[UA] In Media Res (was Re: Jailbreak (was Re: joy & sorrow))

[John Tynes]

> It's not an impossible bind for a GM to find him/herself in.  So, what
> specific obstacles did you have to overcome with such young players?

The biggest problem was that the material was extremely inappropriate. In
the scenario, the four players play amnesiac escaped inmates from a facility
for the criminally insane.

As the story goes on, each has an opportunity to play through a solo
flashback to the time when they first decided to kill someone. So there's a
flashback about a burglary gone wrong, one about the first murder of a
serial killer, one where the character's sister ties him to a pole and beats
him whenever the parents are out of town, and one I'm forgetting. They're
all unpleasant and intense.

The GM's goal for each flashback is to set up a situation in which the clear
choice is murder, without ever telling the player they're supposed to kill
anyone. Once the player actually expresses out loud the character's desire
for killing, the flashback ends. The flashback sequences are tricky and rely
on careful manipulation and suggestion to guide to their desired conclusion.
Taking an eleven-year-old boy into a hotel bathroom and goading him into
accepting and acknowledging that he was going to murder an innocent woman
was creepy.

I did my best to soften things. But at the same time, I kept thinking: if I
was eleven years old and could have had this bizarre and challenging
experience at my first gaming convention, it's something I'd remember for
years. The alternative was to tell them to get lost, but they were so darn
eager to play (it was a sign-up game) and so clearly wary of being told
"you're too young! scram!" that I went ahead and ran the game.

Their participation wasn't a problem. They stayed focused and interested and
so forth. This scenario only takes about an hour and a half to play, if
that, so keeping it short helped us stay on task. I tried to describe things
in terms they would relate to, so instead of calling one character a
psychopathic sadist, I said he was a constant bully. That sort of thing.

<- John Tynes - rev at tccorp.com - http://www.JohnTynes.com/ ->
"He's just a hero in a long line of heroes,
looking for action and a price he can pay."
Liz Phair, "Soap Star Joe"


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