Now, the final game, Carl ran another Don't Rest Your Head and Mickey/Geek Girl has mentioned it above, was, for me personally, the best game of the con in terms of playing/experiencing, but also one of the best games I've played across my life, really, upon reflection. I can't do it justice remotely. I was a bit tired though by then and while Mickey sat right across from me so I saw her nametag and it entered my memory, I think Daneils' PC's name was John [edit - corrected this for any later reading, as mentioned below it's Lucas so I've edited to say "Lucas" below whereas this original post said "John" as a mistake throughout] but somehow I was tired enough I can't quite remember that! But no matter, the story produced was so good and to be part of making it really organically (we just reacted in character, not trying to come up with a result and back into it at all), a true fairy tale, a traditional type through a modern lens, not the Disney kind but the kind the Brothers Grimm recorded, with tragedy even as the protagonists, this time, "live happily ever after." The other roleplayers were on fire, and Carl was at his usual excellence in spinning and complicating the situations. I was truly impressed with DRYH's support for this, with the madness and exhaustion mechanics so perfectly suiting it.
The interlink of the PCs was strong to begin with. I'll use the PC names hereon out. Julianna (my player) AKA Julie had grown up with Tiffany (Mickey's PC) in an orphanage in the midwest (I think we figured Indiana), and they had fled to LA as soon as they could, hating it in the small town and conservative atmosphere, Julie getting a full scholarship to school in LA, Tiffany of course going with her. Central to the background and PC relationships/dynamics, but not coming up overtly in the actual story/game-as-dice-were-rolled, is that Julie was biologically male, she's transgendered, with Tiffany having provided the money - by doing porn - for the change while she was in school [edit after initial post - it should be said that this wasn't the sole motivation for Tiffany, Tiffany already saw this as her only realistic way to make significant money to support herself and themselves in general - though maybe Mickey can comment more on that at some point, I shouldn't speak too much for her].
Tiffany became a porn star, and she liked this, this isn't per se an issue, but in this life and among her feelings is the fear of growing old and thus on the long and painful downward spiral in the porn industry. Tiffany is not business-oriented whatsoever, but does want to be a successful porn star in the Betty Paige or such mold, an enduring figure, someone who's made her mark. Julie is business-oriented, but is driven to have it all, and concentrates on her career as a hard-driving banker doing mortgage deals.
Now, switching to Lucas, he's a house husband with 2 kids whose wife and her family (I forget some of the precise details) have some money but quickly became over-extended in the very deals Julie set up (btw, Carl helped us a lot in suggesting these links and getting this background so solid among us). Lucas' wife died a month ago as we pick up the story, and in that it's become apparent to him (he didn't do the finances prior) that they couldn't afford the real estate and the deals were collapsing, foreclosure and bankruptcy looming. Julie in fact has been calling Lucas, who stopped answering the phone some time ago now, not able to deal with all of this tragedy at once. Lucas on the surface is easy-going and all, but underneath his rage is real. I don't want to go through the whole story, as I am running out of time, but basically we get drawn into the Mad CIty as John's kids now have disappeared and Julie and Tiffany's fears are manifesting about them.
Oh, it should be mentioned that Julie and Tiffany are 30 at this point, and while Tiffany is at the top of her career and just about to go downhill (or so she fears), Julie is really just barely kicking into high gear and only just now starting to really make money, but Julie is also under great threat with the possibility she was unethical or illegal in her lending dealings (she just thinks people are "stupid" not to "read all the text"), plus she's hitting the glass ceilling and with all the office politics and scapegoating, she fears losing her job.
The story has a lot in it, and I'm sure it's always more interesting if you were in it than not, but to skip to that ending, basically we have this relationship with a great Silver Mare, a magical horse (really a sort of unicorn, as the horn is mentioned), who has helped us to find "the princess" which is John's daughter (Lucas' son is there, too, though it's that weird pseudo-Catholic school aforementioned and so the son is just for casual trade while the daughter seems to have great value to them). Lucas has the ability to tell stories and they come true. We are trying to do a trade to get his daughter and son back. Tiffany has the great idea of giving up her neurosis about aging, pointing out they should want that as after all they're Catholic, and Julie also will give up her driving ambition. The Lady When (sp?), the head of the school, excellently portrayed as this Hepburnish appearing sort by Carl, is poised to take the deal EXCEPT she demands the mare, too. John tells the story and weaves in something such as "And it was not enough, what the three could do, and the Silver Mare had to sacrifice herself..."
You had to be there, but as Mickey says she was teary and I was pretty misty-eyed and choked up, too, and I know Carl was affected as he mentionted it later directly. And the Silver Mare gives itself up. And becomes Lucas' dead wife, transforming, laying in stasis now!!! We know she'll never be seen again.
