[Unseen] a thumbnail sketch of a possible game

[Bailywolf]

I just read Christopher Priest's book The Glamour, and beyond being Priest's usual alternately intriguing and frustrating blend of unreliable narrators and psychological schisms, it also got me thinking about invisibility... about being unseen.  I then thought about all the film version of The Invisible Man  I'd seen, and about how ripped off I felt when I read Ellison's The Invisible Man in middle school, and in the end, nobody was actually really invisible at all. 

Anyhow- what would you do if nobody noticed you?  Not transparency to light, but rather the inability to be seen.  People look around you, past you, they are aware of you on some level, but you remain unseen, unnoticed, unrecognized.  A more profound invisibility than simply being transparent to light- the effect is psychological and perhaps psychic, but in the end, what it means is that people simply don't see you.  You can shout, kick them, turn off the lights... and though they might become temporarily terrified and gripped with a superstitious dread of the unknown and unseen, they won't become aware of you, and after you stop messing with you, they'll invent fantasies to explain the incongruous events.  They hit their shin on th table and their wife turned off the light.  You can sit next to them on the couch and watch TV with them.  You can sleep in their bed with them.  You can eat the food off their plates, and you remain unseen.

What does that do to your mind?  Your morality?  Your sense of self? 

To no small part, we are who others perceive us to be... what if nobody perceives you as anything at all, and even when you do something to call attention to yourself, they don't acknowledge it?

Live this way for days... weeks... months... how long before you go absolutely mad? 

And then... you meet someone as profoundly invisible as you are, someone who can see you as you can see them.  Someone to whom you aren't unseen.  How do you deal with it then when your power and security of invisibility is stripped away, but suddenly you are no longer isolated?

Some mechanical thoughts...

This would be a game about people on the fringes, barely clinging to sanity.  To them, the small circle of social conatct they can establish among the other unseen  would be a vital lifeline- they are the only people who can tell you that you even exist.  Relationships as a mechanical concept would be a vital element of the design, but rather than tracking them as a conflict/task modifying system element, it appeals to me to track them as a resource and as a way of accounting damage.  The most profound form of damage one of the unseen might suffer is to their fragile and precious self-afirming relationships, and one of the worst punishments would be shunning. 

On invisibility... I see a spectrum.  Say, tracked on a scale running from 0 to 10.  Call it Aura for now.  Normal folk have an Aura of 0, and their psychic influence rarely extends beyond their own skin.  A character can only see  something with an Aura no more than 3 points greater than his own.  A norm can see something with a weak aura, but with increasing inability to grok it.  At Aura 3, it is really difficult for a normal to maintain awareness, especially if there is any distraction.  You can temporarily- through an effort of body and mind which is draining and unhealthy over a long term- raise or lower your Aura... the more you raise or lower it, the harsher the strain, and the shorter the time you can maintain it.  Push things too far for too long, and you can permanently raise you Aura or sicken yourself... and try and get medical attention when Doctors and paramedics ignore you.  Unseen characters being with an Aura of 5, so all are completely invisible to ordinary people.  With effort, they can force themselves to become visible.  With time, their Aura can increase to such a degree that even other unseen people can't perceive them- a character with an Aura of 10 is as utterly invisible to a character with an Aura of 5 as that character is invisible to a normal with an Aura of 0. 

Assuming this track for Aura, obviously trying to maintain relationships with a difference in Aura ranks is going to be difficult.  A difference of 1 point is a slight strain, 2 something more profound, and at 3 it is nearly impossible, and at 4 it is impossible, unless a pretty extreme effort is made to force visibility, to remain seen to the other character. 

To do the kind of thing I want this to do, I need a few elements...  a simple conflict resolution scheme which scales up and down as needed.  This isn't too difficult, and I have a couple of interesting little mechanics that can cover this basic element.  I need a way to track relationships, and to use them to motivate play- especially encouraging the kind of obsessive and dysfunctional relationships that this concept makes me imagine (and the novel which got me thinking about it featured).  I have this vague notion for tracking relationships based on stress and strain, on how much they drive and motivate, and how a player can exploit them for mechanical gain- at a price, of course.  And there are all the power trip with fulfillment aspects of this sort of existence- go anywhere, steal anything, and watch people take showers.

