As someone who hasn’t played many TTRPGs, I was very excited to play A Quiet Year since I’ve heard a lot about it. This game excelled at enabling collaborative storytelling by restraining creativity.
Our initial decisions for our map’s main features and its resources got us thinking about our world in a very abstract way. By this point, I might’ve had some ideas of what our community was like, but I didn’t have anything coherent.
The prompts serve as a great way to help me answer more specific questions about the community that I didn’t have a clear idea for before. Things like how the youth act or what some stories about the local area are. I found that this is common in many TTRPGs while researching different systems for our project, but it’s kind of ironic that restricting creativity would specific prompts, or some other means, would help me come up with more creative answers. It’s not too surprising considering how game jams accomplish the same thing with themes, but it’s an interesting interaction with the player that I would like to keep in mind as I play and design more games.
Affective Variation
This game was also very good at evoking emotions as a result of our storytelling. For me, these emotions were a sort of light-hearted dread. In this section, I’ll talk about the light-hearted part, but also why I expect that a player’s emotions from playing this game would vary greatly between different players.
The light-heartedness came in large part from our decisions and the tone that we wanted our map to have. One of the features we added was an abandoned McDonald’s, and my drawing of icons on the map were bad enough to be a bit funny.
The freedom that players are granted in adding features and making decisions allows for players to insert a bit of their own tone into the narrative. If you want to have a more serious contemplation of how a community would act in this situation, you may, but if you want to create a sillier story, you may do that too.
This variation makes each player’s playthrough different. However, it also makes it difficult to claim that this game evokes a specific feeling across all players. This is the case for interactive media in general. There have been plenty of serious dialogue moments in Batman: Arkham Asylum where I’ve had Batman tea-bagging the whole time. But I feel that this issue is particularly noticeable in this game, and probably other TTRPGs in general due to the large amount of input that players are given over the narrative.
To guide players towards a specific tone, I noticed that a lot of TTRPGs have mechanics that encourage players to think a certain way. Some that stand out are confessionals in Low Stakes that incentivize players to have silly one-off camera moments like in mockumentaries and strings in Thirsty Sword Lesbians that incentivize players to think about and seek relationships with other characters. With that in mind, I’ll talk about a few of A Quiet Year‘s mechanics that stood out to me as setting a tone even though they didn’t always work as they were probably intended during our playthrough. From this discussion, it’ll be come clear why I felt the dread part of that light-hearted dread.
Mechanics that Set the Tone
Discussions had a very interesting structure unlike most mechanics I’ve seen before. Communication during a discussion is very structured, with each player saying one thing, usually leading to no sense of agreement or even explicit disagreement. What other players are thinking in terms of what projects to start is pretty much always a mystery unless you want to spend another turn talking about it. Even then, you may not be clear on what people want.
The abrupt way that discussions end took some getting used to. At first, it was a bit funny in an “ok I guess that’s it then” way. Again, this may have not been intentional and might have just been because our group was already in a laughing mood. Over time, we got used to the format of discussions and that humorous part wore off. By this point, the discussions felt like they were having their intended effect of leaving us unsure of what others are thinking.
This, combined with the overall independence people have in starting projects and other decisions, led to a bit of a feeling of helplessness. I felt that I had no particularly effective way of collaborating with other players in making decisions. This led to some moments where decisions each player would make independently of one another would culminate in very bad decisions. One example I like was when an argument among young people was introduced, followed by a dragon, and we ended up running a spelling bee among the children where the winner would try to negotiate with the dragon.
The feeling that I only have so much control over what happens leads to lots of storytelling moments like these that I would have never come up with on my own, which is a great thing about collaborative storytelling. It also affects the tone of the game by making us feel like we’re just doing our best in a situation that doesn’t allow us much control. This is further emphasized by the time limit caused by the frost shepherds, which lead to a bit of a feeling of “we’re doomed” when moments like these happen.
Contempt is another mechanic that seems to instill a sense of uneasiness. You know that another player doesn’t like what you did, but due to the lack of communication, you might not know why. This adds to the uncertainty surrounding what other players are thinking and whether you can cooperate well enough to accomplish certain goals.
However, our group didn’t use this mechanic much. Again, this is likely an example of how our group’s prior emotions lead the game in a certain direction. I wasn’t feeling particularly emotionally invested in certain projects to place contempt, which may be because my goal was more about telling a fun story and less about accomplishing tasks. Additionally, I wasn’t familiar enough with the other players to jokingly say “I hate what you just did,” which may have also discouraged me from placing contempt.
While these mechanics were able to affect my emotions and set a specific tone, their ability to do so still seems subject to the player’s attitude, which is an interesting aspect about TTRPGs, and media in general, that I would like to keep in mind.
Closing
Overall, I had a very enjoyable time playing A Quiet Year. While our group made a story that was mostly humorous, I still felt some emotions like helplessness and dread that make sense given the context of the game’s narrative. This unit as a whole has sparked my interest in TTRPGs, and I hope to play a lot more in the future!
