[The Call] - Further Thoughts on Reality Gaming

[Juan D. Six]

I did some work on a game concept called "The Call" here a Good While Back, then got pulled off by, well, Real Life. The Out There place. Le Monde.

The nutshell was I had some confused ideas about mapping a relationship between the mysterious drives which make us heroes and the idea that "secret truths" create reality around them, like the Secret Truth about Cthulhu or Vampires or the Illuminati. Or that Magic is Real.

I was also trying to stay away from the Rifts model, of cut-and-paste narrative realities, and also away from the X-files model where The Truth Is Out There in an objective sense, waiting to be discovered. What I wanted was something more subtle, something that allowed for reality to be fluid and confusing like it is in good con games or cults yet also backed up by physical evidence, like in UFO cases.

(links to the old threads)
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18048.msg191005#msg191005 - The General Set Up
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18094.0 - Game Metaphysics

So I think I've got an approach to this that really works for me now.

There are three assumptions:

1> Reality is bendy at the edges.
The "normal model" of reality is suspended at the edges - close to death, for example, all kinds of weird things happen. The dying see lights and angels, or wait for a visit from a friend before passing. Freak accidents kill or miracles save, like the people saved by having a bible in their pocket when they get shot. Heros live closer to this edge than normal people so they will see a lot more of these phenomena than ordinary folks will.

Similarly, fringe groups like UFO cultists or ET contactees or New Agers all have *real experiences* of altered realities. It might not show up in a lab, but to those present, in the real world, they experience these phenomena as real. Away from the center, reality is different. And the fringes are not consistent with each other. What happened to reality in Nazi Germany? Or around the birth of Judaism, or Christianity, or Islam to take the converse case? How did people come to believe these new things so completely as realities?

So this is our first thesis: reality is bendy at the edges.

2> Some people intentionally manipulate the substance of reality, often through language
Con men, or politicians, or those who start cults (or even religions) often normalize highly questionable phenomena in an almost Orwellian sense. They give new language to people to describe experiences that they may not have had previously - consider the "aura" and how, once people are familiarized with the notion that it is "real" and culturally normal, a lot of people being to see auras. Well known in New Age circles.

Of course, they'll swear it's because the Aura is real. But if so, why can't everyone see them? What if some other culture thought the aura was a cube, not an egg. Would people see those instead? Or is an Aura like fingers and toes, but real?

We don't know. We don't care. But we do know that reality is socially constructed to the extent that those who believe the Aura is an Egg will protest against the Reality that the Aura is a Cube mightily. Just look at religions.

This angle - that most of these sub realities have leaders and that language matters - is the crucial piece I had missed on the first pass through the idea.

Note that we haven't talked about what is Real yet - only about how things get wobbly at the edges and how people use language and identity to respond to those phenomena.

There is no Prime Material Plane
Instead, there's a consensus default reality which, like all the crazy little UFO cults, has a head. Perhaps you blame Jesus, or Issac Newton, or Bill  O'Riley, but there's a set of things which are agreed on as Real, and a set of things which, if you experience them and insist on the truth of it, make you Crazy. But those rules - Crazy / Not Crazy - are defined by People. Not physics. Or the rules of Crazy would be the same everywhere.

So part of the game is marked by this journey through a Crazyland - the phantasmagorical nature of the "Real" while all the time the foaming chaos of What Is Actually Happening To People goes on unseen.



What we're doing here is getting down to the core principles of a game which is about changing what is real rather than simply accepting it.

And isn't that the very core of magic?

Games like Mage or Dungeons and Dragons posit a Real Reality which includes magic. Even though Magicians may choose to rewrite the physical plane, they're doing it in ways which obey well-defined rules - often book, after book, after book - of well defined rules.

Let's compare with our Prototypical Hero - Captain T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Wanders off with a rifle and a camel, reunites the desert tribes into an effective army, takes the port, and says "Nothing is Written" and means it. Lawrence's victory is that he does the impossible not in the David Blaine sense, not even in the Rasputin sense, but in the "Nothing Is Written" sense - in the sense of making his own destiny, in the "drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars" sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom

He really did it.


So this is the framework of our game. Reality itself is the background, the idea that there are consensus reality limits. And we'll assume that our characters, for whatever reason, have become unstuck from that background - like in Unbreakable, perhaps they survive a weird accident. Or like in Lost Boys, they run into something entirely outside of the Framework. Or in Mage, where they, er, "Awaken."

