How Breaking the Ice led me to Shooting the Moon

Last year, I read and even got to play Emily Care Boss's Breaking the Ice, which was a revolutionary game designed for two players to play out the first three dates in a couple's relationship. I still think it is one of the best RPGs I've seen to discuss romance and relationships.

So, of course I had to read the second game in her romance trilogy, Shooting the Moon. While Breaking the Ice is about two people getting to know each other, Shooting the Moon is about that other classic romance formula, the love triangle.

From a mechanical angle, Shooting the Moon is definitely simpler than Breaking the Ice. Character creation is much simpler, which is a shame because I thought that the word association chain and the switch in Breaking the Ice are particularly brilliant.

Scenes in Shooting the Moon have a simple structure of call and response.  The active player sets the scene with the opposing player offering obstacles and complications. To be perfectly honest, it's a common structure in GM free games and it works very well.

But one of Shooting the Moon's greatest strengths, as well as something really sets it apart from Breaking the Ice, is the fact that it is structured around a love triangle. That creates a very strong dynamic of conflict and competition.

One of the great strengths and weaknesses and hurdles of Breaking the Ice is that in the end goal is rather nebulous. Is the relationship going to work? No can be a perfectly satisfying and valid answer. Exploring feelings can be complicated.

But, at the start of Shooting the Moon, you create specific and concrete goals for your characters. In a two player game, you are both competing for the same love interest. Even in the three player game, with someone playing the love interest, they have their own goal.

That makes for a simpler and, to be fair, probably more shallow story. To be frank, it is also more safe. I know a lot more people who would feel comfortable with the structure of Shooting the Moon than Breaking the Ice. Truth to tell, I know more people who I would be comfortable playing Shooting the Moon with.

Romance isn't a genre that I'm terribly interested in and a genre I wouldn't have thought could work as a RPG a few years ago. Emily Karen Boss, though, has done an amazing creating innovative games about romance. Shooting the Moon is a short form game that requires no game master, just a willingness to compete for love.

If John Hughes directed a RPG

If you were looking for a role playing game that let you relive movies like Sixteen Candles or Some Kind of Wonderful, Unrequited fits that bill. In fact, that's pretty much all you're going to do with it.

Unrequited is a short form role-playing game for two players. One player will play the Infatuated, who is in love with the Crush, an NPC. The other player plays the Friend, who supports the Infatuated but is secretly in love with the Infatuated. 

Yeah, you can see where this is going.

You play out three scenes, heightening the Infatuated's obsession with the Crush and depending the Friend's love for the infatuated. Throughout the scenes, you develop dice pools that will help determine who ends up with who at the end of the game.

One of the things that I don't like about how you earn those dice. You get them by performing very specific actions during the scene. While the rules state that the setting can be anywhere, the actions are really, really geared towards a John Hughes style 80s teen movie. Seriously, I can't see using this rule set with any other kind of setting.

What I do like is that the Friend can choose to give their dice pool to the Infatuated to help them win the love of the Crush, sacrificing their love for the desires of the Crush. It's pretty standard for the genre but it is the most dramatic choice in the game. Perhaps the only dramatic choice.

In short form games, particularly narratively driven games, I do think that it is important to have a strong framework. A lot of games, you go in knowing what kind of story they are trying to tell and the framework helps you tell that kind of story. In the case of Unrequited, I feel like the structure is so rigid that it's telling me how the story is to be told in addition to what the story will be. In fact, if we were given a very specific setting and three pregenerated characters for the three roles, I think that it would bother me less because the rigid structure would make more sense. 

Unrequited suffers from comparison to a number of games. For me, the most obvious one is Breaking the Ice. Two player, romance games aren't part of my RPG interest but the depth and many interesting choices in Breaking the Ice would make it my game of choice. 

Since Unrequited is part of the Indie Mixtape Megamix, I also can't help but compare it the game right before it on the play list, A Courteous Night, another romantic short form for two. And one that I feel allows for more interesting choices and more freedom, despite also having a very tight structure.

