Thread by @ActionEconomy

As part of Arcanacon I had the chance to play On Mighty Wheels and it has stuck in my head because it is SO GOOD AND SO UNIQUE. I’m going to think out-loud about it for a twitter thread, and if you like design, you’ll love this game. (Paging @magicspacegirl)

Prologue: Dr Melody Watson is at melodynova.com/portfolio/. And honestly, get up in that grill for awesome games and poetry and stuff. Ignore the tweets about sex as a full contact LARP. Get in now for kitten tweets. Now thread thread thread

Firstly, On Mighty Wheels is a roleplaying game for GM+5 about the October Bolshevik Revolution by Dr Melody Watson. Mechanically it’s...oh boy. What is it? PbtA adjacent? That’s not fair. It has moves...but...okay, let’s talk about it rather than classify it

On Mighty Wheels is a game about the revolution, except it isn’t. It’s a game about a family during the revolution...except it isn’t. It’s about a play. There was a period of the revolution where citizens were putting on plays. Proletariat theatre.

So, this is a game, where people act as people acting as people. A family putting on an amateur play about real history. We are players playing players. And this framing device changes hugely what the game is actually saying in a way that I don’t think is clear at first glance.

Three reasons! Easiest to Hardest: 1. Historical Inaccuracy. None of us are historians. Okay, I take that back. Remember “Dr” Melody Watson? Most of us are not historians. So the fact we’re putting on a play, rather than living the reality, it gives authority to be non-canon.

2. The “fuzziness” of memory. Did you say you were in the other scene but now you’re across town in this one? Wait, were you always carrying that gun? Weren’t you illiterate before, how do you read the pamphlet? Memory is fluid, so is our story.

These fuzzy moments are part of the diegesis: This wasn’t professional theatre, it was the peasantry. Plays written by illiterate workers who probably never saw a high-culture play in their life. They were fuzzy. It’s okay that the play’s dots don’t connect.

(Very short digression here to put a pin in the nature of amateur theatre and the nature of RPGs being so incredibly intertwined in this, the age of distributed APs. BUT NO, I HAVE SO MUCH MORE TO SAY ABOUT ON MIGHTY WHEELS!)

3. The nature of theatre. In theatre, there is a large culture of plays that are okay with the fact that they are plays. There’s naturalistic, or “representational theatre”. And there’s “presentational theatre” (This is not a Brecht course, promise)

Presentational theatre is less interested in having the audience spy on a reality represented on stage, and more interested in bringing the audience into the emotional space by acknowledging that it’s all a story, it’s all craft. The audience and characters cross the fourth wall

Presentational drama is the history of theatre, and I believe, its heart. By framing a game within presentational drama, we give ourselves a bag of tools, formed over centuries of theatrical culture, with which to tell the story.

Presentational characters are often archetypical, expressive, and explicit. Their conversation lacks subtlety. In fact, everything about them lacks subtlety. Their costumes are usually broad, for example. They don’t say what’s natural, they say what needs to be heard.

This is especially true in the Aside, which is a beautiful moment where the character turns to the audience in the middle of a conversation and says “but, beyond all this context of pleasantries between I and my conversation partner, here is EXACTLY what I really think”

Sir Ian McFucking Murray McKellen in Richard III (1995). Watch this. .
The speech is cheery metaphor. “our stern alarums changed to merry meetings!”. Then we aside! It’s us and him, he stares at us and says “I am determined to prove a villain”.

This is the power of presentational theatre. Come join a show, come see what shall come of high drama. And we will work with you, as an audience, to be explicit. Our villain doesn’t just sneer. They look you in the eye: “Plots have I laid! To set my brothers in deadly hate.”

So, tie this back to On Mighty Wheels. I’ve mentioned before that we’re bad at metaphor in RPGs. We don’t have established language, and the stakes for a mistaken metaphor are too high. It’s too easy to destroy shared fiction.

But in OMW, characters speak their hearts to the audience at whim. Mechanically incentivised asides! To make a move, a player must first conduct some small aside, must make explicit the feelings of the character who is playing a character.

“Eliza and Larissa, you’re stopped on the way home. The militia want to know why you’re out so late.” Eliza’s character wants to make a move, so they: “‘We’re just friends,’ then asides ‘I spoke too quickly. I wonder if he heard my voice crack, saw my hand brush hers.’”

