Oooh. Interesting. Could you give some examples of conflicts? That'd really help.

See, I've seen Best Friends work really well. So clearly, somewhere, the idea of "how to play Best Friends well" didn't get communicated by the text.

A couple of things...

But doing stuff together wasn't really an exciting option. Characters can't help one another face adversity.

Yes...external adversity in Best Friends isn't, in itself, interesting. For example, if someone takes down the big villain, that's not really interesting. (It gets interesting when the external adversity has an effect on the characters' relationships).

What was not in the rules was that you were trying to win stakes and to do so you either went for the direct approach, challenging other players with their weakest hatreds, or a more subtle goal of drawing out your friend's chips and collect all you can (for a max of five). In trying to accomplish this the game ran cleaner and the challenges got crisp, challenging, engaging and ugly.

Mmm. In my experience, Best Friends doesn't have to be competitive to be fun. The characters are friends, but they have issues with each other. So it does need to stay focussed on relationships between character (which, I'm guessing, is why the competitive thing worked well for you, because competitiveness has that focus on relationships) but it needn't be tooth-and-claw fighting.

So that helps with another point...

The second issue was a question of sexism...all agreed that the combination of the two - being fiercely competitive and unilaterally supporting negative stereotypes - was just a little too much to make the game fun for them.

...I don't think it's all about competition and negative stereotypes. It's more about relationships (positive and negative) and, although I've seen stereotypes, they're usually affectionate.

So...by saying all that, I'm not saying Here Is How It Should Be Done. I'm trying to say that there's a particular way of playing Best Friends, which works well, and the text clearly didn't convey to you.

Interesting review. Thanks. I'm sure Gregor will be along shortly.

Oh, wait, you asked for feedback on the review. I'd like more examples of conflicts and some idea of how the game fiction progressed, if possible. Otherwise the style's great.

Graham

Hi Don

Many thanks for the review. I must say that I applaud the speed at which you've done this -- I think it's fair to say that the speed of the reviewing process for RPGs is generally of the order of years -- and so I'm thrilled that you have committed to doing this and completed it in a timely manner.

Constructively, for your reviewing, I don't get a sense of what the book looks or feels like. There are small pieces alluded to in the review as it stands but they're not expanded upon. You say it's not complex in presentation and that it reads quickly, but you don't really tell me what's actually in the book, whether the bits are in a sensible order, what the art is like, the book size, etc. As a games buyer I think I would have liked more of that.

I think Rich has a good point in that it seems like a drifted AP report in some ways, though I don't object to such things in games reviews -- the open and detailed manner of your AP was excellent (though as Graham noted perhaps you could have detailed a conflict? That then allows me, the reader, to judge how my play style matches).

Maybe the review could have been split into three parts though: (i) what the book is about and what it physically contains, (ii) how you got on playing the game, (iii) conclusion and points of note.

Now, that was all as someone who enjoys reading reviews and buying games. I guess as designer I ought to make some comment on the content of the review and how your game went.

I'm in two minds over whether I'm happy your group won't play the game again, or not. In one sense I'm unhappy because, hey, we like to think that we've written something that people will play and have fun with. On the other hand I think I'm glad actually. I get the sense that on many levels: this is not the game for them. And that it is good that this is communicated to other similar groups.

In my view Best Friends is not a competitive game. On the contrary it is a supportive game. It does not in any way sustain conflict with things outside the group, unless that external conflict is reinforced by the group. There is no winning in Best Friends by accumulating friend-chips. Its aim is to allow you to create fun characters, who are simultaneously each other's greatest pillars of strength and also each other's greatest adversity. And with those characters you create stories. They have stuff, but ultimately it's just stuff. They have nonsense, but ultimately it's just nonsense. They have Best Friends, and ultimately they are your Best Friends.

I also deeply believe that the game is not in anyway negative about women. In fact, I would say that the game is, if anything, a cheapshot at men. I'm curious, were any of the players women at all? Did they have a similar impression?

I think I did sum up what I find enjoyable in the game in the phrase "you and your friends all play girlfriends and try to do stuff together, while secretly hating each other..." but that didn't work for your group, which is fair enough.

I am in the process of putting an Appendix online that details a conflict and I hope that you'll find that handy.

Thanks again! I'm always glad to see the game reviewed. Can I link to the review from my website?

On sexism. So let me try to map out why my players came to the conclusions they did and hopefully I can get them to comment here as well:

So, after a brief setting description, the game focuses on developing the characters hatreds. Why do I hate my best friends? This keyed players into certain dynamics right from the outset. You can only play girls. These girls are friends, and all that it implies, yet they have some petty differences they have to work through. Who's prettier? Who's tougher? Who's smarter? When I asked if this game as written would work if we played as men, we all agreed that it would not. Now, in my experience, this comes with the prejudices of the players as well. If you percieve that there are some differences between the genders about these issues then it's your own perceptions that are saying "there is an inequality that is being exploited here." My players would contend that it was more that there are some underlying stereotypes at play - the negative stereotypes that women are more likely to be petty, vindictive and mean. They recognized that the stereotype existed, do not agree with the stereotype and thus reacted to say "I don't like what this is saying about women."

The conflicts described in the book and the conflicts that we had played to some very peculiar ideas for them. That was the idea that these women could not set aside their petty differences even when important stakes were on the line. One example in the book was women trapped in a cave and one is keeping another underwater longer than needed to show how much tougher she is. That's rough and not supportive in any way.

In what way were your games about being affectionate or about supporting one another? How was that explored in the mechanics?

