OK, I am starting a separate thread on this topic, because it seems like an interesting approach for a game. My idea is to have a game where the intent is for different players to have a different idea of what happened. Part of this could happen through note-passing, but I want to minimize that. The interesting part would be through public statements, which are interpretted differently.

To some degree, this is always true, I think. Players will interpret statements differently, and they don't always identify and correct differences. What I would be trying for would be to actually exploit this for effect -- to actually try to keep up differences among player views while still maintaining functional and social play.

Note that the differences don't have to be big, but they do have to be meaningful. On this thread, Valamir wrote:

Valamir wrote:

John Kim wrote: In any case, here you assume a single group viewpoint: i.e. either a statement is accepted or not by everyone. However, if you have multiple people, then this can be ambiguous. One person can accept it as happening, while another person could deny it, and a third could accept a modified version.

Sure. In general this would be considered a "bad thing" and a source of frustration for the players...but if you approached this as a specific design goal, could be interesting. The explicit withholding or obfuscating of credibility as a game mechanic. Of not being sure whether what one says is or isn't accepted as part of the game world.

Quite an interesting application of the Lumpley Principle to experiment with.

John Kim wrote:
Nope, you're not really getting it. You describe this as not being sure if the statement is accepted. The point is: there is no single, canonical game-world!!! The players have different views, but it is not necessary that one of them is right and the rest of them are wrong. At any point, the player knows for sure what happened in the experience of his PC. But there is no need to define a "real" reality which is separate from the individual PC experiences.

Ben Lehman wrote: I've done this. As a (10 person) LARP, no less. It was bloody hard, even with one semi-coGM, and it involved convincing every player that almost every other character was, in fact, stark raving mad.
...
That said, it was awesomely fun.

John Kim wrote: My idea is to have a game where the intent is for different players to have a different idea of what happened.

John Kim wrote:
To some degree, this is always true, I think. Players will interpret statements differently, and they don't always identify and correct differences. What I would be trying for would be to actually exploit this for effect -- to actually try to keep up differences among player views while still maintaining functional and social play.

Didn't the roleplaying game "Psychosis: Ship of Fools" do this to some extent? Every player wakes up completely insane, and their insanities are different. So how they interpret the world around them, how things are described to them, is different.

As the game progresses, they change psychoses, they change how they view the world. Most of the book itself is dedicated to describing various psychoses, and there's a mechanic for when the psychoses switch, and what the new one brings about. Even after you reach "the real world" you can be knocked out of it again (and if as GM you do it "right", they might not realize which one is the real world for a while).

So one character is literally seeing the world as, say, a noir picture while another is literally seeing it as a horror flick, and a third is seeing it through the eyes of a child. Meanwhile, it's really a spaceship...

Topos, my PBeM rules system, specifically does not require consensus among the players as to what has "really happened." This wasn't because I was trying to be postmodern, it was because I wanted to design Topos to be immune to player defection of any kind. Story divergence is not encouraged, but consensus is not enforced either. (There is a mechanism whereby consensus can be encouraged, but not enforced; that is the 'topos' mechanic which gives the game its name.)

Y'all are talking like it's some big deal to design a game like that. I did it accidentally when I wasn't even trying! :)

Overall, I enjoyed designing Topos, and some fun was had playing it, but consider it more of a learning experience than a masterpiece of a game. I wouldn't recommend the approach.

We're talking about a range of different things here, which is why some are saying, "wow, is this even possible?" while others are saying "what's the big deal?"

For instance, in the "what's the big deal" category, we have Rekon-1, the first LARP using pre-written characters. Six of the characters, played by six different players, are time travellers from the future. In fact, they're all the same person with the same name (Anton Myriad) and they're all the grandson of a present-day character also in the scenario (John Myriad). But each is from a different future diverging from the various possible disastrous outcomes of the game scenario (nuclear war, alien invasion, etc.) So one can say that each character (and each player in those roles) perceives a different reality. But one can also say that the reality (the shared imaginative space) is that they're all time travellers from different futures.

Alexander's example of Psychosis is the same. The characters perceive different realities and the players playing them act on the basis of different perceived realities, but the shared reality is that the characters are all psychotic.

Moreover, it doesn't seem to me to make much difference whether or not there is some objective explanation of why different characters perceive different realities. If there's not, you can just say that the shared reality is that different characters are perceiving different realities. Nor does it appear to make much difference, if an objective explanation exists, whether or not the players know it. Nor does it appear to make much difference if an objective explanation exists, and the players know it, whether or not they imagine their characters knowing it.

In all those cases, it's still a shared imaginative space, just one that has additional details regarding what each character perceives. In other words, if I know my character thinks the sky is pink, and you know my character thinks the sky is pink, that's shared imaginative space. Even if your character thinks the sky is green.

