One Can Have Her

One Can Have Her is written by my fellow wrnu-ite Jonas Ferry. It's set in the grim, black-and-white world of film noir, and concerns the struggles of a few men on the wrong side of the law, and the woman they all love. The game has its own website over here, and it can be bought as a pdf for $10.

The premise of OCHH is simple enough: The characters are all film noir-stereotypes. They all have a goal that they strive to fulfill, a horrible crime in their past, and an enemy that stands in their way. And they're all in love with the same woman, the femme fatale. The game concerns the characters' struggle to defeat their enemy, reach their goal, avoid the repercussions of their crime and, of course, to get the femme fatale. As the title suggests, only one character can reach this desirable outcome.

Chargen: Chargen is completely non-mechanical. You simply decide your character's name, his crime, his enemy and his film noir stereotype, plus his relation to the femme fatale. All characters are male, as are all important NPCs except for the femme fatale. This is a man's world. All choices are made from lists of ten options each, pre-generated by the GM. Example lists accompany the game, but GMs may make their own. Chargen is deliberately kept simple; the idea is to flesh out characters through actual play.

Chargen does not tie in to the resolution mechanic in any way, which is fine with me. You don't have "skills" or "attributes" that affect your chances to win conflicts, and in my opinion, this is just as it should be in a game like this. After all, in a co-narrative game like OCHH, resolution is about plot management, not about simulating the characters' in-game abilities. In this regard, OCHH is very intelligently designed - moreso than many an indie rpg I've read. I think many game designers would succumb to the temptation to throw in a couple of "aspects" or "talents" or whatever that wouldn't contribute to the game, but Jonas Ferry doesn't. Kudos for that!

Resolution Mechanic: The resolution rules use cards. Each player begins play with a hand of seven cards. In a conflict with an NPC, the GM gets his own hand, and the party identified as the "agressor" starts by playing some cards on the table. You can play a single card, a pair, a three-of-a-kind and so on. The opponent must beat the value of your cards and the number of cards you played. I'm at somewhat of a loss as to the exact purpose of this mechanic. It provides an extra tactical element in the game, but why it was included, I don't know. Perhaps Jonas Ferry might shed some light on this?

Every conflict has exactly one "agressor", and he is the only one allowed to define his stakes before the conflict. If he loses, he is not allowed to start a new conflict over the same stakes later in the game. That means that if you try to kill someone and fails, you can't try again later. The purpose of this rule seems to be to keep the story moving forward in new directions, and perhaps to give a sense of "spiral of failure"; more often than not, the stories told in OCHH is tragical, and seeing one's character losing one hope after another could certainly contribute to this. I think I like this rule.

Face cards have special effects. When you play them, the conflict immediately ends, and depending on whether you played a jack, a queen or a king, different events take place in the story. If you play a jack, the police arrives. A queen signifies the arrival of the femme fatale, and the king means that the enemy of one of the participants appears on the scene. This might mean that the victory goes to the player of the face card, through the actions of whoever just entered the scene, or that the conflict is interrupted and can be picked up again at a later time. This is a nice rule that guarantees that the femme fatale and the characters' enemies never become unimportant, and gives the players a certain amount of direct control over them.

Narrative Power: Narrative power is distributed in a fairly traditional pattern. Players control their characters and may frame scenes. The GM controls all NPCs.

Endgame: As players use up the cards on their hands, the game approaches its principal moment: ratting. According to Jonas Ferry, OCHH was concieved as an rpg based on "the prisoners dilemma" of game theory fame. In the ratting phase, each player secretly writes down if he will rat. The rules are unclear on whether it is possible to rat on several other characters. In any case: Each character ratted on goes to jail for his crime or is destroyed by his enemy. If one single character avoids being ratted on, he gets to attain his goal and the girl of his dreams, the femme fatale. If two or more characters avoid being ratted on, neither of them achieves his goals or gets the girl, but at least they stay out of jail.

Now, the thing with the prisoner's dilemma is precisely that it isn't a dilemma. Game theory-wise, there is only one reasonable course of action: to rat! On the other hand, the ratting phase of OCHH isn't a real prisoners dilemma, so it's all the same. In any case, the players are presumably expected to act on the basis of their characters' personalities, as developed through play, and their relationships with the other characters, rather than on pure game theory strategy. Which is a good thing, because there is no real mechanical connection between the ratting phase and the rest of the game: the only connection is the story.

Final opinion: OCHH seems like a fun game with a number of clever design solutions. Definitely a game I could imagine playing.