Front Page

Content

Authors

Game Index

Forums

Site Tools

Submissions

About

You May Also Like...

AL
Andi Lennon
September 15, 2021
Hot
MT
Matt Thrower
May 03, 2021
Hot
MT
Matt Thrower
April 26, 2021
Hot
AL
Andi Lennon
September 23, 2020
Hot
T
thegiantbrain
September 03, 2020
AL
Andi Lennon
August 19, 2020
Hot
T
thegiantbrain
August 14, 2020
MT
Matt Thrower
October 31, 2016
Hot
MT
Matt Thrower
September 18, 2016
Hot
MT
Matt Thrower
July 13, 2015
Hot
  • Interviews
  • Interview with Jason Morningstar, Designer of Fiasco and Co-Owner of Bully Pulpit Games

Interview with Jason Morningstar, Designer of Fiasco and Co-Owner of Bully Pulpit Games

Hot
A Updated
 Jason Morningstar

Game Information

There Will Be Games

In this Q & A, I talk to celebrated game designer Jason Morningstar about his design philosophy, his company's embrace of the Drip platform, and the intersection of play, history, and politics.

Andrew McAlpine: Jason, thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
 
Jason Morningstar: My pleasure!
 
AM: I’ve been a fan of your designs for a while but was inspired to reach out after spending some time with the recently released A Green and Narrow Bed, a one-shot game that centers on a gathering of Civil War widows who must determine how to confront their husbands’ killers. It’s a striking conceit that puts players into some harrowing, uncomfortable, and thrilling situations. Can you talk about how you came to this subject? How do you decide if a particular historical situation is “game worthy?”      
 
JM: Every historical situation is game worthy. People are innately interesting and history is full of messed up situations we are collectively forced to confront in the moment and in retrospect. The American Civil War might be slightly more full of messed up situations, and I've read a lot about it, so those sometimes come to the fore. The genesis of A Green and Narrow Bed comes from a few directions - Drew Gilpin Faust's book This Republic of Suffering, George Root's song The Vacant Chair (which supplied the title of the game), and a deep dive into the border skirmishes that preceded the war in Kansas and Missouri through first hand accounts, like letters in the American Memory collection at the Library of Congress. All this stuff got boiled into some questions orbiting the concepts of grief and retribution. Then I started asking questions about who and what and how. Who is grieving? What does retribution look like, and is it a foregone conclusion? How does this play out?
 
AM: A Green and Narrow Bed in some way feels like a companion piece to Carolina Death Crawl, your game about stranded Union soldiers fighting, dying, and debasing themselves across the American South. In that game players are encouraged to ask themselves what they are willing to stoop to in order to survive, while in A Green and Narrow Bed players are asked to reckon with the lasting effects of this kind of violence. How do you approach the use of violence in your games?
 
JM: My thoughts on violence in tabletop and live action games have evolved over the years. My current thinking is that violence needs to be grounded in meaning or I'm not interested. That's a baseline - no stupid sociopathic violence. Of course once a game is out of my hands I don't have any control over how it is approached and played, but I'm deeply, resolutely uninterested in pain as a punchline or as a way to make something trivial feel serious. I don't always succeed. In A Green and Narrow Bed that inflection point of violence is singular and momentous. The depravity and horror of Carolina Death Crawl also feels like it serves a purpose and is not something to revel in. 
 
AM: A Green and Narrow Bed was released as part of your Drip program, where fans are able to subscribe for a relatively small amount to get access to regular releases of Bully Pulpit’s smaller, more experimental games. Do you approach these Drip projects differently than your larger, traditionally distributed games?
 
JM: Drip (https://d.rip/bullypulpitgames) has been fantastic for us. I have a large backlog of "almost done" games, most of them small and fun but needed a little push to reach an acceptable state to share. Drip frees up enough of my time to get these weird little experiments over the finish line. It also gives me a direct channel for new things that don't really fit a traditional retail mold, which is great. 
 
AM: Has Drip’s subscription model had an effect on the way you engage with your fans and supporters?
 
JM: Drip gives me an opportunity to ask questions and solicit early feedback from people who are inclined to be responsive and are definitely well informed and smart, so that's a direct benefit. If you measure engagement by finished products, it is having a very large effect.
 
AM: I’m looking forward to the upcoming release of Fiasco in a Box, an updated take on your classic role-playing game. It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since Fiasco was originally released; what do you hope this new version of the game will accomplish?
 
JM: The new version is really exciting to me! It distills a decade of lessons learned to speed up and streamline play and has been well received in playtests so far. I think it is far more accessible than the previous incarnation, and presents the game in a way that makes sense to someone excited about trying roleplaying but unfamiliar with the peculiarities of the form, which are many and unstated. I hope it will get picked up by curious, weird people who "get" board and card games, or social party games, and want to try something adjacent but slightly different and rewarding in a different way. 
 
