Making Soap

A couple of years ago, while going through a period of involuntary soap opera viewing, my attention was caught by a couple of characters being overheard while having a discussion in a public place. It was the typical kind of badly realised scene I'd come to expect: two characters conspiring secretively yet choosing to do so in a cafe and making no attempt to lower their voices. Now, fair enough, a scene has to be presented in a way that the audience can hear what's going on, but this was so deliberately staged to create drama rather than to be realistic that it just seemed more like the characters were in a game. Since I play a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games, I imagined it that way and the framework of the move appeared in my head; obviously, whoever rolled had gotten a 7-9 result, meaning that their plan was hatched but someone had overheard them plotting!

I shared this on G+... gosh, G+; that seems like a long time ago now, right? Anyway, I shared this primordial soap opera move and a lot of people chimed in with other ideas about how soap operas are like PbtA games, which got me thinking and thinking lead to writing, so within a few weeks, I had the rudimentary outline of Liquid Soap complete and ready to play. Why 'Liquid Soap'? Because it flows into whatever container you pour it into, taking on it's shape: during playtesting, our soap operas concerned a glamorous & exotic island resort; a haunted Scottish castle; a ski-lodge threatened with bankruptcy; and a Greek villa serving as a boutique hotel, among others.

One of the things I particularly like about this iteration of the PbtA system is the separation of the stats from the moves: any of your character stats can potentially be used when making any basic move, because the stat used depends on your character's motivation, not their action. If you create a character who is all about greed & selfishness, then they can roll with that motivation with everything, if that fits the drama, but to maintain balance, you mark experience by using a variety of stats instead of just hitting the same one over & over again.

The last few tweaks and changes to the game were happening up until last month, with the Arc rules being a late addition to encourage players to give their characters juicy, engaging plots for them to follow: a lot of the story will emerge organically from play, but if you want to have a particular plot be significant & rewarding for your character, then the Arcs let you flag that up. There might, at some point, be some more playbooks for the game: I can see the spaces they could fill in the roster, but the eight available cover most of the archetypal soap-opera characters.

As ever, please enjoy the game, fire any questions my way and share any actual play recordings or reports you create!