So this aside thing. It literally changes the flow of the whole damned game. It’s like...it’s like Read a Person but the only question is “What are you trying to hide?” and the only person you can read is YOURSELF! And it's the BEEEEST!

It’s beautiful and it’s empowering. It brings everyone else along for the ride. It also creates these moments where players can be explicit about what they need from each other. The stern war hero: “I needed so badly to hug Anatoly before he left.”

Meta-level communication at an RPG table is necessary, and OMW doesn’t alleviate all of that need, but this is a beautiful way to frame it. Plus there’s a mastery level in there for theatre nerds like me. Spotlights. Blocking. Framing tableaux.

Asides can turn the tone of a scene. “I wasn’t really mad, I was frightened.” “I wanted desperately to apologise, but my pride wouldn’t let me.” “This would be the last time my mother saw me alive.” “Little did they know, they weren’t the only ones armed.”

The asides allow players to engage with Moves. And the moves are tightly designed and beautiful. Eliza the agitator has “encourage a desire”. Anatoly the soldier can “put a gun in someone’s hand.” Maxim the old war hero can “put someone in a position of authority.”

Which creates a really cool instant loop. I want to Move. But to do so, I need to foreshadow the Move. It’s awesome. I turn to the audience “Mother never dug too deep, like she preferred the safe lies.” then I make the move “introduce a rumour as if it were fact”.

There’s...maybe a flaw in just how tight that loop is? Like, the aside-move loop is INTENSELY individual. Asides are about distancing one character from the other characters, to bring them closer to the audience. When I turn TO the audience, I turn AWAY from my fellow characters.

(In OMW this is cloudy because the audience are the same people as the characters, but I still felt it in parts). In contrast, Good Society’s monologues are requested by the audience, through token exchange. It’s an invitation from the table, not a demand to the table.

This isn’t saying that GS does it “right” though, this is a matter of framing. Is spotlight requested or offered? Both can play into excellent game structures and I don’t want the take-away for anyone to be that having a mechanic seized = bad. I'm still not 100% how i feel tbh

Now, I stand by the belief that no design holds up to bad faith, and attempting to design for that is foolish. If someone is hogging spotlight through asides, that’s not OMW’s fault, it’s the fault of the person not reading the room. But bear with me.

OMW is a game that lacks external structure. The three moves + Aside is all that’s offered to the players, which interests me. I think that it’s a game that could use some sort of Prologue or Acts or Intermission or Pacing mechanic. The game is a joy, but I can see the effort.

Melody ran it for me, and a more effortless handling of a story I have never seen. She’s practiced. Dr Melody, right? She knows this Bolshevik shit back to front, and she knows OMW. But I’ve written and run games enough to know the labour underneath.

And that’s because the GM is essentially structuring during play. Without pacing mechanics, and with the amount of narrative authority offered through those three (inaccuracy, fuzziness, presentational) there’s nothing stopping the players from...ruining their own experience.

Without the ability to interrogate fiction (ie to ask each other questions) our only option is to create fiction. If I want to know if Pravda has carried Larissa’s story, the best method i have is to aside “I could hear it on the street, or read it in the pamphlets.”

Which...is frustrating, sometimes. Especially for a support-class player like me. I want to invite others to show their character, not be throwing mine around all the time. Asides can be used to invite other players in. But it’s labour that game doesn’t assist with.

But OMW is something I’m not seeing anywhere else, and it’s something I’m desperate to get my hands on! I love the idea of characters being explicit about their feelings. I love the idea of using the language of theatre to share metaphor.

And here’s the other thing: it’s doing something new. It’s doing something unique and wonderful and brilliant. It’s making a game that is unlike everything else you’re wrapping your head around. Which, tbh, is kind of Melody’s brand rn, but is no less worthy of praise.

On Mighty Wheels isn’t available online at the moment (Aside: Which is a fucking crime), but hit @magicspacegirl and melodynova.com. I recommend LAIKA, a solo craft game about shooting a brave dog into the future, and lonely engines: The Sad Satellite Diaries.

@threadreaderapp
May I ask for your help to unroll this please? It would be...quite the help.