I've ran another playtest of Illumination yesterday, with Kamil as the player. The session wasn't long, but it gave us quite a blast fun-wise. The game had exactly the right over-the-top feel of reality on the edge I've been aiming at for the whole time. Pure psychedelic weirdness.

In short, after the game Kamil concluded that we should sue Grant Morrison for irrevocably hurting our brains. And this neatly sums things up.

We've spent about an hour on prep, and another hour or so playing out some scenes and conflicts. Kamil suggested that we define Reality with lots of social laws, so I proposed to focus the game on corporate warfare and we used it as a starting point. However, after defining a pretty mundane consensual paradigm,  with Beliefs like Cultural norms are set by the media, Advertisement defines needs, Humans are slaves to their instincts, and The laws of physics work as in the news, we started adding some pretty bizarre stuff.

In the end, Kamil wound up playing a rogue memeplex, complete with hitman training, memetic gun and and an intriguing view on human mind as a reproductive organ. We created only one opposing faction, a corporation that prepares the world for an alien invasion by performing a psychological equivalent of terraforming on its customers. I conveniently dubbed its most dangerous operative as Agent Smith, and charged him with the mission of stopping Kamil's character from taking over the world before the aliens will.

On top of that we included some additional weirdness in the Otherside. I already dropped the idea of defining it in terms of realms and now it's just a list of key beings, locations and phenomena from outside the consensual reality that the characters regularly interact with. And so, we came up with things like an armada of alien memeships orbiting Earth, alien admiral Pn'fmz existing as a liquid state of his own name, an ocean of old movies, John Wayne himself and a place we simply called p0rnland.

Things we had in play included:

-A Matrix-like battle scene culminated in a duel of holographic shapeshifting.
-Interrogation through gratuitous usage of linguistic BDSM techniques.
-Kamil's character infecting alien armada's admiral Pn'fmz after being reduced to liquid-morpheme state and assimilated.
-Mass memetic rape of a corporate building's personnel that resulted in the infection of the whole consensual reality with alien submission virus.
-Multiple revelations about the limited scope of human semantic capabilities.

That's roughly one hour of play, and with the initial setup alone we have enough material to keep things rolling for a session or two. Coolness.

System-wise, the game exposed quite a lot of flawed mechanics. Which is only natural, given that my sole goal for this playtest was checking out how much and in what places my new rules are broken, identifying parts that need to be fixed. I didn't even try to have the whole system perfectly worked out before the game.

Working on the project I've found that a single playtest gives me much more than weeks of pondering the rules. All in all, I'm glad that I've been writing detailed APs from previous sessions, as having them well documented helps me immensely now.

I streamlined the game a lot after the last playtest and simplified many rules greatly. Currently, there are about half as many Beliefs at the table – a fixed starting number of seven index cards per paradigm, which seems to be just the right amount. I pushed all the interactions with the currency to the end of the scene, leaving mostly freeform role-playing in non-conflict scenes. There was some needless complexity in moving Beliefs from various paradigms around, so I unified their functions and now they simply travel there and back between the paradigms and two mirror resource pools. Also, I reduced the starting range of Belief ratings and simplified their development by introducing two types of marks (one gained for proving and the other for disproving the Belief) and removed all instances of adding more than one mark at a time. Conflict always leads to strengthening or changing the Belief at stake now, as it accumulates marks during the exchange, working as a kind of a progress track.

I'm still left with some old terminology, but currently most of the terms serve as placeholders anyway.

So far so good – not everything worked well, but the whole thing is much closer to the game I wanted to write than my initial attempts. Actually, I think I have much cleaner design goals now, as I realized that Illumination essentially boils down to exploring the implications of the underlying metaphysics. Setting specifics, weird characters, fun with powers, conflict options and even the story as a whole – basically these are all just tools for making the range of possibilities to explore manageable. For over nine months I've been scratching the surface, considering the vehicle but taking it for the destination. No wonder the original version of the system collapsed, with the whole mismatch of random Gam and Nar facilitating rules.

Conclusions after the playtest:

*There is a special category of Beliefs that deals with character's motivations. However, Kamil's goals were too broad, and consequently the session lacked good direction. Now that I look at it, the game needs something akin to kickers, and this is more or less how such Beliefs should work. I need to stress this and come up with some good guidelines for their formulation.

*There were situations we should have resolved as conflicts, but we reluctantly went with negotiation as conflict wasn't the best option at those times, resource-wise. There's something that worked fine in Absolute Apocalypse Academy – prolonged build-up of issues culminated in a big conflict – that I couldn't get here, due to pretty intense action probably. But I feel I need about two or three scenes focused on exploration and interaction per conflict.

*I have double stakes, as every conflict can result in story development and affect a Belief. I feel it doesn't work well here. I'm inclined to remove normal stakes altogether, and making it all about Beliefs. Resolution of specific events can just as well occur on the level of particular actions inside the conflict.

*There's a problem with putting a chosen Belief at stake at the start of the conflict. I suppose the game would benefit if the Belief was designated some scenes before the conflict, so that there was time to build stronger context for it being affected by the events and the resulting consequences on the reality.

*Scene structure didn't work perfectly, and despite my intentions it seems that during freeform role-playing we've been focusing on Beliefs that we wanted to activate too much. We could just as well frame the scenes around the chosen Beliefs in the first place, and after the scene only decide whether they are validated or disproved. I've been considering it earlier, but I didn't want to limit role-playing needlessly. However, since we've been doing it anyway, I can just as well formalize it in the rules.