Now, Julie has the ability to touch something and take its shape. So Julie touches the shape, vowing that while she can never replace the woman, she can do her best to give the children a mother even if it's a loveless marriage. But in assuming the shape, Julie also ends up in stasis - as she crashes (exhaustion, this exhaustion mechanic so perfectly fitting the "sleeping beauty' thing)!
So now it comes up that if Lucas kisses her, she'll come awake. Lucas is very reluctant, understandably, but tries [edit, this is incorrect, more on this below, see Ice Cream Emperor's post], and tells another story to help, and in so doing mentions something about "the evil witch" or such in reference to the Lady When, the headmistress, and the Lady, with the slightest of grins, slays this schoolgirl who had been our erstwhile guide (though she had selfish motivations, she seemed a sympathetic and ultimately sad figure to us), just to make a point to John he's crossed a line and life is meaningless to her. [edit, Carl corrects this account below]
The PCs are shocked and (more) saddened but feel powerless, and this seems how life is here. And Lucas' story doesn't work as he tries to kiss Julie - because he's not her true love. Tiffany can't stand by and realizes what to do, kissing Julie, waking her - because Julie is her true love. Julie realizes the same re Tiffany, they're not just best friends, they are soulmates.
So Lucas goes back with his children rescued. He can no longer tell stories about the Silver Mare, but he instead tells stories (regular, bedtime stories) to his girl about the schoolgirl, whose name the PCs never learned, so he gives her one, and he hopes to honor her and have her memory live on. Julie, leaving her job, on the way out does everything she can to rescue Lucas and his family financially and avoid foreclosure. Tiffany, shedding her neurosis, gains self-confidence and in so doing becomes the great porn star she hoped to be, aging not mattering. Julie is happy now to "just" be a housewife, and now gives Tiffany the full attention she needs to manage finances, assuring both their future years.
And they lived happily ever after.
See also index of my various GPNW game commentaries at http://www.story-games.com/forums/?CommentID=147473 ([Go Play NW2008] It's Over! # 26)
Daniel's househusband was named Lucas, although I don't believe that name was ever said aloud in the course of the game. Julianna called him by his last name, as proper for their existing professional relationship. The magical horse was Silvermane, although the creature that answered Lucas' need seemed a lot more like a unicorn than a horse, it's true.
There was a bit midway through the Mad City where Lucas asks the School Girl Guide "Can I have your name?" so he can know what to call her and instead she spits on her hand and holds it out for a deal saying "I don't like my name anyway. Sure, and I'll take yours." but he reneges on the deal to swap names, without even realizing that's what was going on.
Lucas' madness power of "Bedtime Story" only worked if told to a child, and when the PCs were making a rescue plan he told the story of how the plan would work, and asked the unnamed School Girl how it would end, the same way he'd always asked his daughter Chloe to fill in details to shape the story to her liking. The Girl rejected the offer strongly, with a speech about how fathers don't care about their daughters and nobody ever comes to rescue you, and love is a lie. So they had to come up with another plan, and eventually they wound up just knocking on the door to the High School and asking to see Mother When, and offering her the Ambition + Neuroses (not just the aging, but EVERY hangup Tiffany had, which will come in handy in a school), and then having to offer Silvermane as well.
I don't think Lucas even tried to awake the sleeping Julie-in-his-wife's form, because the idea of having someone around in the form of the woman he loved that wasn't her wasn't at all appealing. But it was kind of Julie to offer herself that way, and it was a great ending to have Tiffany open her eyes to true love.
There was a bit between Silvermane's sacrifice at the obsidian knife of Mother When (becoming Lucas' wife, asleep or dead) and Julie stealing the wife's form, in which Mother When offered Lucas his wife back if he would give up the children he had now rescued. He rejected her, but rudely, and Mother When (without changing expression or looking) slashed the same knife across the School GIrl Guide's throat to wash away the insult with blood. If he hadn't been rude, she might have lived.
The deal was done with game mechanics, by the way. Mother When rolled 15 pain dice for 10 successes, triple 6 for pain dominating, Tiffany (dressed up in bondage gear as one of the Ladies in Hating from part of an earlier plan) rolled 9 successes, and Julianna and Lucas each contributed one success from their three discipline dice, resulting in a player victory with pain dominating, and thus Silvermane becoming the wife and the offer to trade the kids back for the return of his wife.
But what kind of father would give up his kids for his wife's sake? The School Girl could tell us, I suspect.
I greatly enjoyed all five games I ran at Go Play NW, but this is the one I thought about on the plane ride home. I'm thinking about it still.
