A Psionics-oriented game and Surrealism.

[Cadriel]

Hi.

My name's Wayne, and you may have seen some of my posts on the RPGnet GNS thread.  I think I've mentioned this game in this forum before, but it has gone through some significant changes, and I have a question with which I thought the folks here might be able to help me.

Okay.  Psi (for lack of a better name) is a roleplaying game about individuals who are psionic.  Vaguely Jungian components of their psyches have awoken and have the ability to project their influences outward.  The rundown is straightforward:
-Ego--yourself, at the core.  The Ego does not have any powers.
-Persona--the Mask you Wear.  Most Persona-related abilities influence your communications with others.
-Logos (Male) / Eros (Female)--the inner gender image.  The Logos is concerned with the patriarchal qualities of righteousness and logic, while the Eros deals in the matriarchal tendency to defend others and create genuine connection.  (In other words, the Logos is the natural introvert and the Eros is the natural extrovert.)  Their powers tend to correspond roughly to these roles.
-Anima (Male) / Animus (Female)--the imperfect image of the opposite sex.  The male Anima tends toward halting attempts at connections and self-defense, while the female Animus is self-righteous to a T.  If this attribute is more influential than the latter, it is entirely possible for traditional gender roles to disappear.
-Shadow--the narcissistic part of everyone that despises "others" or "outsiders."  The Shadow is a dark, destructive part that exists in everyone.  Healthy people tend to come to terms with their Shadows.  Often, the insane are dominated by them.  (Psychics who are thus insane are called "Shadow Dancers.")

Okay, all nice and well-thought-out, but what do you do with it?  Well, now it has a thematic question.  "Are you who you think you are?"  We all know our self-images are wrong to some degree, but what if something very basic about yourself begins to become unstuck?  And Psi has some ways of addressing that question.

-Mode of play.  Basically, Psi is to be a GMless game.  There is a Moderator who has final call in all rules decisions, usually so they'll get sorted out simply and effectively.  Beyond this, all the players have a variable number of Control Points.  A player may pay 1 Control Point (CP) to act as the setting's mouthpiece (as would a traditional GM) for one scene, and gets to control one significant NPC who is in that scene.  The catch is, his or her PC may not be present.  In fact, the only requirement is that one PC has to have face time.  Other players may spend 1 CP (all values are subject to change and negotiation) to insert and play a significant NPC of their own creation.  The intent here is to remove the central GM (which I think is necessary to create the uneven tone that a surrealist game should have) and to remove the concept of the PC party (which is antithetical to the idea of having isolated psionics struggling to control or even make sense of their lives in a world that doesn't always make sense).  It is replaced with a style that creates several parallel narratives, all of which allow for high involvement from all players (who play NPCs or do the traditional GM thing for a little while).

-Actual, in-game surrealism.  And this is where my question is.  How the heck do I pull off surrealism in an RPG?  Currently, my best thoughts are that a focused stream-of-conscious narration might work.  Essentially, each player has another player assigned to his/her PC as an "Instigator" (a better word is needed).  In some situation during the game session (or more than one situation, depending on the relative sanity of the PC), the Instigator has to make the world seem to flip out for the PC.  For a couple of minutes, the security and surety that things are what they seem to be must disappear.  This kind of surreal effect has to be pulled off convincingly enough that the PC, in-game, is completely bewildered.  Nothing seems sure or right.  Should it be low-key, high-key, what?  And what methods might work?  I think it's a pretty interesting proposition, so I look forward to any answers.

Beyond that...I'm still figuring out the dice mechanics, though I'm thinking something with roll x dice vs some number, plus bonus dice or minus penalty dice for good or bad situations.  Oh, and psionic powers won't have completely predictable effects...I want them to have variable results that will make them more interesting as story tools than as all-purpose D&D-esque magic.  Tips on that would also be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for reading this and for any advice that is given.

-Wayne

[Zak Arntson]

My advice: You have a basic premise: Are you who you think you are? Try coming up with some default setting to help you wrap mechanics around that premise. That may help you refine your game, and you can always pull back grom that setting afterwards.

Surrealism: That'll be tough. Surrealism tends to be a pairing of completely unrelated things with the effect of a new experience. You could riff off of that simple fact. The scene-GM takes two unrelated offerings from other Players and weaves them together?

[Cadriel]

Zak--thanks for the commentary!

The setting, which I seem to have forgotten to mention, is modern urban America (and can actually be scattered in play between various locales...which is part of the intent of breaking up the PC group).  It's extremely well-known, and I want to work in the existence of a government conspiracy-type group that researches people with psionic powers as a method of advanced espionage; the rest of the world is more or less blind to the existence of psychic people beyond the quacks that you and I know.  There is not a deliberate mass hiding (a la any White Wolf game) so much as the knowledge that if most of these people came out into the open, they'd be considered freaks or worse.  One guy with psionics could whip a guy without psionics into a phone pole or worse using telekinesis; faced with a dozen or so normal humans, though, he becomes outclassed.  Shadow Dancers don't care, but their personalities are so extremely deviant that most of the people who meet the Dancers aren't aware of their powers so much as their general actions.

A big part of what I want the surrealism to do is to indicate several, somewhat contradictory, points:
1.  It is possible that Shadow Dancers and/or Oculis (that gov't conspiracy) do not exist.  It is also possible that one group exists and uses the other as a red herring.
2.  It could be that you aren't even psionic to begin with, but instead you're just plain delusional.  This is one of the unsettling ramifications of that premise, "Are you who you think you are?" beyond the rather frightening aspects of your own actions that are driven by your antagonists (who often seem to drive you farther from normalcy).
3.  What is behind this?  My standard, "canned" explanation if you will, is that psionics are a manifestation of the human collective unconscious, but I want it to be suggested that there are perhaps aliens or weird experimental drugs or other odd metaphysical aspects that link all of this together--over the course of time, all sorts of conspiracy-type solutions (which, I think, are useful to the game) appear.  All this is to be accomplished by surrealism.

As a side note, I don't have the answers.  That's actually a big part of the fun of the game as it exists in my mind:  the world is like one big quantum state, and the answer isn't there until you find it.  The players' decisions throughout the game have an impact on what the final truths are.

The welding of ideas could be pretty nifty...maybe having each player stream-of-consciousness several sentences onto slips of paper before the game, and when it comes time for things to wig out two or three get drawn from a hat.

-Wayne

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Wayne,

I really, really like this - as in this sounds like a game about psionics I'd actually play. I think your mechanic to let players author scenes completely will add to the quantum/surreal feel you want.

Just so you won't scare off some people (and because I can see some benefit to it) you might want to make a mechanic so a player can author an entire session: the benefit would be contradictory "X-Files"-esque episodic games.

[Tim Denee]

The game should came attached with this icon (Bottom row, fourth column)