AM: One of my favorite things about Fiasco (and many of your other games) is its relationship with failure. Many role-playing games put players in a position where they are trying to acquire power in order to succeed at various challenges; success means advancement, while failure brings the game to a halt. Your designs, though, seem to gleefully embrace failure as a means of moving the game forward. What are your thoughts on failure and weakness as they relate to game design?   
 
JM: Thanks for this thoughtful question. I think you are correct. My relationship with power and authority in games is tempered by my experience in theatrical improvisation and a heavy dose of live action roleplaying. In both of these formats, the real "game of the scene" is often sniffing out power and status and then playing against it. In larp it is called playing to fail or, more positively, playing to lift. In improv it is just agreement and endowment with an eye toward status - I stole the term "tilt" from Keith Johnstone, as a matter of fact. 
 
AM: This connection between theatrical improv and gaming makes sense to me. In my own experience, I’ve had a lot of success playing your games with folks from a theater or performing arts background who have never done any kind of tabletop gaming before. Conversely, I’ve found that folks with a more traditional gaming background can struggle in a free-form storytelling environment and have to “unlearn” certain gamey behaviors. Are there lessons or practices that the gaming community can learn from the improv community (or vice versa)?
 
JM: So many. Beyond very basic stuff like agreement and endowment, I think there's tremendous value - which I try to leverage in various ways - in respecting and deferring to the collective brilliance of the play group. You see this in improv, where you can rely on your fellow players to help edit a scene or to provide a hook or offer you something when you have nothing. There's no shame in saying, effectively, "team, I have nothing here, what's the most interesting thing that could happen?" and just working it out with a table full of beautiful brains instead of relying on your own innate but extremely limited genius. Improv performers can and do benefit from tabletop play, which is, essentially, a very complicated "game" in the improv sense - there's a framework we play within, and in really good games that framework provides for emergent narrative in fun and surprising ways that honor and enhance everyone's contributions.
 
AM: Bully Pulpit has maintained a steady release of new games since The Shab-al-Hiri Roach was published all the way back in 2006. What changes have you seen in yourself as a designer over this period of time? What kinds of games are you most interested in making these days?
 
JM: I've been making a lot of live action games, which are informed by my tabletop roots but really splash around in the strengths of the medium - the prosocial feeling of connection and deep embodiment you get from fully inhabiting a character, moving around, jumping and crawling. In fact I feel I may be spending too much time in the larp world! It's a pretty sweet place to hang out if you enjoy quick hits of emotion and complex social situations that can spring up easily and with little preparation. I've changed a lot and look at my early games as part of their time, really - The Shab Al-Hiri Roach is charming but takes six hours to play as written, which seems really outlandish today. 
 
AM: In an interview you did with Meghan Dornbrock on the Modifier podcast, you said something that stuck with me: “We really should be making and playing games that embody our ideals.” Looking back at your catalog of games, do you see any themes or ideas that persist throughout your body of work? 
 
JM: I think I want people to examine and appreciate the past for all the obvious reasons, and to look at the absolutely amazing history we all share as a well to draw from. I don't really understand the impulse for fantasy and reflexive abstraction that seem so common. Some of my games are a direct commentary on that impulse. I feel like I'm also drawn toward interrogating injustice and human weakness. Lately I've been really trying to make games that are engaging and fun but also didactic (like WINTERHORN) or celebrate emotional palettes beyond misery and brutality (like this month's Drip release, Deep Love). 
 
AM: I’m fascinated by the way your games engage with the present political moment, either in silly ways (such as in your competitive representative-calling game, Phones of Glory) or serious ways (such as the aforementioned WINTERHORN, a game about the tactics governments use to oppress activist groups). What relationship do you see between gaming and civic engagement?
 
JM: Well, I'd like to see more. Right now I'm doing a deep dive into Augusto Boal, who is obviously way ahead of us on combining theater, politics and play. In my experience play is a great way to teach and to learn. Engagement is high, retention is high. People love games and understand games. One of my consulting projects was to deliver some content to nursing students that was simultaneously boring and stressful, and as soon as I told them we'd be learning it in a game they were very excited, and they played hard (and retained the material). I feel like we're just scratching the surface on methods of playful civic engagement that utilize what we've learned designing tabletop and live action games. I have a few "white whale" projects - games I want to make but don't know how to yet - and one of them is a tabletop game that teaches the principals of non-violent direct action in a way that is very fun and not at all didactic. 
 
AM: Thanks again for taking the time to thoughtfully engage with these questions. One last thing: what can we look forward to from Bully Pulpit in 2019?
 
JM: Fiasco in a Box! That is a huge project for us and taking up all our time! But we have some cool surprises coming as well. 

There Will Be Games  Jason Morningstar

 Jason Morningstar
Andrew  McAlpine (He/Him)
Associate Board Game Reviewer

Andrew McAlpine is a writer and teacher living in Northampton, MA. When he’s not gaming, he’s probably obsessing over poetry and music. He’s also a member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets Theater, where he writes, acts, and directs.