The seed, though, in all cases is the same: "this isn't real" - it's what The Matrix is about, too.

But what we will not do is put another level of Hard Reality outside. No "new world" of submarines and Zion, or old-world-plus-vampires, or old-world-with-superheros.

No, screw all that. We'll go straight into the Void, and say "reality is what you can get away with."

This is where we get into the nitty gritty. All genre fiction says "like the real world, but with X, Y or Z" added. Even TORG with it's colliding realities makes each one real, and assumes there's an easily-parameterized underlying Reality on which the thing is played. Everybody assumes hard reality is just one step higher up.

So that's what we'll cut through. The metaphysical assumption of rigidity which is at the heart of the Game Universe, with rule books - and which is challenged *implicitly* by freeform games, although they can find themselves constrained by the reality of genre constraints.

Next I'll look a little at how to tell stories in the Void.

[Juan D. Six]

So let's look at those axioms again: reality is bendy, some people intentionally bend it their way, and there is no prime material plane. We'll call those three axioms Flexibility, Narrativity (the property of being narrative) and Indeterminism (there's no known absolute basis).

Against this kind of framework, let me suggest that there's one more concept required to be able to tell meaningful stories: the idea of stories being created by cooperation. No cops-and-robbers if the cops refuse to give chase, nor cowboys-and-indians if one side begins to go home. If Americans used Gandhian tactics against Al Quada and simply said "that really hurt, please don't do it again" and refused to be provoked (but, perhaps, increased airline security and so on) the dialectical game would be completely broken. Better or worse we can't begin to know, but it would be different!

So against this framework, let's look at the game context again: how do you tell a *story* when there are no rules.

Let's start with Orcs. Orcs have a pretty simple story, a narrative. It's something like "everybody hates us and we have to kill to live." Or, perhaps, there's some Overlord with his own story, which the Orcs buy, like "Vote For Mordor and Enjoy The Spoils!" The D&D reality doesn't give Orcs a narrative - they're simply seen as either wild animals or as soldiers running a script given to them by their Evil Overlord. Orcs are beasts or tools.

But what if we shift the perspective to that of an Orc in Middle Earth, late in the day before the Ring is destroyed. It's time for the Big Push, the final overthrow of the Men who've oppressed you. It's time to take whatever you like from the land, almost - just one or two more cities must fall, then it'll be all the fun and games you like. Perhaps the Armies will disband then you can get set up right somewhere on your own.

Even stupid, an Orc can have ambition.

So let's take a head-to-head between a Player Character and an Orc. At one level - the MERP level - it's a lot of tables and dice and slash criticals. But at another level, it's a clash of three narritives - the Sauron narrative of Kill The Nine and Take Over The World, the Orc Narrative of "win, or run away, but stay alive and looting at all costs" and the PC narrative of Defend Mirkwood from Orcs or whatever it happens to be that day.

Typically either the DM's judgement, or the dice, or in some games other mechanisms, define who's carrying the narrative football. Have a Conflict, see who won, they then script the next bit. Note, though, that there are three narritives (Sauron, Orc, PC) in-game, and two more (Player, and GM) out of game.

Rules used to create a New False Objectivity, in which the Player - or at worst the Player Characters - get what they want against the House, the GM - like gambling and almost always winning. The decks stacked...

Let's go back to Lawrence. He's the closest thing we're ever going to see to Frodo Baggins, and he's quite well documented. What did he know that allowed him to become a Hero? Sure, he knew arabs. And, sure, he had some inner tortures which accelerated him forwards, we can guess. But I think the key is that Lawrence knew that he could. Perhaps, if he was wrong, he'd have died in a gutter somewhere. But he knew he could, and was right.

This, I think, is the core of what stands our Player Characters out from the crowd - they know they can and the game is about are they right?

Note we're still two levels above "set and setting" - we're still in the metaphysical assumptions which form the foundation of the game.

So we have a Character who Knows They Can. This "knowing you can" is The Call - the sense of being special, waiting in the wings of history, for your chance to shine. Endemic among geniuses and lovers, scientists and mystics, wonderful successes and abject failures of all kinds.

1. What is your game about?
It's about people who know they can change the world or be heroes, if the circumstances came.


So now back to these issues of five narratives. We have two levels: OOG (out of game) (Players and GM) who are only notionally in opposition, both having agreed to play so they'll have a good time. IG (In Game) there are what we'll call Cultural Narratives (Mordor vs. Gandalf & co.) and Individual Narratives. These need to be distinguished because Cultural Narratives is where we're going to derive our Magic system from!

