[The Call] Game Metaphysics

[contracycle]

I want to avoid a Rifts-like system which wires these pools of reality into the structure of the (meta)physical universe, opting for something more fluid and tricksy - a world in which, yes, perhaps that did happen, and perhaps it didn't... where truth doesn't necessarily travel well, and just because you saw a Byakhee come down from space doesn't mean that NORAD saw it too, or that you can make it happen again...

Well, if experiences are not real to all observers, and are not independantly reproducible, what should I or anyone care about what you saw?  I mean, if seeing a Byakhee come down from space does not imply that say the locals might be in danger, cos ya know, perception is "subjective", then why would anyone care?  The sighting means nothing becuase it has no consequences.

I think this kind of subjectivity is an extraordinarily bad idea in a game that occurs in the imaginations of its players.  It amounts to refusing to firmly establish the imaginary space.

Henry For the fifteen seconds while you're squarely facing it, it's as real as stomache cramp. All the religions, all the stories, all of that stuff really happened... even if it's only inside the minds of the people who were there. Our job seems to be to help stop the bad stuff getting through into the consensus reality, into the place where people live most of the time, to keep the weirdness at the fringes, where it belongs. That's what makes it weird.

Well, if it only ever happened inside the minds of the people who were there, then they are simply delusional and nobody else has to worry.  I mean, if this effect was so trivial as to be unable to reach beyond the head of the "observer", it poses not threat to me or mine.

A world which DOES have secrets, real tangible secrets that don't care if you believe in them, is something I find interesting.  A world which only has the appearance of secrets, however, is not very interestesting.

[Juan D. Six]

Isn't this the core question, though? Is BigFoot Real?

We play games in which the Supernatural is simply assumed into hard, tangible reality: you can go hunting for these things (infamously) with shotguns. It's Dungeons and Dragons with meaner, eviler monsters (in many cases) and far worse odds.

But, you know, if CoC characters leveled up and got more hit points and spells, just like D&D Characters did, you can see how this would go: "the Ghoul bites your for 11 hit points" "ok, I'm down to 28 HP I better think about getting out of here."

It's my reading, from looking at eyewitness accounts of supernatural events - UFO sightings particularly - that something *weird* does happen to the narritive flow of reality. People travel into some kind of altered state, *then* the UFOs appear, then they come back again. Sometimes physical reality bears the scars: radioactive footprints or peasants relocated hundreds of miles away. But more often there's no tangible physical evidence left behind.

That is interesting. The idea that these things happen pretty frequently, at least in people's own minds (check the abduction stats!) - and very, very infrequently do they happen in a way which leaves tangible physical evidence opens up a lot of territory.

Perhaps the cultists can summon a Byakhee. And they all see it. But it can't "maintain" itself outside of  a rural, isolated location with only True Believers present. Mebbe the unconscious psychic backpressure of downtown Boston acts like a magical shield, the combined weight of the disbelief of the unconscious magicians scattered through the population forming an unbreakable spell of "YOU DON'T EXIST!"

Again, I'm not suggesting that as an actual play mechanic (yet) but you get the idea: without taking it all the way down to the mat ala Rifts and providing mechanical models for these bubbles of competing realities, I think there's a lot of milage in **playing into the distrust of one's own experiences.**

It's altogether too easy in a world where you *know* the monsters are real to simply saddle up and go spook hunting. It's all to easy to go from The Exorcist to Ghostbusters in two sessions. "Holy water? Check" "Little low on Garlic, let's hit the supermarket on the way out to Arkham"

In a sense, this is the more *real* version of SAN loss leading to insanity. In CoC SAN loss represents a mixture of post traumatic stress disorder, and dysphoria induced by realizing that humanity is a snack food.

Hardly ever is it played as uncertainty about the Nature of the Real but, actually, that's where most of the action is in the real world. The UFO nuts might be right - or they might be having the same experience as people Taken Away by the Faeries in Rural Eire 400 years ago. Same with the BigFoot guys.

Reality isn't even and continuous, nor does it form tight, isolated bubbles: Bigfoot is Real inside of this 20x20 mile box, and unreal outside of it. There's something more subtle going on where people's beliefs factor into how they filter evidence, into what they will ignore and what they will objectify and what they will religiously believe in.

I want to try and find a way of representing that *relative* reality. I'm not suggesting that the Monsters *can't* come play downtown, but if the illusion that the game world is like the real world is to be maintained, they come down town in suits and ties, and they eat in basements, not bars.

One final angle. A warewolf - or all the warewolves, or a vampire - and all the vampires - are very, very pathetic monstered when compared to a Hitler. The reality is that human evil is much, much more terrible than goblins or Byakhee. It would be nice to see a game which had something intelligent to say about that too. A game which actually acknowledges that, compared to the Humans, whatever supernatural races exist are comparatively benign. Even if Great Cthulhu rises, he's just a hungry alien. It's the people who work for him, herding the rest of the population into his Great Maw that are the real evils here.

