Challenge accepted, motherfucker.
A lot has been written already about Over/Under and it’s small mechanisms. As I said before, the main “action” players can take is to give each other money. And when the only thing you can do is make money, players start to hustle. But I think there’s one other thing you can do, and it kind of goes back to the reaction of the bosses, mod team and GM of the Chokespawn Incursion.
So, in any traditional TTRPG, stakes are pretty easy to set up. The easiest is: Your character might die. Your character is going into a dangerous dungeon, or a haunted house, or a derelict spaceship, and probably there’s going to be some terrifying goblin or man-faced bat creature or alien abomination with eight mouths that is going to do so much damage that your character no longer has any hit points and will probably die, maybe with no recourse for resurrection. Hey, I don’t want my character to die! I like playing as this character! So, we do what we can to avoid that. No sweat.
There’s lots of other ways to add stakes. The bad guys get ahold of an NPC the players like and want to save, or a magic cube that can destroy the world, or they have a bunch of money that the players want to rip off. Easy stakes. Five minutes, a GM can make the players invested enough to rigamarole them through some terrifying location with a bunch of silly bullshit they made up for the night.
Over/Under has none of that.
One of the problems with all those stakes I just outlined up above, though: it’s very easy to get the party invested in it. It’s very hard to get the party invested in each other.
A lot of posts from GMs online start with a conundrum: My players won’t “roleplay with each other.” They don’t care about each other’s back stories or motivations. They’re all just sort of slapped together for this adventure I’ve made, but without that adventure, they wouldn’t really have a reason to care about each other.
Now, this isn’t necessarily a problem to be solved. That’s the usual advice, and it’s basically correct. If the players don’t want to roleplay with each other, you probably shouldn’t force them to do so. They either will or won’t according to what they desire as players, and that’s fine. But.
Over/Under is made almost exclusively of players roleplaying with each other. Revealing their backstories. Being invested in them. One of the first things I do after a big server-wide event (like last night’s Invasion of the Jovankabots–uhhh more on that later) is go around and check in on everybody. I gotta make sure Lily and Thoss and Noa made it through.
These are characters who maybe I’ve actually only interacted with them two or three times before one of these events. Before Thoss ended up in the hospital, I interacted with them…twice? Once on a job and once a few days later to shit on their religious epiphany. But then when a technomancer needed to use me as a conduit to sort through Thoss’s memories, to separate their personality from the cybervirus corruption inside their brain? Berwick broke the fuck down crying for the first time in ten years. (Berwick spent those ten years on various spaceships, alone, doing jobs usually reserved for androids.) Berwick called out to his friend Thoss, apologizing for blowing them off, crying out for them to come back to consciousness.
I met this player like fucking twice!
But here’s the thing: This kind of relationship between our two characters, in this scene: now we have stakes. We have emotional stakes between us. This is why we’re doing this.
The word “scene” really started to enter the vocabulary of not just me but multiple other players. The idea that our two (or three or four) characters end up in a little box theater together and we all kind of know how this should go, but also have no fucking idea what’s about to happen, but we all want it to be important, otherwise we wouldn’t be goddamn doing it. We WANT there to be STAKES. And in a game with no hit points, no macguffins, no “monsters” (villains, surely, but no true monsters), the only stakes left are emotional ones.
That’s why the doomed yuri squad is so popular and why it’s brought the station to the brink of war like three fucking times already. Even though my character is asexual and definitely not interested in any kind of emotional or physical relationship with anyone (he’s not a people person and has asomphosomphobia from the decade alone in space), I as a player am always deeply invested to see anything from these chucklefuck lesbians because it seems like they are constantly having the most emotional moment of any one person’s entire life, this very second. Scenes that might take an entire two hour film to lead up to are happening seemingly every goddamn day between this lesbian polycule and I don’t think it’s possible for a semi-casual player like me to keep track of all of it, so when I catch any of it I’m down to clown with the rest of the server. (Tbh, I think former Union President Sanyang was assassinated purely because of the player’s complete disinterest in the plotline. You can’t be part of this station and not be at least a little invested in the doomed yuri squad.)
When you give the players no outlet for stakes, they will create them. Emotional stakes are super easy to create when this is all you got, and IMO it’s something we could do to remember.
