Multiple Reality Roleplaying

[John Kim]

OK, I am starting a separate thread on this topic, because it seems like an interesting approach for a game.  My idea is to have a game where the intent is for different players to have a different idea of what happened.  Part of this could happen through note-passing, but I want to minimize that.  The interesting part would be through public statements, which are interpretted differently.  

To some degree, this is always true, I think.  Players will interpret statements differently, and they don't always identify and correct differences.  What I would be trying for would be to actually exploit this for effect -- to actually try to keep up differences among player views while still maintaining functional and social play.  

Note that the differences don't have to be big, but they do have to be meaningful.  On http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=7406">this thread, Valamir wrote:

In any case, here you assume a single group viewpoint: i.e. either a statement is accepted or not by everyone. However, if you have multiple people, then this can be ambiguous. One person can accept it as happening, while another person could deny it, and a third could accept a modified version.

Sure.  In general this would be considered a "bad thing" and a source of frustration for the players...but if you approached this as a specific design goal, could be interesting.  The explicit withholding or obfuscating of credibility as a game mechanic.  Of not being sure whether what one says is or isn't accepted as part of the game world.

Quite an interesting application of the Lumpley Principle to experiment with.

Nope, you're not really getting it.  You describe this as not being sure if the statement is accepted.  The point is: there is no single, canonical game-world!!!  The players have different views, but it is not necessary that one of them is right and the rest of them are wrong.  At any point, the player knows for sure what happened in the experience of his PC.  But there is no need to define a "real" reality which is separate from the individual PC experiences.  

Again, differences in view are not a new thing.  They happen all the time in real games.  What I'm looking for is how to use them as a part of the game, rather than assuming that they are bad and trying to eliminate them.  I'm thinking of a game which involves dreams as a theme, like Reve de Dragon, perhaps.  I'm still pondering though.  I may have to read some Philip K. Dick for inspiration.

[Ben Lehman]

Nope, you're not really getting it.  You describe this as not being sure if the statement is accepted.  The point is: there is no single, canonical game-world!!!  The players have different views, but it is not necessary that one of them is right and the rest of them are wrong.  At any point, the player knows for sure what happened in the experience of his PC.  But there is no need to define a "real" reality which is separate from the individual PC experiences.  

BL>  I've done this.  As a (10 person) LARP, no less.  It was bloody hard, even with one semi-coGM, and it involved convincing every player that almost every other character was, in fact, stark raving mad.

I could not see maintaining it for more than one session, and it is the sort of trick that can only be pulled off once with any given group.

That said, it was awesomely fun.

If I had my webpage up, it would have a little section on the game.  Sadly, the poor server is presently in dodo-land, so I can't point you to that.  I'm away from my main computer right now, but if you PM me I can get you the material in about a month, when I'm back together with my precious.

yrs--
--Ben

[John Kim]

I've done this.  As a (10 person) LARP, no less.  It was bloody hard, even with one semi-coGM, and it involved convincing every player that almost every other character was, in fact, stark raving mad.  
...
That said, it was awesomely fun.

Well, with ten people and a premise which is already inherently pretty chaotic, I can see that this would be pretty wild.  I ponder about less extreme versions of this, though.  As I said, the differences of reality don't have to be huge ones for the principle to apply.  

Just a top-of-my head thought.  The premise of the game is that people gain psychic powers, but there is some reason to think that derangements come with it.  So one character is playing an apparent clairvoyant.  However, he claims that his ability to know things comes from a ghost (or perhaps giant rabbit) that only he can see and talk to.  One player plays the clairvoyant.  One player plays the ghost.  

So here we have an ambiguity about what is real.  Is the ghost a figment of the psychic's  imagination, a multiple personality through which he uses his clairvoyance power?  Or is the person's power not clairvoyance but rather this special communication with a separate being?  The same game events may have different interpretations as to the reality.  

So obviously this is just one character idea (or two, really).  I guess, this is musing on how to use the concept -- not necessarily a game design.  But it's the first thing that came to mind.

[Julian Kelsey]

My idea is to have a game where the intent is for different players to have a different idea of what happened.

Having weaned myself from the desire to write a general game engine, I've started down this sort of path myself.