What would make a big difference -- and what puts it, I believe, into the "gee, is that even possible?" category, would be if the players themselves were unaware that other players were imagining different realities, or were aware of it but didn't know what the actual differences were. In other words, I'd have to think that the sky is pink (or that my character sees the sky as pink), while you that the sky is blue (or that my character sees the sky as blue), and you must be unaware of the disagreement. Unless the play is very director-stance oriented, if you know that "my sky" is a different color than "your sky," you'd tend to see it as a difference in character perception and we're back to the "so what?" case. Having truly divergent and signficant player perceptions of the game reality, not attributed to divergent character perceptions, would be very odd, and sounds very difficult to bring about.

- Walt

No problem, Walt, each player in a different room with a different GM. Each delivers a version of the events filtered in some way, ala Psychosis. OTOH, the players may suspect something, especially if they ask why, and you don't tell them why. You could, OTOH, lie, and say, for instance, it was to make for play where they could split up and play more real time. Which is what the Multi-room/Multi-GM set up is usually for.

Of course, this has to be for some effect, or else why do it. The obvious choice is to really mess up the players perceptions and then toss them together, and see what heppens. Could be neat.

Mike

Walt Freitag wrote: What would make a big difference -- and what puts it, I believe, into the "gee, is that even possible?" category, would be if the players themselves were unaware that other players were imagining different realities, or were aware of it but didn't know what the actual differences were. In other words, I'd have to think that the sky is pink (or that my character sees the sky as pink), while you that the sky is blue (or that my character sees the sky as blue), and you must be unaware of the disagreement. Unless the play is very director-stance oriented, if you know that "my sky" is a different color than "your sky," you'd tend to see it as a difference in character perception and we're back to the "so what?" case.

Having truly divergent and signficant player perceptions of the game reality, not attributed to divergent character perceptions, would be very odd, and sounds very difficult to bring about.

Mike Holmes wrote: No problem, Walt, each player in a different room with a different GM. Each delivers a version of the events filtered in some way, ala Psychosis. OTOH, the players may suspect something, especially if they ask why, and you don't tell them why. You could, OTOH, lie, and say, for instance, it was to make for play where they could split up and play more real time. Which is what the Multi-room/Multi-GM set up is usually for.

Mike Holmes wrote: No problem, Walt, each player in a different room with a different GM. Each delivers a version of the events filtered in some way, ala Psychosis. OTOH, the players may suspect something, especially if they ask why, and you don't tell them why. You could, OTOH, lie, and say, for instance, it was to make for play where they could split up and play more real time. Which is what the Multi-room/Multi-GM set up is usually for.

Of course, this has to be for some effect, or else why do it. The obvious choice is to really mess up the players perceptions and then toss them together, and see what heppens. Could be neat.

Multiverser suggests something like this in the treatment of insanity. Rather than tell the player that his character has gone insane, and suffers thus-and-such problem, the reality is described as he would perceive it if he were crazy.

It's greatly aided by the fact that in most cases players are alone in their own worlds anyway, so they don't have the conflicting evidence given to the other players. However, there are two ways in which it can be used in multi-player situations.

One is to bring the other player characters into the player's world as figments of his delusions, without ever telling anyone that's what they are until after the fact.

The other is to keep it limited such that not more than one sane character is present, and provide differing descriptions to each. At this point they may all know that someone is crazy, but they might not know who.

Again, this is aided by the fact that if you're universe hopping, you really can't know what normal is in the current world, so you can't know whether the descriptions are the reality or your own filters.

--M. J. Young

No disagreement, Mike. All those GMs and different rooms and filtering information back and forth fits my idea of "very difficult to bring about," in practice if not in principle.

I wonder: Could you shortcut around some of this by stacking the deck of player/character expectations? Provide a single description of events, but do it in a such a way that there are specific, genre based interpretations that are equally valid.

In fact: genre expectations seem exactly the thing to play on. Who hasn't been in the game that was actually another game? As in, the D&D game that's actually a Chthulu adventure, or the X-files game that turns out to really be an Amber game or whatever. Announce you're running a, I dunno, Gurps Horror Game, and that you want people's concepts. Then talk to various players before the game and tell them that it's actually an Amber/Kult/Unknown Armies/World of Darkness/whatever game, and you need them to play the representative of some group from that game with an interest in these events. Assuming that you chose players based on their understanding of the second games cosmology, they'll do the work for you, and come up with explanations for things based on the way powers and such work in the "true" game (or if not a game, a book or movie that they like).

I've been in games that use the idea of the one person from the 'real' game, and it can definately be interesting, but I've never considered trying it as the central conceit of a game.

Anyway, this approach won't allow all the sophisitication and flexibility of seperate data streams, but it'd be a lot easier to run, and as a lazy, lazy man, that rather appeals to me.

-Rob D.