Games are rife with ideas about how to handle Individual Narrative Conflicts. From hit points all the way up, it's all the same basic notion: two+ sides contest based on notions of strength or force, be it intellectual, moral or explosive. Sometimes one of those sides is the GM dressed up as the Laws of Physics - the whole Simulationist kick.

So let's go back to the question "What is your game about?" - well, it's about heroes. And heroes do Heroic things. And sometimes, they fail, and become dead heroes. The question of whether you become a Hero or not, however, is too important to be left to blind chance. In the D&D model, it's GM fudging plus heavily hero-biased rules - gaining hit points, for example, creates a hero factory. D&D *is* a Hero Factory ruleset.

Who's got it and who doesn't is partly a matter of "luck" in that a stray bullet could have taken our Lawrence. Perhaps ten die in stupid ways for every one who makes it, and it's only our cognitive filtering which creates the sense of Fate.

But screw that: let's put it out in the open. "The Call" is the Call to Become A Hero. And it's expressed in points and is a vital characteristic: how much Hero do *you* have?

And it's bad to have too little, because then you're a mundane, and weak. And it's bad too have too much, because then you're a Gandhi or a Lawrence and your life is hellish because of the huge responsibilities you're carrying, all alone on your high tower...

Furthermore, let's add a fatigue factor: a Call has three forms: current, top and bottom. Let's say it's 1..10 for the moment. The Top is a "soft ceiling" - you'll lose Call down to the Top Level if for any reason you get supercharged over that point. Likewise, you'll regenerate Call up to the Bottom level even if you fry out and find yourself drunk in a gutter cursing the god that made you one time too often. And the Current level is just Where You Are Right Now.

How is Call gained and lost? Well, we'll assume that to remain a PC, there has to be at least a bottom level of two or three points. And, interestingly, this creates the possibility of Burning Out at which point the character is all out of Heroism and simply returns to acting like a Mundane, probably under GM control. Perhaps you go home and think it over and the Call recovers.

How are Call points gained and lost? Well, they're lost through using them to TAKE CONTROL of a situation - climb the impossible wall, get shot and keep running, whatever it takes. Every time YOUR NARRATIVE runs over the laws of the Mundane Universe around you, the "cultural background", that's the Heroic Call in action. And like James Bond, one beating too many and it's time for a martini.

Gaining Call seems like it should be equally obvious - sufficiently awful situations come with Free Call. Like putting out a nuclear reactor fire has, let's say, 5 points of Free Call associated with it. Anybody who gets involved in that situation is automatically made a hero - until, when the crisis passes, the Call Points fade back and people return to their regular levels of capability.

Note: you can't get here from a Simulationist, "real external world" perspective, except by assuming this stuff is a simple statistical delusion (where there were 10,000 people like Lawrence, and one of them happened to make it.)

Also note the notion that very high Call Values deprive players of control - you rush into the Burning Building knowing that you'll be fine, and you are, or you die, but in the process you hope to burn enough Call to return to the ordinary way of being.

More, as they say, Later.

[Simon C]

I can see some great opportunities to play with the conventions of RPG here.  I guess I see an amusing conection between how you've described "consensus reality" with heroes who try to change that reality, and "GM vision" of a game world, with players who try to write their own story over that vision.  To describe more clearly:

Most RPGs are run with the implicit assumption that the Players control the actions of their characters, and the GM controls everything else.  In other words, the GM is reality, the characters live in that reality.  Much of what this forum is about is trying to reduce the tension between the players' interpretation of that reality, and the GM's.  Players in the archetypal bad AD&D game run riot over the GM's carefully constructed game world: ninjas storm taverns, assassin/paladins burn down villages, someone has a stupid name, and one guy is catatonic until there's a fight.  The players try to force the world to reflect how they want it to be, the GM tries to force the players to act how "reality" dictates they should be, and the whole thing collapses into bickering and argument.  What I see as the goal of your game is to keep the sense of players trying to bend game reality to their will, while reality tries to keep them in line, while making rules to prevent the bickering and game collapse.

