The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor

Recently, my group and I ran a one-shot of the iHunt RPG. It's a game about being a monster hunter in the gig economy. You're perpetually poor, and hunting monsters for cash is the preferable alternative to getting evicted. The game requires a bit of a cognitive shift from your traditional games, which is what we are here to talk about today.

This post is based on a preview version of iHunt, so final mechanics might change.

Our interview about the game with Olivia Hill

During our first session, one of the PCs got shot with a bullet and was in need of medical attention (you are playing fragile humans after all). When discussing our options, one of the players started solving the problem by trying to pin down some numbers - "how much did we earn from killing that vampire?", "what's the standard rate for a vampire? Is that even listed in the book?", "how much does a hospital visit cost?", "how much does a street doctor charge?", etc. However, as we found out, the game (at least in its current, preview state) didn't have any of those prices listed, because that's not what the game is about.

iHunt is a game about being a poor person that turns to hunting monsters to make ends meet. Money is always fickle and doesn't stick. You might earn $10k in a day, but that's cash, not wealth, it's a windfall that comes and goes. There is a reason iHunt and FATE in general doesn't have a space on your character sheet to put your gold pieces in - the game is not about that.

Now, this was frustrating for the player. The game is about playing a person that cares about the money, but the game does not care about the money. You may want to get invested in the character getting ahead and lifting themselves out of the rut they're in, but by the dint of what the game is about, your character will never get out of their hole as long as they are a character. Otherwise, they wouldn't have a motivation to go iHunting.

The mechanic of how money is handled (or the lack of said mechanic) is one of those rare "mechanics as a metaphor" moments, where a mechanic exists not only to serve a purpose, but to convey a deeper message - "money is fickle, it comes and goes". Heck, later in episode 2 we came up with something similar - when a player sold some extra stuff they stole for cash, they didn't just add some numbers to their gold coin total (since again, the game does not track that), but instead they receive a temporary bonus in form of a FATE Aspect. The character was now Flushed with Cash, which they could tap into to get a temporary roll bonus in the future, after which the Aspect would fade, just like that extra cash in your wallet.

Both of those mechanical ways of dealing with money conveyed a message that was congruent with what iHunt is about - money is fickle, it comes and goes.

Sometimes playing games like this requires one to unlearn some tropes one picked up from other games. Going from D&D into iHunt (or many other games) one might start asking "what's your alignment?", "how much can I carry?", "where is the gear list?", "what damage bonus does this weapon have?", "what's my AC?", "what are my saving throws?", "how do I level up?", etc. The answers to all of them would be "the game is not about that. Unlearn what you have learned and see the world from a new perspective".

Talk about your game and communicate with each other!

In the vein of the last post, let's talk about another important thing that doesn't seem to be hammered in often enough - communication. RPGs are a social activity. It's a shared story you all weave together. It's not something owned by any one person, everyone at the table is contributing (no game, asides the worst case of railroading, is owned by the GM!). So if you have a cool idea about what should happen in the game, here is a magic trick - talk with each other about it.

The GM is not a psychic, they can't read your mind to know exactly what you want out of the game. Better yet, give them wholesale ideas they could use. Telling your GM "hey, I want to get rich" is nice to communicate your character's desires, but giving that GM a plan to heist a bank, complete with some NPC ideas, what security they might have and other plot hooks takes a load off their shoulders. Mind you, you should keep things concise at least in the pitch stage, since few people have the patience to read multiple pages of stuff, but a brief summary to get the ideas across might just do the trick.

Even if you don't give the GM the complete adventure you want to have, sometimes discussing how the session goes might still be helpful. Sure, sometimes you want to be in the dark about some things, and that's a good rule to keep in mind if that's what you're going for, but sometimes knowing a bit of what's coming up can help you strategise and get over bumpy parts of the adventure.

(I know it's not for everyone, but sometimes even if you know what the adventure will be, it can still be fun to play through. Heck, once we ran Storms of Yizhao, didn't like how it turned out, workedhopped a fix for the adventure, and then ran it one more time knowing the ins and out of the module while still having fun)

This can go both ways too - perhaps the GM has prepared an adventure for the players that requires a bit of buy-in ("Hey, I have 'Fane of the Night Serpent' adventure module. Heads up - this module expects you to sell yourself into slavery as the main way of getting in. Everyone cool with that?"). Communicating that clearly up-front can save some cat herding during the actual game itself. And hey, if players have some issues with the premise of the game, you can discuss it ahead of time and think of a solution before investing half a session getting to a point of contention and dropping the adventure altogether due to some disagreements.

Communicating outside of the game can also help you facilitate the Watsonian vs. Doylist decisions. Me as my character might not want to get beaten up and put into jail, but me as the player might be totally on board with that situation because it sounds fun to roleplay.

In general, talking about what you as the player or the GM want out of the game in general and any particular session in particular and agreeing on what's the best plan is can ensure people get the most fun out of the game.

It's good to let people know what you'd like to see happen, and also raise any concerns about some problems you might be seeing. It's good to address those early on before they snowball into something more toxic if left unaddressed. Maybe the party is turning into murderhobos and you don't want to have another one of those games, or maybe they aren't murderhobo enough and you're not having fun with your chaotic evil death knight. Communicate about those issues when they come up, otherwise you might be left stewing for awhile while nothing gets fixed. GMs and players aren't psychic, talk with them.