Interestingly enough, although there are other was not very much alike, since the scenes in Unrequited are all conversations, I find myself reminded of Until We Sink. That's a Nordic LARP that consists of nothing but conversations around the table. Making it a tabletop LARP, I guess. 

Unrequited isn't a game that I can see myself playing, even if I was in the mood for a romantic game. It's certainly not a game I can see playing twice.

Breaking the Ice is about creating your own romantic movie

Breaking the Ice tackles what is one of the most logical and most difficult subjects for a two-player role playing game: romance and relationships.

Seriously, romance can be either uncomfortable or completely unnecessary for someone to play. Do you really want to play a game about developing a romance with a power gamer who insists on always playing a ninja or an elf in every game, even when it's Bunnies and Burrows? Can I see a show of hands for everyone who wants to do that?

(One, two, three, four... I didn't think I had that many readers. Okay, maybe I'm the exception to the rule.) 

And I have to admit, I have seen a number of two-player specific role playing games out there. So there is an audience out there. So, since I'm looking at two-a player games, I figure I should take a peek at the genre.

Breaking the Ice is one of the more respected games in the genre, at least as near as I can tell. Mind you, I may have just set myself up to read the rest of Emily Care Boss's Romance trilogy :D

Breaking the Ice has you create two characters and then explore how their first three dates go, including seeing if there would be any more dates after that or if they should have called it quits after the second date.

Boss does two things with the game that really struck me.

First of all, she frames the game in terms of a movie, using many movie examples and using the movie rating system to help players understand the structure of the game. This is great because it absolutely gives the players a context to understand the story they're creating. And, since this can be a touchy and uncomfortable subject matter, but also creates some comforting distance.

I'll freely admit that Boss won some points with me by making several references to Bringing Up Baby. Not only did it help define the romantic comedy as a genre and is a great movie besides, I'm a cat lover. Who doesn't want to babysit a leopard?

Second, Boss is extremely adamant  about defining limits. In order for both people to have fun, people have to either define what the comfort levels are or how far outside of their comfort levels that willing to go. If both parties want a NC – 17 movie with graphic sex and possibly even graphic violence, that's fine. But both parties have to be willing to go for that.

Honestly, this feels like a reoccurring trait in Boss's work, making sure that everyone feel safe with in the game. And, frankly, I think that's a very important thing to establish.

For me at least, the most interesting part of Breaking the Ice is the character creation.

It starts with the switch. The players define one or two things that are different about each other. Could be gender, age, orientation, ethnicity, etc. You then make the characters different in that way. THEN, you switch! You play the character who is opposite you.

It's a super clever way of mixing things up and making that change meaningful.

Each player picks their character's favorite color. The two players take turns developing word association chains for each color. They then build the characters personalities and lives out of those words, using as much flexibility as they need to keep it fun and interesting.

After that, the dates consist of the players taking turns actively describing the setting and action while the other player responds and awards dice for good choices and complications. Each date consists of four to six scenes. At the end of each scene, the active player rolls dice to see if they can heighten attraction and compatibility.

You earn dice through attractive ratings and compatibility ratings (which, of course, you have to build through earlier dice rolls) but also through bonus dice you get from the other player and compilation dice by throwing in plot twists. At least in the early turns, bonus dice and conflict dice will be most of your pool.

After the third date, you check out what the attraction and compatibility levels are and figure out what the long term chances are for this relationship.

Every role playing game can live and die depending on the people playing it. In the case of Breaking the Ice that seems stronger than most. On the one hand, both players have to be willing to give the relationship a chance. On the other hand, if folks are too quick to give bonus dice or make the conflicts too light, you won't have an interesting story.

Conflict dice are a big enough deal (potentially half your initial dice pool!) that you have to generate conflicts but I really wish there was more mechanics to throw in screwball curves. Fiasco, for instance, has light dice and dark dice, to determine the degree of failure and success.

Breaking the Ice, in all honestly, isn't a game that really interests me but that's just because this isn't a niche I'm into. On the other hand, if I was going to play a game where I was reenacting a screwball romantic comedy, Breaking the Ice does seem like to would do a great job at that.