I'll follow this up with some specific mechanics, but right off, is this kind of niche game something anyone would be interested in? 

-B

[Judd]

Its interesting but I'd like you to tell me what a rockin' session of this would look like.

What do the players do?

I get flashes of skulking ranger/ninja characters, always on the periphery of the D&D party with their backs to the wall, weapons at the ready, which I know you aren't trying to tap but that gamer character archetype worries me but I'd love to see you explode it out of the water and make this issue fun.

[Bailywolf]

Its interesting but I'd like you to tell me what a rockin' session of this would look like.

What do the players do?

I get flashes of skulking ranger/ninja characters, always on the periphery of the D&D party with their backs to the wall, weapons at the ready, which I know you aren't trying to tap but that gamer character archetype worries me but I'd love to see you explode it out of the water and make this issue fun.

Very good points- the skulker is a real gaming stereotype, and very worth exploding and exploring. 

More than anything else on the character sheet- and I'm seeing something pretty slim on conventional stats- you have relationships.  These are lifelines, links to sanity, sources of inner strength, resolve, and vital metagame currency.  Immediately, they define where the conflicts of a session will arise and what will be threatened- I'm even seeing a fairly mechanical way for determining what happens when a relationship is damaged or stressed past certain limits based on some core personality/passion stats. 

A rocking session would involve some player wish fulfillment power-fantasy stuff with invisibility, a surface-level conflict related to this (or to some other practical problem), and then a whole subtext of relationship driven conflict and crisis to sideline and complicate play. 

Alright, say Jack has the flu- he's dog sick, puking buckets, and needs medical attention.  But Jack is among the Unseen, and his Aura hides him so well, it will be a major strain to remain visible long enough to see a doctor.  But Jack has heard of a guy who was a doctor himself before becoming Unseen- a guy who could help him out.  Jack wraps up in a sweater, and stumbles over to Lucy's squat in someone norm's currently empty summer condo, and asks for help.  Lucy is another PC, and she and Jack have a troubled past together (worked out by their players) and both have a Relationship for the other.  They have the same Aura, so there is no strain on the relation there, but they have a rocky history full of infidelity and fights- the relationship has a high Significance (term subject to change) but also a high Stress.  It is powerful but also volatile.  While they seek the unseen doctor, and Jack gets sicker, the Stress piles up, but they both use the Significance to help them achieve the over-reaching goals.  They interact with others in their relationship webs- and those interactions (based on overall Themes to the relationship they share) can increase or decrease the scores of the Relationships- they seek help from one of Jack's some-time lover, and the Theme of Jealousy Lucy has attached to the Relationship with Jack causes the Stress to increase, for example.  At some point, Stress will pile up and cause a blow-up of some kind which can do any of several things- they can try and hurt each other (physically or emotionally), they can try and reconcile, they can be forged into a tighter bond together, or they can be pushed apart...  but in the end, that short list of Relationships is the only thing keeping the characters in play at all- the only thing that really matters in the whole world.  A Love, hate, obsession... psychodrama. 

That's a total riff right there- I need to work on the kind of mechanics which drive this kind of interaction- amongst players, and between players and NPC's.  One stipulation of the Realtionship thing is that some of those relationships must be with other PC's.

-B

[Bailywolf]

Some mechanical thoughts...

The neurobiological definition of "Emotion" got me thinking about a kind of out-there system...  roughly, and emotion is 'an impulse which drives an organism to action'. 

The 'drives to action' is the thing that really got me thinking.

What if a character were defined by their Aura, their Relationships, a short list of their Abilities, and some pools- one representing vitality, energy, and health, other (not sure how many) representing Emotions (in the above context).