I'm specifically concerned with creating the effect that happens in lots of urban fantasy, (from Charles DeLint to the X-Files), that some characters will interpret events one way and others differently, (Scully's mundane approach, while Mulder wants to believe).

My present rambling notes involve a scale from mundane to mysterious, each character has a world view rated on that scale, and each scene is also rated on that scale. Then depending on various factors players get to narrate different interpretations, and depending on the match of scales some explanations have more weight. An important mechanism is that if they are confronted by weighty alternate interpretations, they may be swayed, and the characters rating on the mundane to mysterious scale moves.

As play progresses and the scene mystery indexes shift, explanations that had more or less weight may shift in their significance or truth. This means what was taken as true at one point during play may become untrue later.

I'm starting to catalogue, as hints to players, features of these stories that make it possible for characters to hold conflicting views. In play I think it will depend on fairly conscious support of Author and Director stances. Players may employ everything from saying they had their backs turned, to being knocked out, to not quite remembering, insanity, ignorance, hopefully lots of clever justifications and interpretations of events, and even plain conflicting opinions on what they saw.

Having characters absent from some scenes can help, so I'm working on text to discuss sharing GM responsibilities, and different ways of participating without one character to one player fixation. Ideas and material on cut scenes and parallel play, tight scene framing and so forth that can yield short scenes that are fun to observe.

Importantly I think rewards for taking part in these facilitating behaviours. Players who facilitate other players starring scenes get rewarded. Players that offer up explainations that can be used in many ways get rewarded. I figure if players understand that's what the game is about and are familiar with the genre they'll come to the party.

There are a bunch of other ideas that are getting thrown into the mix as well, and it's early days.

[contracycle]

To some degree, this is always true, I think.  Players will interpret statements differently, and they don't always identify and correct differences.  What I would be trying for would be to actually exploit this for effect -- to actually try to keep up differences among player views while still maintaining functional and social play.  

Yes but.  I'm afraid my objection here is that same as to all the subjective reality approaches - what is there to Explore if it is my own creation.  More power to those who enjoy, it leaves me completely cold.

[Lxndr]

Didn't the roleplaying game "Psychosis: Ship of Fools" do this to some extent?  Every player wakes up completely insane, and their insanities are different.  So how they interpret the world around them, how things are described to them, is different.

As the game progresses, they change psychoses, they change how they view the world.  Most of the book itself is dedicated to describing various psychoses, and there's a mechanic for when the psychoses switch, and what the new one brings about.  Even after you reach "the real world" you can be knocked out of it again (and if as GM you do it "right", they might not realize which one is the real world for a while).

So one character is literally seeing the world as, say, a noir picture while another is literally seeing it as a horror flick, and a third is seeing it through the eyes of a child.  Meanwhile, it's really a spaceship...

[ejh]

Topos, my PBeM rules system, specifically does not require consensus among the players as to what has "really happened."  This wasn't because I was trying to be postmodern, it was because I wanted to design Topos to be immune to player defection of any kind.  Story divergence is not encouraged, but consensus is not enforced either.  (There is a mechanism whereby consensus can be encouraged, but not enforced; that is the 'topos' mechanic which gives the game its name.)

Y'all are talking like it's some big deal to design a game like that.  I did it accidentally when I wasn't even trying! :)

Overall, I enjoyed designing Topos, and some fun was had playing it, but consider it more of a learning experience than a masterpiece of a game.  I wouldn't recommend the approach.

[Walt Freitag]

We're talking about a range of different things here, which is why some are saying, "wow, is this even possible?" while others are saying "what's the big deal?"

For instance, in the "what's the big deal" category, we have Rekon-1, the first LARP using pre-written characters. Six of the characters, played by six different players, are time travellers from the future. In fact, they're all the same person with the same name (Anton Myriad) and they're all the grandson of a present-day character also in the scenario (John Myriad). But each is from a different future diverging from the various possible disastrous outcomes of the game scenario (nuclear war, alien invasion, etc.) So one can say that each character (and each player in those roles) perceives a different reality. But one can also say that the reality (the shared imaginative space) is that they're all time travellers from different futures.

Alexander's example of Psychosis is the same. The characters perceive different realities and the players playing them act on the basis of different perceived realities, but the shared reality is that the characters are all psychotic.

