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I love science fiction. I love role-playing games. So an SFRPG (science-fiction role-playing game) ought to be my favorite thing in the world. And yet, none of the SF games I've tried in the past has been quite what I was looking for. Most SF RPGs seem to fall into two categories -- there are faithful reproductions of popular TV/movie settings, from Star Wars and Star Trek to Firefly and Farscape, and then there are settings which are basically fantasy universes with the addition of high-tech tropes, like RIFTS and Shadowrun and the Warhammer 40,000 universe. While each of the games I've mentioned can be lots of fun in its own way, and each is deeply loved by its fans, I feel like none of them captures the essence of what really good science-fiction is about.
When I say "really good science-fiction", I'm usually thinking of one of those classic collections of short stories by authors like Isaac Asimov, or Arthur C. Clarke, or Larry Niven, or [insert name of your favorite author here]. Each story was a self-contained "what-if" scenario, meant to be thought-provoking above all else. The best of them made us think in a serious way about how human life and society might be transformed -- within our own lifetimes, even! -- by our first contact with alien life, or the beginnings of interplanetary colonization, or the invention of self-aware robots, or by a networked gestalt human consciousness, or any of a thousand other possibilities both marvelous and terrifying. The emphasis was not so much on the exotic life-form or nifty gadget, but on change, and what such changes might mean. At their best, SF stories ask us challenging and uncomfortable questions about the world around us, our future, and our own philosophies of life.
So, that's what I'm looking for, and that's why I get a little bit frustrated every time I open a SF game book and all I find is a bunch of rules for how well a cyborg ork can shoot with a laser bazooka, you know what I'm saying? It seems like most games use SF tropes as setting details, but the emphasis is all on action-adventure. I don't know of any games that captured that speculative, intellectual element of SF.
...Until Shock.
To sum up "Shock: Social Science Fiction" in one sentence: think of it as an interactive, multiplayer version of one of those classic SF short story collections. Sound interesting? Read on!
2 How The Game Plays
2.1 Creating the Setting
It's sometimes been said that in SF, the setting is the main character. That is, if your story is an exploration of a possible future, then the focus must be on the ways that the future differs from the present. Here we get to the first innovation that makes Shock different from most RPGs you've probably played: instead of giving you a default setting (or a line of setting sourcebooks) Shock gives you rules for creating a unique setting of your own. After all, if the setting is the main character, doesn't it deserve its own character sheet?
The setting creation rules are worth going into in a little bit of detail, because everything else about gameplay depends on the setting you come up with. Setting creation is a collaborative, brainstorming process. The group makes a grid on a piece of paper. On one axis of the grid is a list of real-world social issues. For instance, in the game I played, we chose the issues "Intellectual Property" and "Lack of Due Process of Law" (after brainstorming a much longer list and narrowing it down). Both of our issues were rather academic and technical ones, but yours don't have to be. The most important thing is that the issues should be things the players care about. The game book suggests several issues and recommends scanning newspaper headlines for more.
On the other axis of the grid are the Shocks. The game I played was a short one-shot game with just three players, so we had just two issues and one Shock. If we wanted to do an extended campaign and explore a world in depth, we would have used more. Our Shock was "Ubiquitous computing": Everybody in this world has the Internet permanently wired into their brains. Choosing this Shock pegged our setting as being kind of cyberpunk-ish. You don't have to do anything like that, though; you could choose "interstellar war" as a Shock and play a far-future space-opera, choose "nuclear holocaust" and play a post-apocalyptic scenario, or you could pull a Shock out of the latest issue of a science/technology magazine and play a game set ten minutes into the future. This, too, is a suggestion straight from the book.
Your group must also decide on the "Praxis scales" for your setting. What this scary-sounding phrase means is really just, "What are the different ways player characters can deal with problems, in this world?" You can think of Praxis as being setting-specific stats. Most RPGs have a fixed list of typical stats: Strength, Intelligence, Agility or Dexterity, Health or Constitution, and so on. But when the players create the setting, a fixed list of stats might end up being meaningless. For instance, in a world where all fighting is done with energy-beam weapons and robots perform all physical labor, what possible use would there be for a Strength score? And if you're never going to use Strength, why bother even putting it on your character sheet?
So, to create a Praxis scale, the players think up two ways of approaching a problem which are in some sense opposites. For instance, a good Praxis scale might be "Fighting vs. Negotiation". Each character will have a number that tells his or her position on this scale, so that characters who are better at Fighting will be worse at Negotiation, and vice versa. A setting always has two praxis scales, for a total of four methods of dealing with problems.