Emotions drive action- and if denied, they will cause Damage.  Doing things (and having things done to you) increases or decreases your pools of Emotions.  If a pool hits a threshold (defined for your character, representing predilections and personality) then you MUST take action based on that emotion or suffer damage.  You take the points from that pool, and spend them on creating a conflict scene based on that emotion.  If one of the pools is Anger and it maxes out, then the character is going to blow up, or otherwise act on that anger.

How does this tie to Relationships?

All relationships are linked to one or more of the Pools, and by interacting with the relations you can build or reduce the pool.  If you lose control of the pool- because of circumstances or bad luck- and it blows up, then the conflict is going to ground out into those Relationships linked to it.

Following the above example, Jack and Lucy find the Doctor's whereabouts, but when they arrive he's being held captive by a group of unseen assholes who're using him as their personal physician, and demanding favors and service from other unseen for access to him.  Jack is in bad shape, and Lucy tries to first beg, and then force them to let Jack into the Doc's place, but they beat them both up and toss them into the alley.  Her Anger pool- creeping up steadily, but held in check by bitching at Jack- hits her limit when she feels a lose tooth from where one of the bastards punched her- her Anger goes explodey.  Her anger links to Jack, and so he's dragged into the conflict scene as well.  She stomps out of the alley, dragging Jack behind her, takes the car keys from the hands of a businessman and steals his car right from under him, and shoves Jack into the back seat.  He says, "What are you doing?" and she goes off on him, slaps the car into reverse, and then lays down some rubber as she charges straight at the big abandoned storefront the Doc is being held behind.  Jack screams for her to stop, and she screams back at him (the balance of the Relationship they share changes, and points flush into various emotion Pools, and out of others).  She makes a roll- to crash through the storefront and into the Doc's operating theater without killing him- adding in the Strength of the Relationship she has with Jack, and with a modest success, plows the car into the building, slams Jack around in the back seat, and revealing the Doctor.  The car is wrecked, so it's time to leg it- she screams at the Doctor to come on.

An emotional blowup means you must do something.  You must spend those points to buy a conflict scene and force your action, and doing so in some way must involve at least on of your linked relationships. 

I have this notion to use playing cards...  the nature of a card laying face down on the table seems thematically linked to the condition of being unseen.  The card is there, and there IS a definite finite value on the unseen face, but until it is revealed, there is uncertainty. 

In something like this, what a character can do is far less significant than why he would do something- and to whom.

Invisibility becomes like a pressure cooker... like zombies outside the pub trying to get in, or the hurricane keeping Bogart and Bacall and the mobsters inside the hotel... it forces emotionally volatile people into close quarters, until something goes boom.



-B

[Bailywolf]

Here's another possible scheme for pools- base them on one of need structures from a cognitive theory... say Choice Theory.

The needs are...

Survival
Love
Power
Freedom
Fun

In no particular order or hierarchy. 

Since I want pools which build up rather than spend down, invert the meanings of the above...

Dread
Isolation
Impotence
Restrain
Boredom

You'd gain Impotence when your actions failed to produce the desired results, or despite your best efforts, you still fail... when it reached a critical threshold, it would blow up into some kind of crisis.

Now, if you have a Relationship linked to Power/Impotence, then you could reduce this pool (keeping it under control) by going and being a dominate bastard to your relation- by imposing your Power on them, you compensate for your Impotence somewhat.

If you are Isolated and lonely, you might seek out a relationship liked to Love/Isolation and try and achieve come kind of intimacy.

Not sure if this is the direction I want to go, of if I want to use more colloquial and easy to grok things like "anger" and "fear" but the result is the same- relationships are safety valves which let you (the player) stay on top of things.

-B

[David Artman]

The latest post interests me most: your choice of build-up Emotion pools leads right into what I'd consider "stats." Thus, a lot of character design could rest in allocating (say) build points into each Emotion, to represent those explosion thresholds.