Similarly, make sure to clear some major twists, reveals and wacky ideas you have with your GM ahead of time if you have any doubts they might work. One fun story about that in our game is when we played AMP Year One. One of the characters was a super strong soccer mom that lost custody of her kid after getting into an accident. Since the PCs started working with a criminal organisation, they decided to pull some strings and surprise the PC with getting her full custody of her child. Spoiler alert, the PC surprised the entire group, GM included, by revealing her character was repressing that her kid died in that accident, so whoever the poor kid was that the NPCs have brought in wasn't her child. It was a fun moment and a fun twist, but yeah, clear such things with the GM ahead of time ;) . Other things that need to be communicated - clearing up any wacky rules / power combos you want to use to some great effect that aren't obvious, or could be interpreted in different ways. You don't want to spend a whole session or two building up to a crescendo that fizzles out because the GM interpreted a rule differently than you.

The same communication advice can be applied in the other direction as well - if a GM has an idea for something interesting to do with a character that might be risque or imposing something about their past or present situation, it might be worthwhile to check with the player ahead of time. Introducing a new relative, some friend, a new detail about their past, putting them in danger seemingly out of the blue etc. would fall into this category. Of course, you don't have to reveal every upcoming twist (one of our favourite examples of a cool twist the player did not see coming was Boundless Jurisdiction checking up on his husband in Gangs of New Gloam, not realising how he has moved on...). How often you check in will depend on your mutual trust and preference in the end, understandably.

So yeah, all in all:

• Nobody is psychic, don't expect people to know something you don't communicate clearly
• Talk about expectations, hangups, problems, etc.
• If buy-ins for adventures or some obtuse adventure moon logic might be an issue, best communicate them ahead of time
• If you have some cool ideas of what could or you'd like to happen, let them be known
• Clear important things with your GM about your character's backstory, important twists, and any weird things you are basing your plans on
• Clear things with your players about new things you want to introduce to their backstory
• In general, communicate with each other!

Agree on your game's vision before you start playing

Over the years, my group has learned that it's important to nail one thing down before a game starts - its vision, an agreed vision of what the game is about, what are the core assumptions, etc. Having something like that in place can help a lot when it comes to keeping the game focused.

A game's vision can be something very simple. In our Fellowship - The Deeps it started off as "we want to play a Fellowship game about sailing the ocean". This informed the setting - an archipelago with plenty of water to go about, the characters - all having to have a reason to be on the boat together, etc. Later, as characters got fleshed out the concept evolved further - the game was also about an Heir opposing an evil ruler Overlord to dethrone them and take their place, and other characters whose goals would align with that objective.

The vision will also help you figure out what the game is not about. In the Deeps, we weren't going to turn our sailing ship into a flying ship, because that would go against our goal of sailing the ocean and having ocean adventures. In Heaven For Everyone, our goal was to:

1. Play teenage demigods in the 80s
2. Have no clue what's going on
3. Focus on family life and school life
4. Try to be good people
5. Have our actions have consequences

With such clear goals, you could fall back on them whenever you'd want to do something drastic with your character. Would it be useful for a character to run away from their family and ditch school not to be bogged down? Sure, but that goes against the game's vision, so you won't do it. Would it be easy to declare yourself a living god-king and kill all the other supernaturals? Yes, but that's not what the game is about. Should the GM introduce a character that knows what's going on and explains everything to the players? Probably not, because we're meant to not have a clue of what's going on - it's part of the fun.

Making the vision does not mean you have to reveal everything the game is about. For our Conspiracy at Krezk game, we as players decided to be in the dark as to what would be the mystery of the game, so the GM kept us in the dark about those things. We still agreed what some other constraints about the game were (something along the lines of "you live in Krezk, you want what's best for the town, you're 'adventurers', so you'll put yourself in trouble because it needs to be done, etc."), but we had fun experiencing the mysteries slowly revealing themselves over time.

Of course, your game's vision is not set in stone - over time you ought to revisit it and maybe change it as it suits your game. Maybe some assumptions didn't make sense, or maybe you've gotten all the fun you could've had out of these ideas. For example, after a dozen episodes of Heaven for Everyone, we're pretty much done with our characters doing bits of school life, and we'll probably be transitioning that into some other scenarios, like internships or what have you. Your visions are your game's guiding compass, but it's okay to change course if that's what you want to do consciously.

Our group also has a few good examples of when we didn't nail down a vision in mind and things went a bit awry.

For our Fellowship of Cybertron game the GM wanted us "to be Autobots that fought in the Great War", but didn't state that clearly enough, so our party consisted of two Decepticons, an unaligned character and one Autobot. One character slept through most of the war, one was on a colony for the entirety of it, one was made not so long ago, and only one had some deeper connection with the war. We still had fun in the game and the GM still ran it, but for the follow-up season he made sure to clearly state and enforce the vision.

In our Godbound: Living Years game, we had two characters that were nobles. One of them wanted to restore the land of Ancalia that has been devastated by a zombie plague and give ownership of it back to the mortal nobles, while the other wanted to rule the land himself and do away with a lot of the old ways. The two character concepts were often at odds with one another through the entire game since neither of those goals were clearly stated before the game started, and both character concepts were very focused on bending the setting to their vision. It caused a lot of tension in the party and was very stressful to play through.

So if you are starting a game, consider sitting down together and deciding on what your game's vision will be. Once everyone has agreed on what it is through whatever means, it might be easier to keep the game focused and have something to point to when deciding if a character or story idea fits with the game.

Hopefully this will help you avoid having that one loner evil character in a game where you're all supposed to be heroic good people ;).

Related posts:

• The Doylist choices in role play games