The Motion of the Ocean

Kids know how to make ‘fun’.  That’s probably why they make such amazing make-believe games.  Put three kids under ten together for five minutes and suddenly they’re on the gas planet Xaxon, using their cotton candy boots to hunt down sporns with their death rings.  At 33, I really wish I could still find my death ring most of the time.

Kids are great at this sort of thing because reality isn’t as “fixed” for them.  The more raw information we put into our brains, the more we jot down on our internal map of the world.  Here there be dragons gets replaced with Here there be McDonalds, or Here there be mortgages.  As the mystery of the world lifts, there is less and less room for us to find unexplored territory, and often less obvious reason to do so. The result is often a certain laziness of the imagination, and feelings of shame for using it in public.  This made my first excursion into the game Ocean both rewarding and difficult as hell.

Ocean is an independent RPG put out by Atarishi Games.  In looking up that name just now I’ve noticed that one of their other games is called Panty Explosion Perfect, and now I really can’t decide if I want to hit the publish button on this article.  Ah well, it’s not F.A.T.A.L. (unless it IS F.A.T.A.L., in which case I sincerely apologize).

Anyway, Ocean is put out by some guys that make some other games in which you do things.  But that’s not the point, the point is Ocean.  The game (Ocean that is, not some other game about panties and explosions) is an extremely free-form collaborative storytelling game.  It IS an RPG, there are dice and you roll them to do things, but there is no game master.  Or rather, EVERYONE at the table is a game master.

The premise is simple:  Everyone wakes up with no memory in an undersea complex.  Who are you?  Where are you?  And what are those mysterious shadows that are darting around the edge of your vision?  These three questions frame the narrative that the players must come up with as they “move” around the station.  Each player begins the game with nine dice.  These dice represent your ability to do things, as well as your “health”.  You also have one character in the group that you will implicitly trust, and one that you implicitly do NOT trust.

As you move through the complex, players take turns describing rooms and obstacles contained in those rooms.  In order to bypass the obstacles, you must risk some of your dice in rolling them, and the player that you do NOT trust dictates the consequences of failure.  When you roll dice, you’re going to lose some, even if you succeed.  When you succeed (rolling at least one 5 or 6 on a d6), you give all dice that were successful to the player of the character you trust as “bonus dice”.  These bonus dice can be spent in a number of ways, including uncovering “clues” to the mystery.  Ultimate success in the game comes from fully revealing all three mysteries and having at least one person escape.  Although the game is not necessarily set up to turn characters against each other, the dice mechanic means that there are most likely not going to be enough dice being passed around for EVERYONE to make it, so drama comes built in.

The game is a LOT of fun, and extremely easy to pick up on the very few rules there are.  The trouble comes when you spend your bonus dice to find a clue, and then realize you need to make up some (mostly) cogent explanation for the weird shit that everyone has been interjecting into the game.  “We’re all being used to grow extra appendixes to be used in a future fake public panic by the CDC?  Then why on Earth were the Royal Canadian Mounted Police shooting spearguns at us from the backs of those sharks?”  While these moments lend themselves to being the crux moments of coolness and hilarity of the game, they also open the door for extreme anxiety and creative fumbling you don’t see in standard tabletop games.

When we sit down at the table for an rpg, we’re used to being creative within a very narrow scope.  “My character does X.”  Even if you’re the GM, your scope is limited by the players – you don’t throw in frogmen if no one in the group has the swim skill, for example.  Ocean is having none of that shit.  You want frogmen?  There are frogmen.  Deal with it.  I’ve been playing RPGs and writing fiction my entire life.  I thought I was a pretty creative guy.  Turns out, not so much.

Me: “I spend three dice to find a clue.”

Them:  “Ok, what do you find?”

Me: “Uhhhhhhhh………a . . . .  . . . . . yeti?”

As gamers I think we often fool ourselves into thinking that we’re being more creative in an absolute sense than we really are.  That type of imagination and raw abstractery (coined!) requires regular practice, and my sporn hunting muscles are sadly out of shape.  But I’m sure as hell going to try to start working them out, starting with more Ocean.