Moreover, it doesn't seem to me to make much difference whether or not there is some objective explanation of why different characters perceive different realities. If there's not, you can just say that the shared reality is that different characters are perceiving different realities. Nor does it appear to make much difference, if an objective explanation exists, whether or not the players know it. Nor does it appear to make much difference if an objective explanation exists, and the players know it, whether or not they imagine their characters knowing it.

In all those cases, it's still a shared imaginative space, just one that has additional details regarding what each character perceives. In other words, if I know my character thinks the sky is pink, and you know my character thinks the sky is pink, that's shared imaginative space. Even if your character thinks the sky is green.

What would make a big difference -- and what puts it, I believe, into the "gee, is that even possible?" category, would be if the players themselves were unaware that other players were imagining different realities, or were aware of it but didn't know what the actual differences were. In other words, I'd have to think that the sky is pink (or that my character sees the sky as pink), while you that the sky is blue (or that my character sees the sky as blue), and you must be unaware of the disagreement. Unless the play is very director-stance oriented, if you know that "my sky" is a different color than "your sky," you'd tend to see it as a difference in character perception and we're back to the "so what?" case. Having truly divergent and signficant player perceptions of the game reality, not attributed to divergent character perceptions, would be very odd, and sounds very difficult to bring about.

- Walt

[Mike Holmes]

No problem, Walt, each player in a different room with a different GM. Each delivers a version of the events filtered in some way, ala Psychosis. OTOH, the players may suspect something, especially if they ask why, and you don't tell them why. You could, OTOH, lie, and say, for instance, it was to make for play where they could split up and play more real time. Which is what the Multi-room/Multi-GM set up is usually for.

Of course, this has to be for some effect, or else why do it. The obvious choice is to really mess up the players perceptions and then toss them together, and see what heppens. Could be neat.

Mike

[John Kim]

What would make a big difference -- and what puts it, I believe, into the "gee, is that even possible?" category, would be if the players themselves were unaware that other players were imagining different realities, or were aware of it but didn't know what the actual differences were.  In other words, I'd have to think that the sky is pink (or that my character sees the sky as pink), while you that the sky is blue (or that my character sees the sky as blue), and you must be unaware of the disagreement. Unless the play is very director-stance oriented, if you know that "my sky" is a different color than "your sky," you'd tend to see it as a difference in character perception and we're back to the "so what?" case.  

Having truly divergent and signficant player perceptions of the game reality, not attributed to divergent character perceptions, would be very odd, and sounds very difficult to bring about.

I'm not sure about this.  In your example, say, it seems easy.  If the other player doesn't say that he is imagining the sky as pink, then you don't know it.  That's very simple.   To allow open conversation between characters, the characters just have to have reasons for not saying things about what they perceive.  There are variety of reasons for this, but they can be very simple.  The character might avoid saying that the sky is pink because she doesn't want the others to think she is crazy.  

The trick isn't making it possible, I think, but how to use it in significant ways.  The sky being pink may not affect play at all, so it would exist but there wouldn't be much point to it.  

On the other hand, I think the example of the psychic ghost is a potentially significant one.  The player of the psychic is told that he knows  he can talk to this particular ghost.  However, the other players -- perhaps including the ghost's player -- are secretly told that he has a clairvoyance power and the ghost is an imaginary split personality, known as scientific evidence.  However, their characters have been advised by the psychic's psychiatrist not to disrupt his delusion.  

Now the players have conflicting perceptions of reality.  The other players watch the ghost talking to the character, and even though their characters don't directly see it, they imagine it as an inner conflict in the mind of the psychic.  The psychic's player imagines the reality as his character talking to an invisible creature.  Even though the conversation is the same, the significance of what is said can be extremely different.

[John Kim]

No problem, Walt, each player in a different room with a different GM. Each delivers a version of the events filtered in some way, ala Psychosis. OTOH, the players may suspect something, especially if they ask why, and you don't tell them why. You could, OTOH, lie, and say, for instance, it was to make for play where they could split up and play more real time. Which is what the Multi-room/Multi-GM set up is usually for.

As a side note, this seems clearly better suited for PBEM.

