# It's Complicated tags: #game/rpg/its-complicated ![[It's Complicated (cover).jpg|600]] **It's Complicated** is Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat's *other* relationship game — the one where nobody's been burned and nobody's packing heat, which is worse, because it leaves the mess pure. Published by Two Scooters Press in 2008, it's a GM-less, dice-less game about convoluted, messy, occasionally one-sided relationships in the vein of *The Royal Tenenbaums*, *Ugly Betty*, and *Pushing Daisies*. There's no combat here; the only weapons are the secrets you keep and the ones you finally can't. ## Setting There's no fixed world, and Sampat wants it that way. The group decides the basic situation — clichés encouraged, whether that's a kidnapping gone wrong or a reunion of incompetent superheroes — and then narrows the field to as small a location as the action can reasonably fit, a movie-set sense of backdrops. The setting can be anywhere across time and space, as realistic or as fantastic as the table likes, with some strange issue hanging just beneath the surface of the place. The situation is deliberately a *stage* on which plot can develop, never the plot itself. ## Mechanics ### The Board No dice, no GM, and only two traits on the game board: **Oddities** (the deep-seated secrets, skeletons in the closet, and hidden traumas a character keeps from the world, lining the top of the board) and **Dysfunctions** (the outward behavioral symptoms those inward issues drag into the open, at the bottom). Every character lives by the same equation: **Due to [Oddity], I [Dysfunction].** Oddities are internal; Dysfunctions are what they leak. ### Revealing & Wiring the Board The first round has everyone declare their Dysfunction and claim a quadrant of a numbered box. Then the Oddities go up, each connected to its Dysfunction by a line. Relationships spring from geometry: **Touching** — sharing a trait box with another character — binds two people through what they hold in common, while **Crossing** — drawing your line across someone else's — declares a relationship with them. Here's the cruelty in the craft: you can only declare *your* side of any relationship. You may never say or imply how the other person feels; that's their declaration to make, or decline. ### Scenes Play runs as scenes with no conflict resolution to speak of. On your turn you *own* the scene — you call the characters, the place, and the tension, and the scene exists to reveal something true about your character: an Oddity, a Dysfunction, a relationship. The other players are there to help you land it, under a strict etiquette that says they deepen rather than newly grow their own characters in somebody else's scene. No dice, no fights, no opposed rolls — just the slow, agonizing, frequently hilarious business of the truth leaking out. ### Endgame Once every Oddity and Dysfunction box is defined and each has at least one quadrant filled, the game hands everyone a final scene in which they dramatically alter a relationship with someone else — a cliffhanger if the group plans to carry on, an odd little closure if not. Continue simply by laying down a fresh board; everything already established carries forward, but the next round of wiring begins anew. ## Editions **It's Complicated** was published by **Two Scooters Press** in **2008** (first printing August 2008; the text is credited 2007-2008) by Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat. *The library holds two electronic copies — an early **Online Edition** and the **Final** print edition — both in the library.* (The RPGnet index also lists a **Revised Digest** edition, which is not in the collection.) ## References - [It's Complicated — RPGnet RPG Game Index](https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=13082) - [It's Complicated: a game about messy lives and messy relationships (ebook) - Lulu](https://www.lulu.com/shop/elizabeth-shoemaker/its-complicated-a-game-about-messy-lives-and-messy-relationships/ebook/product-1yvdj4wv.html)