For Friday’s meeting of the Mandatory Fun Club, we watched the movie Bad Education and then made a quick roleplaying game inspired by it.
The night began with a selection of movie theater concessions. We then had a discussion about which of the five pre-selected movies we were going to watch. The choices were The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Bad Education; The House of the Devil; Best in Show; and Grey Gardens. Each of the films was chosen because they represented territory not often explored in a roleplaying game, and, since we were ostensibly doing an Apocalypse World hack, had the possibility of producing some neat, universal character archetypes.
The rules for watching the movie were pretty straight-forward. We each had note cards and pencils on which to write down our thoughts, and we could each pause the movie once to have a discussion about what was going on so far in the movie, and how it was informing our thinking on the eventual game to be created.
After the movie was over, we sat down to make our game. Right away, we identified the type of story we wanted our game to tell, which was heavily influenced by the events of Bad Education: a group of people, each of whom wants something from a fulcrum-type character, and each of whom is presenting a false image of themselves to said fulcrum character.
The immediate difficulty we ran into is that Apocalypse World wasn’t going to serve our needs very well. So, we ditched that aspect of the exercise and made a game from scratch that (hopefully) accomplishes the goal of our story better. In the end, our game was a GM-less affair in which each of the characters had spotlight scenes, at the end of which Truths were established about them, as well as Questions that hint at their duplicity. The Questions would be handled in a similar manner as those in Psi-Run, meaning the player of the character doesn’t know the answers beforehand. In later scenes, you re-incorporate Truths established about your character to answer a Question about another character.
We think it’s a neat concept. We’ll probably fiddle with it for a little bit and eventually turn it over to the group for play-testing and critique.
Thanks to Kristen D Scott Owen and Daniel Fowler for participating!
