Category Archives: Experimental Mechanics

My wife is fond of asking me when I’m going to stop trying to learn more things. I don’t have an answer to that because I suppose I will never know enough about the universe to have the complete picture of it that I want.

Lately my interest has been neuroscience and behavioral science. I think this is mainly because in the last few years I’ve been exploring the fact that I have a mild spectrum of autism and I learned that most people do not experience the world as I do.

To me autism means I do not have some of the automated processes that are normally encoded in a human being’s brain. The fewer automated processes an autistic has, or if certain important processes are disrupted the more severe the dysfunction. This is my take on my autism, it’s how I define it.

When these processes are not automatic a person has to develop their own process for dealing with input from the world. This is often on a more conscious level. It takes conscious thought to work through a situation that would normally be dealt with automatically. This usually means a greater mental stress load for common every day things but the trade off is that you sometimes know why you process things the way you do and can occasionally manipulate the process.

So it become profoundly interesting to me to learn how these automated processes actually should work in people. It’s fascinating because most people make use of these automatic programs without knowing that they’re doing it.

Today I listened to a program about beauty. I listen through the lens of the above. What are people doing that they aren’t aware of?

For one the program talked about a landscape that was nearly universally considered beautiful by humans. It was one that a human would be able to thrive in easily. A diversity of plants, the presence of water, evidence of bird life, an optimal view of the surroundings. This is a process that most people have, built in to tell them when life will be good for them. A subconscious signal that this is a good place to live.

To tie this in with world building, what does that mean for your world? Does your world deliver beauty?

Without specific knowledge of these universal human tendencies for perceiving beauty, long ago I set out to create a very alien world for The Artifact that rejected human ideas of beauty and strictly dealt with functionality. This was important to the story that I wanted to tell.

It does have it’s trade offs though. It is extremely difficult to draw and paint things that are not beautiful or at the very least intriguing. Even something that is ugly is easier to depict. It’s also difficult to describe things that are not beautiful and not ugly with words.

But why do I want to try and make a world that is not beautiful and not grotesquely ugly? To me, this is an expression that is sublimely alien to the human mind. It is not something opposed to our thinking and not something that we would want to think about. It is alien.

The difficult thing about it is to now fill it with enough humanism to make it inviting  enough to want to stay for a while. The reader can be disoriented by the alien, but invited by the human. This has been a struggle to get right, I’ve made some progress but is something I will have to keep working on.

Most worlds that are constructed swing from beautiful to grotesque. We know how to deal with those things. They are in built, automated responses. What happens when you put normal people in an environment where they have no in built response? Each response must be handled consciously. This can be taxing on the mind so it has to be done slowly and carefully. It throws off a person’s ability to easily parse their world.

Without knowing it, was The Artifact crafted as a metaphor for my own autism? They always say to write what you know. Was I recreating a feeling that I have in response to the world?

When worldbuilding, it seems that people often build off a feeling that they have. I often find it difficult to articulate the aesthetic of the world, the why or what of that root feeling. I may have found a few tools to describe it here.

Yesterday I talked about what RPGs could learn from Pro Wrestling and how wrestling went from a sport that took too long to win so was only sometimes entertaining enough to an entertainment that looked like sport focused on pleasing fans. It did this by kayfabe or ‘keeping it fake’, fixing fights and enhancing the action with moves that make no sense as far as real wrestling is concerned but are exciting to watch.

So how do we use that to make RPGs an easier hobby to take up and make them more fun in the process? At first the idea of kayfabe making the game more fake sounds awful but so does turning a sport into a pseudosport. The fact is though that Pro Wrestling is a bigger money maker now than it was. The concept when executed properly is successful.

What we have to remember is that the players are not the audience. They are the contestants and the contestants are in on the fakery. In fact, they act out the fakery which is core to making this work.

Lets back up though for a moment and look at the goal of our faking. One is to make the game shorter. Two it’s to amplify the excitement of the game. To get to the good part right away. What is “the good part?” That could change from game to game but I’m going to start with the example of a the final conflict with the Big Bad that comes at the end of the game.

Just skipping to the Big Bad would be unsatisfying. There is no discovery, no ramp up, less challenge to the PCs. We don’t want to just skip to the end. This is where the players being in on the kayfabe comes into play. They generate how they got to this point. The GM presents them with the big exciting finale and then asks them “How did you get here?” and the players describe why they took on a job offered to them by a old man in the village. It doesn’t matter what they come up with as long as it fits the description of them getting to the finale.

You might be thinking “But they don’t have to fight their way through the Big Bad’s hordes to get to this point, they’re fresh as daisies. This won’t be as interesting.” Lets fix that then.

The point of all that build up is partly for the story of a struggle to get to this point and partly to wear down the PCs resources. Let’s have the players generate both. The GM can offer a set of deals. Take 2 hit points of damage and get the “Brave and Heroic” experience bonus. Take off half your ammo and get extra cash. Take 30 points of stress of any kind and you get to pick from this list of equipment. Nothing says they have to take any deals so they have to be tempting enough that the players will bite and make a more interesting story.

Now as well as “How did you get here?” the players also have to integrate the deals they chose into their story.

This whole process should take 15-20 minutes. The finale could then take 40 minutes and you have a game in one hour that included everything you normally put in your games.

There are story advantages to this process also. Because the players can describe their own story, they will likely tell one that is more interesting to them. The GM may learn more about the specific interests of the players and be able to really tune into what they like and want out of a game.

The players can throw in crazy things that they would never accept from a GM. Things like “The guy that gave us the job turned out to be my long-lost father!” because it’s safe from consequence. They have control of it and more or less know what the GM has in store in the finale. Yes there’s some room for surprises but the players have a reasonable expectation of what’s to come.

Mixing it up

What if the real draw to your game isn’t the Big Bad? What if it’s the puzzle, or the mystery that you worked so hard on? Then we reverse the process. The deals happen after the puzzle is solved. So that take off two hit points happens only after the puzzle is done. What if the PC has lost most of their hit points while solving the puzzle and then goes into the finale with only two? Well they die in the battle. Kayfabe it and make up the heroic battle and how they die saving their friends.

Try it, see if you like it. No doubt it will be a bit different from what you’re used to but remember the point is to enhance the entertainment and make the game quicker and easier to take up. This will be an odd sell to a lot of players but would be a lot of fun if embraced. The main question is can players fake it so well that it feels authentic to them, like they really went through all those things.

Let us know what you think. Will you try a kayfabe session?