Posting this as reminder to self that I wanna think about it more. Inspired by @annabelle-lee's question:
How do you make rules/problems for a place that is supposed to be inexplicable & mutable & impossible to understand (like fairyland or dreamland or roadside picnic zone)?
And @Scampir 's reply:
If i really wanted to get the point across that an area was under the influence of different logics, I would just use a different game for that area.
(Attribution to make it clear I’m building on other folk’s ideas.)
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Say you are running a campaign using D&D or retroclone. Your players encounter Faerie / the Dreamlands / Area X / the Zone.
When they slip into its borders, you tell them things are getting weird, but you don’t give them new character sheets. You just start organically calling for resolutions and mechanics from a game that isn’t D&D.
Maybe a dice-pool game like RuneQuest or WFRP. Or Blades in the Dark:
GM: “So you rest? Okay, tick your healing clock.”
Player: “Wait, wtf’s a healing clock?”
This does a few things:
- Discombobulates players. They have to figure out the ways in which assumptions of reality differ.
- The choice of new ruleset you use signals the specific ways that this specific Weird Zone is weird. (Use a game with more story-game mechanics and you imply that the Weird Zone has a different relationship with causality.)
- Players learn / jot down / use new mechanics on the same old character—implying that the Weird Zone changes their characters.
Abilities / mechanics they pick up remain when they leave the Weird Zone, and return to boring normal D&D rules. A signal that the Zone has changed them in uncanny ways.
Player: “Hey, I’ve still got this ’+1d to gather info’ ability, right? And this counts as a gather info situation? Can I roll two d20s and total them?”
GM: “Yes.”
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This thought dovetails with some musings I've had previously as part of this conversation about subjective world-building:
If characters visit a culture with different mores / cosmology, the literal rules of the game change.
I like tension. I like the emotional thrill of roleplaying interesting and tense situations in roleplaying games. I am an "affective response shock-jockey."
There are two things I think swapping the system does.
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Confront a player's reliance on knowing the game (perhaps this is the System Mastery?) and return them to a state of learning rules all over again (this brings to mind Eventide Island from Breath of the Wild; not the same but akin in how it as a zone pushes you to figure something out without your normal tools). A significant part of this trick is that by robbing the players of their regular tools, while restricting this rules permutation to a zone, they must choose to enter the zone without their usual tools, like choosing to walk the tightrope without a safety net.
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Introduce consequences of a different scope. If failed rolls or checks or tests in your usual game result in a character taking harm, abandon that in exchange for exclusively changing the state of the zone to be a worse and worse place. If you favour Verisimilitude then abandon it to approach the unreal.
Long story short, games where the rules focus on what a person could do, with their character sheet or with the tools they're equipped with restrict how players can interact with the fiction. Story games do something similar by sharing narration and encouraging negotiation with the player and game master (though this negotiation has its place in other games as well). But what the stakes are, and the scope of what is at stake are usually consistent within games (both how they are played and how they are written). This is why I advised to change games.
