Psi*Run at a creepy-odd angle
Darcy Burgess:
Hey Vincent,
I kinda think that I know the answer, but it's not 100% clear.
Did your players know that it's their job to make sense of all the whackiness? Is it explicit in their minds?
D
Robert Bohl:
It wasn't, to me.
lumpley:
Explicit in their minds, I don't know (and Rob says no, so, no). It's strongly implied by the rules and setup. I didn't make an especial point of it, but answers in the game come from the flashbacks, the answers to their questions, and I'm specifically barred from providing them. By the end of session 1 everybody knew that, if they didn't before, so I figured they'd make the leap.
There's this too: Psi*Run proper banks a lot on genre familiarity, but I was screwing around with the game's genre without bringing the players explicitly on-board. I figured I'd bring the players implicitly on-board, and that worked, but maybe it was still enough to baffle the game's genre-based processes.
-Vincent
Meguey:
I wish we'd pushed deeper, too. I also think I never quite got the hang of setting my character up to get answers. I was surprised we finished the game in only three sessions, but I liked my character's ending - turns out Sandy was a mathematical construct, not really a person at all. Cool, huh?
jdfristrom:
Wow, so glad I stumbled upon this post, being a fan of Philip Dick I've been mulling a game like this. I've tried running something like it trad in a Cyberpunk game once, and that sucked, because it was a railroad.
I never did run a less trad one, but I did make a list of "unreality conditions" - wrong shit like "player seems to be in two places at the same time", "you see someone you thought was dead", etc. And, I was thinking of disguising it as a trad game where I'd follow their cues to figure out what really happened - either that, or keep pulling the rug out from under them, shattering every hypothesis as soon as they come up with one.
And that sounds like exactly what you did.
It may be too late to resurrect the thread but...
So, you weren't satisfied. You want that big reveal, right? The "you're all dead" or "you're all brains in vats" or maybe a set of complicated things that work together in concert: "Joe's a robot" and "the hatch was an experiment" and "the town was created explicitly for you as a test"...
You say "I should have let the players in on it" but...man...don't you want that bleed? As a player, I'd want to feel just as lost as the character. Knowing that I'm actually authoring the reveal? This is one place where I think I want the illusion of the there there. I'd want you to pull the wool over my eyes. And not even tell me you had done it, so you could do it again next time. You'd even consult the "module" - some blank pages in a folder behind your GM screen...
Did you ever try this sort of thing again? How'd it go?
I wonder if that means I shouldn't bother pursuing these lines either...
Here's some random extra thoughts I'm having right now:
I think the "reality turns out to be simulation" story is almost always unsatisfying at the end:
Spoiler warning, I'm about to kind of spoil the endings of a dozen "reality is simulation" stories.
Lost and the Prisoner - never have the reveal. What and why is the island? Who is number one? Answers just raise more questions. It's fun being on the ride but it never ends and you think the screenwriters don't have a clue either.
Imply it's not real but never give a definitive answer. Total Recall / Inception.
Existenz, Truman Show, 13th Floor, the Matrix: there's a transcendent signified. Now we're in the Real real. That's garbage to a postmodernist, right? There is no real real, deal with it. (Existenz wins, here, because it's self aware. "Transcendenz!" Awesome. And it has the last little tweak. Are they? Maybe.)
Or Dark City - yeah, we don't know what the Real real is. We're stuck here in our simulation, making the best of it. But you're living in a dream, man!
Or - a fake reveal. I don't want to spoil Ubik for you if you haven't read it, but it has the big reveal, and then in the last chapter Philip Dick throws us something that breaks the big reveal. We thought we understood it and didn't. That's cool but we feel kind of like we're just being fucked with. More satisfying than Lost, I think? At least there was a coherent explanation for everything that happened up to here.
Oh, Man in the High Castle. "It turns out we're all characters in a book." There's an ending for you. Break the 4th wall. "Turns out we're all just characters in a role-playing game!" Yuck.
Just realizing now, Jacob's Ladder is the closest to being satisfying: his conflict in the dream is real. And though it has a real Real it symbolically leaves it open, right: maybe there's more.
Maybe a best of both worlds is that the GM authors the big reveal, and the nature of the unreality is what gives the players their narrative power - within the dream. It's really secretly a sim game. The reason the players have narrative influence is because it's all just a dream....
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