Thanks, Carl, for filling those things in, the only thing I'm still not sure on is that one point as to whether Lucas attempted the kiss or not. The player had started to say that, I'm quite sure, but maybe then he said he took it back because it was made clear in-character that this would be futile? I know we didn't roll conflict dice at that point, even though Daniel had expected to, and I'm clear we didn't roll them because it was futile, an acknowledged no-win situation without true love. But I don't know if we didn't roll because in-game the leaning to kiss never took place. Or, you know, maybe that was it, he leaned to kiss but didn't actually?
Re Mother When's slightest of grins, I think in light of what you just posted that you said something like "you think you can almost see a slight grin" or some-such, the implication that it seemed like it to us, so I over-stated. I'm expressionist that way. It should be restated, but I think there's a reference you made as I remember it was chilling in light of what happened,I recall the inference that there was a bit of actual amusement to her in this display of power. Not to say that the implication was yours, to be clear, it was merely my inference, but it was based on some comment as I mention.
Otherwise, totally agree on the corrections/additions. I don't mean to be nitpicky, but you know a great game deserves total geekery and thus picayune distinctions and arcane interpretations that become doctrine to some! And then we can let trivial disputes become a source of division among us who played for years to come. I see the wikipedia article now regarding "Silvermane": "At first it wasn't an issue, but by Go Play in June of 2011, grin-implied versus the no-grim-implication camps not only avoided eye contact but then there was the infamous 'snub' incident..." Of course, "'snub' incident" has its own wiki article hyperlinked.
I might be wrong about Lucas attempting the kiss, I'd be happy to hear from Daniel, if he's reading this.
I think Mother When's "slight curve of a smile that chilled the spine" was when Daniel's story dooming Silvermane referred to the evil queen in the goblin tower. She liked that part.
But we were packing a lot of action into that final scene so things were pretty intertwined. I could be misremembering.
For those watching at home, with about 10 minutes left in the 3-hour or so game (because Mickey needed to leave then) it looked like we were going to end with a cut as Our Heroes enter the High School, and the final result would be left to the imagination. But then everything clicked and fell together and we finished the story in grand fashion. It's really great when that works out.
An insight I had over the ensuing 6 hours of conversation (not all about this game, it was wide-ranging) was that I run DRYH as a game of consequences. The PCs are very powerful so they almost always succeed on rolls (in my style of GMing, I don't know how it is for other GMs), especially if they're willing to bring in a lot of exhaustion and madness. So they succeed, and I ask "what then?" I think it's a "Yes, and" style, and I owe that to Dogs' "Say Yes or Roll the Dice". I don't think the six games of DRYH I've run so far would have gone nearly as well had they not been standing on the shoulders of the 60 games (or so) of Dogs that went before them.
Ah, Carl, that's it, the 'evil queen in the goblin towe,' okay. I was thinking of the reaction as closer in time to the follow-up event, but I see what you're saying, it was the immediate reaction to that description. Then a follow-up. So, yeah, I'm with you now, agreed.
As an aside, I've also now really got the Terror Dogs game in my head, too, as I posted a good bit about just now. Now I really have to get some rest, that'll be an hour before I get up....
Hey there, Daniel here. This game was definitely a highlight of the con for me (one among many) -- especially after having almost-but-not-quite played in two of Carl's other games. It's always a good game when you can make the other players (and yourself) cry, after all.
To me, the emotion of the ending came less from the sacrifice of the horse and more from what the other two characters were willing to do on Lucas' behalf. I remember at some point Julianna and Tiffany engaged in this heated argument about which of them should offer what to Lady When -- and all for what? To retrieve the children of a complete stranger that they had met only a few hours previously. That a magical horse would give its life to save the princess is not so surprising -- it's a storybook creature after all. That two strangers -- two real people, entirely unmagical -- would make similar sacrifices is where the emotion came from for me (and for Lucas.) The story about the horse was really just a focus/outlet for that.
Lucas never did try to wake Julianna up by kissing her -- he began a kind of half-hearted effort by telling himself a story about it, but gave up after a comment from Mother When made it clear how half-assed he was being. I really liked the way that didn't work out, actually; there was nothing clean or perfect about the ending of the story, none of that fairy-tale simplicity. I understood Julianna's transformation into Lucas' wife as a kind of desperate act, an attempt to just magically create the family she wanted (her path was 'get out of the rat race') out of thin air. And it worked, but it was only because that desperation put her in a vulnerable place, and created a situation where Tiffany could step in -- again, the real chance at a family and a relationship, based on a lifelong friendship, not the fairy-tale version based on magical transformation.
