The Triggermen: a 200-word ttrpg after Harold Pinter

I made a game for the 2024 200-word RPG jam on tumblr. Wasn't planning to! The great thing about a small jam like this is that sometimes ideas do just spring forth at 12:30 AM. Here it is.

Harold Pinter, as the suavely terrifying Mr. Goldberg, gives a friendly smile to his new (?) acquaintance Stanley in the BBC televised version of The Birthday Party.

The Triggermen: A Pinteresque TTRPG 

Choose a man. Enter the room. Sit down at the table. Each note 3 Pride, +1 for the last to enter.

The man with most Pride, if any, is Dominant. Group decisions must always be agreed by a Dominant man.

He now says: "This is too much, too long. Somebody ought to sort it out."

+1 Pride when you detail injustices against you. -1 Pride when you let insult or injury pass unchallenged. 

Decide what to do about the situation. You may speak and move normally, except for violence. Describe all violence, then participants move to their final positions.

You may enter or leave the room. Play occurs only in the room.

The game ends when nobody is in the room.

The Men:

Frank: early 30s. Insult or injury you inflict strips Pride even if challenged.

James: early 20s. +1 Pride when you contradict a past statement unchallenged.

Michael: late 50s. +1 Pride when you speak of past triumphs.

Edmonston: late 30s. +1 Pride when you rearrange the furniture and nobody replaces it.

Winston: late 20s. You always have 3 Pride.

Sam: teenager. +1 Pride when praised. -1 Pride when you make an original suggestion.

Commentary (not included in wordcount)

This started out as a game in the vein of my academic interest in Northern Irish Loyalist paramilitaries. A game about a group of aggrieved (semi-competent at best) men gathering in a nondescript place to plan poorly-targeted vengeance.

I also really like the plays of Harold Pinter where groups of nondescript (mostly) men have ambiguous and threatening conversations and occasionally attack each other, and I slowly realised this was that so I just made it that in the end. I think I covered all needful mechanics pretty well for an ominous and oddly amusing experience to be had by all. Negotiate, wheedle, show compassion all you like, but you're all here to do something and to get anything done - at least the way you want it done - you're going to need to put the others down or perform the most Righteous fury and personal sacrifice. The game drags you into interminable mutual suffering until a decision is made to turn that outwards on whoever your other is.

It should be noted: this isn't a Pinter play simulator. In those, the agents of threatening forces generally turn up in somebody's apparently-normal life and expose its lurking weirdnesses. This is more the meeting those agents have before doing that, where they're revealed to be exactly as riddled with issues.

The game deliberately makes no comment on the world's realities, even down to period or geography. (Though the names do have echoes of Pinter's British 60s-70s and of Ulster Scots families in the same period.) Players can say whatever they like about the world, and there's no requirement that others roll with it. Truth and meaning are secondary to power relations; indeed, whoever is Dominant can functionally control them if the group needs to agree on the facts. The game's name still implies paramilitary violence but that isn't essential: what issue the men want to sort out and how may or may not be established in play.

Obviously there's a bit of gender commentary here too. Pinter reads to me as very much deconstructing masculine norms of emotion, violence, and power, through heightening them to the point of absurdity. I don't know that I have much to add here except that most people who've been in a male-dominated social space have probably seen versions of these dynamics of constant struggle to control others and preserve one's own ego play out. To greater and lesser extent, of course. Hopefully most don't do [nebulous violence] about it. Though given recent events...

All of the men are based on some Pinter character or another - I.e. you get minimal information on them but a strong personality/mechanic that hopefully causes a vague idea of them as a more complete person to emerge. I won't spoil the experience of using them yourself and seeing what happens by laying out my own thoughts too much and priming you. Per the man himself: "start off with people, who come into a particular situation. ... I'm convinced that what happens in my plays could happen anywhere, at any time, in any place, although the events may seem unfamiliar at first glance." ["Writing for Myself," in Plays: Two].

If somebody actually plays this, I'll be overjoyed, so please let me know!