Is this a good description of your aims?  If so, good luck!  I think this is rich ground, but difficult territory to make rules about.  I note that you reject the idea of a "simulationist" agenda being useful to this idea, but my feeling is that it may be more useful than you think.  I don't generally find GNS to be paticularly useful to my understanding of gaming, but I'll try to work with those terms:

As I understand it, Simulationism in terms of game design is about making the game rules reflect how reality works in the genre/world/alternate reality in which the game takes place.  So, for example, in a "Transformers" game your chance of hitting should be inversly proportional to the amount of damage your weapon does (Megatron can dodge a laser, but not a thrown rock), also, Laserbeak gets +10 to everything.  In my opinion, the best way to impliment your idea of "flexible" reality is to create rules by which the the game world can be "flexed".  You seem to be approaching this through you "Call points" mechanic.  As I understand it, given the nature of your game world, this is a simulationist mechanic.  I think perhaps this is a semantic debate though.  My question is: What does the GM get?  How does the GM force players to comply with consensus reality?  Is there a mechanic for this? Or is consensus reality the "default". 

[Juan D. Six]

Great questions, and thank you for the feedback Simon.

So, here's the GM's part of the puzzle. Let's go back to the Orc, and the five versions of reality running:

* Sauron's view - the Orc's Boss. You can think of this as being a "cultural" level of reality.
* The Orc's individual view.
- The Player Character's view.
- The Player's View
- The GM's view.

So the GM is speaking for three Points of View (POVs): Sauron, the Orc and his own perspective, based on his sense of the narritive.

Let's take an abstract conflict: a fight. In the D&D-verse, the rules are stacked in the player's favor - statistically, a lone Orc has essentially a zero chance of knocking off say a 5th level fighter. There's where your Hero's Advantage comes from.

Some narrative games would divide the fight up between the GM's perspective and the Player's perspective, told through their respective eyes. I like that more but I don't think it cuts quite deep enough into the issue: everything in the scene has an opinion. Now here's the delicate part.

There are two basic assumptions about reality:

* There's a basic "physics" framework which, outside of Magic, defines what happens.
* What needs to happen for the plot to advance happens

And there's a lot of interaction between those two ideas. In the D&D age, it's dice-fudging that drives that interaction.

What I want to attack is the question of Who's Plot Advances.

Both sides are, in their own mind, right. Yer Orc feels totally entitled to live, to win - and although it's capabilities might be limited, in both reason and force, it's fighting with everything it has for it's agenda, and for that of it's masters. And this isn't about "fairness" or "realism" - I'm not suggesting that looking at "monsters" in this way is about anything other than making games fun.

So let's switch genres for a moment, and consider a movie like Terminator or the Bond movies. Part of what makes films like this *fun* is the active sense that evil could triumph. "Evil" characters aren't hopelessly flawed, obviously going to fail, or driven simply by the desire to be bastards - no, they've got a vision of reality for which they're willing to shed blood as do the people trying to stop them. And the same is true, to some extent, in LOTR, except it has this whole Elemental Evil thing going on which obscures the idea of Sauron having motivations.

Getting back to the narritive: the question is, who's got more power to tell the story according to their own lights. The arrow is loosed from the bow - does it strike Our Hero square in the chest, or graze over a shoulder. One is the Orc's Narrative, the other the Heroes' Narrative. They result in totally different stories, different futures. Perhaps the Game Master would prefer a grave wound which still allows the Hero to kill the Orc, but requires urgent medical attention from the River Folk.

The heart of the game is the arbitration between narratives. The central conceit of D&D was always that the Gamemaster represented an Objective Reality, an underlying Universe, in which he was a fair and impartial God. It was always a God Trip.

So let's pry this apart and put a share of the Gamemaster's power back in the hands of the Player. Not, mind you, the Character - but the Player. This is the first step - taken by many of the New Age RPGs - where players can take control of the script.

How is this going to look in play?

GM as Orc: I fire my bow at Melmac
John as Melmac: I try and evade by ducking behind a tree to continue my advance.

Now, let's assume there's a convenient rules framework here for dice-based conflict resolution. Let's assume that the GM wants to ignore it.

GM for Orc: I'm going to spent some of Sauron's Call Points on this shot. Fate takes a hand at this juncture.
John for Melmac: Well, I'm not going to get killed: still got four points in the bank, so how's about a non-fatal wound. But I want that Orc dead.

GM: Ok. We'll have the shot hit for half damage.

(we're making some big assumptions here about cooperative play and the interacting between the "rules physics" on one level, and the Call Points / Fate level on the other. A real game might not be so weak here.)

