Blood on the Clocktower: The post I meant to write a month ago. (part 4)

[magistrate]

LUDO-NARRATIVE DISSONANCE.

...part of the reason (not all of the reason) it's taken me so long to get around to this is that I don't really know what point I'm trying to make. None of this is intended as a criticism of Blood on the Clocktower; I don't think that a cohesive internal narrative would make the game better at what it's trying to be, and I don't think it suffers from not leaning into a narrative aspect.

That said, my confusion about where the narrative balance lay was one of the things that frustrated me and turned me off of the game when I first encountered it. Is that a problem, per se?

I do have to own the fact that I don't play a lot of social deduction games, and I also play very little human-human RP (as opposed to computer or console RPGs), and that BotC is also not really RP. Whatever precise subgenre of social deduction BotC falls into, it's not one whose conventions I'm familiar with.

I've mused before about the conventions of game formats and inessential weirdnesses – those things which are intuitive to in-groups and can form barriers to out-groups. In a computer game context, having a common set of conventions can help you get people who are familiar with them up to a higher level of complexity very quickly, at the expense of being accessible to people unfamiliar with them.

And coming into one genre, whether of games or other media, with the expectations of another can also set you at a disadvantage. Frex, if you were to hop over into the writing world and compare the genre conventions of commercial romance, hard science fiction, and literary fiction, you might not even be able to identify what was good craft for each genre if you'd come out of another one. In the context of romance, being able to effectively and engagingly deliver certain emotional beats, arcs, and dynamics is going to outvalue your ability to craft breathtaking prose or fluidly navigate and communicate complex scientific ideas.

Complaining that a hard science fiction story doesn't fully explore the emotional landscape of its characters and the implications of the plot on their relationships, to flip that around, is a bit like complaining that your saucepan is unwieldy when you try to pour boiling water into your mug for tea. Sure, a saucepan is capable of boiling water, and that water can be used for tea, and you can also find saucepans which have a spout on the side which would make it significantly easier to pour that water into a mug. But the little spout on the side is hardly a requisite component for a saucepan to be a good saucepan, and if you really want to make some tea, may I suggest a kettle?

So complaining that Blood on the Clocktower doesn't come across (to me, someone who identifies heavily as a writer) as particularly deft with its narrative elements seems like a misguided complaint.

So. As much as possible, I'm going to work on observing rather than complaining. I suppose this will be more of a set of travel notes on my journey of increasing familiarity with the game; notes on a few places that I stumbled; and points I found curious.



I discovered this game when I wandered unprepared into a stream and tried with increasing confusion to work out what the heck was going on.

I do not recommend this.

I recall that people were talking, and debating who other people were, and that players got executed, and other players died at night, and (from my confused, first-brush observations) those deaths didn't seem to affect them in any way. They'd wake in the morning, find out that they died, grumble about it, and then go off to chat with other players like it was business as usual.

And a lot of those chats were taking place in this frame of who people were, and all the characters (which are referred to as characters) have very strong archetypal names: the Sage, the Soldier, the Huntsman, the Farmer, the Chambermaid, the Seamstress, the King. So there were questions like, "Do we believe they're actually the Mayor?" or "They claimed to be the Fisherman," and it made very little sense.

I mean... you're in a town, says my confused first-time-viewer self. You've presumably lived in this town for a while. How do you not know who your own Mayor is? So much of this game is about trying to confirm or disconfirm people's stated identities, but in a narrative space, can't you just kind of tell who the Clockmaker is? Surely they're the one who's in their workshop day after day, making clocks!

I recall my experience of watching Markiplier play Presentable Liberty, a game in which the game's own mechanics directly contradict the story the game is trying to tell. (You're locked in a cell, presumably to protect you from a disease which has killed almost everyone on the outside. Your only source of human connection comes from letters which are slipped under your door. The most consistent of these letters comes from a distant friend, who's slowly making his way to you, hoping to reunite and possibly rescue you, but the distance between you shrinks painfully slowly. And yet... his letters keep reaching you? His physical letters, which have to be transported from his location to yours in some fashion? And who is slipping them under your door?) And having a game in which the central problem of never knowing who anyone is brought up a similar sort of dissonance: even in Mafia or Werewolf, you could see the logic of existing in a village and not knowing who was cursed to turn into a wolf at night; you could see the logic of living in a city and not knowing who's working for organized crime. But how do you live in a town and think to yourself, "Hmm, can I take them at their word that they're really the Town Crier?"

There's a great bit in one of the No Rolls Barred episodes where one character is trying to convince another that he is the balloonist:

Empath: And I have also been standing next to you both times [that I was told I was next to one evil player].
Balloonist: Yeah, but – yeah, but I'm the Balloonist.
Empath: <sarcasm>Ohh, okay!</sarcasm>
Balloonist: I don't know how else to – we're hundreds of feet in the air! I don't know how else to prove this to you!

It's hilarious, because it's the form of comedy where something presented to you with one implicit context suddenly snaps into a different one. (There's a great video where John Cleese discusses this.) Those contexts are the worlds of the Blood on the Clocktower game mechanics, where you'll almost never know definitively who you're talking to, and the world of the narrative set dressing, in which it's completely absurd to have that degree of suspicion and incredulity. It's funny because those two worlds are not compatible.

