The first game I played in at this year's Go Play NW was Joe McDonald's second edition of Perfect. I'd like to say in advance: the game is now definitely ready and works very well. I'd also like to say that out of the 5 games I played, this is the one that might stick with me the longest.
Perfect is a game about an ultra-Victorian dystopia. The main characters are people who rebel against it in a variety of ways. We had six players (Chad, Lukas, Lesley, Ben, ________, and myself), so we only made it around the table twice. Everyone gets to successfully commit a crime and then try to avoid detection and brainwashing by the inspectors.
I'm going to let the other players tell their stories, because they can do that better than I could. Suffice it to say that we had a nurse who forged charts to order unneeded operations on inspector snitches, a noble who fostered blossoming love among strangers, a writer who placed erotica leaflets in church books, an old beat cop who led an uprising against an inspector station, and a worker who blackmailed inspectors with (often fabricated) evidence of their own transgressions.
My character was Lawrence Hawthorne, a drummer in the Queen's Marching Band. We were not allowed to play original pieces; creativity is immoral, after all, because it represents change, and change is bad. He was in love with a lower-class girl he saw every day. He had never spoken to her and didn't even know her name. His strongest trait was simply, "I love somebody." Then he had "Pain is Life" and "I have my own rhythm." He also thought animals were much purer than people, but I didn't bring that out too much.
For the first crime, Lawrence created an original percussion piece for his secret love. He scoped out a supposedly abandoned place adjacent to her favorite diner, set up his drums, and played it for her when she was there. He didn't get to see her reaction, and she wouldn't know it was for her, but it was all worth it anyway. Only the place wasn't abandoned, he had to hit someone over the head with a drum stick, and the bloody stick gave him away when the inspector came.
They brainwashed him with beatings to the ever-repeating tune of four musicians, most severely whenever they veered from the notes that were projected on a screen in front of his eyes. By the time Lawrence was released, he would never be able to play anything spontaneous anymore; he had to follow sheets. That was harsh.
Disclaimer: some graphic, violent descriptions follow.
Lawrence suffered horribly from the effects of the conditioning, and he wanted revenge. Chad's nurse character helped him in a combined crime (round two consisted of three paired-up crimes). They brought the four musicians into an empty wing of the hospital, secured them with surgery restraints (there's no anasthaesia in this place and time), and paid them back. Chad described each torture instrument for the different victims as befitting their instrument, which was more elaborate but also much cooler than what I had in mind. It included stitching machines, saws moving like violin bows, and so on. Lawrence played an original piece, written down on sheets so he could play it, while they were horribly tortured. He ended with playing on their fingers, toes, knees, elbows, groin, and finally face, until the piece and the victims were done.
So we ended up with four barely-recognizable corpses. The nurse's brother, an inspector, happened to stop by. Despite all our attempts to hide the crime (cramming the corpses in the bathroom and explaining the blood as a "leeching accident"), we were caught.
I expected more physically cruel and psychologically intensive conditioning, but Joe had other things in mind. It's possible that he knows me well enough to set this up specifically, from Knife Fight or otherwise, or maybe he just read me right in the moment. But instead of the torture chamber, the inspector brought me to a feast and introduced me to a bunch of people. Everything was pleasant and strangely friendly.
Except that the guests were the members of my victims' families.
That was manageable, until we got to three now-orphans (their mother had been dead for a while already). Joe wisely let other players play them, to give them more personality and make them feel more like real people. And they did play them very well, with tears and guilt and even trust.
And so, if you know me, you know that the one thing I personally am touched by the most in real life is the suffering of children. I can't read newspaper articles where kids get abused and/or killed without starting to cry (actually I often can't read them at all). I can't even begin to think about things that might happen to my children, because it makes me physically ill.
So here we are. I think it's good that Joe and I had met before, and that I think highly of him, because it made the whole thing easier to process in a I Will Not Abandon You way. I trusted him there; else I might have withdrawn rather than dwelled on it. I'm pretty sure I didn't show too much of it, but this moment just hit me hard, and my character in turn, when I had to explain to the kids what had happened to their father. Lawrence had to break the news to them. I stammered on about bad things just happening, the pain of loss making them feel really alive, and how even animals kill each other, and all such crap, but Lawrence (and I) realized even as he was saying those things how meaningless and ultimately wrong they were.
Even as the conditioning failed, Lawrence adopted (secretly to two of the three children) responsibility over the kids, and he would never kill again. He went way past the big red line right to the edge, had looked too deeply into the abyss, and had done WORSE than the inspectors ever did in our game. Sure, they brainwashed people, but they never killed, and they had never, ever caused this much suffering to children.
At that point, the end of freeing society could no longer justify the means for him. If in the future Lawrence could have saved the country by killing inspectors who also happened to be parents, he would have rather died or been brainwashed into a vegetable state.
I learned something about my character, about acts and consequences and ends and means, and about myself. I learned that, in my Room 101, I wouldn't find a mask with a rat cage; I'd find my kids in the hands of O'Brien.
At this point, Perfect is up there with Dogs in the Vineyard for me regarding the interplay of thematic setting and game mechanics leading to a thoroughly Narrativist experience, if you excuse the jargon. In fact, as someone who doesn't have a big personal connection with religion and judgment, Perfect speaks to me much more. There might be some tweaks here and there to be done, and a lot of GM advice that needs to be written, but overall it's a solid package.
Yeah, so. Thank you Joe, and everyone who played in that game. I'd love to hear from the other players too and see how they fared.
Christian, your second scene was probably the most... vividly violent crime that I've ever had in a game of Perfect. It was pretty intense.
I really did dig the mirroring that went on between their Conditionings and your Crime. It was almost like your character was on the cusp of "losing himself to the game", getting entangled in a back-and-forth struggle between him and the Inspectors.
I was the mystery sixth player, and the player of Noble who nurtured the Blossom of Love, both literally and figuratively. I did not have quite the profound experience that Christian did, but I thought the game worked quite well mechanically (I have not played v1 so I cannot compare) and there are some seriously cool elements to the setting that is woven through the mechanics. My favorite feature is the Freedoms, permissions you can gain by making an even greater sacrifice. My character, who believes their is no greater thing that love by his own choice must live alone, travel alone, and always have his hands bound when outside his one home so that he may touch nothing. The last proved especially inspiring to me in narration - one of my character's special abilities was his graceful dancing - his hands are bound, but his feet is not.
I also enjoyed the casually brutal anarchy of Lukas' character, and that Leslie stepped up and brought the porn right out of the gate.
I definitely think your character had the most potent arc of any of them, Christian.
I went into this game of Perfect with the decision that I wanted to play a Bad PersonTM. My previous experience with Perfect was all about art and freedom of expression and liberating the minds of the masses; in this game, my character's beef with authority all boiled down to power. They had it, and he wanted it.
It started with Nicholas brazenly walking into an inspector's house and taking photographs of him in a compromising position. It escalated into a group crime with Ben's ex-beat-cop that incited a riot using the evidence (both real and fake) that he had gathered on some of the inspectors as fuel for the fire. It ended with a horrible brainwashing in which he watched months of concentrated work and power-building reduced to nothing in moments. But they haven't seen the last of him, no sir...
I really enjoyed the fact that this guy wasn't afraid to mix it up with the inspectors whatever form was necessary. If they were going to manipulate the people, he'd manipulate the people; if they were going to wade in and bust heads, he'd bust them right back.