There's a moment in an RPG session that's going to stick with me for some time, I think. Not necessarily for how dramatic or important it was, but for how miraculously effortless it was. I was playing a session of Girl by Moonlight, a game about magical girls in the midst of turmoil. My character, Aster, was doing physical training at the gym with her teammate Solania-Vetis when she pushed too far and collapsed. When she was advised to be mindful of her limits, Aster lashed out and said "I don't want to have limits!"
It surprised me, because it just popped out, and yet it also perfectly fit the situation, because of the way that the game set things up--it was the sort of spontaneous outburst that I hadn't really experienced in games for some time. Let's have a look at what came together for that moment...
A Bit of Context
Within the game Girl by Moonlight, there are several "playsets", each of which has a different theme and different inspirations. For this campaign, we were playing with the "Sea of Stars" playset, where instead of usual magical girl costumes, the characters bond to semi-magical giant robots to fight colossal enemies. Here, we were protectors of the Bastion, a mobile fortress-city that protected humanity from the Leviathans, otherworldly beings who devastated humanity when we opened portals that we probably shouldn't have.
All the characters were members of the Returned, a number of teens who had been taken by the Leviathans, and then mysteriously returned to the Bastion. Most of them obtained the ability to interface with the Engines, creations of older human civilizations and long-lost technology. Aster was created using the "Unlikely Hero" playbook--a character type defined by lacking the central alter ego of the other characters, who is able to eventually, in a moment of crisis, gain this ability in a triumphant swing of fate.
This played heavily into Aster's scenes. I'd already decided that she felt guilty for not properly "doing her duty" (we decided that the Bastion was heavily demanding in terms of "duty" and "honor"), because instead of piloting an Engine, she flew out with the rest of the team in a small support ship. She went through tests that tried to determine why she was powerless, she tried connecting with characters who she believed to be powerless (although one of them was secretly her teammate and very much a powered character). It was a core part of her identity. And in that training scene, she was working with a character who she looked up to as leader. But it wasn't just this framing that made the scene work.
The Pressure of Mechanics
Girl by Moonlight doesn't just leave the struggles of its characters to the players: it uses reminders of the constant pressures that face the protagonists in their everyday lives. Like many Forged in the Dark games, characters have a resource called "stress", which they can accrue in order to push themselves beyond their capabilities. However, it's also something that characters can't pile up with impunity. Acquire too much stress, and bad things happen, causing permanent changes to your character. Girl by Moonlight runs things a little differently.
Like other Forged in the Dark games, it has a cycle based around missions that the characters go on. In between, there's downtime, where characters recover, bond, and prepare for the next mission. However, there's another part of the game that acts as a prelude to the mission: the Obligation phase. In Blades in the Dark, characters have to spend actions during downtime to recover stress incurred during the mission--Girl by Moonlight flips this on its head, and characters recover all stress for free after the mission...but get stress from the Obligation phase, to give the stress economy some texture. In the narrative, the Obligation phase is the Gamemaster's chance to showcase the pressures that the characters are under.
Aster constantly had Obligation scenes that highlighted her powerless nature, that highlighted the irresponsibility of her desire to fight alongside her companions. These Obligation scenes constantly kept attention on that duality inside of her. The stress mechanic also contributed significantly, however, because of something called Eclipse: the consequence for accumulating too much stress.
When a character enters Eclipse, their accumulated stress becomes a sort of lifebar--they get to drain stress instead of accumulating it, but if they run out of stress, the character dies or leaves the story permanently! Everything becomes higher stakes, and the Eclipse itself also gives instructions for how a character behaves, and what can bring them out of the Eclipse. Here's what Aster's version of Eclipse looks like (it's different for every character archetype):
You are not who they need you to be. You’re weak, useless, unworthy of their friendship. They have given so much to you, and in return you give them nothing. You throw yourself into danger, desperately seeking any way you might possibly be of use.
You escape eclipse only when someone engages you in a dialogue about your feelings, and shows you that they have felt the same.
Shortly before the training session, Aster had actually fallen into Eclipse during a mission, and just barely recovered by having a vulnerable scene with Solania-Vetis. Throughout all that time, I made sure to keep playing to that prompt, playing up the ways that she felt useless to her team, which made her recovery incredibly cathartic.
Many Moving Parts
All of this added up to this one memorable moment. It was an Obligation scene where Aster was training, representing the pressure on her to keep up and be as strong as her allies. With the struggle of the past mission fresh on her mind, Aster was in a place where this conflict came to the front. It wasn't intended as a scene highlighting her feelings about being limited, but in that moment, when my fellow player started talking about the topic, the response that came felt completely natural--because everything about the game was practically screaming that aspect of the character.
That, to me, was a profound success within the game's rules. It wasn't necessarily that it was pushing me to explore something about the character that I didn't want to. Rather, it empowered me to easily slip into the mindset of the character, and to shoot from the hip. It primed and conditioned me to think from her perspective, and that, I feel, is the most powerful thing that a roleplaying game can do.
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