Oh, just to clarify that the caving stuff is all a tip of the hat to The Descent, which is probably a film you haven't seen but which I would highly recommend (warning: as a horror flick it's very scary and at times bloody).

I think the key points about petty hatreds in conflicts are two things: (i) your petty hatred for a Best Friend is generally only for 1 thing, you have no hatred for the other 4 things with that Best Friend, and (ii) when do you decide not to push? That's when you overcome your petty hatred.

edit: deleted repeat post

Okay so here was the first conflict:

I framed the scene where we were all getting together to see, for the first time, that there was no planet left. There was some fun role-playing as Matt's character, Tara, regretfully pointed out the ill fortune. My character flips out. We figure that my panic attack should somehow threaten the ship in some way. After some deliberation we come up with the idea that I would be slamming on the "comm controls" in the observation platform we were all on and the holographic displays would distract us from a peice of debris hitting the ship. Tara is trying to calm me down. If I succeeded then Tara would miss the signs of the impending collision and something vital would be damaged on the ship like oxygen would start to get vented (cool). If Matt wins then Tara calms Sabrina down and turns off the hologram in time to avoid the collision (cool).

We tie. I push to Tara who I think is cooler than me and Matt pushes to Cadence who Tara thinks is cooler than her. Still tied. So we dictate that as a tie Tara noticed the giant boulder about to his the ship and at the last minute steers the ship remotely so that the collision affects a non-critical system like the communications array - something that needs to be narrated in future scenes.

This worked well. It took us a little time to work out how we thought it would be interesting but in the end we were happy with the story there.

In the next scene Cory's character, Alli, wants to fix the array but has no way of getting out there. Cadence has a designer space suit and offers to help. Cadence points out that she has to go out (even though she has zero smart) because Alli's hips are too wide to fit in the suit. So Alli walks Cadence through the procedure. They bicker appropriately during the scene. Then it's time to find a conflict. Both want the array to be fixed but want to be seen as responsible for accomplishing it. So we figure that if Alli is successful she is able to keep Cadence's bumbling on track long enough to fix the array (cool of zero). If Cadence succeeds, Alli loses her temper and Cadence is able to figure it out on her own (smart of zero). Both pushed and again it's a tie, thus we decided that the array did not get fixed (which I though became an interesting variation on the prisoner's dilema (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma).

Scene after scene went like this. We didn't see any intriguing way to get out of the cycle where we challenged each other's lowest hatred or inevidably tied. If we didn't do that then we were just pushing chips around and the mechanics didn't really mean anything (especially since the text never suggested narrarating the effects of pushing or how someone might have helped you). If another player ever tested Alli's smart of 3 then it would have gone something like "Alli is face to face with the computer monitor and has to figure out the ships password to jack into the security system. Uh, she succeeds..." If Alli frames the stakes similarly it's equally flat.

Now I realized later that a small sidebar (I always expect sidebars to be option rules or clarifications, not actual important baseline rules so I must have glossed over this the first few readings) others could work against Alli if she did this. Sure it would have been interesting if she made Sabrina look dumb by framing a scene that pitted their smart against one another and the others could have pushed to help Sabrina if they thought Alli's stakes were too high. At three to zero, or actually four to one with pushes, all three other players could have pushed for a tie. I am not saying a game about comprimises isn't cool. I'm just saying that any way I look at it I still see a competitive game about women being mean to one another.

Could someone describe for me an experience you had where this supportive nature you speak of was not at the detriment of another character?

Posted By: eruditusSo we figure that if Alli is successful she is able to keep Cadence's bumbling on track long enough to fix the array (cool of zero). If Cadence succeeds, Alli loses her temper and Cadence is able to figure it out on her own (smart of zero).

Don, was that a sort of Cool vs Smart conflict? Because, in the rules as written, a conflict is either about Cool (Alli's Cool score vs Cadence's Cool score) or about Smart (Alli's Smart score vs Cadence's Smart score). It's never about Alli's Cool vs Cadence's Smart.

Not criticizing, just trying to see what happened.

Graham

Hi Don.

I think that this post called Larceny, hatred, and supportive actualization hits the button (it was Ron Edwards, Julie Stauffer, Todd Olson and Maura Byrne I think). Meaningless external opposition can be easily overcome with a push (and that's fine for things like "Oh, I want to buy a house" but you don't have enough Rich, so you just push), it's when its bound up in the Nonsense that it becomes adversity and then it you can find the strengths of the relationships between these characters.

Looking at Alli and Cadence they're actually pretty mismatched across the Hatreds with Cadence having the edge in more of the conflicts.

If it's Pretty then, sure, they're tied. (Alli 1, Cadence 1)
If it's Cool then Cadence wins. (Alli 0, Cadence 1)
If it's Smart then Alli wins. (Alli 3, Cadene 0)
If it's Tough then Cadence wins. (Alli 0, Cadence 1)
If it's Rich then Cadence wins. (Alli 1, Cadence 2)

Whether Alli or Cadence wins, the other can choose to push and win instead. At that point the original winner can push back to re-establish their superiority, or let it go.

If Alli pushes on Tough the chip goes to Cadence (so Cadence might allow Alli to win and get a chip gained), and if Cadence ever pushes on Pretty the chip goes to Alli (so Alli might choose to not push back and just keep a chip in that case). With other pushes the chips go to other characters.

And if they've both pushed once then another Friend can push in on the conflict too and help one of them out.

So a conflict has to be about one hatred, say Pretty, rather than having Pretty of one character matched up against Tough of another for instance. Sorry if that wasn't clear in the text!