Characters modifying memories

[Person]

I'm (strongly) considering running an Unknown Armies game in the near future, and there's one sticky GMing issue that's been bothering me: how do people handle the situation where PCs have picked up some false memories (most likely through Cliomancer trickery)?

Specifically, how do you introduce the false memories in a way that

1. Minimizes IC/OOC confusion over what is happening. That is to say, the players should realize that something's screwing with their characters' heads, rather than assuming that the GM is forgetful or trying to rewrite game history.
2. Maximizes dramatic/visceral impact on the players at the moment of revelation. (Obviously, players are going to realize that the memories are fake before characters do.)

I see false memories as a really horrific/impactful* element, so I'd rather not refrain from using them when appropriate. It does seem likely, in-game, that they'll be used in one of two ways: gaining trust and sowing confusion. If a PC meets someone that the character has never met or referenced before, and they're described as a really close college buddy, they player should be thinking "what the hell is going on here" rather than "why is the GM dictating elements of my background."

Likewise, I'm somewhat unsure of how to appropriately introduce drastically false "screw with your head" memories. "The latest headlines from Iraq remind you, as they so often do, of your years fighting for the Khmer Rouge alongside the zombified corpses of Hitler and Mao."

Any general advice/experience with handling memories that change in unusual ways would be appreciated. Thanks.

- Peter

* If someone's got a better word for what I'm getting at here, feel free.

[TonyLB]

Is Unknown Armies a game in which it would not have been possible for a character to fight alongside the zombified corpses of Hitler and Mao?

I find that somewhat surreal worlds do wonders for increasing the disorienting impact of false memories... you can't apply Occams razor, or anything similar.

In terms of how to make sure your players are all on the same page with you, the first element is clearly to talk to them about it.  Say explicitly "This is a game where your character memories can be falsified in many ways.  Now do you want me to conceal this from you artfully, so that you as the players are immersed in the resulting confusion?  Or would you rather collaborate, with the players all knowing what's going on, and responsible for making the story of it dramatic through the characters?"

[Person]

Is Unknown Armies a game in which it would not have been possible for a character to fight alongside the zombified corpses of Hitler and Mao?

I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's certainly out of the ordinary. I guess I'll have to try harder for examples of horrific, inconsistent memories.

I find that somewhat surreal worlds do wonders for increasing the disorienting impact of false memories... you can't apply Occams razor, or anything similar.

This is an interesting point, and one I had not considered. I suppose that a memory-alterer with malicious intent might either dump a batch of memories like the ones above on their victim or take the time and effort to construct a series of more plausible (and hence, perhaps even more disturbing) memories, depending on thier subtlety. Of course, there are much simpler and more lethal/dangerous ways to use this, but they seem less interesting for discussion.

In terms of how to make sure your players are all on the same page with you, the first element is clearly to talk to them about it.  Say explicitly "This is a game where your character memories can be falsified in many ways.  Now do you want me to conceal this from you artfully, so that you as the players are immersed in the resulting confusion?  Or would you rather collaborate, with the players all knowing what's going on, and responsible for making the story of it dramatic through the characters?"

Just to clear up any potential confusion (including mine), I should mention that I plan on approaching UA from a firm Sim standpoint with perhaps the lightest touch of Nar arising from built-in character obsessions and the like. From my very untrained eye and what I've gleaned from these boards, this seems to be the intended use of the system?

The first option you mention is intriguing. If I understand you right, it's something to the effect of "just trust that if it intially looks like I'm doing something that's really bad form, it's for a good cause?"

Ideally, I would like for the immediate realization of the players to be contrasted and layered with the slower realization of the PCs. The analogy that just struck me, perhaps inappropriately, is a GM dropping hints at the involvement of some Terrible Thing that the players immediately catch onto (because of OOC/setting knowledge) but the players don't. This effect might not be as desireable in practice as it seems in my head; I'm unsure.

[Shreyas Sampat]

If you want to conceal your manipulation from the players, then you could take advantage of some of their assumptions - for instance, you could actually play out some of their false-memory scenes. The players will naturally believe that this stuff Really Happened. Etc.

[Person]

If you want to conceal your manipulation from the players, then you could take advantage of some of their assumptions - for instance, you could actually play out some of their false-memory scenes. The players will naturally believe that this stuff Really Happened. Etc.

The problem with this approach would seem to be that it relies on the actions of the characters being either unimportant or fixed. It would work for memories of events in which the character wasn't really involved, but doesn't seem like it would hold together in cases where the character's (false) actions are an integral part of the effect.

[Praetor Judis]

I've done similar things in the past.

I find it useful to go a little over the top when dealing with mental manipulation.  Good events are a little too picture perfect good, bad events are far worse than normal events.  Focus overly on visual details, giving it a movie-like quality.  Give it a creepy, or surreal, narrative edge.  Tack in small incongruous details like a demitasse cup in a torture chamber or a severed finger lying on a napkin on the piano in a luxurious manor.  The players will quickly pick up on the clues and have a good idea when they're characters are being manipulated.  If they're good players, their characters will continue to act true to form, but the players won't feel cheated.