Choosing your Praxis scales allows you to focus on the types of conflicts that are going to be important for your characters and your setting. If you wanted to do a style of game heavy on the physical conflict, with a lot of "infiltrating heavily-defended enemy base" type of action, you might choose a Praxis scale like "Combat vs. Stealth", or even "Guns vs. Martial Arts". On the other hand, you could do a game of political struggle over the fate of a group of space colonists, with no physical combat at all, and you might choose Praxis scales like "Reason vs. Emotion" (how does your politician character appeal to the populace?) and "Cooperation vs. Sabotage" (how does your character deal with political opposition?). For a very philosophical game, you might even have "Science vs. Religion" or "Nature vs. Nurture" as Praxis scales -- you just have to deal with classifying everyone's in-game actions according to those scales.
In the game I played, we chose "Self-Reliance vs. Reputation" and "Force vs. Cooperation". This was after quite a bit of discussion where we rejected several other ideas ( "Law vs. Trade", Accusation vs. something-or-other... ). Picking the right Praxis scales for your game is very important, because every action a character takes during a conflict has to be classifiable as one end of one praxis scale, in order to determine the target numbers for your dice. Well-chosen Praxis scales can interact with the Issues and Shocks of your setting in a way that makes the story incredibly cool. On the other hand, Praxis scales that are too narrow, or too vague, or which don't apply to the types of characters you want to play, seem like they could really screw up your game.
With just Shocks, Issues, and Praxis, your setting is starting to take shape, but it's not very detailed yet. That's OK. If you had to create every detail of the setting before you could start playing, you'd never get started! So instead, the idea is to start with a sketchy setting and then figure out the details as you go, answering questions as they come up. To do this, your group must decide who is the "owner" of each Issue and each Shock. (This will often be the person who suggested the idea, but not always). The owner will answer any questions that come up during play about that issue or that shock: "Is the technology capable of doing this?" or "Is it against the law to do so-and-so?" So in the game I played, for instance, I was in charge of the "Intellectual Property" issue, and my fellow players (who I'm just going to call A. and B.) owned "Lack of Due Process of Law" and "Ubiquitous computing". Of course, we were all constantly suggesting ideas, but the owner of each shock or issue has the final say over how something works. Once they make a decision, they write it on an index card and throw it into a pile in the middle of the table. This growing pile of index cards is called "minutiae" and serves to document the details of your setting for future reference.
Here are a few minutiae about "ubiquitous computing" in our setting:
When you've got the Internet in your brain and you look at another person, you automatically get pop-up windows in your vision showing all sorts of information about that person. Your personal network records every sight you see and every sound you hear, so you can recall any of it instantly and perfectly. For this reason, most people have gotten really bad at using their own memories (just like how when writing was invented, people got worse and worse at memorizing 50,000 line epic poems. It wasn't a skill they needed anymore.) Finally, it's possible to steal somebody else's "rig" and plug it into yourself; you know practically everything that person knows, but the danger is that the flood of memories will overwhelm your personality: you'll forget who you are, and think you are this other person instead.
2.2 Shared World, Shared Power
"That's odd", you may be thinking, "What's all this about ownership of Issues and Shocks? Why does a different player make decisions for each aspect of the setting? Why doesn't the GM just make up a setting and decide how everything works?"
Well, that's another interesting thing about Shock. There is no GM!
"WHAT??" some of you are probably thinking. "If there's no GM, who sets up the challenges? Who sets up the goal of the adventure? Who settles rules disputes? Who springs surprises on the players? Who keeps the game from degenerating into total chaos, or worse, total boringness?"
A GM-less RPG is a pretty weird concept for most of us, but there are several of them in existence, mostly obscure indie games. Clearly you can't just take an RPG system like d20 or Storyteller, remove the GM from it, and expect to have a functional game, any more than you could rip the heart out of a person and expect him to stay alive. But you can imagine an alien life form that evolved along a very different path and so doesn't have or need a heart. In the same way, it's possible for an RPG to follow a very different path of design, one where there is not a single Game Master in charge of everything. Instead, responsibility for NPCs, for the details of the world, and for the direction of the story is spread out among all of the players. There are still goals, challenges, surprises, and ways of settling disputes, but it's no longer the case that all of these are the responsibility of a single person. A GM-less game like this must have very clear rules to guide the sharing of responsibility, to say who gets to decide what, and so on. In the following sections, I'll go into a little more detail about exactly how this division of power works in Shock. It's quite clever and, in practice, surprisingly playable.