The Relationship map thing... I've never seen one in action, so I don't know how it could mechanically drive things. I imagine a Relationship as "clusters" of cause-effect pairings, with each effect aiming at a particular Emotion.
Ex) Jack has a Relationship to Lucy called Troubled Past: If their previous relationship is mentioned in the narrative by anyone, then his Isolation and Impotence both increase by 1. Further, if he brings up their past himself, then his Isolation increases by 4. This Relationship cluster has a Value of 6: 1 for each Emotion effect, adjusted for the likelihood of the cause (-2, rare, unless in a scene with Lucy) and who can trigger it (+2, anyone who knows to bring it up, to screw with him).
The Doc has a Relationship to the Gang called Hostage: If the Gang asks him to do medicine, then his Impotence increases by 2. This Relationship cluster has a Value of 2 (for the effects) and another 2 (because anyone in the gang can trigger it).

Then, over the course of play, the flow of events can lead to a shift in Values or in pairings--even in the very existence of the Relationship. As you have mentioned, losing all Relationships would be akin to death... but each Relationship is hardly worth having, in its disfunctionality. Of course, you could let a character spend build points to get a positive Relationship, which lowers Emotions: that's just the mirror effect of what I have so-far covered (negative effect Relationships that grant more build points for the character).

Is that sort of how it works? Basically, with some kind of trigger followed by a mechanical adjustment of the significant Emotions?

Further, I could see you using the Emotions, mechanically, as such: Tests against an Emotion are basic threshold tests in reverse. If a test reads "Restrain 5" then only those characters with Restrain 5 or less can succeed, without engaging Abilities.

Then, Abilities would be minor modifiers to decrease a character's effective Emotion level for a given test. And perhaps each time one is "pinged" in a storyline--without being "Refreshed" however that is done--it is effectively lower by 1 for the next application, down to a final effectiveness of 0 until Refreshed.

You could even let the Emotions go "negative"... which would mean they are positive values in their positive alternates. (The whole reversal to use negative emotional terms seems a little bass-ackards when one is thinking numbers, but makes for a dark tone.)

I think, then, Aura would become just another ratchet: temporary adjustment of one's Aura leads, 1 for 1, to an increase in Emotion whether Aura is adjusted upwards or downwards. You might offer a "power" or "merit" of being able to do a one-point adjustment by temporarily losing an Ability point, if you like. For instance, "Aura Tweak" could be an Ability that does not work as a "modifier" to an Emotion test, but is a value which, in effect, represents the number of points you can Tweak up or down before you have to Refresh.

I'll go off-ramble for a bit, to see if I am helping or distracting.
HTH;
David

[Bailywolf]

No- your ramble is really helpful, and on-target.

Right now, I'm considering the following components for a relationship:

Subject- who do you have it with.
Theme- a general sense of what the relationship is IC.
Strength- how strongly are you motivated by and for the relationship?
Stress- how much tension do you feel within the relationship?
Inflame- which Emotion does the relationship feed?
Soothe- which Emotion does the relationship reduce?

So... for Lucy's relationship with Jack

Subject: Jack
Theme- on again/off again boyfriend
Strength- 4
Stress- 2
Inflame- Isolation
Soothe- Boredom

Being in a relationship with Jack is interesting- he's always doing something to relieve the boredom.  But he's also distant and hard to get close too, and he sleeps around at every opportunity. 

Jack's relationship with Lucy...

Subject:  Lucy
Theme- on again/off again girlfriend
Strength- 3
Stress- 3
Inflame- Boredom
Soothe- Dread

Lucy sort of bores Jack... she's always around, and isn't all that exciting anymore, but he needs her like he needs air- he feels like he'll die without her, and she soothes his existential dread of death and mortality.  When she's around, he feels safe.... safe, but bored. 

I larked that Stress and Strength total to 6, and can sway up and down with circumstances.  Interacting in ways which Soothe reduce an Emotion by the Strength of the relationship, while interacting in ways that Inflame add Stress to an Emotion. 

It might be too much to keep track of- Emotion pools plus relationship scores, but it seems to be the direction I want to take things.

Forcing your Aura would add to the relevant pool (depending on which need you were trying to meet when you did it), otherwise differences in Aura are subtracted from the Strength of a Relationship.