[Kaare Berg]

I don't know how helpfull this is, but IMO the way you percieve the world depends on your perspective, or who you are. I would argue for the sake of this game that we as human beings (or other entities) is the sum of our experiences.

Following this reasoning a character with a set of false memories will percieve the world differently than if he had his proper meomories.

You as the GM controls what the character percieves.

If you then start to make the player question what his character experiences, compared to what his character and/or He the player knows you will get the effect your are looking for.

How?
Start of by giving them information coloured by their perceptions. like Praetor Judis suggets, and then have this gradually contrast with what they know.
i.e. I know that some insane murderer butchered my family, and this is why I percieve this gory details so clearly, but why does my mom's ghost run from me. Then there is this knife I keep seeing around. Why is there a video tape of me at the local gas-station at the time, I was posted in Korea, when it happened. Is that a black sedan following us?

This works if your players are on the ball and it will fuck with their minds and then they will proclaim you GM-god.

Oh and you will have fun.

[M. J. Young]

I'm not sure how UA works, but I know how I'd do it in Multiverser. Rather than attempt to alter the player character's memory of the history so that it no longer matches what happened, I would alter what really happened so that it no longer matches what the players remember. All the non-player characters in the game world now recall those events as entirely different from what the players remember--and consistently so, such that either everyone else remembers wrong, or whatever it is that the players remember playing through never happened in this world.

That achieves the effect in the perceptions of the players: their memories of events don't match the apparent history of the world.

As I say, I don't know whether that works in UA or not.

--M. J. Young

[Person]

M.J. Young: I'm unsure how this technique works. If I've read right, a series of events is established through play, which both PCs and NPCs can agree is what actually happened. The memory-altering effect occurs, and now the GM constructs a new sequence of events reflecting "what actually happened," which all the NPCs believe in, but the PCs are unaware of.

I do agree that this would achieve the given effect, but it seems to be rather potentially harmful to players' control over their characters: if the actions they chose to take only exist in false memories, there must be some actions they did take in the "real" timeline, which the GM must decide upon. I'm unfamilar with Multiverser except through reputation, so I'm not sure if there's some mechanical difference that makes this strategy more palatable.

It does sound like a good approach to a related problem that springs up in UA, namely that of history-altering effects.

[Albert of Feh]

Cheers, Pete.

Well, this is only applicable in certain instances, but perhaps the "What actually happened" is simply that they weren't there? If it was an invented memory in the first place, it might not even have to have taken real time; this would also provide a curious time disconnect for the characters as an extra clue, which may or may not be a good thing. Heck, any false scene of any length in recent memory (so to speak) is probably going to require at least some spatial or temporal disconnect.

The problem with this approach would seem to be that it relies on the actions of the characters being either unimportant or fixed. It would work for memories of events in which the character wasn't really involved, but doesn't seem like it would hold together in cases where the character's (false) actions are an integral part of the effect.

Or it relies on you gaming the 'memories', bringing full illusionist guns to bear on the false scenes. Depending on how exactly you interpret the memory insertion to occur, this could even still be consistent. It's known that our brain rationalizes everything we do. So the scene course present to the characters needs to be such that it makes a particular choice of action very 'rational'. It's if that slightly modifies the content of the original idea behind the inserted memory, because that's how your mind would probably work when faced with the act of sorting and storing the memory.

-Albert

[M. J. Young]

As regards the technique in Multiverser, the most common application would be in situations in which the player character has developed some type of insanity. Insanity in Multiverser is played by presenting the world as the character perceives it. Since the player can't know anything about the world other than what his character perceives, he responds to that. The referee has the tricky business of keeping straight what really happens in the world while communicating to the player the character's perceptions. This is excellent for paranoia and certain other delusions.

It's not the only way it's handled. Sometimes the technique is turned on its head, and the player's reasonable actions are interpreted by the referee as if they were unreasonable. Megalomania is a good example of this. Someone with this condition thinks that everything he says is perfectly reasonable, but it's actually coming out as extreme. Thus the referee reinterprets what the player says his character says into what the character would actually have said to convey that, and has the non-player characters react accordingly.

One of the aspects of Multiverser that enables this is that ordinarily the player characters are each alone, and so the referee can present information to them individually that doesn't have to be checked against the information of other player characters. However, for your application, if the altered memories are being inserted into the minds of all the PCs, this isn't a problem, as they would all have the same wrong recollection of events. If they manage to correct the memory problem, you could resolve matters by restoring the original history.

I'll note that in this particular approach to play, what matters is not what the history of the world actually is, but what the experience of the players is. When you change the history of the world, their memories are wrong; when their memories are right, you restore the original history of the world. The actual story of what happened is in this case not as important as the feeling that things aren't what they remember. If that's what you're seeking, this will get it. If it's fine for the players to know the real history but their characters to be confused about it, then the solution is to tell the players that their characters' memories have been altered and they should play them accordingly. That puts the emphasis on cooperative creation of the real history, and not on the player experience.

--M. J. Young