2.3 Protagonists and Antagonists
I've already explained how responsibility for aspects of the setting is split up among the players. Let's move on: now that the setting is sketched out, we can start creating player characters. Since there's no GM, every player gets to create a Protagonist.
Remember the grid we created for our setting? Each protagonist exists at one of the intersections on that grid, so each Protagonist is based on a combination of one Shock and one Issue. This is not allowed to be the Issue that the same player controls. I owned "Intellectual Property", so I couldn't have played a character with Intellectual Property as his Issue. If I was allowed to own an issue and also play a character based on it, there would be a temptation to decide facts about the issue in such a way as to make my own goal easier, which wouldn't be very much fun.
In the game I played, my character was at the intersection of "Ubiquitous Computing" and "Lack of Due Process of Law". What does it mean to be at an intersection on the grid? The Shock and the Issue are going to be a big deal for my character. His story is going to be about these things in some way. But that still gives me a lot of leeway for deciding who my character should be. Does lack of due process mean that I am an innocent man, falsely accused of a crime? Does it mean that I am a criminal who was unjustly set free? Or perhaps I'm someone in a position of authority who is responsible for due process not being implemented. Hmmmmmm.... I chose the latter. Here's my character:
Raymund Pulaski, Retired Master Hacker
Issue: lack of due process
Shock: ubiquitous computing
Features: Master Hacker.
Zeroed out of all legal records.
Has memorized the Lord of the Rings word-for-word.
Links: Independent lifestyle (Goats!)
Praxis: Self-Reliance/Reputation = 3.
Cooperation/Force = 6.
Story Goal: To fix what he once made broken.
Antagonist: The ARCHoN system.
That's not a summary of my character sheet, by the way -- that's the entire thing! Characters are pretty simple, at least mechanically, in Shock. You can make your character's personality and background as detailed as you want, of course, without any reference to the game systems, so here's mine:
Raymund Pulaski was the main programmer who created the "ARCHoN" system, a massive artificial intelligence which has replaced the entire judicial system. Vastly more efficient than the old system of courts, judges, and juries, ARCHoN can decide any criminal or civil case in a matter of seconds, not weeks. As soon as a complaint has been registered by at least three people (using a convenient web form), ARCHoN goes into action: downloading all relevant sensory records from the personal networks of the victims, accusers, and suspects, analyzing them, and reaching a judgment as to guilt or innocence.
Of course, the problem with this system is that it assumes that all sensory data from personal networks is inherently reliable. Therefore, it's easily fooled by anyone who can tamper with the inputs. "Garbage in, garbage out..." -- a fact that Raymund Pulaski knows all too well. Before he quit his job, he put a backdoor into the ARCHoN system and "zeroed himself out", meaning that as far as the legal system is concerned, Raymund Pulaski does not exist and can never be tried for any crime.
Troubled by the implications of the networked world, and the fact that people are losing their ability to remember things on their own, Raymund moved to a small patch of land in the Rocky Mountains, where he has been living a simple, natural life for the past few years, raising goats, chopping firewood, and exercising his biological memory capacity by forcing himself to memorize, word-for-word, the entire works of JRR Tolkien. He still has his personal network, of course, and when he goes online he does so under the pseudonym "Feanor" -- the elven prince whose beautiful, perfect creations (the Silmarils) led his people into thousands of years of suffering.
I didn't decide all of those details about the ARCHoN system all by myself. I hashed them out in discussion with B., who owned "Ubiquitous Computing", and A., who owned "Lack of Due Process". Like everything else in Shock, character creation is a collaborative process. Since you don't even create the setting until all players are assembled, there's no such thing as creating a character in isolation.
As you can see from my sheet above, each character has Praxis scores, and Features and Links, which are a fairly free-form way of describing personality traits, special skills, possessions, and other facts about the character. But the most important things that every protagonist needs are a Story Goal and an Antagonist. The Story Goal is simply what you, the player, are trying to accomplish with your character during the game. The Antagonist is who or whatever is trying to stop you from getting that goal. Your antagonist will be played by one of the other players at the table. An antagonist can be a person, but it could also be an organization. The interaction of Protagonist, Antagonist, and Story Goal is what gives shape to the game.