*All in all, I think I'll have three types of scenes. Focus scenes will be used to designate Beliefs for later conflicts and give direction to the story. Build-up scenes will serve activating Beliefs through interaction and exploration, to amass resources for conflicts. Finally, conflict scenes will be used to change characters and reality by affecting previously designated Beliefs.

*Substances, basically the last element left after the original version of the game, don't fit the rest of the system well. They are fuzzy and are more likely to confuse the players than facilitate using dynamic powers in fun ways. Also, as fanmail accumulating batteries they're somewhat weak in their current form, and even after streamlining their handling as much as possible the payoff doesn't seem to be worth the bother. They have their place in conflicts, from a purely mechanical point of view, but I can substitute them with something more workable just as well. Generally, I think that a mechanic somewhat similar to Gifts from Unsung could fit here, with players suggesting the kinds of effects they'd like to see and both rewarding others for introducing them and being rewarded if they do this. I have some loose thought about index cards with effects like weather control, man-machine fusion, folding spacetime or whatever circulating around the table, gathering power and paradox. Hmm...

I've been tinkering with the rules and I addressed most of the issues I had. However, no solution for the last one clicks in my head. I could use some suggestions and brainstorming.

My current rules for reality-shaping powers are as follows:

-Every player starts with two Substances, aspects of reality his character can influence. They are defined by the player, can be as broad or narrow as he wants, and are written on index cards.
-The GM has one universal Substance that he can use for NPCs, and one backlash card corresponding to each Substance in the game.
-The scope of character's reality shaping is determined by his Substances (what can be affected) and personal paradigm (by what methods it can be done).
-Whenever the character changes reality in an entertaining way using the Substance, during the conflict or not, the group can award him one power mark. It is marked on the relevant Substance's card. The GM can be rewarded for coming up with cool effects as well.
-Additional marks are gained when Beliefs are strengthened or changed.
-In a conflict, power marks can be spent for bonuses whenever the player uses a given Substance. This changes them into revelation marks and gives an equal amount of backlash marks to the GM.
-Backlash marks can be spent for bonuses by the GM, and it involves narrating some phenomena relevant to the Substance that generated it. Backlash generated by the GM himself is public and can be used against NPCs by the players. Spent backlash marks are simply removed from the game.
-Once per session the player can decide that his character experiences a revelation, spending a number of revelation marks. Revelation can be used to change revelation marks back into power marks, or trigger character's endgame. There is a number of successively more efficient options for this, and they involve adding new Substances or merging two related Substances into a one broader.

These rules are weak, and this is why:

-In practice, they don't go well with Beliefs. The paradigm is much more suggestive as far as limitations of character's power go. If I'm a living form of carefully engineered commercial bullshit it's natural that I can make people see, think and want whatever I like them to, project myself onto TV screens and so on, but shooting fireballs obviously doesn't fit. In this regard Substances kind of felt artificial.
-Given that applicability of Substances can only be adjudicated on a case by case basis, the group would have to be very strict about non-mundane actions fitting their scope. Considering what I've been doing in practice, it's too much of a bother to give a lot of attention to this stuff, and it would be constraining rather than inspiring. And paradigm trumps Substances in a way that feels natural, anyway.
-There's a problem with awarding the GM - i.e. it doesn't make much sense. I'm considering removing it entirely and going back to the GM having only paradox at his disposal, mechanically. However, I feel there should be some way for him to boost NPCs' reality-shaping on the same terms PCs can.
-This part of the system is kind of bland, playability-wise. It lacks some engaging interactions and doesn't create interesting dynamics at the table. Maybe it's because there was only one player in this playtest, but I want the game to work fine for groups of 2-4, so it should support one on one sessions as well.

I could remove special rules for shaping the reality entirely, leaving only Belief mechanics, but they tie some stuff together mechanically and cutting them out would leave a gaping hole between the gears. Without irrerevant specifics, their current functions are:

-I need to have some resource that can be spent to gain bonuses in conflicts. It's important because of the conflict structure I want to keep.
-There's a currency generated by Belief changes that needs to go somewhere and needs to do something. Technically, this could be any function. The thing is, there needs to be some gameplay effect of paradigm evolution, and there's a certain byproduct of it that needs to do something mechanically, or the whole Belief economy will break.
-I need to connect endgame mechanics somewhere - but this is probably the easiest thing to transplant elsewhere.

All in all, I think I need some rules that would mechanically reinforce doing crazy stuff with powers locally, rather than only govern evolution of the paradigms and their large-scale consequences on consensual reality. Focusing on effects the group would like to promote rather than general scope of character's influence seems to be the way to go. Also, I need a mechanic that would add an additional layer of interactions and dynamisms to the game. Unfortunately, nothing good comes to my mind.

Eh, the more I think about it, the less in place Substances or a substitute mechanic seem here. I've been pondering some effect-based options and various possible interactions, but they either break something or feel artificial in how they tie to the fiction.

So, it seems I'm cutting this concept out entirely, leaving only Beliefs in the game.

Now, thinking about Beliefs, it doesn't seem that I really need different types of them. Currently, there's one Identity Belief (who the character is) and a number of Dogmata (how the character perceives the reality), Trials (what the character feels he needs to do and what he thinks goes in his way) and Assets (what the character believes he has at his disposal). I could remove everything but Identity and Dogmata, with a "kicker" under Identity instead of Trials, and everything else implied by the Dogmata. Maybe I could reduce their starting number a bit more as well, to 6 or even 5.

I suppose I'll have to have some good guidelines for establishing the Beliefs for the character, but other than that, I can tie all those mechanics currently connected with dynamic powers to them somehow, I think. In result, Beliefs would develop and evolve as they are affirmed or underpined, and at the same time they'd gather spendable mechanical resources as they are applied to affecting the reality.