Emotion pools act as positive modifiers to conflicts- adding as bonuses to Traits- when you want to do things.  So, the closer to blowing up you are, the better you are at doing things.  But the more unstable you are as well... if your Dread is high you can add it in when fighting for your life, for example, but getting hurt might be enough to push you up to the threshold and cause a crisis- one which will have fallout for one of your Relationships (usually, a strength/stress shift). 

So, by abusing your relationships you can bump your pools, which in turn bumps your effectiveness, or you can nurture your relationships and reduce your pools, but that reduces your effectiveness.  Abuse your relationships too much, and you lose them... and when you have nobody keeping you sane and tied to the world, you become more marginalized- the main mechanical upshot is an increase in your Aura, making all your interaction more difficult, and perhaps eventually, driving you right out into total isolation... going going gone...

-B

[David Artman]

Sounds good to me... work out the timing of effects (handling process) and the setting, and start writing. :)

I suppose you are going for a basic modern setting, to keep open the possability of relevance for players to their own lives? Or do you think this system is "universal" enough to apply to a variety of genres? If the latter, may I suggest that you put a slight "twist" on the standard genre conventions for any setting material (or specific setting-related mechanics).

Rather than "high fantasy," do something closer to gritty, medieval fantasy complete with bogons, fae, trolls, witches, and the like. Grimm meets Pendragon meets the Bubonic Plague.
Rather than "standard" space opera and sci fi, make the far future setting something like Serenity or Aliens 3: an ugly, corporate future filled with marginal citizens and cowbow outlaws.

Basically, if the setting echoes the dark, "thrown" (a la Heidegger) life of an unseen, it can help drive the psychodrama of isolation AND it can provide spurs to action for characters that might otherwise descend into impotent lethargy or theme-degrading solipsism.

...Or... How dark do you want to go, with this game? Because that whole cake above could be flipped:

The game is still made as a genre-unspecific game, with several settings provided for immediate play. But the settings are, instead, utopias... and the unseen are vengeful, jealous outsiders seeking to wreck, injure, and darken those utopias. In fact, the whole "metagame" could be to keep one's Aura low enough to have an impact on the world, while the "world force" or the collective unconscious of it denizens tries to shake you off like a nagging flea. An Aura of 10 (or whatever) doesn't just make you invisible... it makes you totally imperceptible! Walk through walls, ride the wind like goose down, watch anything happen: you can't touch it, move it, affect it, once you have been "rejected" by the prime reality.

And you *hate* that. That drives you to want to destroy it ALL!

So, then, the "meta-metagame" is to find some way to reach Aura 10 and be content with it. To fade out of being with no rancor or fear. To let go.

The unseen could be a game that teaches about the disempowerment of isolation, aging, decrepitude, and slow death. It could help people actually learn how to accept such a final passage, even if it should mean oblivion without justice or reward.

So what's it going to be? "Wraiths for Great Justice" or "The Existential Adventure Game"? ;)

HTH;
David

[Qi Chin]

I really like this idea, and the system with the emotions is something really gritty that I would like to try out once there's something concrete written up.
Just a couple of things about the base idea of the unseen that sprang to my mind.
People with a high Aura can not be perceived, but is that only personally, or generally? For instance, if I were an unseen posting in here, would you just ignore my post and move on? Or would you be able to read what I've written here? Or something like chat, or scrawling messages on walls. Any medium of communication that does not require the receiver to focus on the sender personally (like voice or gestures), but can instead see the message?

And can there be "translators"? Such as people with Aura 2 who can talk with few problems with normal people, but can, even though barely, perceive unseen with an Aura of 4? It might make such translators very valuable, especially to unseen.

Qi

[Pôl Jackson]

Cool game shaping up!

You're talking about "invisibility" as some kind of supernatural effect - people who are literally difficult to notice. And that's fine; it's a neat concept.