So in our game, my goal was to "fix what I made broken" and restore due process of law by reprogramming ARCHoN. B. played my antagonist, the ARCHoN system itself, and tried to stop me. B. was also playing his own Protagonist, a sociopathic serial killer named Lawrence (intersection of Ubiquitous Computing and Due Process). Lawrence's story goal was to get away with murder without ever having his identity revealed to the public. Opposing him was a detective named Mycroft, played by A.. Finally, A.'s protagonist (intersection of Ubiquitous Computing and Intellectual Property), was a comic artist who published comics online under the pseudonym "G. Fire" -- smutty comics starring copyrighted anime characters in sexual situations (don't think that this stuff doesn't already exist!) G. Fire's goal was to make money off of his work; opposing him was "Johnny's Mom" (another pseudonym), played by me. Johnny's Mom was the overprotective mother of a teenage boy who found G. Fire's comics in her teenage son's memory and immediately started an online crusade / moral panic to get G. Fire shut down.
So let's see: we got a serial killer, a pornographer, and a guy responsible for the false convictions of probably millions of people. Clearly this is not a game that requires you to play heroes! There's no alignment, and you don't even have to worry about whether your characters could fit together in a "party", because there is no party -- each protagonist is the star of their own story. You pretty much have free reign with your choice of story goals, and again, players are encouraged to discuss them with each other. These choices determine most of what you'll be doing during play, so you'd better pick a Story Goal that you're going to enjoy pursuing!
2.4 Scenes
We don't all play all our characters at the same time -- that way lies madness! Instead, we take turns doing scenes. So when it was my scene, I played Raymund, B. played my antagonist the ARCHoN system, and A. was a neutral onlooker. Not a passive onlooker, though -- she decided all facts about due process, meaning she was in charge of how the justice system actually worked. Once a scene had reached a logical stopping point, we would switch roles and play a scene in another protagonist's story. At no point did our three protagonists meet each other, so in a certain sense we were playing out three parallel plot threads which never met. But since these plot threads were based on the same themes and the same setting, the game felt like it held together anyway.
As I see it, this round-robin style of play cleverly takes care of all of the important services that a GM provides in a more "normal" RPG. Instead of the GM presenting a scenario or mission with an implied goal, the direction of gameplay in Shock comes from the protagonists each trying to accomplish their own Story Goals. Instead of the GM throwing various enemies and obstacles at the players, opposition is provided by the player of the Antagonist. Instead of the GM making decisions about the way the world works, each facet of the setting is owned by a different player who gets final say over it. And so on.
There are a couple very nice results of doing things this way. Since there's no GM, nobody has to spend hours laboriously preparing an adventure before the game starts. Such things have no place in Shock: you sit down around the table, create a setting together, create characters, and play! Speaking as someone who has spent far too much of his free time writing elaborate adventure plans -- only to have them rendered instantly useless when my PCs made an unexpected choice -- the idea of a game that I can play without prepping an adventure is extremely appealing.
It also means that every player gets a chance to express his or her creativity during the game. If you were ever frustrated in other RPGs that what you wanted your character to do didn't fit into the GM's plans, you may find Shock very refreshing. In fact, it's too mild to say that you'll "get a chance" to express your creativity -- it's more accurate to say that the game demands maximum creative input from everyone.
Have you ever been frustrated, in any RPG, by having to feign interest in generic "adventure bait"? The old guy in the tavern with a map to a cave full of treasure? The shady contact offering you big bucks for an illegal corporate espionage mission? ("My character's really not motivated by money", you think to yourself, "but I'd better go along with this or I won't have anything to do tonight." -- sound familiar? ) In Shock, this cannot happen, because everything that your protagonist does is in pursuit of a story goal that you chose, based on issues and shocks that you cared about enough to write on the grid. Not only that, you've got a devoted antagonist dedicated to making your chosen goal as hard as possible. It's like having an adventure custom tailored to your protagonist and your interests. I think that's a lot more fun than following the generic adventure bait.
2.5 Conflict
I'm sure that some of you are still skeptical. "Are you sure this is really a role-playing game?" I can hear you asking. "It's starting to sound more like some kind of group therapy session, or a brainstorming activity from a college creative-writing course!" And that's not an entirely unfair description. Shock does, in fact, require all the players to think a little bit like story authors. But don't worry, I'm getting to the part where we roll dice. The actual gameplay of Shock is tightly focused on the one thing that every game needs in order to be exciting: Conflict!
Conflict in this game can be anything. Depending on what your Issues and Shocks are, conflict in your game might take the form of a massive starship battle, a political debate, a duel of wits between hacker and corporate security, or an argument between two lovers. With an infinity of possible settings, there's no way to have specific rules covering every possible kind of conflict.
