[Lady Blackbird]: It’s Not Over til the Old Guy Gets His Questions Answered

I’ve been asked to post about the end of our Lady Blackbird rpg series.

You’ll want to read these two other posts first, for context. Which means three very long posts altogether, just to unpack a wonky ending to a wonderful game.

AP Report from Daniel
AP Report from Rich

It’s been really difficult to unpack this situation in my head and then express it honestly while also avoiding pettiness and selfishness. I have not been able to do it via an AP report, as Daniel and Rich have done. I couldn’t even begin to try to express the ending of the session from Naomi’s (my character’s) POV. Besides, I think the two overviews of what happened in the fiction really cover it well, so I’ve got nothing of value to add to that, in Naomi’s voice or otherwise.

I was very unhappy with the last ten minutes of the session and I spared no passion in saying so to everyone at the end of the game – but I was too worked up at the time to give a good accounting of WHY I was so unhappy. And I owe that accounting to my friends Daniel and Arnold, because I yelled and cussed and ranted at them.

How do I maturely and helpfully express what kicked me in the junk? I think I’ve hit upon a good way to manage it without further whining and ranting. Here goes:

First, I believe players should have agency over their characters’ choices. I imagine anyone who knows me is aware of that – but it is still important to this issue and so I’m saying it up front. Player characters should HAVE choices, and players should be able to author those choices into the fiction and have them stick. I’m not saying the player gets to decide outcomes/results/consequences, but to choose what her character intends or desires to do in the first place, that’s sacred to me.

If a player decides that his character thinks the other protagonists are a bunch of destructive, violent, unprincipled yahoos without conscience – or another player decides HIS character is not appreciated by his deluded best buddy for the sacrifice he’s just made on his friend’s behalf – and therefore both characters choose to turn their backs on the other protagonists and walk away, well, I strongly believe those choices should be worked into the fiction.

So I’m not about to come out and declare that either Arnold or Daniel misused their agency – they didn’t. Choosing to exit stage left is a viable choice, at any point in the ongoing fiction. I don’t get to trump that and I don’t get to whine about it. So, I can’t point to their choices as the source of my dissatisfaction.

I’ve wrangled for days over how to authentically express myself without resorting to blaming their choices. It eluded me, until I was doing some free-writing in my art journal and the following quote – which happens to be one of my favorites from Judd Karlman – flowed out of my pen: “Good characters aren’t based around a statement; they’re based around a question.”

I think that’s very true. Furthermore, I think that characters working through their questions and making meaningful choices in the course of that effort are the essence of what – to me – makes for interesting fiction in rpgs. I am specifically using the word “fiction” instead of “story” because I don’t want to get this caught up in a loop of arguing what makes good story in a roleplaying game and/or whether creating ‘a good story’ ought to be the conscious focus of the players at the table. I don’t care.

I care about addressing questions. I care about being entertained, surprised, shocked, and elated in the process of my friends and me collaborating to address the questions posed in the game’s premise, the questions posed by the characters’ issues, and the questions raised in play through the ongoing fiction.

And that is the core of why I was upset at the “ending” of our Lady Blackbird series. To put it simply, way too many of the questions that I was socketed into were left unanswered.

For example, here are the questions posed by the game’s premise, pulled right from the text:

• How will Lady Blackbird and the others escape the Hand of Sorrow?
• What dangers lie in their path?
• Will they be able to find the secret lair of the Pirate King Uriah Flint?
• If they do, will Flint accept Lady Blackbird as his bride?
• By the time they get there, will she want him to?

I’m not suggesting a play group MUST follow the path suggested in the premise. It is entirely possible – and fine – if questions come up in play and become more interesting than the original premise, and following those threads takes things off in a different direction. But in my opinion, that’s not what we had here. Until the last ten minutes of play the original questions were still the driving force of our overall fiction. (A couple of minor differences, sure. As of the scene in the tavern between Naomi, the Lady, and Vance we were no longer wondering if the Lady would become Flint’s BRIDE – but I’d venture to say it was still immensely important to address whether or not Flint would be her ally, as the Lady suggested, or if he’d turn on her, reject her, or even possibly hold her as a hostage and sell her back to her family and/or Count Carlowe?

