When I think about moments in life where my eyes were opened to something perspective changing, it is a long list. Reading books, watching movies, having conversations with strangers and friends, witnessing moments in history, I am the kind of sponge that takes these things in and dives into self-reflection. Reading and playing My Life With Master easily falls within that category for me.
Memory is a hazy, imperfect thing, but I believe I got the book either the year it won or the just before it won the Diana Jones Award. It is a small, beautiful work that I devoured, and devoured again until I finally had the chance to play it. Reading and playing this elegant game forced some serious reckoning with myself and my preconceptions regarding games.
But let me back up a bit and share my favorite introduction to a game book...
Dear Reader take warning - go not incautiously forward into these pages, for they describe a roleplaying game about the horrific and dysfunctional ties that bind a monstrous Master and his or her minions. It is a game with a not-so-traditional style of play that could well give you the creeps... though other games may have not.
Now having weighed this caution, should you proceed with these rules I think you'll find the most chilling events of your games aren't so much inflicted by the GM upon the players, but rather, produced by them to the horror of all.
Will you laugh?... If you like that sort of thing.
Let that sink in for a minute. This game came out in 2003 when a million experimental modes of play were barely explored if explored at all. Games that engaged with these ideas didn't exist...
Or if they did, they leaned on the construct of Dungeons and Dragons. A fools errand that never, ever has worked.
Paul hits you right out of the gate with "this game is different" with very cryptic, yet mood setting statements. It certainly hit me right away. I knew then that I needed to shed my preconceived notions.
And you have to shed those notions immediately. The text and gameplay begins with everyone at the table co-creating the Master. There is no GM constructed story we all have to play through wishing they would just finish their fucking novel. There is no jumping into character creation in silos, creating elaborate backstories for the GM in hopes that your bat signal gets picked up in play.
No, you create the antagonist together. The quasi real character that the GM will have to embody and almost merge the duties of their role with how they play the character.
Oh, and by the way, the Master, and later your characters, the Minions, don't have any stats that make sense in the context of a traditional RPG.
It pretty much melted my brain and opened me up to new possibilities. Paul accidentally or accidentally on purpose shifted the ground beneath me.
He left me in a new land. A land of possibilities. A land where fear, and self-pity, and love, and every other human quality is something we can explore and play with...
And so I played a lot of games. I unlearned things and learning new things. I got to play with people who could pick up the game and force you to confront the human condition at the table.
I recently found the recording of part of a session of the game on video, and you can feel the tension grow as we are unwittingly pushing ourselves towards places we may not know we want to go. There is laughter and fun, but an undercurrent of discomfort.
That discomfort is where the power in the game lies.
I have found that the game forces me to reflected on aspects of myself. The roles we embody when we play games, even when at a remove, rarely stray far from who we are. With My Life With Master, after the game is over, and the dice are quiet, all you have are your memories of how the inner you manifested.
How did you explore the desire for love shadowed by personal self-loathing as a minion? As the master, how hard did you let your needs push the minions to acts of depravity? Are you comfortable with what happened at the table? With yourself and the things you drove your character to do?
Were you wrestling with your own demons or the demons of the characters?
It isn't a game you walk away from playing with that blissful ignorant satisfaction of slaying a dragon. The popcorn joy of a summer blockbuster letting your endorphins float you to your next thing. It is a game you walk away from noticing that you are carrying the weight of your own humanity. It is burdensome.
I think about the game a lot, if I am honest. I haven't played in years, but I drift back to the text when I hit a wall. Paul's terse prose and tight design have more than once helped me over a hump.
The game is special. It reflects a past, the past, and my past.
It is an early avant garde game that broke the mold of D&D. It is a seminal work that shaped the thinking of many people who participated in the Forge. It is a game that shifted my perspective multiple times.
It is a work of art to be loved and loathed in equal measure.