So Shock doesn't try for detailed, realistic simulation of every event. This is not "GURPS: Social Science Fiction"! Instead, Shock goes for a system that is extremely simple, flexible, and abstract. In fact, once you're done creating characters, there is really only one game mechanic. This all-purpose die-rolling mechanic, based on Praxis, can be used to resolve any kind of conflict, from the starship battle to the lover's argument that I mentioned above. It just takes a little bit of flexibility from the players to decide how to apply the results of the dice to their specific situation.
I consider this a pretty nice feature. The entire set of game rules is small enough to easily fit inside my head, so there's no need to look anything up during play. I for one hate to have to pause everything in the middle of a fight to dig out a reference for how some spell works. But if you're the kind of player who likes to have a detailed table of weapon ranges and damages and so on, Shock might not be your kind of game.
Gameplay is very streamlined. If you're not in a conflict, you're role-playing freeform. At one point, I wanted my character to steal a pickup truck and drive to Kansas. Nobody at the table contested that, so it simply happened -- no skill rolls, no random encounters, no filler, just "OK, you're in Kansas now." But as they teach in dramatic writing 101, the point of every scene in a story should be to drive towards conflict between characters. A scene never goes on very long before the protagonist, trying to do something, runs into the antagonist trying to mess up his plans.
As soon as the players find something to disagree about, a conflict begins. The protagonist and antagonist each declare a goal, decide what method (from the Praxis scales) they will be using, and then roll dice. Choosing your goal is key, and so there is always a period of discussion and negotiation about what the goals should be before the dice are rolled. An important twist: it's possible for both goals to succeed, or for both goals to fail. For this reason, players are required to choose goals such that "mutual success" and "mutual failure" make logical sense as possible outcomes.
Here's an example of a typical conflict, from the very first scene of our game. B., my antagonist, declares that a SWAT team has just descended on Raymund's little cabin. They've got black vans, black helicopters, rifles, riot shields, all that good stuff. They demand that I come out with my hands up. (My antagonist is the computerized judicial system, so ordering in a SWAT team is well within his power.) My guy is supposed to have total legal immunity, so obviously something has gone horribly wrong. This sounds like the start of a conflict, so we declare goals! As protagonist, I choose first. The obvious goal would be "get away without getting arrested". But my curiosity is stronger than my fear, so I say "My goal is to find out what's going on: who sent them and what am I being arrested for?" B. declares the obvious goal: "They're trying to take you into custody."
(Note that if I had said "My goal is to escape", then B. could not have said "Their goal is to capture you". Those are mutually contradictory goals -- it wouldn't make sense for both to succeed or for both to fail! But since my goal is to find out what's going on, then any outcome is a possibility -- I could get captured and find out, I could find out and escape, I could escape without finding out, or I could get captured without finding out.)
We put this in terms of Praxis. Remember, our choices are Self-Reliance/Reputation and Force/Cooperation. The SWAT team is clearly using Force to try to arrest me. I explain that Raymond is hacking into the personal networks of the SWAT team members in order to access their memories of their orders -- and, if he can, to confuse them, in order to stymie their Goal. Since he's relying on his personal 1337 H4x0r skills in order to do this, we decide that I'm rolling Self-Reliance. This is typical -- it's a matter of interpretation which Praxis defines an action. Like much in this game, the players need to talk it out and reach a consensus before rolling.
After goals are declared, we've each got a certain number of dice we get to roll. Out of that number, we each choose how many are going towards achieving our own roll, and how many are going towards hindering the opponent's goal. You can think of it as dividing your dice between "attack" and "defense". It can be a tricky decision. I have to decide which is more important to my character -- getting that information, or evading capture.
Meanwhile, A. is neither the protagonist nor antagonist in this conflict. Does that mean she sits around being bored? No! She gets to roll a single die, which she can throw in on either side of the conflict, by introducing a new fact about the setting. If there were more players, they'd each get a single die too. Since A.'s character has no stake in the outcome of my struggle with the SWAT team, she can decide based on what sounds like a more interesting direction for the story to go. She decided that in this setting, SWAT teams have all their members sharing a single powerful network, for rapid coordination of their missions. They're like a mini-hive-mind! She put her die against my goal, since their powerful shared network is very difficult for my character to hack.