[joepub]

Well, if it only ever happened inside the minds of the people who were there, then they are simply delusional and nobody else has to worry.  I mean, if this effect was so trivial as to be unable to reach beyond the head of the "observer", it poses not threat to me or mine.

A world which DOES have secrets, real tangible secrets that don't care if you believe in them, is something I find interesting.  A world which only has the appearance of secrets, however, is not very interestesting.

This strikes me as a bit of a naive way of looking at this. Picture 12 Monkeys here (if you've seen it). The guy knows about deadly virus, know about time travel...
He *has* fucking time travelled. But he still talks himself out of it during the movie.
And the psychologist talks herself out of it despite glaring truths, until finally the build-up of evidence is too great to deny any longer.

I think that's what we're getting at with the idea that truths are subjective - most people want to exist within a rigid box.

The reality is that human evil is much, much more terrible than goblins or Byakhee. It would be nice to see a game which had something intelligent to say about that too. A game which actually acknowledges that, compared to the Humans, whatever supernatural races exist are comparatively benign. Even if Great Cthulhu rises, he's just a hungry alien. It's the people who work for him, herding the rest of the population into his Great Maw that are the real evils here.

*Starts applauding Juan's brilliance*
I don't see how that fits into the rest of the game (yet), but that's definately a good angle to push. The fact that after you find the bizarre, you find the humanity in it... which only exposes the GAP of humanity in regular humans.

very nice.

[Juan D. Six]

By the way, just to chase this hare a little further (even though it has a bit too much of a lead for me to catch ;-) )

What if the Human Population seriously went after the Vampires and other Monsters? House-to-house searches by the Men in Black with Detect Undead Boxes. Compulsory DNA testing for warewolves... Anti-Monster Fascism.

Great Gulags where the Monster Population is rounded up and the Vampires limp by on synthetic blood while Nanny State tries to figure out if, in fact, a Vampiric American is a Human Being with an Illness, or an Animated Corpse that needs to be inanimated as quickly as Due Process of Law allows. Perhaps it's the Born Agains who run the camps, and they allow everybody to live because they might still find Jesus, or because the second coming is immanent...

I'm just not sure that, in an all-out-war between the Traditional Monsters and the High Tech Humans the bad guys win, or even survive. Of course, this is true of Organized Crime too - Mafia vs US Army is a fairly short engagement if fought in the open field.

But this matters - the idea that the Monsters only *survive* because they're underground, because nobody believes in them, because the massed power of the human race is never turned on them - changes the dynamics remarkably.

Players who find themselves in the Underworld - who're asking the Mob for favors, or otherwise outside of the Rule of Law - they might have to deal with a world in which the monsters are Very, Very powerful. But it's the power of corruption, not the power of the massed Orc Armies of the West who might just be able to over-run the Human Race or the power of the UFO-flying Raygun-Toting Space Aliens.

In both LOTR and CoC the Small Evils - the Orcs and the Ghouls - are menacing because they're backed up by the Big Evils - Sauron and Morgoth, and the Great Old Ones. There's a great polarity, Heaven / Humanity vs. Hell / Inhuman Monsters. Play seems significant because these are the tactical skirmishes that becomes strategic push/pull in the Great War.

That's true of the X-Files as well: the threat of Alien Invasion is what makes an abducted truck driver into an incident. Monster-of-the-week is a curiosity, with some personal danger, but the big issues are Agency Support. If the Heavy Firepower of the Agency can be brought to bear, no monster-of-the-week is a real challenge. The real danger isn't critters, it's a bureaucracy unable to effectively respond to critters.

I don't know exactly where I'm going with this in game terms, but I think perhaps what I'm driving towards is a game where the *skirmishes* that Players get into aren't automatically part of a Great War. Perhaps different groups understand their actions to be *part* of that Great War, but misunderstand or are misled.

Eyewitness It wasn't till the fourth or fifth time I'd seen them set down in the cow pasture that it came to me. "Those ain't soldiers, even if they are aliens. Them's joyriding kids!" and I thought about what they'd done to some of my friends, and I knew I had to do something. I'd heard that if you shot 'em the bullets just bounced off, but I was in 'Nam, you know, and I ain't forgot everything they told me, so I buried two gas cans and a handgrenade right under where they normally land and I waited, buried in the dirt right over here...

I'm sorry the saucer is all burned out and the bodies are gone. They just kind of disintegrated in the fire like they was made of wax or something, or didn't have no bones.

Agent, visibly shaken Well, thank you Tom. Thank you very much...

It's all very different if the loss of that saucer brings down a mothership that levels Los Angeles. It's all very different if the Cultists are backed up by Elder Gods.

But there's no reason for players, at the beginning of a game, to know that the Elder Gods are real, that the Vampires are actually strong enough to eat the whole human race because they're 2,000,000 of them sleeping in Egypt.