Now, we have a couple of new concepts here: the first is that people "know" nothing bad is going to happen to them while they still have Call Points. That's not "realistic" because it is very reminiscent of Hit Point Invulnerability, where no high-level D&D character fears surprise attack as long as they have a Teleport or some other way to get out of dodge in a hurry. There's no notion of a one-shot-kill from an ambush. But this is broadly genre consistent. James Bond never gets nailed in the back from a rooftop sniper. Well, except in "XXX" but that was the point. In general you want characters to run out of *something* before they suddenly die, even if the final event happens in a flash. We're talking about "luck" wearing thin - a series of bad events, each requiring the characters to burn more and more fate, eventually leaving them on the wrong side of the tide, the wrong side of the story, the wrong side of history, and then in the grave.

So, one more concept - the Narrative Pool.

Sauron's a Big Guy. An Orc doing Sauron's business is a lot more dangerous than a regular Orc because it's in Sauron's story, and Sauron's story is World Changing. He's got a lot of big tickets, big plans, and the Narrative Power to implement them. The Ring's ability to warp reality, for example, is Sauron's invested power. Sauron's Orcs carry Sauron's Will, Sauron's Destiny - Sauron's Call Points.

Consider the unusual heroism around natural disasters or wars - similarly, it's somehow the "force of the plot" running through the characters. James Bond is capable but what's holding him upright is Saving The World, not his own personal power or ego. It's a Job For A Hero, so A Hero Comes. Michael Moorcock plays extensively with this concept in the Eternal Champion books, and of course Stormbringer is a classic example of a supposedly inanimate actor which turns out to have ideas of its own.

So let's try and put some of those pieces together into some interim mechanics, then we'll look at Magic.


1> Characters have a characteristic we'll call Call Points which represent their current level of Fate. These points regenerate to a "minimum" and dissapate to a "maximum" over time. Additional points are gained for getting involved in Fateful events like adventures or disasters.

2> Situations come with "pools" of points which can be spent to ensure a given outcome. For example, Baron von Totallyevil's plan for Nuclear Nazis has some 50 Call Points available to stop it. Somehow this forms a pool which players can access, probably through helping to stop the plan, being awarded a few points, and continuing to push forward. Of course, the Baron might have 20 points *for* his plan, and what's more he's got a fortress, the Alternate World Adolph Einstein and a few other big bad guys on his side.

3> During critical conflicts, the GM or the Players can simply suspend the normal mechanics (going beyond mere fudging of dice rolls and into weird coincidences like a passing car having two off-duty cops in it or even outright magic). Bigger deviations cost more.



To Spend, or not To Spend, that is the question
So how do people know when to spent their Call Points? What happens if you burn them now - you limp through the rest of the adventure kind of crippled, burned out, no faith or certainty left. Some can fight pretty effectively even from there, but not having any buffer when the shit hits the fan...

Of course, this suggests a simple kind of attrition - burn out the other side's Call Points, then pave them using your excess. What's the point of that - all we've done is invented Karmic Hitpoints.

To resolve this, we have to return to the concept of the GM and the Player having some kind of scoreboard, quite outside of the game world that their various characters are manifested in.

The goal, for the GM and the Player, is to succeed with the minimum expenditure of Fate, not because of any future benefits, but because this is *Art* dammit.

For example, two groups of players have the same scenario - a heist to recover a fortune in manuscripts, one of which has some esoteric significance. One group goes in guns blazing, burns plot points to survive firefights with the guards, and so on. It's a cakewalk, but at the end of it, they're out of plot points and they've burned hard.

Another group is cunning - they scheme and plot for a silent entry with alarms disabled - and the GM is forced to burn Call Points from the scenario's reserve to have guards wander by at inopportune moments.

This is the metric of success: are you pushing fate around, or are you navigating within the frameworks of fate in a skillful way. The gamer who avoids deadly combat to horde plot points for showdowns is showing common sense.

And this is where we get our final dynamic: "Levelling Up."

Simply put, players who end each session having burned less of the plot resources than the GM burned to keep them busy consistently increase both their Minimum Call Point Level, and possibly their Maximum Call Point Level. As they demonstrate less and less need to rely on fate to push them forward, their ability to use fate increases.

Of course, what goes along with this is that such skillful people find themselves driven by this fate into more and more complex and important situations. A two Call Point minimum might be a good beat cop. But a 5 point Call Point Minimum character is a general or a hero: between recharges they can survive *five* lethal events.

This approach to Leveling Up avoids the horrendously accelerate "growth curves" of games like D&D where people double their capabilities in the first few games, and a single high level character can defeat literally thousands of lower leven characters. Characters get more "fateful" and more robust because of it - but their situations get increasingly complex and dangerous alongside of it. Characters work their way up through *situations* not through simply becoming bigger and more tanklike.