The addition of this die resulted in a tie for my goal. Exactly on the number, in Shock, means that we're so evenly matched that the conflict must escalate. My original goal fails, but I get a chance to try for a bigger goal and roll again. There's no way I can access any information about the SWAT team's orders -- so I escalate to attempting to bring down the central server of their network, disabling the whole team!
As it turns out, the result of this conflict was mutual failure. I didn't defeat the SWAT team, but I wasn't captured either. I was able to disorient my enemies just long enough to grab a shotgun and make my escape, vanishing into the woods. And that was the end of my character's first scene.
The dice don't tell you exactly what happened -- they only tell you whose goals succeeded and whose failed. The group has to interpret these results in terms of what goals were declared and what Praxis values were being used. There's quite a bit of flexibility here; it's up to the players to go back and narrate how the conflict played out, turning a dice result into an exciting bit of storytelling. This is not a game system that cares about how fast people are running, how badly they're wounded, whether a gunshot hit or missed, or how much fuel your rocket has left. Those sorts of details are left up to your common sense and how you're imagining the scene. So just like setting creation and character creation, the outcomes of conflicts require the players to put in their own creativity, discuss the situation, and reach a consensus.
It's fair to say that Shock is rules-light enough to be almost free-form role-playing, most of the time. But let's be honest: a lot of veteran role-players of any system do most of their resolution by common sense and GM fiat anyway, only occasionally reaching for the rules and dice. What makes Shock different from free-form (and, in my opinion, much more playable) is that the regular use of conflict dice in each scene help to provide structure, focus, pacing, and unpredictability.
2.6 The Dramatic Conclusion
Scenes continue alternating between the protagonists' plot threads until we finally reach a climactic scene for each one. The climactic scene is actually explicitly defined in the rules -- when the antagonist runs out of "credits" (used to buy conflict dice), then it's time for the climactic scene. That's when it's time to play out one last conflict that will decide the fate of the protagonist's story goal.
So you actually decide ahead of time about how long you want your game to run by deciding how many credits the antagonists start with. For our game, we wanted to do a one-shot, so we gave each antagonist 12 starting credits, which resulted in about three scenes per protagonist. That doesn't sound like much, but each scene covered a lot of ground, and it enabled us to finish the game with a satisfying conclusion for each character in a single play session. It took just under four hours from start to finish, including setting and character generation. If we had wanted to do a longer, multi-session game, we could have used the same story goals but more credits, and filled the story out with more intermediate conflicts, more detail, and more subplots before reaching the final conflicts.
This may sound like an odd way to play ( "Pre-deciding when the final scene will happen? What?" ), but I found it quite refreshing. I've played in dozens of campaigns over the years which started with great promise but which ended with a whimper long before the epic plot could come close to a resolution. It's a nice change to be able to say "Let's play a game of Shock with 21 credits" and know that you'll actually be hitting a resolution for those Story Goals after two or three focused gaming sessions.
Let me tell you about how our game ended, because it was extremely cool.
Remember Lawrence, the serial killer? His story was a tense battle of wits between him and the detective Mycroft who was tracking him down. As we got to his final scene, Lawrence realized that his cover had been blown, so he formed a desperate plan: He knew the police would be tracking him by the electronic signature of his personal network, so he went down to the docks, looking for a fall guy. He found a man of his own approximate physical description, snuck up on the guy, bound and gagged him, and swapped rigs with him. The fall guy would be Lawrence for all intents and purposes, and take the punishment in his place.
What Lawrence didn't realize is that the fall guy he picked was in fact Mycroft, the detective, who was down at the docks tracking him. In his haste to escape, he didn't check the identity of the rig he was putting on. And in the final conflict roll, the force of Mycroft's memories in the rig was strong enough to overwhelm Lawrence's personality... and vice versa. Lawrence, now acting as Mycroft, shot the man he thought was Lawrence, and then walked away into the sunset, thinking justice had been served. It was a perfect Twilight Zone kind of ending.
Meanwhile, our copyright-infringing artist had been engaged the whole time in anonymous cyber-warfare, a series of plots and counter-plots and double-crosses involving legions of angry mothers, unscrupulous fans, and the lawyers of the Bandai corporation. There were message-board flame wars and Google-bombing and corporate blackmail and fake pseudonyms and Internet-based pleas for sympathy. G. Fire continued to get more and more ruthless as all of this went on, making the rest of us wonder just how far he would go to protect his right to profit from cartoon smut. Someone pointed out that despite the cyberpunkiness of our setting, everything that was going on in this storyline was stuff that's already happening today. We truly are living in a world that's more cyberpunk than cyberpunk.