In the beginning nobody should be sure. Perhaps this is another aspect of this Call business: if you find out that there really is a Big Threat then you're commited. But perhaps, just perhaps, you can "win" by successfully fighting your skirmish and then standing down before you get sucked into the Great Game.

PS: Thanks, Joepub!

[joepub]

Vampires limp by on synthetic blood while Nanny State tries to figure out if, in fact, a Vampiric American is a Human Being with an Illness, or an Animated Corpse that needs to be inanimated as quickly as Due Process of Law allows.

Hahahahaha. That's gold. That could be turned into its own game!

Anyways, I like the idea that there are few, if any, giant societies keeping this all "under wraps". I like the idea that you are a believer among skeptics, if you believe at all.
(just my two cents)

[Juan D. Six]

A bit more on the framing of the occult / supernatural / science fiction elements.

So my idea is that characters start out with some or no exposure to the Weird Universe - they might have capabilities and have some Secrets either individually or in common, but they don't have a bombproof, cohesive world model. Furthermore, at a metagame level, the rules make it quite clear that there are a variety of scenarios which might be The Truth, and only the GM (if even they!) really Know What Is Out There.

The Unknown is important. Great Cthulhu may or may not exist, and if It Does, it may or may not be like Lovecraft's depiction. The foundation of reality is fluid because:

1> The Call does not define a single rigid underlying reality like Vampires or UFOs
2> Players only know what their characters know about Reality
3> The GM can make up their mind about what is Real as they go, as the game unfolds.

You Cannot Count on Anything is a fundamental.

So here's a general outline of the game flow:

Characters start with, let's say, 5 points of CALL. Those points are converted or lost over play in three ways:

1> A point of call can be used to master a Secret Truth (and associated powers) on first exposure. At the first hint of something a character can roleplay the reaction of I ALWAYS KNEW IT WAS LIKE THAT, SINCE I WAS A CHILD or something along those lines, and absorb the new reality immediately. Subjecively, it appears that the Path Unfolds at Your Feet.

2> A point of call can be used to fudge results ala Warhammer Fate Points. Frowned upon except in exceptional circumstances because, usually, points are more valuable for absorbing new realities. The needs of the day shouldn't supplant the thirst to understand what is real!

3> Call points can be lost if a character acts in ways which are antithetical to the Call itself: a wounded character knows they should follow the car with the abducted child, but they're bleeding pretty badly and decide to go to the hospital instead. It might keep them alive, but it'll also potentially cost them a point of call. Some kind of a dice roll would probably be appropriate "15% chance of a point of call being lost" and you roll, and if it's OK, well, you make it to the hospital and somebody else has a lead on the car that you can follow - a weird synchronicity saves your butt, basically. The more Call you have, the more likely it is that things like this happen!

Of course, the more call you have, the more likely it is that Weird Shit will keep coming into your path demanding attention.

As a model, at Low levels of call, one or two points, you're the Trouble Magnet Beat Cop who always gets the crazy cases.

At Five points, you're Mulder or Scully.

At Seven or Nine points, you're the guy from the Celestine Prophecy.

At 15 points, you're Frodo Baggins.

I'm not sure how one increases these Call points beyond the initial levels. One option is that it's scenario / decision based: characters decide to get involved in something messy and interesting, and points are granted based on having stepped up to plate. "You want me to follow the Cultists to Brazil?" "Yes, Mr Jones, I do. And  I have $5m in cash to fund your travels, and those of your team, if you can guarentee me results...." (GM aside: and there's four points of Call here too.)

What's interesting about this is that Call is in some way owned by the *situation* and not the *character* - it could be that if you bail on the situation, the loss-of-Call is simply the situation reassigning it's Weirdness to somebody else who's willing to step up to plate and play the role the situation requires.

I think there might be some milage in that idea, but I'm still exploring it.

I'd really welcome some feedback on how this is looking to your variously-experienced eyes: does it look like there's enough of a concept here to flesh out into a game?

[dindenver]

Hi!
  JUst a thought, but maybe instead of Call Points being like a carrot dangled in front of the player, they relate directly to secrets and truth.
  For instance, maybe players get Call Points for teaching others secrets and/or truths..?

[Juan D. Six]

Hm.

I don't know. "The Call" is a mysterious thing - I don't have an understanding of it in Real Life where it shimmers in and out of perception depending on how you look at it. Lawrence of Arabia is really my Main Man on this whole Call business: one gay english academic vs. an Army and, by god, he builds an alliance unheard of in local history, crosses an impossibly horrible desert, has to kill a man who's life he earlier saved and at the end of all of it, retires home to Merry Old England.

You know? What the heck was going on there. That's supernatural, in a sense.

I feel that "Call Points" should more-or-less compel people to try and rise to those heights: if you wind up with a bunch of them, life should *suck* unless you're living the bold life of adventure to which your soul calls you. Clearly double-edged swords...

Definitely not experience points. Definitely not.