The idea that grabs me, though, is the idea of social invisibility. People who live on the fringes, unable to interact with society at large. Lepers in the Middle Ages, for instance. The homeless, as a modern-day example. Severely marginalized minority groups. For sci-fi: aliens, uplifted animals, or AIs.

It would be cool if "Unseen" could be played either way: with real invisibility, or with the more commonplace variety. In both cases, the Unseen have a building need to be noticed, to be recognized; to be seen.

That "drive to be seen" is the real pressure cooker, I think. Perhaps some kind of mechanic that builds, and builds, and builds, until something has to give.

[Bailywolf]

For setting, I was thinking more or less NOW, with the obvious caveat that scenes can take place almost anywhere, because the Unseen are nearly impossible to keep out, and I didn't want to fool with setting design, because beyond "there are some people who are invisible, and you are one of them" it isn't even really relevant.  I also wanted players to use the freedom of invisibility for some power fantasy wish fulfillment- go anywhere, do anything, get away with it...  until something goes horribly wrong.

As I imagine it now, invisibility is some kind of supernatural or otherwise weird effect rather than a social one, but in a sense, it is taking the themes of social alienation you'd get in stories about the mentally ill or homeless and dialing them up to metaphorical extremes.  Take social invisibility, and ramp it up... people see you- light bouncing off your body hits their eyes, and their eyes tell their brains they are seeing something- but they don't notice you.

How far this aura extends... not sure.  I'm inclined to say indirect methods of communication allow you to bridge an additional 1 or 2 points of Aura difference, but eventually, you get so obscure, that people ignore your written words, they don't pick up the phone when you call, and you can't even IM them because they ignore it.  That's the final stage- when you're a ghost among ghosts, and at best, can sometimes communicate with slightly less invisible people by way of the phone or internet, but you're totally isolated from mundane people.

Creating some kind of 'translation chain' allowing people from different ends of the spectrum to communicate... yeah that would be possible, and desirable really.  Get ten people together, each with slightly different degrees of invisibility, and let the most invisible speak to the least invisible like that kid's game 'telephone'. 

I'll continue to monkey with the mechanics... more than anything, I want the system to dump gas on the fire- I want the game mechanics to explode into conflicts, to spur creativity and narration, and to pose near-constant risk and threat.  The life of the unseen is uncertain, unstable, chaotic... dangerous.

-B

[knicknevin]

I would recommend that anyone who is interested in the subject of this game looks up the 80s twilight Zone episode 'To See The Invisible Man', which covers a situation much like whats being described here. In the story, the main character is sentenced to invisibility for his crimes against humanity (mostly the fact that he doesn't care for his fellow man) and has  amrk placed upon his forehead; the episode then follows him through one year of 'social invisiblity', during which it is a crime for anyone else to interact with him or acknowledge his existence in any way.

[Castlin]

I would recommend that anyone who is interested in the subject of this game looks up the 80s twilight Zone episode 'To See The Invisible Man'.

This is exactly what I was going to bring up.

Also, while I like the Aura idea, just given the definition of Aura it seems like the scale should go the other way: 0 is totally invisible, 10 is the norm. Things with auras are perceptable, things without them are not. If you want it to go up, just name it Unseen, like the game title.

[Bailywolf]

I called it Aura because when I started thinking about this, I was considering games with more weirdness than just invisible people- lots of weird things that normal people can't see.  Aura determines how invisible you are... and also how much kewl power you can use (psychic stuff, magic, demon powers, etc).  Being really weird meant people couldn't really percieve you... when I thought about it at first, all the gods and demons and ghosts and elves and spirits and everything weird people have believed in was inspired by people with Auras who developed strange abilities even as they faded away...

But then the all the psychodrama of invisible people and their messed up relationships sort of came to the fore... perhaps I'll keep the 'invisible monsters' thing for later, and stick with the messed up people for now.  Whatever I do, I'm not married to the word 'aura'.

-B

[Sovem]

Bailywolf--I love the idea! Awesome. Have you ever read H.G. Wells original "The Invisible Man", by any chance? It deals with some of these topics though, of course, his unseen is only transparent, not actually Unseen.