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One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

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amaranth-witch
@amaranth-witch

This is a partial crosspost from my twitter, so some of you might have seen it before. But I have more space here, so I may be able to go into more detail.

In between sleep phases, I found myself having thoughts about the Mutant Year Zero RPG (henceforth MY0). I decided to write them down to get them out of my head before I fell asleep again, and now I'm expanding on them here a bit.

I’m not going to pretend that the games are revolutionary, or overly deep, or a progressive manifesto, or any of the other claims that people like to make about the media they're trying to represent. There's a lot of unexamined stuff in the games, a lot of replication and a lot of "well, this is what you DO in an RPG", and similar perfunctory design that evokes "oh but if it's not combat we don't need to touch on it THAT much, the players will just know how to roleplay" but there’s still something there.

To put things broadly, I like it when a game says something, and I don’t like it when a game pretends to have nothing to say, or tries to have nothing to say, or deliberately silences itself in order to appeal to shareholder reports. And "oh you can do anything in this game", whether from the fans or from the game and marketing itself - before you bring that up, the only time that's "saying something" is when the game is actually about providing a broad, general resolution framework, otherwise it feels like deliberately inoffensive empty praise to me, as even GURPS is saying something with its choices in what to simulate and what not to simulate.

Not everything in a game has to speak, mind you. A lot of my favorite games have one or two key highlights of messaging, and the rest is functional fill, and that's okay. The MY0 games (and honestly, a lot of the Year Zero engine games) fall into this category.

This is not the same thing as “this game is ABOUT (phenomena, experience, message)” although they often go hand in hand. Far too often I see “this game is about…” and the game says nothing, not even to back up what it’s “about”. MY0 is a game that I’d struggle to say with certainty what it’s “about” past the surface layer of post-apocalyptic survival and exploration in several forms. There’s some messaging about community and mutual aid and care, but it can be also played somewhat selfishly. There's very little stopping you from trying to play the game as a crew of badass mutant raider-scavengers who roam the Zone and take what they want/need to survive and basically just deal with things like the modern classic D&D player party, and from my experience actually playing the game, with some DM's that strike out on their own and don't play with the suggested starter campaigns, that's kind of what it often ends up being.

If this sounds like faint praise, that's because I'm writing this stream of consciousness. There's more.

The thing that stands out about all 4 games is what it has to say about your home.

MY0 does something standard for post apocalyptic games: you start off in a home base, which is the Ark settlement in the core game of MY0, a pretty normal style of setup, a cluster of residents in a rare safe area in the Zone. In Genlab Alpha, your home is one of the camps in a mutant animal experimental preserve, in Mechatron it's the undersea robot factory Mechatron-7, and in Elysium it's an underground high tech city. With the exception of My0 itself, the homes share the titles of the game, which I think is honestly kind of nice. Where do you start in Genlab Alpha? Why, in the Genlab Alpha preserve, of course!

There are advantages to be had at home. There are people you get attached to. There are resources to be found. There’s safety and shelter and probably community to be had there. You spend some time starting in character creation building it out, starting with the element that some of my acquaintances find a bit banal of "who is an NPC that you (positive emotion towards), pick from this list? Who is an NPC that you (negative emotion towards), pick from THIS list?" but going forward from there, connecting characters to activities and to home community statistics and fixtures and roles. You are intended to get attached to your home, to participate in its struggles and want to protect it and see it thrive.

And you cannot save it.

This is especially true in Elysium and Mechatron, but also present in Genlab Alpha and the base game:

Your home is failing. Whether it’s the strict experimental social order of the Genlab preserve or the literal supplies and structure of Elysium and Mechatron, it’s dying. Mechatron-7 was abandoned by the Titan Power that created and sustained it, though the robots there don't know it. There are no new shipments. The walls are failing. The water is seeping in. The docks lie in ruin. Elysium is in a similar state: built to be almost, but not entirely self-sustaining, to supplement deficiencies with assistance from fellow enclaves instead of struggling to subsist on subpar resources, it has been on its own for a while. Resources are scarce. Areas are quietly shut down. But, of course, as far as anyone is concerned it's fine! It's fine. Elysium will be fine, it has always been fine, we have the backing of our Titan Power, we will win our war. Genlab Alpha is under societal pressures as the researchers depart and their hidden support breaks down. The Ark was on borrowed time from the beginning.

Each of the homes has a different method of charting its decline, usually in the form of a series of stats representing resources the enclave has at its disposal, or stability, or otherwise, and they decline at a regular interval. Sometimes it's sharp and random, like Mechatron where each of its four stats declines by 1d6 every single game session. Other times it's tied to specific campaign events, or other random seeded events, but they all go down. This is mirrored in some ways by the MY0 character system, where gaining mutant powers for your character costs attribute points, but the character options are a trade, and the effects on your home are a decline.

You can act to slow the decline, maybe even halt it briefly. You may even be able to reverse it in a small way. But you cannot FIX it. The time for that has passed: no matter how long it’s lasted, the last legs are upon us, the window is closed. Whatever the purpose of your home in the world, the purpose of your home in the story was to bring you to this point: to last long enough for you and your party to come together, to keep your world safe enough for this story to be told.

If you cling to the security of your tiny shelter, says MY0, you are doomed; you cannot save it. The only way to survive and thrive is to struggle and make something new. You cannot stand still, you cannot go back. Some characters and connections may follow you. Some may be lost in the process. Some will refuse to move on, and you will have to bid them farewell, which is a thing that a lot of players in my groups have historically had big problems with: they want to hug their blorbos close and carry them along no matter what happens - I've had players willing to burn the whole setting rather than let a treasured NPC take a fatal wound. Sometimes you'll be able to preserve infrastructure, other times you'll have to rebuild from scratch. The thing that's consistent is that you'll be in position to leave: you've been a group in that position since the start of the game, this is not a game about characters that sit in huts and make berry bread, the messaging of character types is very clear. And with that clarity comes another important part of the story: What happens next is up to you.

You have to learn to say goodbye, you have to learn to move on. You have to take responsibility. You have to own the bad and the good, but most importantly, you have to let go.

You have to learn how to leave.

Is it good at this message? I can’t tell you. I haven’t played through the campaigns, my play experience is with DMs who shunned the idea that some things aren’t fixable and insisted that we defend our enclaves of safety.

Those games didn’t go very well.

But good or no, I greatly respect and appreciate that the games have something to say, and say it very clearly.


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in reply to @amaranth-witch's post:

It is something that I'd love to try though. Playing a game with real pressure sounds really cool or really frustrating and that line is fascinating to think about.