The conversation has really moved. Skip this if you don’t want to hear me talk about An Instance Of Playing Montsegur.

Here are the mechanics in Montsegur-As-It-Was-Explained-To-Me that put me in director mode:

* Multiple characters. That right there is essentially enough to make bleed not possible. Amiel reacted to the horrors of the game by pitching tantrums and hating all the Blessed (they called him a demon and said he was in hell, “what a bunch of pricks” was his response).  Shifting gears from him to Corva was easy because they were so different.

* You pick a character almost immediately to be a “main character.” I picked a guy who seemed interesting at first, but to produce good friction with his boss, played by Ara Kooser , I made him a bit world-weary. People let him be world-weary so he stayed that way. He wasn’t an interesting “main character”. But that didn’t matter because the only thing “main character” status gets you is that you are guaranteed a finish in the flames, in the arms of the Pope, or if you’re lucky, an escape. Since those are arranged as the interesting outcomes in the game, dying early (with the exception of staying on as a vengeful ghost) is absolutely a director-level choice and not a character one – it is boring to die in Montsegur in any other way than the flames.  A much more interesting character for me was Corva (sp?) the mom who had lost other kids, watching one of her daughters lose her kid. I played her as old-school-Shakespearean melancholic almost to the point of a personality disorder (advising her child not to name the grandchild until she’s sure it’s going to live, etc.) In the end her decision was more interesting: to let her daughter give herself to oblivion to end her grief even though my character had chosen to live. I sort of played her as a grief-worshipper, like Constance in King John.  But again, people spotted me this, let her be that weird grief-worshipper. The coolest part was when Eric Mersmann was like “yeah, your husband’s fucking pissed about that”. But it was late in the day. As it turned out there was no reason she couldn’t have been a main character, but on the other hand this wouldn’t have made mechanically any difference.

* When Paul Beakley ‘s character (my character’s daughter), lost her child, Paul set a scene in which he (and Ara Kooser ‘s character) stood over the small body. Paul explicitly said “nobody says anything” and Ara nodded. I didn’t know whether that meant Paul was proposing an idea to Ara and Ara liked it or if Paul had the power to say that and Ara acknowledged it. To me it seemed directorial no matter how it was analyzed. “Oh, this is a game where I can say what other people say and do” I concluded. This fit with the aesthetic of having many characters. (Hey, by the way, for the last eleven years I’ve worked in the child abuse/neglect field so analyzing this scene dispassionately is really easy for me, that might be a relevant fact for ya. )

* The story cards are random and you don’t have to play them. So not only is it somewhat unlikely that your story cards will put your characters in the vises necessary to squeeze out interesting emotional beats, even if they do, whether you play them or not is completely up to you. I came out pretty confident that nobody (maybe except Eric Mersmann ) got what I was trying to do with Corva’s history of grief and losing kids, but that was okay because this game isn’t set up to where everyone can express that by the end of the game except at the social level (“hey did you like what I did with X”).

All in all I don’t see where Montsegur could ever produce bleed for me. The mechanics provide a really solid blockade against that.