Part 2: Character Playing

[yukamichi]

(This is the second part of a three-part entry; read Part One Here)

Ambush Machine Go Brrr

So, how does our character actually function in play? Of course, our first concern is the long-game play of setting up Jealous Wolf. Our early moves are going to be similar to most characters in a typical game of Shinobigami: tentative relationship-building and feeling out the positions of the other characters. Forming bonds is important because of information exchange (when someone with whom you have a bond learns a piece of information, you also learn that piece of information); getting the most out of Jealous Wolf means knowing which of the other characters we're most likely to find ourselves at odds with, and characters' secrets and alliances are important to making that determination. Being able to swap around a skill mid-game also makes for a powerful defensive option, as attacks are defended against using the same skill that the attacker uses: if we know whom our primary target is going to be, we can tweak our skill list to make their attacks easier to dodge (this is in addition to the open-ended tactical question of being able to gain an entirely new ninpo as well).

But beyond the strictly mechanical side of the game, we're also still producing fiction as a core part of play; this includes not only the fictional events that make up the story, but also the fictional expression of our character concept. One of the most straightforward ways of "producing" our character in play is through the framing of drama scenes where we are the scene player; since each drama scene needs to tie back to a skill (and it's most advantageous to use skills we know, instead of defaulting to ones we don't), our skills aren't just representative of our character's knowledge and abilities; they're also an important tool for actualizing our character concept.

Hidden Weapons: This skill includes not only concealing weapons on one's person, but can conceivably include hiding them anywhere. One obvious use is simply to ambush someone in public (beating information out of people is a time-honored tradition); or maybe tape a gun to the back of a restaurant toilet like in The Godfather, for example (seemingly a bit odd for this character, but you never know), ambushing someone after convincing them that we're just there to talk. Another fictionally fruitful option for the skill might come as a result of being trapped or captured through the course of fictional events: being able to produce a weapon from nowhere is a great lead-in to narrating an escape scene. We could also construct a scene that revolves around a secret weapons cache, such as the mausoleum scene from Terminator 3.

Blade: Another fighting-themed skill. Play-fighting is a tried-and-true Shinobigami technique (you can fight as much as you want in a drama scene, without suffering any damage or other mechanical consequences that come with formally-defined fight scenes using the standard combat rules). Shinobigami has no actual representational rules for weapon types or weapon proficiency—meaning anybody can describe themselves as fighting using anything they want, and there's no explicit mechanical differentiation between shooting or stabbing or beating someone—so describing how our character fights is mostly just an issue of flavor (but flavor is, after all, one of the main objectives of play). A less hostile use of this skill might be to describe a friendly training or sparring scene.

Interception: As mentioned earlier, this skill is primarily about the interception of information. Perhaps we narrate a scene that predominantly takes place between two other characters, while we lurk nearby unnoticed, listening in. We may also be able to intercept asynchronous forms of communication, such as messages passed between another character and their clan that contain vital information related to the scenario (the means by which we fictionally accomplish this depend heavily on the concepts of the other characters), or hack a computer system, perhaps to take control of digital surveillance devices or even to directly breach the resources of a rival ninja clan.

Guerrilla: This skill focuses on using intimate knowledge of the terrain to one's advantage. This could be used to track down another character, or perhaps to help them escape from a bad situation (for example, by using shortcuts in dense urban terrain, or knowing places to hide from a pursuer).

Memory: One possible use of this skill is as a kind of "Spout Lore" effect to conjure plot points out of nothing in the middle of a story. This could be a memory of some obscure piece of knowledge from the past, or perhaps a close recollection of a previous encounter told in the form of a flashback. We can also take a cue from the Jealous Wolf ninpo to which this skill is linked: using the same supernatural technique that we use to absorb another character's skills and powers, we can perform a kind of Vulcan mind meld to extract information from them (willingly or otherwise).

Signaling: This skill represents our capacity to transmit messages to others. This may work well with the "hacker" aspect of our character concept, in order to surreptitiously communicate with other characters (for example, by hijacking digital signage or other innocuous communications systems). It also has potential for more "just-as-planned" fictional twists (a deeply underrated Shinobigami technique), perhaps by conjuring reinforcements or other deus ex machinae from a distance, who show up just in the nick of time.

Troubleshooting

It's all well and good to have an idea for what we would like our character to do in play, but what happens if the fiction unfolds in a way that boxes us out of the "plans" we've made for our character?

First of all, it's worth noting that it's unlikely for this to happen to such an extent that we're forced to throw out our entire character concept—at least, not without it being supplanted by an ad hoc replacement, a new fictional grounding for our virtual character-to-be that arises from fictional touchpoints we hadn't originally considered. One of the effects of this strong focus on potential actualizing of character in the character creation process is that our character enters the game with a lot of initial "weight" to it; not in the sense of any kind of story gravitas, but simply because we've built them to work with mechanics that are largely indifferent to their fictional triggers (or, at least, have a variety of levels of specificity/generality to which situations to which they're appropriate). The fictional cruft we're working with is, ideally, broadly applicable to many fictional circumstances that the game is meant to handle; genre is—at the risk of being tautological—generic.

But what about more complex mechanical effects, ones like our Jealous Wolf ninpo that relies on a fairly specific set of formal game circumstances to be usable? In fact, Shinobigami also has an answer to this, although it's found not in the rules but in the actual plays included in the rulebooks. In one of the scenarios, we're introduced to the concept of makenai roleplay,
a technique that in a word might be described as "fail forward for character concept". When the character Genzou, who is meant to function as a kind of cool-headed mastermind, repeatedly fails his drama scene rolls and approaches the end of the scenario without the player having a clear sense of what's going on, he nonetheless continues to play Genzou to his concept, carefully choosing to portray the character and frame scenes in a way that papers over the mechanical failures while still projecting the image of the character promised by its concept.

A practical, non-roleplaying example of this kind of narrative technique can commonly be found in those fictional media that have managed to generate popular recurring villain characters. The villains may have their plots foiled by the heroes (repeatedly, in many cases), but it doesn't stop them from strutting their stuff, showing off the things that make them unique, and winning fans regardless of their inability to win the battle. Much of this media consists of self-contained stories that repeat the same structure each episode (not entirely unlike Shinobigami itself): it's rarely in question that the good guys will win and the bad guys will lose, and so this simple, repetitive structure productively dissolves itself as we learn to stop caring about the plot, and focus instead on the synchronic brushstrokes of the fiction itself—the framing of scenes, the expression of characters and setting, and the ways they interact with each other—something that Shinobigami as a game also chooses to favor over forging a rigid, diachronic path of causes and effects. Moreover, as a game that regularly features PvP, our Shinobigami characters are frequently going to act as the heroes of their own stories, while also serving as the villains of someone else's; it's an important lesson to incorporate into how we approach the game, both with respect to the fiction that we're authoring, but more importantly with respect to the people whom we are authoring it together with: play isn't just about actualizing our own character concept, but helping the other players to actualize theirs as well.

Continued in Part Three.