Gaming In Constrained Universes

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Played a bit of My Life With Master last week with Bryant. I hadn't played a RolePlayingGame? in ages. It angled away from whole group interaction a little more than i enjoyed, but was otherwise quite fun.

Nineteenth century setting. The game master plays an Evil Master (tm), and each player plays a minion (think Igor of FrankenStein fame). First we developed the Master together: we came up with a former ballet dancer, panned by the critics who never understood his genius. Now he uses and abuses us minions to suck the emotional juices out of the hapless townfolk with his diabolical gadgetry, and plans to use the juices to enhance our ballet performance, under his direction of course, all to Show Them!

Another group's experience with the game is described and discussed on The Forge.

My usual bias is to open-ended game settings, but i liked the tightly constrained storyline (the game always ends with one or more of the players' characters killing the master). It frees the game master and players to focus on the moment, because there's no worry about the long-term plot. Reminds me of some of Peter Lindberg's postings in recent months about the value of constrained universes in programming.

Of course the plot of the game totally reinforces the MythOfRedemptiveViolence?, but as i was acculturated in that myth, i suppose that's what makes it so familiar and satisfying. Hm, wonder if anyone's tried to 'break' the game by role-playing compassion with the Master to see if that changes his/her ways.