Articles by Andrew

 Jason Morningstar
Andrew  McAlpine
Associate Board Game Reviewer

Articles by Andrew

Log in to comment

Nashorn80's Avatar
Nashorn80 replied the topic: #291200 31 Jan 2019 05:23
I find that as I've grown older I don't enjoy vanilla D&D as much, partly because violence has very little consequence- at least for the players.
A lot of players are playing for escapism rather than enagagement and emotional conflict, and the grounded reality of violence is less appealing than action movie violence.
GorillaGrody's Avatar
GorillaGrody replied the topic: #291203 31 Jan 2019 07:31
Good interview!

I’ve never said no to a Morningstar\BP jam, though over time I’ve started to develop some issues that this interview clarifies for me.

At the end of Fiasco or Carolina Death Crawl, I’ve often felt as if I’ve performed a set of activities rather than played a game. I keep waiting for that magic moment where every one looks at each other and says “wow, that was great” and instead it’s always more like “hey, we just performed some promising activities.” Performing activities deriving from acting exercises is not equivalent to having staged a play. In theater, warm-up exercises are there to help you flexibly serve a solid theatrical result, usually a script. Even in looser, avant-garde forms, there is a finished result, and an audience who receives that result and sends feedback back to the players. Bully Pulpit games can, like improv exercises done for their own sake, feel meandering and pointless.

In this respect, his explicit distaste for fantasy makes sense to me as a way of explaining his design philosophy. He has a firm attitude about “being didactic” but doesn’t mention ideology. Fantasy, in fiction and in games, always has rules, and uses those rules to generate dramatic reversals and revolutionary change. In realism as an aesthetic form, however, one just has a series of misfortunes and is told to figure it out for oneself.

It’s like getting work outsourced to you from an indifferent boss, or being told that Kamala Harris is the best choice for president because hers is the best narrative we could derive out of careful polling (which after all is the apotheosis of realism). Holy shit, yeah...that’s what his games feel like. They feel like I just got through a round of exit polling about what kind of game I’d like to have been playing in the first place.

Give me fantasy, please! And the roll of a die to use as incontrovertible leverage when attempting to prove our shared fantasy true! I instinctively distrust anyone who distrusts fantasy (unless what they mean is that they’re tired of Tolkienesque tropes, which, yeah, but it’s not the same thing).

OTOH, what he has to say about violence as a medium of exchange in games is something I’m going to carry with me into my next RPG. It’s a great thing to point out.

In all, he seems like a smart and feisty guy. I like him.
Shellhead's Avatar
Shellhead replied the topic: #291213 31 Jan 2019 08:45
I first heard about Fiasco nearly a decade ago, and I wouldn't mind trying it. It sounds like an experimental approach to role-playing that really emphasizes the role-playing. But every attempt at describing the gameplay always makes Fiasco sound very meta. And the people that I roleplay with tend to be old-school roleplayers. Their go-to games will always be D&D and Call of Cthulhu, and anything else is a hard sell. Our games tend to be more focused on tactical roll-playing than actual role-playing. But I have also done a fair amount of diceless role-playing, which seems closer to the intent of games like Fiasco. There is a strong element of yes-and-[insert complication] resolution that often leads to better stories than dice-rolling.
Erik Twice's Avatar
Erik Twice replied the topic: #291217 31 Jan 2019 08:53
Fiasco is one hundred perfect dice-less roleplaying with no rules telling you what you can or cannot do. So it is completely opposed to "rollplaying" in an old school manner.
Gary Sax's Avatar
Gary Sax replied the topic: #291224 31 Jan 2019 09:49
This is an amazing interview. That also tells me I'm not super interested in chasing down his games (that's a compliment!).
GorillaGrody's Avatar
GorillaGrody replied the topic: #291247 31 Jan 2019 14:21

Erik Twice wrote: Fiasco is one hundred perfect dice-less roleplaying with no rules telling you what you can or cannot do. So it is completely opposed to "rollplaying" in an old school manner.


In fairness, Fiasco requires a whole bucket of dice, and whole set of modules to be printed out. For a rule set that’s meant to translate beyond “gamerness,” it really requires a lot of minute preparation. Probably a boxed set is a good idea.
AndrewMcAlpine's Avatar
AndrewMcAlpine replied the topic: #291394 03 Feb 2019 10:49

GorillaGrody wrote: In fairness, Fiasco requires a whole bucket of dice, and whole set of modules to be printed out. For a rule set that’s meant to translate beyond “gamerness,” it really requires a lot of minute preparation. Probably a boxed set is a good idea.


Yeah, we didn't go into it in the interview, but from what I gather Fiasco in a Box will be a truly pick-up and play game--no dice, no handwritten setup, just shuffle and go, which I think is a good move to help this game reach a larger audience. That said, I think the Fiasco setup is one of the most fun parts of the game, so it may a lose a little of that magic.