Episode 14: Relationships in Play feat. Avery Alder

In this relatable episode, we’re joined by special guest Avery Alder - creator of Monsterhearts, Dream Askew, and The Quiet Year - to talk about relationship mechanics.   How does your game change when you model relationships as variable stats, states of being, currencies, cycles, roles, or power dynamics? How do you provide mechanical handles for specific types of relationships, while allowing them to be messy and emergent? What happens when two characters have wildly different interpretations of their mutual relationship? Where do relationships even exist, in terms of the physical sheet or game component that bears them? Avery sees the kids for the trees. Violet hassles her vassals. Freya sticks to the classics. Avery seizes the means of narration. Violet doctors the narrative. Freya draws her friends close. *** Check out Avery’s Stuff! *** https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/ *** Check out JourneyMon! *** https://ilgingell.itch.io/journeymon *** Check out Freya’s Blue Skies Sabbatical, Volume 1! *** https://severalseals.itch.io/drake-barcode-morse-inspector https://severalseals.itch.io/foleynauts *** Timestamps *** No mailbag this time! Intro to topic [*1] - 0:15:16 Why mechanise relationships? - 0:20:37 Design questions - 0:31:00 History - 0:53:47 Three angles on the Taxonomicon - 1:01:30 Rivalries - 1:07:51 Digression about Shock and conceptual poles - 1:13:45 Authority hierarchies - 1:21:46 Peer relationships - 1:30:49 Relationships as a resource - 1:39:00 Parasocial relationships - 1:45:16 Odds and ends and anecdotes - 1:53:17 Difficult relationships (and more Monsterhearts) - 2:02:16 Design Dreams - 2:12:27 Wrapup - 2:27:45 *** Design Dreams *** Freya: the League of Super Frenemies Violet: Hand Inarticulate Hand Avery: Love’s Letters Lost Bonus: The Dream Ghost Conspiracy [*2] *** Games discussed *** Monsterhearts Dream Askew / Dream Apart The Quiet Year JourneyMon Underwhelming Acolytes of an Ageing Immortal [-] D&D 3.5e D&D 4e AD&D Good Society The Deep Forest Masks Exalted Essence Vampire: The Masquerade Delta Green Pendragon Sagas of the Icelanders Girl Frame Hot Guys Making Out Star Crossed Interstitial Riddle of Steel Burning Wheel Blades in the Dark Reign A Place To Fuck Each Other Thirsty Sword Lesbians Lady Blackbird Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Dogs in the Vineyard  Apocalypse World Masks Dungeon World Bluebeard’s Bride World of Darkness (assorted) Aberrant Genius: the Transgression Over The Moon Tournament Arc Transit Shock Lasers & Feelings Avatar Legends Flabbergasted The Between Pathfinder Everyone Is John Belonging Outside Belonging Mad Alien With A Box Golden Sky Stories Blue Rose The Serpent’s Tooth Lost Kingdom (The many gm one streamer game) Dialect Going For Broke Smallville Last Fleet Exalted (not Essence) The Thunder Perfect Mind Silver And White [-] Microscope Children of Time [-] [*3] Seven-Part Pact [-] Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast Voidheart Symphony Midnight Muscadines *** Other media discussed *** Earthborne Rangers Steven Universe (obliquely) The L Word Animal Crossing Homestuck (inevitably) Kingdom Hearts Beastieball Pride & Prejudice Jeeves & Wooster Dr Who The Order Of The Stick Mage Knight Gloomhaven Battlestar Galactica [*4]  Final Fantasy XIV Buffy the Vampire Slayer [*5] Dispatch Persuasion Portal 2 Philosophers in Space A Psalm for the Wild-Built A Close And Common Orbit Shogun (the board game, not the show) The World Ends With You: NEO *** Notes & Links *** [*1] …and apparently a local dog immediately goes wild in the background of Freya’s audio, sorry! It doesn’t last forever. [*2] if you know of a game that already implements Dream Ghost Conspiracy’s mechanics, tell us about it! It saves us having to write it ourselves. [*3] Predictably, the Children of Time crowdfunder ended some time before we finished editing this episode. [*4] the board game, but also the licensed RPG I guess! [*5] all this Monsterhearts talk and it took us two hours to mention Buffy. Spoilers at ~2:12:00! [-] games with this tag are unpublished (not yet released) or un-published (un-released). It is a fact universally acknowledged that when you make a joke and say “that was rubbish, you can edit it out,” that makes it funny enough to leave in. According to the dictionary wot I done red, a pastiche does not have to also be parody. The term, delightfully, is derived from a name of a pie with a melange of many ingredients. Sorry, Francis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man *** Contact us! *** Thank you to everyone who has emailed into our mailbag - If you too have a question, idea, or interesting game you’d like to share with us, email [email protected] *** Additional Credits *** Our intro music is  "Magic Escape Room" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ System Shop is made by humans. We do not use generative AI at any stage of our process, from research to editing.