In the end, G. Fire threw up his hands and walked away from the whole thing. He gave up on the idea of making money from his artwork, gave up on smut, left the Bandai corporation with their public-relations nightmare, and started a new career under a new name making legitimate, original artwork. A. was the only one of us who failed to achieve her story goals, and yet her character was the only one of us who achieved a happy ending -- or at least personal redemption.
And my character?
I had finally arrived at the physical location of the ARCHoN central processor, in the middle of Kansas, buried underground under a field full of satellite dishes. I went down through the service elevator, evaded the guards by posing as a legitimate sysadmin doing routine maintenance, and logged in directly from the console. I found that the backdoor I had put in all those years ago had long since been disabled, but I was able to log in as a regular maintainer and trick the system into escalating my privileges.
In the final conflict, between me and the ARCHoN system, my declared goal was to reprogram it to re-introduce the element of human judgment to the system. My antagonist's goal was to see me dead.
We both won our rolls...
Under ARCHoN's new programming, in any case where its margin of uncertainty was greater than 0.5, it would select twelve random people by e-mail to form a remote jury-of-peers, and pass judgment only when the jury had reached a unanimous agreement. As soon as the system was reactivated, it immediately tried its first case under the new programming. That case was the case of Raymund Pulaski, on trial for tampering with justice. The remote jury reached a verdict within minutes, and sentenced me to death. A security guard patrolling the building received the APB on his personal network, and responded at once. He executed my character on the spot, before I even got up from the chair in front of the console.
None of us could have predicted any of these endings. There was no script and no pre-ordained ending, neither in an adventure supplement nor in a GM's mind. But the game mechanics, and the combination of each player's choices and ideas, led us all to the perfect dramatic endings for our characters. It was the first time I've ever stood up and applauded my own character's death, let me tell you.
3 The physical book
I couldn't be happier with the experience of playing Shock. But an RPG book is not the same thing as a game experience, and presumably you're reading this review to find out whether you should buy the book, right?
The book for Shock is a small, thin, square, paperback. The cover is bright, shocking orange with black text and no illustration. It's an unusual design choice, but certainly attention-grabbing. Make no mistake, this is an indie-press book: small print run, shoestring budget, amateur artwork. You can feel that it's a labor of love.
What's actually inside? The rules, as I said, are quite simple, and take only a few pages to explain, and there's no such thing as a fixed setting, so most of what you'd find in typical RPG rulebook simply has no reason to be in Shock. Much of the book is taken up with a complete story called "Who Art In Heaven". Taken from an actual game session, this is a story about a race of creatures called "vacuumorphs" -- engineered to survive in the vacuum of space, controlled by an artificial religion, and used by humans as slave labor for orbital construction. The main body of each page gives a fictionalized, in-character account of the story, while the sidebar details what the players at the table are saying, the rules being used, the dice being rolled, and so on. It's a very helpful example as well as an intriguing story in its own right. The rest of the Shock book is suggestions: Where to come up with ideas for Shocks and Issues, how to play an Antagonist in such a way as to make the game challenging for your Protagonist, examples of play, lists of SF stories that inspired the game and how to turn them into playable settings, and so on.
I have only one reservation about the Shock book, but it's a significant one: I'm concerned that the rules aren't presented clearly enough. I was lucky enough to be taught the game by people who had played it before, so this was not a problem for me, but when I read the book cover-to-cover it made me wonder whether I would have been able to figure out how to play if I had picked up the book cold. Several play procedures which are quite crucial do not seem to be explicitly spelled out in the book -- at least, I couldn't find them when I looked for them. Important information such as the maximum and minimum values that you can use for a character's Praxis value are never mentioned in the book. Additionally, the book says something about protagonists spending credits for more dice, but nothing about how protagonists might get credits -- the rules seem to say that only antagonists have credits. We simply played without the protagonist-credits rule, but I'm still wondering whether it was a typo, a missing rule, an accidental hold-over from an earlier version of the rules, or what.
If you're interested in Shock, I highly recommend getting someone who already knows the game to show you how to play, as that's the ideal way to be introduced. But the game is not yet very well known, so it may be hard to find other players. If you are considering buying the book, teaching yourself how to play, and introducing it to your gaming group, be warned that the book may leave you with some serious questions about the rules. (You may find the glyphpress website helpful -- it has a small section of errata, as well as links to play reports, which are an aid to understanding.)
