Sporadic Distillations

Gawain in Realis

There's an interesting new RPG developed by Austin Walker from Friends at the Table called Realis, one of the many ways it's interesting is that instead of using dice, or indeed having any kind of randomness, entities (and places) have Sentences with a certain rank, and when a conflict occurs the Sentence with the higher rank wins.

For example: if Circe has a Sentence "I always enchant those who come into my island" at +0 and Odysseus has "When I'm saving my life, I always trick those against me" at +1, Odysseus will manage to trick Circe and avoid being enchanted.

When you fail you mark the failing Sentence, and after 3 failures you can "Realise" your Sentence, which means that they increase their rank, but you also need to add a condition to their use. The feeling is that you're sharpening the Sentence, and the character, making them more specific, but more powerful within that purview.

Characters have 4 Sentences, starting at +0, 2 bond Sentences with other characters, and a Dream Sentence. The game has some extra complexity, but I think this is enough to grasp what we're doing here.

The plan is to imagine how would Gawain (David Lowery's version) be written as a character in Realis.

This post contains spoilers for The Green Knight, don't read further if you want to avoid them

I've been thinking about this exercise, on one hand it's quite foolish, Realis is a game about certainties, the Sentences have to include the word always, it's a game about "what happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object", and poor Gawain is extremely uncertain.

On the other hand, the movie is a coming of age story, it is a story about someone having their beliefs tested and about being sharpened by your journey, and in that sense it fits the way characters in Realis evolve perfectly.

Sentences

Figuring these out was pretty hard. One thing I started with was that I couldn't use battle/combat-related sentences, because Gawain in the movie is pretty bad at it (the one in the legends is probably better), so it wouldn't make sense to have a sentence about that.

He's trying to be a knight, to prove himself to King Arthur and the people around him, so seeking glory and trying to impress others makes sense, and indeed one can easily see the either being behind him deciding to behead the Green Man, on the other hand his drive to impress his uncle is why he undertakes his journey towards the Green Chapel, and why he helps Saint Winifred when she recognizes him as a knight.

In the example classes in Realis you often have 3 "positive" Sentences and 1 "negative", though given the way the game works you can always use them creatively in good or bad ways, for Gawain I'm using "I always try to impress others" as his negative Sentence, but I still see all of them as double-edged swords that can save or doom him at different moments in his journey.

Being recognized as a knight helps him to be well-treated by the nobleman, but also means that the bandits decide to target him for not giving them enough money. Always escaping with his life saves him when he's left for dead, but can mean he ultimately fails his test at the end.

At the end of the story I think Gawain isn't just trying to save his life above everything else, nor is he blindly seeking glory, which together explain his final decision, so I think he's Sentences would have turned into: