{"id":1287,"date":"2010-12-26T17:41:48","date_gmt":"2010-12-27T01:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=1287"},"modified":"2016-12-06T13:41:59","modified_gmt":"2016-12-06T21:41:59","slug":"dangerous-high-school-girls-in-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/1287","title":{"rendered":"Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"

I remember playing a demo of Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble<\/em> a few years ago, when it wasn’t in its final form yet. It was clear that this was a game worth watching for, but only now that I’ve been gifted a copy am I starting to play it for real.<\/p>\n

DHSGiT<\/em> has been described as a game that’s difficult to describe. It adopts the style of a vintage board game, but mechanically, it’s more of an RPG. Just not the usual sort of RPG for a computer game: there’s no combat, or at least no physical combat. There are Monkey Island<\/em>-style insult duels, though, as well as a few other kinds of abstracted confrontation: you sometimes have the option to tell lies or expose secrets or flirt by means of other special mini-game mechanics, aided by your character stats in various ways. I’ll go into details in a future post. For now, let me note just a couple of things.<\/p>\n

First, these mini-games are no more or less abstract than typical dice-based RPG combat. Your stats represent attributes relevant to stories about a teenage girls in the 1920s: popularity, rebellion, glamour, savvy. The stats are applied simply as numbers, but in ways that make stats more or less relevant to certain kinds of conflict, as appropriate. For example, in a taunting-match, your popularity rating is used like hit points, which stands to reason: the more popular you are, the more abuse your reputation can stand.<\/p>\n

Second, the stats chosen seem more narrative than simulationist, aspects of character<\/em> rather than physical attributes, chosen for their importance to the story rather than for their practicality in themselves. They remind me a lot of the special-purpose narrativist stats found in alternative pen-and-paper RPGs, or the “storytelling games” that they’ve developed into. One of my favorite examples: in Paul Czege’s My Life with Master<\/em>, the player character stats are Love, Weariness, and Self-Loathing. The more freeform storytelling games take this a step further by letting players make up their own attributes, but you pretty much need a human adjudicator for that sort of thing. The point is, the RPG has branched out from its wargaming origins, but the CRPG has largely been content to stick close to D&D<\/em>-ville, regardless of setting or genre. DHSGiT<\/em> is a glimpse of what else is possible. It really shows just how conventional Recettear<\/em> is, despite its pretensions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I remember playing a demo of Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble a few years ago, when it wasn’t in its final form yet. It was clear that this was a game worth watching for, but only now that I’ve been gifted a copy am I starting to play it for real. DHSGiT has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[437,438],"class_list":["post-1287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rpg","tag-dangerous-high-school-girls-in-trouble","tag-my-life-with-master"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1287"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4729,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1287\/revisions\/4729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}