# MSG™: The Deoffensified Edition ![[MSGtm (cover).jpg]] So, you've decided the daily grind isn't soul-crushing enough and you'd like to simulate it in your leisure time. Excellent. **MSG™** is a "game for professionals" that lets you and your friends roleplay as corporate drones, euphemistically called "Representatives," in a dystopian near-future where everything is branded and your only real value is your profitability. One player takes on the role of "the Company"—a faceless, amoral tangle of corporate interests—and presents the other players with morally compromising "Situations." The goal? Navigate these ethical minefields, try to come out on top, and maybe, just maybe, retain a shred of your humanity. It's a cheerful satire of late-stage capitalism where your character's soul is quite literally a resource to be spent. The core mechanic, a blessedly dice-free system called "The Risk," is where the game's cynicism truly shines. Your Rep has two resource pools: **Compassion** (your ability to care about anyone other than yourself) and **Self** (your flickering sense of self-worth). When your Rep tries to do something the Company disapproves of, you enter a conflict. Both you and the player running the Company secretly bid a number of points from the relevant resource pool. Reveal your bids simultaneously. The higher bidder wins the conflict, discards their bid, and then—in a move of pure corporate vampirism—absorbs the loser's bid into their own pool. The Company literally feeds on your hopes and principles. The ultimate goal isn't to be a hero; it's to finish the game with the most points combined from both pools, because in this world, the person with the most well-managed emotional capital wins. Having examined the earlier **MSG™ Executive Edition** (2009), it's clear the later **MSG™ The Deoffensified Edition** (2015) is more than a simple reprint. The "deoffensification" itself is subtle; some of the more lurid example tragedies ("My husband's willy is rotting") and politically charged references have been replaced with scenarios of a more absurd, tech-dystopian nature (having an affair with an iPad). The true changes are mechanical. The _Deoffensified Edition_ introduces a "Consequences" system where winning or losing a Risk mechanically alters your character by adding new tragedies, enemies, or selling points—a feature absent in the original, where outcomes were purely narrative. Furthermore, the newer edition's "Bailout" rules are harsher, forcing players to sacrifice their own resources to prop up a failing Company. So while the tone was ever-so-slightly sanitized, the actual gameplay became mechanically bleaker, codifying the slow erosion of your Representative's soul. ## References - [Where to buy MSG™ The Deoffensified Edition - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/152079/msg-the-deoffensified-edition)