Does this make sense?

What's interesting is that it looks like a simple mechnic which could be refined (a lot!) and then playtested on top of an existing game structure. You could literally take Plot Points and bolt them on to D&D (well, you'd have to do something about XP and levelling up, but let's say Call of Cthulhu) to see if this approach could be refined into a new way of managing both character progression and game thrust.

[Juan D. Six]

Finally, let's cover magic.

We've got this notion of there being no Prime Material Plane - no solid external reality - to weave back into the mix.

The Byakhee knows it exists. It existed when it woke up this morning.

The fact that James Hammond, Detroit PD Detective, knows that the Byakhee does not exist, does not change a damn thing in the Byahkhee's mind.

So how are these two entities going to resolve this conflict? Well, either side could spend Call Points simply to have Snuffalapagus Invisibility - Hammond runs into the basement when the Byahkee is on the roof, then when he checks the roof, it's in the alley. Comedic as this might be, it doesn't change that at some point these beings are going to meet face to face, and Hammond is going to get busted.

Or is he?

What we have is a conflict between two models of the world, one with a six meter long wing'd monstrosity snuffling around in the basement looking for the magician that Hammond just shot on the roof, and the other with a hardboiled detective who just shot an axewielding freak in a Halloween outfit. In a conventional game, either the Byakhee is real, or it isn't.

Well, in a conventional game, either the Arrow hits Our Hero, or it whizzes over the shoulder. Either the dice indicate the climb up the tower succeeds, or somebody falls and gets busted up.

Fate steps in. Hammond says there is no such thing as a Byakhee in that basement and, what's more, he's got the Call Point Pool of Western Science on his side.

Well, surely enough, he opens the door - and there's no Byakhee.

Now, what happened in the Byakhee's narritive? Did it just wink out of existence? No - no more than the Orc's direct hit winked out of existence. It's just potential.

Well, what about those badly chewed bones of the things the critter was just eating? That's evidence of something. And, sure enough, by the time the results are back from the lab, the ruling from the State Pathologist is rats-and-feral-dogs.

Something which was "real" has winked out of existence because of the nature of Fate. Hammond's player might suspect - or know for sure - there was a Byakhee there. But Hammond walks into empty air.

Now this is not a joke - something weird happens when parties with totally different opinions on the nature of reality come into conflict. You can see a really good example of this in everything to do with UFOs, or in the old Hammer Horror movie "The Devil Rides Out," in which an entire set of realities gets winked out of existence at one point.

And this kind of approach really seems to map pretty well to what we see of the occult or alien realities in real life - if there was ever anything "real" going on, it all gets covered over by some kind of self-healing, evidence-denying reaction. Which might be Men in Black, but seems to me much more like some kind of undiscovered law of magic or physics - stuff just gets rejected by the dominant paradigm and vanishes from our consensus reality, regardless of it's underlying reality.

Magic is still common in places without science, at least if you ask the people who live there. But we disregard their accounts with a lot of force, and, oddly enough, never see it.

So we get "magic" which is mundane - the stuff defined as normal in the reality the game is set in. This stuff is just "local reality" and can be safely ignored.

The action is in places where magic - or technology - or talking dogs - SHOULD NOT EXIST.

And when they do, it's Call Points that maintain them. Your gritty spy drama is interrupted by a FIFTY CALL POINT TALKING DOG. He says he's the result of a brain transplantation genetic experiment - but there's no scar and he "can't remember" the lab he came from. And the damn thing has the luck of the devil, pushes the plot forward, and then runs off into the bush never to be seen again.

Players with special powers run them off Call Points. That's why Superheros are consistently getting into huge trouble, over and over again - got to keep fueling the drama that makes them who they are.

More later.

[Simon C]

Ok, you're getting into more interesting territory when you discuss more wildly divergant world views.  With the Sauron orc, basically they're sharing very similar world views: Player: "Orcs are cannon fodder."  Sauron: "Orcs are cannon fodder."  Orc: "Help!"

With the Byakhee, it's more critical, and therefore more interesting.  Detective: "There's no such thing as a Byakhee." Byakhee: "I exist, and I'm hungry"

I think by restricting your concept to a simpke "Points" system, you're under-selling it.  I can see these points as being used to create a person's entire self concept, their abilities.  The detective is a crack shot because he believes he is.  The Byakhee is voracious because the elder gods will it.  You can do more with this.