sometimes failure
Make story yours, you know?
Welcome to Snapshots, an occasional Brittle Almanac series about quick encounters with interesting stuff!
Some friends and I have been playing Tournament Arc, a tabletop roleplaying built with the No Dice, No Masters framework, and it's been a hell of a lot of fun. We're playing a group of teenagers living in Point Peninsula, a city from a longer game we're all involved in, and participating in a series of games of Capture the Flag in increasingly difficult/strange circumstances. The ultimate prize? A swig of some superpowers-granting juice!
The kids all have something to prove–one claims a dubious familial connection to a popular super; another is much younger than the others, eager to impress–but their secret sauce is they're psychically linked to each other, thanks to some recent nearly-world-ending shenanigans in the setting. No Dice, No Masters games (like the postapocalyptic OGs Dream Askew/Dream Apart or the Star Wars-adjacent Galactic 2e) are narrative-forward and rules light; where Dungeons & Dragons tries to simulate a world and its trappings with rules about impact and distance and all that, games like Dream Askew hand the player the raw materials and tools of storytelling and tell them just a little about what to do with them. Rather than the Setting Elements present in other No Dice, No Masters games, Tournament Arc instead makes use of Episodes. The major difference here is that, while Setting Elements are fixtures of a world, Episodes are prompts for situations. Both truck in genre. When someone picks up the Psychic Maelstrom in a game of Dream Askew, they are engaging with the long history of science fiction playing with concepts like community and the collective unconscious, messy as that play has been. Similarly, when a table wades into the Tournament Arc Episode "The Game Is Off?!", they are riffing on the classic beat in sports stories where the characters are on the precipice of being forced out of the game that has brought them together. Because they are situational, Episodes bring a welcome bit of structure to the No Dice, No Masters framework without straying away from its beating heart. Like other games using this framework, Tournament Arc is not interested in dictating how to play, only prompting its players with familiar beats and encouraging them to dig into what is pleasurable or even what is frustrating about about this type of story. Sometimes it's victory that is pleasurable, sometimes failure. Despair, too. Make story yours, you know? That's how my friends and I ended up with a cast of teens without superpowers trying to succeed in a Battle Royale-inflected game of Capture the Flag, all in the hopes that they can make an impact on the world. Can't wait to find out how our little yarn wraps.