So, in my opinion the overall through line suggested in the premise had only been solidified and made more dramatic by the other questions that arose in play. Rich has suggested in his report that maybe he was dancing on the edge of railroading, but he was wrong – the objective progress of our fiction was very strongly aimed at finding Flint, discovering what he’d do in reaction to reuniting with Lady Blackbird, and seeing what The Lady would choose to do in return – and by extension what the other protagonists would choose in that ultimate moment as well.

Those questions were not answered.

And then there are the questions posed by character issues (from the sheet & born out of our play):

• Vance
  • Will his secret longing for the Lady be revealed or abandoned?
  • Will he choose to complete his job, deliver the Lady, then walk away, or will love trump pride?

I think these are separate questions and that answering the first one does not resolve the second one – it only makes it more interesting. We got the answer to the first question. The second question was not answered.

• Lady Blackbird
  • Is she in love with Vance?
  • If she is, will that trump her ultimate choice regarding Flint?
  • What’s she really up to? Is she merely trying to dodge an arranged marriage while still determined to win back her place among the nobles, or is there something more to her quest to get to Flint?
  • Does she really think the pirate king will be her loyal ally and protector? Or does she have something more up her sleeve?
  • Is she in love with Naomi?
  • Is she actually just a manipulative minx with dark secrets and darker motives, as Arkham has suggested? Are Naomi and Vance being fooled?

In my opinion, none of these questions were answered. And by the way, a couple of them were raised in the first place by Arkham and Snargle.

I originally planned to actually write down every question that I could think of relative to our series, and then point out how many of them were left unaddressed or unanswered. I now realize that is overkill. Suffice to say that there are many other questions about the characters and the fiction that were important to me – several questions about Naomi, about Briarea, and, in fact, about Arkham and Snargle, too. Interesting, important, relevant questions that came into the game, floated around, and ultimately got left unaddressed. Really, though, the most relevant ones are mentioned above and pretty much all required an ultimate confrontation with Uriah Flint ON STAGE, tipping all the dominoes, pushing the buttons, forcing choices that would address the big questions.

But the game ended before we ever got to Flint, before the important dominoes ever got tipped, before the really important choices were made.

I realize we had to end the series that night, and we were under the gun to get it done. It was an extremely tall order in the best of circumstances. I realize there are real-life issues that impact upon some of the fiction choices we make. I also realize that we’re dealing with an apparent issue where Rich, Chuck and I thought things were one way, and Daniel and Arnold thought they were another way. If we all open up about that and work through it, we might learn a lot of things, I dunno.

But in terms of Daniel and Arnold’s assertion that the game had a satisfying and viable ending – I can’t agree. Too many questions unanswered. Important questions, play-driving questions.

Now, all that upset me and disappointed me and frustrated me, yes. This was one of my favorite games of all time, and it was epic and intense and funny and revealing and exhausting. And then two players made a choice – a viable choice well within their rights – to have their characters walk away from the group. Fine. But due to circumstances of timing, character skill, and emotional resonance, in my opinion that choice effectively ended the game – or at the very least that choice severed my connection to the fiction enough to force me to concede an ending. And Daniel and Arnold, the two players who made that choice, have described that they feel the ending they brought about was a good one, a satisfying one.

No way, dudes, sorry. It was a satisfying ending for your characters, perhaps – but not for the other characters, and not for the three other players.

Too many unanswered questions.

So that’s that.

*** Oh, I have an epilogue about “epilogues”. When the last scene was over, and Chuck and I started grumbling, the way that Daniel and Arnold suggested we handle our unanswered questions was to each narrate an epilogue telling what happens to our characters after the parting of ways played out at the end. Daniel includes his epilogue in his AP report, and Arnold did a similar one where Snargle went back to find Javert and Javert shot him.

I think Daniel and Arnold were totally sincere in offering that as a good idea – but here’s why I was so upset about that:

Put simply, if I wanted to narrate that sort of stuff, I’d write a story. I’m in this to be surprised and entertained by the questions, choices, and spontaneity of things as they happen in play. Especially when the play in question is the climactic domino-tipping confrontation that everything has been leading toward. So for future reference, I will never choose to narrate something that would be more interesting to play, even – and especially – under the circumstances we had going.