RPG Origins: Brecht’s He Said Yes/He Said No

There are a few reasons this Brecht play stands out to me for a post on the connections between RPGs and theatre. Firstly, it’s an important transitional work in the development of participatory theatre – a form that has much in common with RPGs. Secondly, it’s very short and freely available on the web, so short that you could probably read it the time it takes to read this blog post.

It doesn’t stop there. He Said Yes/He Said No (HSY/HSN) was itself adapted from a fifteenth century work of Japanese Noh theatre. That play, The Valley-Hurling, is even shorter (about 1000 words, available here). So you could read both, and see how made Brecht made this very conservative spiritual play “participatory”. And then separately, you could consider how Brecht’s participatory form relates to RPGs.

Obviously, you may not want to read or think about any of this. But the possibility of reading about a play and the play itself in a similar timeframe seems fairly rare to me.

The Valley-Hurling

The Valley-Hurling (TANIKŌ) is a pretty shocking play for modern audiences, which is perhaps partly why Brecht chose to adapt it. It revolves around the action of the title, where a young boy on a pilgrimage is hurled down a valley by his companions.

The play reads like a religious parable, seemingly intended to endorse the tradition of “valley-hurling” as an act of faith for those embarking on a mountain pilgrimage. The tradition states that those too ill to complete the pilgrimage be thrown down the mountain.

If this seems a little harsh, the play makes it even more so. The boy is only undertaking the pilgrimage to pray for his sick mother, who will now be left alone in the world. Note though, the important addendum in the play’s foot notes. It appears the pilgrims later wrangle the boy’s resurrection by praying to their deity.

Whether or not the play’s audience were literally engaging in such sacrifices themselves, the work remains a powerful endorsement of following tradition. The fact that the boy’s personal circumstances are not a mitigating factor reinforces that this should be done unquestioningly. Following an expected course “unquestioningly” is of course a sharp contrast to the approach we associate with RPGs.

He Said Yes/He Said No

Brecht’s HSY/HSN are essentially two drafts of the same play, He Said Yes and He Said No, which have alternative endings. Much of He Said Yes is the same as the Valley-Hurling, with some changes to make it more relatable to a modern context, such as replacing the pilgrimage with a scientific expedition. But the ending is the same, with the boy consenting to be thrown from the mountain.

He Said No is a later revision of the play, the main change being a new ending where the boy does not consent to be sacrificed. The message of the new version instead becomes that of questioning tradition: 

What I need far more is a new Great Custom, which we should bring in at once, the Custom of thinking things out anew in every situation

“Thinking things out anew in every situation” certainly seems an applicable slogan for an RPG. Modern productions of the play sometimes show both versions back-to-back, making it seem a little like a choose your own adventure, pivoting around a central decision point. However, viewing the work passively from an audience seat is not how it was intended to be experienced.

Participatory Theatre

HSY/HSN was performed by over 300 groups of school children in Germany, but not in the conventional form of a staged play. Instead, imagine a behind closed doors rehearsal session for the benefit of the participants only. The division between performers and the audience is abolished here, in same sense in which it is for an at home RPG session. In this context, the meaning of Brecht’s opening line becomes a bit clearer:

Nothing is more important to learn than agreement

Participants were expected to question, discuss and alter the play, potentially switching roles. As a collaborative process, it is necessary to reach agreement. In an RPG dungeon crawl, we can perhaps relate to this sentiment when trying to avoid splitting the party.

In some ways, there is more freedom here than being a D&D player, because participants also had some authorial control. It was in response to feedback from participants that Brecht wrote the revised version of the play. D&D players are rarely granted such discretion by their Dungeon Master, although there are collaborative RPGs which have a similar approach.

Relevance to RPGs

There are RPG modules with a similar structure to HSY/HSN, where the adventure culminates in a predetermined dilemma for the players. An example here is The Lich Queen’s Begotten, where the players must decide whether to kill an innocent destined for evil.

A problem with this is the need for linear story arc, to ensure the requisite conditions are in place for the dilemma to arise. The decision for the mother to let her son go on the pilgrimage cannot be overturned, because the central decision of the play would never then arise. In an RPG, denying players agency in this way would fall foul of the label “railroading”.

Presenting such a dilemma to players is rarer in “old school” style RPGs, where the emphasis is on the exploration of an objective gameworld. There is similarity though between HSY/HSN and the opening location of Necrotic Gnome’s Winter’s Daughter adventure. Here, the characters interrupt a ritual of sacrifice. Here too, the “victim” has apparently consented to the sacrifice. The trick in Winter’s Daughter seems in making the dilemma self-contained, without any dependence on previous encounters or decisions.

Conclusion

For me, the significance of HSY/HSN is in awakening a questioning attitude, in an audience whose primary experience of art was as a passive spectator. The gulf of time separating a modern audience from the context of the original play places its narrative message in sharp contrast. Modern plays will contain their own narrative messages, which we become desensitised to through familiarity. The apparent brutality of the Valley-Hurling challenges us to question the values and world views presented within works of art.

Similarly to HSY/HSN, RPGs are an opportunity to awaken a questioning attitude amongst participants. Part of this is the Games Master being free to construct their own gameworld, without having to follow conventions imposed by a producer or publisher. The principle of “thinking things out a new” and questioning implicit narrative messages seems very much alive in the gaming community. Debates over whether monsters in RPGs can be thought of as irrevocably evil seems an example that fits with this Brechtian spirit.

As I’ve talked about here, Brecht’s style of Epic theatre was explicitly against “linear development”. HSY/HSN doesn’t entirely break with a linear structure, even with the novelty of a fork at the end. In a future post, I’ll look at another Brecht play The Decision as a better model for the type of open world sandbox we associate with “Old School” gaming.