The presentation is not an insurmountable problem, but it is quite annoying that the book doesn't do a better job with explanation. The rules are not complicated, so there's really no excuse. The actual play experience is pretty amazing once you've got the rules down, and I hate to think that the unclear presentation might prevent people from enjoying it.
4 But will I like this game?
Shock is my new favorite role-playing game, personally. But it's not for everyone -- that needs to be stressed. It is a very different type of experience than the RPGs you're probably used to. If you come to it expecting more of the same, you'll be disappointed. If you approach it with an open mind, you might love it or hate it. In this section I'll try to give you some idea of which category you might fall into.
First, your enjoyment of Shock will depend a lot on how you feel about the whole setting-creation idea. If you're the kind of person who buys RPG books mainly for cool background setting, Shock is probably not the game for you. Again, the book contains no setting, only ideas and rules for creating one. You can easily use Shock to recreate the setting of your favorite SF novel or film, or even to recreate the setting of another game. But I predict that the people who will love Shock the most are the kind of people who are wanna-be SF authors themselves, who keep notebooks filled with half-formed ideas for SF stories and settings. Get a few people like that together and they'll have a field day turning their ideas into exciting, playable scenarios. In fact, wanna-be authors will appreciate Shock for another reason: it's a good resource for learning to write SF as well as play it. The elements that Shock stresses as the basis of exciting gameplay -- protagonist/antagonist, setting scenes, escalating conflicts, and so on -- are also the basis of good storytelling, even if you're writing a book and not a role-playing scenario.
Next, I'll warn you that you might be a little disappointed with Shock if you're looking for deep character immersion in your RPGs. Because players in Shock are co-authors in the story, and not just players of single characters, it requires you to put a little bit of distance between yourself and your character. Sometimes you even want your character to fail. As I think I've shown, an ending where your character dies or fails to get his objective can still be very cool. If you're used to thinking of your character as "yourself" then this might be quite jarring. I can't say whether I prefer co-author style role-playing over deep-character-immersion style role-playing; they're just two different things, and you should know which one you're getting into.
Furthermore, I need to stress that Shock requires a mature group of players who can trust each other. You have to be willing to cooperate and to accept each other's ideas, since it is group consensus and not "GM says so" that ultimately determines everything from the setting you're playing in to the outcome of conflicts. I imagine that the delicate balance of player roles and responsibilities in Shock could be easily destroyed if there was a "problem player" in the group -- someone who is unwilling to compromise, who is unwilling to contribute ideas, who is disrespectful of others' ideas, or who is trying to "win" the game. This is especially true since there is no GM to act as referee for the group. Use Shock with caution if you have any doubts about your group's social dynamics.
Above all, the fun you get out of Shock depends entirely on how much imagination you and your friends put into it. Don't buy Shock expecting a ready-to-eat meal. What you're buying is a set of cooking utensils and kitchen appliances. It's up to you not only to do the cooking, but also to provide the ingredients. The procedures of gameplay are just a set of tools. They will help you blend your ideas with those of your friends, add pacing, structure, and excitement, and create a satisfying story out of the mixture. But all the raw materials -- the issues, shocks, characters, praxis, conflicts, antagonists, and so on -- they all have to come from the players' imaginations. This is not a game for people who want to sit back and be entertained, nor for those who want to follow a GM's story and see where it leads. It's for people who want to be active story co-creators. It's a challenge. It's mentally draining. Cooking is work! Some days you'd rather not cook, you'd rather go to a restaurant and consume something prepared for you. But the advantage of a well-stocked kitchen over a restaurant meal is that you can cook something different with it every day for the rest of your life. I feel like I could play Shock every weekend for ten years, going through hundreds of different settings, without ever getting bored or repeating myself. In this way, this one thin little orange book can provide more depth and variety of gaming than an entire bookshelf of expensive, glossy, hardcover supplements.
My closing thought is this: because a game of Shock is built around real-world issues that you care about, your game is going to be a little deeper than just entertainment -- it's going to be a story that's about something. It's going to have some intellectual heft to it. It's going to get you thinking. For this reason, I think that playing Shock can actually be therapeutic: when you're feeling confused about some topic in the news, if you can't decide how you feel about some pressing social issue, if you see a new invention and wonder what it might mean, you can play a Shock game about it. Role-playing it out might help you and your friends work through your thoughts and explore possible consequences. In Shock, I think we might finally have an RPG that does what the best written SF does -- help us learn to cope with the rapid social and technological changes occurring in the modern world.