[Walt Freitag]

No problem, Walt, each player in a different room with a different GM. Each delivers a version of the events filtered in some way, ala Psychosis. OTOH, the players may suspect something, especially if they ask why, and you don't tell them why. You could, OTOH, lie, and say, for instance, it was to make for play where they could split up and play more real time. Which is what the Multi-room/Multi-GM set up is usually for.

Of course, this has to be for some effect, or else why do it. The obvious choice is to really mess up the players perceptions and then toss them together, and see what heppens. Could be neat.

No disagreement, Mike. All those GMs and different rooms and filtering information back and forth fits my idea of "very difficult to bring about," in practice if not in principle.

In a way, the multiple Myriads of Rekon-1 do what you described, in a small way. At the outset, the players (unless they've played before) really are unaware that any other players/characters have different conflicting information about the future. But once known -- that is, once those players try to insert their specific knowledge into the shared imaginative space -- these differences become minor anomalies in a generally consistent larger world view, and can be overtly understood as anomalous. (Time travel is presented as experimental, not something that any character would be expected to fully understand the workings of.)

A more thorough version of what you describe has been done in LARPs, both on purpose (The Great Psionic Feud, in which at the outset all the characters' personalities and memories have been scrambled in a psychic catastrophe) and accidentally (an SF game whose title I can't recall at the moment, in which the information given to players was inadvertently so inconsistent that no consensus on where the characters were or what they were doing there ever arose).

Based on this experience, I predict that tossing together players who have all been prepped with incompatibly different perceptions would result in a massive cooperative search for any underlying consistencies that could lead to an explanation. If there's no such explanation available, there could be a lot of frustration, but players will eventually collectively come up with their own and will adhere to it even without confirming feedback from the GM(s). Such as, "we're all gods competing to create the universe and the last one standing gets to establish the one true reality," or whatever. Players will come up with something. They will do this because the alternative, post-modernist acceptance that everyone has a different perception of reality, just doesn't lead to any further possible meaningful play.

- Walt

[M. J. Young]

Multiverser suggests something like this in the treatment of insanity. Rather than tell the player that his character has gone insane, and suffers thus-and-such problem, the reality is described as he would perceive it if he were crazy.

It's greatly aided by the fact that in most cases players are alone in their own worlds anyway, so they don't have the conflicting evidence given to the other players. However, there are two ways in which it can be used in multi-player situations.

One is to bring the other player characters into the player's world as figments of his delusions, without ever telling anyone that's what they are until after the fact.

The other is to keep it limited such that not more than one sane character is present, and provide differing descriptions to each. At this point they may all know that someone is crazy, but they might not know who.

Again, this is aided by the fact that if you're universe hopping, you really can't know what normal is in the current world, so you can't know whether the descriptions are the reality or your own filters.

--M. J. Young

[Mike Holmes]

No disagreement, Mike. All those GMs and different rooms and filtering information back and forth fits my idea of "very difficult to bring about," in practice if not in principle.

Well, John solves the large number of players problem with his PBEM suggestion. That said, I was thinking two players, two GMs with headsets, two rooms (hence my use of "both" was telling there). That would be pretty easy, I think.

Heck, I'm thinking of trying it out tonight. :-)

Mike

[Rob Donoghue]

I wonder: Could you shortcut around some of this by stacking the deck of player/character expectations?  Provide a single description of events, but do it in a such a way that there are specific, genre based interpretations that are equally valid.

In fact: genre expectations seem exactly the thing to play on.  Who hasn't been in the game that was actually another game?  As in, the D&D game that's actually a Chthulu adventure, or the X-files game that turns out to really be an Amber game or whatever.  Announce you're running a, I dunno, Gurps Horror Game, and that you want people's concepts.  Then talk to various players before the game and tell them that it's actually an Amber/Kult/Unknown Armies/World of Darkness/whatever game, and you need them to play the representative of some group from that game with an interest in these events.  Assuming that you chose players based on their understanding of the second games cosmology, they'll do the work for you, and come up with explanations for things based on the way powers and such work in the "true" game (or if not a game, a book or movie that they like).

I've been in games that use the idea of the one person from the 'real' game, and it can definately be interesting, but I've never considered trying it as the central conceit of a game.

Anyway, this approach won't allow all the sophisitication and flexibility of seperate data streams, but it'd be a lot easier to run, and as a lazy, lazy man, that rather appeals to me.

-Rob D.