game could be played where everyone tried to stay within genre and the precepts of a given reality and I’m sure it would be fun and interesting, but the shear madness of everything definitely made this game very fun.
One unfortunate thing about the game system is that somehow, I never managed to win a roll. Before resolving conflict, the GM announces how difficult something will be and then players get to guage how much they will risk (and thus how many dice they will be rolling.) The person who wins the conflict gets to narrate the results. Since I never won a roll, there was never any direct GM interaction (other than setting up scenes or choosing who got to frame a scene next.) The upside of the system is that just because I never won a roll doesn’t mean players didn’t suffer. The players risk pain, exhaustion, and madness. A player might succeed at a roll, but have to get a little hurt, a little bit more tired, or become a bit more mentally fractured. By the end of the session players were champs at narrating how they succeeded but got hurt in the process or lost control of them self. In other words, it wasn’t a complete disaster, but at the end everyone expressed the sentiment that it would have been nice to see the GM get to narrate a result or two.
In the end, I’ve decided it is not something I want to do every day. It is great fun, and I look forward to doing it again, but it takes too much energy for it to occur on any sort of regular basis. I will take some lessons away from the experience. Next D&D session that a player does something unexpected, I might just respond, “You tell me what happens.”