I said it a few times in the game, but I've always felt like the Mad City is overrated -- so often when I play DRYH there seems to be this rush to get all the characters into that other world as soon as possible, instead of confronting them with the 'madness' in the real world, with the subtle twist or the strange encounter. The scene where Lucas first used his Madness talent -- trying to calm down two unfamiliar children who had somehow replaced his own as he drove their unconscious mother to the hospital -- was a perfect example. Here he is telling this story about a beautiful, magical horse, he pulls up to a red light... and the horse itself pulls up right next to him, like it might challenge him to a drag race or something. And does it solve all his problems? Well, not exactly; he still has this unconscious woman and her kids in his pickup truck in the middle of nowhere. Real life is still there, making demands.
For me all the best play in DRYH comes out of the intersection between the unreality and the real world -- and usually the Mad City feels totally unbalanced in favour of unreality. But I have to give a lot of credit to Carl -- this was one of the first games of DRYH where I actually appreciated what the Mad City brought to the table. At the same time I felt like the strength of our characters' reality, and their real problems, was what made it work. It's so easy for that to get overwhelmed by people made out of paper and selling abstract emotions; it seems like often the solutions to the real problems stop being actions with real consequences. Carl, your comments about the connection to Dogs really ring true for me, in terms of what made this session work.
Hey Daniel, thanks for that post, both for the clarification but also especially the insight into the events, great points, and you explicated things that I couldn't quite put my finger on. You're right that it was way more substantial and real than a simple fairy tale. And I had intended to mention that Julie's action to transform into Lucas' dead wife was as selfish as it was selfless, as you point out her desires to get out of the rat race, and I was aware of it to a degree even at the time.
I say "to a degree" for a couple reasons. As Carl says, the climax of the game happened very quickly, with events happening fast and furious. So I think all of us were going on gut instincts for the characters based on the backgrounds and rapports we had built, at least I know I was. And I found that in those last few scenes I was really keeping up and reacting purely out of what I thought my character's insincts were, i.e., my instincts about her instincts! So I often was realizing just how suited her actions were to her underlying conflicting motivations and feelings just after I'd offer something up. It was a lot like a great session playing improvisational music, for me, really, in retrospect, where I was so in the moment that I was relying on feelings and the other players' rhythms, inflections, melodies, and dissonances (and I mean those words as much for RPGing as music) as much as any intellectual thought process. And my other point here is that for me this is really "simulationist," a sense of strong reality of that game, of emphasizing and exploring that imaginary space as the priority above thinking about explicit storyline or accomplishing something resource-tangible, even though in this case it so well played to the narrativist thrust we all shared in driving, on whatever conscious level or not.
Anyway, like I said, Daniel, really great post, thanks.
PS - until rereading your post, also, I would say I hadn't really considered that whole aspect of just how vulnerable Julie became; that's a great point, thanks. It's a lesson in letting people in - for me personally, anyway.
One thing I realized I should say back to Ice Cream Emperor/Daneil - the actions by Julianna were in some significant part selfish as well as selfless in being willing to help Daniel, and later more selfless in being willing to sacrifice. At first, she assumed that somehow by helping Daniel it would have to help or at least be a step along the way to getting help re the numbers and letters that were attacking her as the dream world became real. But also, she did now see Daniel as the real person he was, upset and worried for his kids, legitimately angry at this new injustice piled on him, and now truly cognizant as well of the death of his wife given the situation (she would have been dimly aware given the wife's role in the finances, but wouldn't have given it thought until now of course, deliberately and subconsciously). So Julianna started to inevitably feel bad for him, and, without fully admitting it to herself, feel bad for her role in his developing foreclosure. And of course, everyone feels on some level re the loss of children.
But as their short time together developed, seeing Daniel more and more this way, and given her underlying compassion, she really began to become invested and especially guilty. So sacrifice became in part atonement. And even more largely, atonement for a life of being so hard-driving she wasn't stopping to smelling the flowers, and feeling she'd never be satisfied, and now thinking maybe it was her own fault, and of course coupled with her really wanting to get out of the rat race. At least that's how it felt, as aforementioned I wasn't so calculating as that. But I see this in retrospect more clearly.
And this is especially related to her outburst at Daniel at an especially-inappropriate moment late into the game about "If you'd just read the f****Ig papers probably none of this would have happened, you'd still have your home and kids," or something similarly poisonous. She was angry as well about the loss of his kids, frustrated at her own guilt and impotence to help, and in a way to try to drive Daniel away, and to keep herself in her well of self-loathing over where she felt she was ending up in life, basically, she lashed out. Again, I wasn't so thought-out about it, but I just had a sense of these variables and this incredible sense of how angry she felt at herself and then extrapolated to him and the whole situation - everyone except Tiffany, her ever-blameless support anchor.