Signs of the Sojourner highlights the limits of conversation systems
Listen to an audio version of this article by becoming a Patreon supporter.
A major challenge of story-driven tabletop games is bridging the gap between players and their characters. Though some might immediately feel comfortable improvising and conversing in-game, in my experience it takes a significant investment for players to internalize their characters. Often the burden falls on the game master - which, depending on the game, might act as a moderator, narrator, or just be the one person in the group who read the rulebook - to help players ease into their roles and become comfortable playing in the space the group creates.
Video games often attempt to emulate this experience, but without the flexibility of human-to-human interaction it can be extremely challenging to adapt something as abstract as a conversation into static systems. This is not inherently an issue, but it does create a situation where few games feel reactive enough to hide the binary input/output of their story engines.
In our post The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012) and Mass Effect (Bioware, 2007) world, games overwhelmingly lean into the transparency of their narrative structures by highlighting even before an interaction has played out how it will sit with the other party, and then emphasizing if the character will respond to that response later on. This is taken to its most successful extreme in Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019) which utilizes a custom built roleplaying system, dozens of stats, and tens of thousands of lines of dialogue to create Redwood-esq narrative branches that are as compelling as they are wildly out of scope for most games. Liam Esler’s talk at the 2016 GDC Narrative Summit does a good job illustrating the draw and challenge of implementing these systems, but the key take away is balancing the illusion of agency and the realities of producing a branching narrative.
Signs of the Sojourner (Echodog Games, 2020) hacks this model by layering a card game on what would typically be a choice of responses. Conversations play out as call and response monologues, wherein the player’s ability to successfully match a series of card symbols determines if the conversation is “successful.” These symbols, theoretically, correspond to different conversational tones: direct, logical, empathetic, grieving. Actual play is much less articulated - play is not disimilar from a stripped down, linear version of dominos - but these symbols do help flavor interactions which typically last for only two or three exchanges.
I don’t think it’s fair to judge Signs of the Sojourner on the versatility of its conversation system, as a card game which attempted to model the impenetrable complexity of actual conversation models would be overwhelming. But like Mass Effect and its derivatives, the emphasis on conversations as systems also calls to the surface all the ways the system begins to break down when it tries to diverge from a perfect chain of events. Signs of the Sojourner describes itself as “a narrative card game about relationships and connecting with people,” but more accurately it is a card game about unlocking the history of its characters.
The protagonist speaks only through the cards they play, leading to conversations that are effectively one sided. These stories can be delightful as even with only a few sentences to spare at a time Signs of the Sojourner’s characters are remarkably well drawn, but I kept wanting a version of this game that traded its card mechanic for a system that let its characters speak more. I want to learn about the secret art society, The Circle, and how its members are confronting profits versus artistic integrity. I want to help the robot that can’t find its home and is stuck working as a farmhand to a vintner. I want to talk to my dog.
To its credit, Signs of the Sojourner is deliberately structured to allow these stories to trickle out over repeat visits to the same areas as you meet more characters and get into their good graces. But this always requires a successful game of cards, something which becomes highly stressful given how many symbols are in play by the end of the game and the limitations put on controlling your deck. Ideally, this would still allow for interesting conversations when a conversation falls apart or the protagonist is too tired to keep up, but aside from a handful of interactions a failed game of cards stops the conversation cold. And this is what I find most frustrating about Signs of the Sojourner: it wants to be both a game about conversations, but only allows for mutually agreeable ones.
A lot has been written about the dynamics of conversations, much of it too academically dense to be worth reiterating here, but one aspect which is directly analogous to Signs of the Sojourner is the work of Gabriella Airenti, Bruno Bara, and Marco Colombetti on the implicit goal of a conversation. Building on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, Airenti and co. define two elements of interaction: conversational and behavioral goals. Put simply, the difference between what is being said and what is being done. “One can be noncooperative from a behavioral point of view, for instance, refusing to comply with a request, while still willing to maintain a correct conversation: 'Could you please help me prepare dinner, dear?' 'Sorry, Bob, I’m busy.'” (Airenti, Bara, Colombetti).
In Signs of the Sojourner, every interaction is strictly over conversational goals. Either you meet a character where they are or the conversation ends. Austin would describe these as perlocutionary acts - conversations designed to do something without being explicitly about that thing. But even in describing these acts, philosopher A. P. Martinich recognizes the issue of having them be the basic form of a conversation. Writing in his book Communication and Reference, Martinich says that “persuading, angering, inciting, comforting and inspiring are often perlocutionary acts; but they would never begin an answer to the question 'What did he say?'” The effect does not explain the cause.
As Airenti and co. highlight, often conversations introduce behavioral confrontation without immediately disrupting the conversation itself. Without a distinction between conversational and behavioral goals, arguments are impossible and the subtext and history underpinning a conversation is flattened into oblivion.
Again, Airenti and co. articulate this problem well, writing “a model of communication should account not only for standard, successful, and sincere uses of language, but also for failures, deceits, and parasitic forms of communication, like irony.” I said earlier that I didn’t want to judge Signs of the Sojourner purely for how well its conversation game maps to actual conversation dynamics, but the ability to fumble interactions in interesting ways seems so fundamental as to be necessary for the system to have any resemblance to the things that make conversations interesting.
One reason tabletop character interactions fall flat is when the systems does not allow players to fail forward. A failed check in Dungeons & Dragons is a failed check. This works in combat because the stakes are binary: either you do or do not damage someone. But this breaks down in conversations, leading to freeform interactions that can be entertaining with well-defined characters but often discard the rules altogether and just become a LARP (see: the first season of The Adventure Zone).
Accounting for the gaps in D&D for conversational play, systems like Powered by the Apocalypse have emerged to focus on all the ways an interaction can go south. Failure is baked into the rules and is often where the most interesting events emerge. Fail to persuade an NPC? Well, now they’re calling the guards. Conversations become dynamic push-pull exercises rather than something that can be won.
Had Signs of the Sojourner taken a similar approach and allowed the player to fail without having the door slammed in their face, it would be easier to forgive some of the flatness present in its card system or the brevity of its script. But by framing conversations as games to be won without anticipating how often they’d be lost, huge chunks of the game become sequences of frustrating nonsequiturs.
I adore the world Echodog has invited me into. I want to live with these characters, travel aboard the caravan, and try to keep my hometown from folding under economic forces. But the game only ever caused me to feel as I was being talked at rather than conversing with. I feel no control over the tone or substance of these interactions despite having to invest heavily at every step. Maybe I’ll get lucky and draw the card I need, maybe not. But surely there is a better way than coming to a fork in the road and being told it ends here because none of my cards have triangles.
Signs of the Sojourner was developed by Echodog Games and is available on PC and Mac via Steam. It was reviewed using a key provided by the developer, covering the version of the game available at the time of publication.
If you enjoyed this piece, consider supporting Kritiqal on Patreon. A huge thanks to my subscribers for keeping the lights on.