From an informed perspective, I'd say that the way to think about the characters in Blood on the Clocktower is more like the way you think about the pieces in Chess. Sure, there's a King, but the King has nothing to do with a tale of monarchy. Sure, there's a Bishop, but the Bishop has nothing to do with religion. Sure, there's a Knight, but the Knight is not tied in any way to quests or gallantry. They're symbols used as icons to provide mental hooks to hang game mechanics on.

But, you know, there aren't narrative accoutrements that accompany chess games. And as charming as it is, I wouldn't use psychomachia's " the ultimate test of cerebral fitness" as someone's first introduction to Chess.

From an uninformed perspective, I went searching for an authoritative text to tell me what the heck was going on in this game. I went to probably the most authoritative text available: the actual Blood on the Clocktower website.

The first big block of text on the main page of the Blood on the Clocktower site is, at current, this:

In the quiet village of Ravenswood Bluff, ‌a demon walks amongst you...

During a hellish thunderstorm, on the stroke of midnight, there echoes a bone-chilling scream.

The townsfolk rush to investigate and find the town storyteller murdered, their body impaled on the hands of the clocktower, blood dripping onto the cobblestones below.

A Demon is on the loose, murdering by night and disguised in human form by day. Some have scraps of information. Others have abilities that fight the evil or protect the innocent. But the Demon and its evil minions are spreading lies to confuse and breed suspicion.

In the quiet village of Ravenswood Bluff, ‌a demon walks amongst you...

Will the good townsfolk put the puzzle together in time to execute the true demon and save themselves? Or will evil overrun this once peaceful village?

So, coming in as a stranger who's seen a brief glimpse of confusing gameplay and is looking for signposts by which to orient myself, what I pick up on is that those first paragraphs are very strong in-world scene-setting. The hellish thunderstorm, the blood dripping onto the cobbles.

Scroll down to the "How to Play Survive" section, and it says "Blood on the Clocktower is a bluffing game enjoyed by 5 to 20 players on opposing teams of Good and Evil, overseen by a Storyteller player who conducts the action and makes crucial decisions", before giving a brief description of the gameplay.

At this point, what I've picked up on is this:

1. A glimpse of gameplay where people are discussing locations (conversations "in the Town Square", etc.) and referring to people with titles like King, Seamstress, etc.

2. A strong narrative and scene-setting voice in the pitch for the game.

3. The use of words like "characters", "Storyteller", etc.

And all of these things signpost to me that I'm looking at a narrative world, and I should be looking for an internal narrative logic if I want to understand what's going on. I was expecting a much heavier RP element, and a much more cohesive sense of the world.

I want to note now that this is not a game that was designed to be played online, and thus not designed to be streamed. The online tools which exist began as fan creations, though the creators of the game are adapting the online tool into an officially-sanctioned application. The first video on the Blood on the Clocktower YouTube channel was posted in 2018; this was not a game conceived or designed in the context of a COVID world where games and social activities had to rapidly adapt to online play in order to survive.

I'm not sure what encountering this game in its native habitat would have been. Attending a con, and seeing a session scheduled in one of the rooms? Seeing a flyer up at a games store? In any of those contexts, I would probably have been introduced to the game in a way that set its context better than wandering in on the middle of a stream.

So, again, I'm not sure that this is useful as a criticism (or even a critique) of the game, but I offer it as a reflection.

Compounding all of this confusion-or-complexity is the use of flavor text throughout the official material. (If you've read any of the character pages I've linked, you've probably seen the flavor text on the right-hand side. "Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful," says the Pacifist, a character in this game in which killing is the method by which the good team gathers information, in this script/edition which the Wiki describes as "a death extravaganza", wherein death is also frequently the mechanism or an unavoidable byproduct of gathering information, and wherein generally the only way to win is by murderating the correct person.)

And some Storytellers will lean into the flavor, and add more little flecks of narrative. The No Rolls Barred episodes of Blood on the Clocktower – particularly the ones where Tom is co-storytelling – tend to have lavish introductions, and the descriptions of deaths in the night (frex, "As you assemble once again around the Town Square, you find, waiting for you, spiralized into protein-packed strands like a bowl of necrotic noodles, the coiled remains of...") are such a phenomenon that one of the reward tiers on NRB's In-Person BotC Kickstarter was "We'll record one of the BOTC regulars waking up the town and describing your own unique (and horrible) demise, tailored specifically to you. Our version of a video shoutout."

So this is clearly a game which holds space for narrative, and which enjoys playing with narrative elements. But I would not class it as a narrative game. Telling the story of a Blood on the Clocktower game is more like telling the story of a Football game than a game of Dungeons & Dragons; tactics and plays feature more than characters or settings. (Twists, though, are a given.)

This is a fine space for a game to occupy, and I've enjoyed the crap out of Blood on the Clocktower as both a spectator and a participant. But figuring out that it was occupying this space was so, so confusing. The fact that I had to struggle to work out how to approach the game and its conventions did make me extremely irritated in the first stages of learning about it, and almost drove me away from trying to understand it at all.

And that would have been a shame. I would have missed out on a lot of niftiness, if I hadn't kept scratching at the irritation and dug into things enough to get a proper grounding in what was going on.

In conclusion, I suppose, I hope that if any of you choose to check out the game, you do so with some understanding of what it is and isn't trying to accomplish. And if you want to start watching other people play, in the name of comprehension please start watching a session from the beginning.