Doubt

[TheFlatline]

There was a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits about a society that branded you "invisible" for a year instead of jail time. The entire world ignored you for one entire year. After a while it turned out to be a pretty cruel sentence.

Welcome to my social life.
Now I must go investigate said episode. That seems to be one I missed..

It's called "To See the Invisible Man" from the 80's version of the series.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734749/

[TheFlatline]

I could definitely see some kind of group who are antagonists because they know about reality bing malleable and are actively covering it up. That could plausibly take the form of something like The Organization from Nowhere Man or a more obviously malign version of The Observers from Fringe. That seems like it would work pretty well, or at least it could.

But while the whole thing is supposed to revolve around player characters being isolated by their inability to get other people to believe them about the machinations of the villains, it is imperative to not do the entire MIB thing where no one believe you because the truth is "wacky". When it turns out the wiener dogs are actually robot suits for tiny men, and you can stun them and unscrew their heads to get at the cockpit - that pretty much ruins the mood. Also, it isn't like you couldn't provide compelling proof of that, it's just that it would be a very silly scene in which you did. So if there is a vast conspiracy of coverup artists, it has to be composed of actually very (apparently) banal pieces. They can send each other messages in typographical errors in newspapers or just plain use disposable cell phones to get orders down the chain and have a largely vaporous paper trail.

Anyway, most of the enemies don't need to have their motivations explained too carefully or completely. The Hollow Men are "looking for something" and they are clearly willing to kill people to get "it". But what it is exactly that is so important need not ever be disclosed. Meanwhile, The Registry happens to own the only apartment with a good view of a jewelry heist, or the apartment next to one that gets cleared out by Night Terrors. Their existence seems to be associated with a lot of weird and baleful events, but it would be kind of a letdown to actually know why they were doing it or even what exactly it was that they were doing.

Nowhere Man and Flash Forward got pretty stupid when they started revealing things. So did Lost. It's a lot easier to set up an interesting mystery than to write an interesting solution to one.

-Username17

To run with this further, there's a short story in the collection called "A Good Old-Fashioned Future" written I believe by Bruce Sterling. A lot of people in this one city/country/whatever have little terminals. These terminals, from time to time, tell you to do something or to go somewhere. You do this because when you do what the network tells you, it helps you out. The main character was introduced to the love of his life through the network, got a job that he loves and fits him like a glove, and never has anything *really* bad happen to him without the network coming to his aid, and so never worries about why he's buying a cup of coffee for a man who just lost his job or why he's putting an allergen in a ventilation duct. He just does it.

An interaction could relate to something in-game, where an entity sends out cell phone messages to sleepers that interferes with/aids the PCs. Is this a powerful willworker sending out messages? Is it a super-deterministic organization? Who the fuck knows? Why does it sometimes help and sometimes harm the PCs? Who knows? The network of people who take instructions don't ask questions because it's generally small efforts, they never incur any real danger, and the benefits are huge.

Case in point:

Someone walks up to the player and hands the PC a briefcase, says "the network told me to give you this. You'll know when to open it", and walks away. Later on, the PC is attacking a Hollow Man, and really needs item X. So he "pushes", opens the briefcase, and there is his item. Now, the question becomes: Did the member of the network put an item into the briefcase or was it the PC's doing? If the item *was* planted there, how the hell did the network know the PC would need it? Does it have power? Is it super-deterministic?

Capturing a sleeper doesn't reveal anything. The person was introduced to the network by a friend who was introduced by a friend and so on. They're sleepers. They're unaware that they're playing in a game of something bigger. The messages can't really be tracked to anywhere in particular, as the network is complicated enough that there are essentially unlimited relays between a user and the core of the network. The cops don't care about the network, because it never breaks the law really, and is nebulous enough that it's too hard to track.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I had this in my novel- the "distributed conspiracy" model. The villain activates a bunch of sleepers like this to prove a point. He does similar things a few times before his final Bavarian fire drill is just too much for the world to handle. The consequences of that aren't seen, but he does observe that he wouldn't be able to pull that trick again. The protagonist has a similar problem when learning how to warp reality- the 'weirder' the effect, the harder it is to perform, and when he essentially tries to break math, the universe pushes back and he gets psychic diarrhea.

[TheFlatline]

I'm afraid if you go too far with this that the players will start feeling put upon, like the entire game is a Steve where walking down the street becomes a "mother-may-I". I really hope that made sense, because I've been out of it recently.

That's the mentality of the PCs though, so it sort of works.

Paranoia has the same "mother may I" problem. A bad MC will say "no" to everything. A good MC will say "no" to the least entertaining options and encourage the PCs to think out of the box.

That's what a Doubt MC would have to do. Reject the obvious and easiest options, while encouraging variety and vagueness.

I don't mind the concept of reality quakes. But they shouldn't just be arbitrary. I'd probably limit them to once per "adventure". The later in the adventure they happen, the more difficult you make it for the players, since they have less time to adjust to the new rules of reality. A reality quake just before the climactic encounter would suck, whereas an adventure opening with a reality quake would not be so terrible for the players.

The thing I like about the reality quake/shifting magic paradigms is that it raises an excellent thematic question: Is what you're doing *really* magic? If the laws of reality shift, and how you do magic shifts with it, then you're not *really* doing something supernatural. It's still linked to the natural world.

Reality quakes also give an ongoing, innate goal to the players: Figure out what the hell is causing these shifts. Player motivations are a wonderful thing. Why would a player care? Because after a reality shift, everything feels slightly *wrong*. The air may feel like you're moving through syrup (even though the air viscosity hasn't changed according to any equipment), or 70 degrees may feel freezing to you all of a sudden, or something else that you're distinctly aware of. You just remember what it felt like. I know it's getting close to consensual reality, but reality isn't based on consensus. It's your "altered" perception that remembers the changes, you never actually *experience* them.

So you have these freaky, creepy things only you're aware of doing bad things, you have abilities which may or may not exist, and every few weeks the entire world seems to have shifted at some point in the past in a way that only you (and others like you) might be able to remember.

Telling anyone else this makes people look at you like you're insane.

Yeah. I like it.

[Username17]

If players don't know which of several reality alteration paradigms they have, it leads to players being more cautious and mistrustful of their abilities. Unfortunately, it encourages players to go on what are essentially training montages of testing the limits of their abilities. The first is desirable, the second is not.

What if the players had Edge that was spent on their behalf to make their abilities work, and the amount that was spent was a hidden number based on how short their die roll was? This way the players would get a bunch of positive results if they did a series of cold tests, and some of the tests would deplete the fate point reserve and some of it wouldn't, but that wouldn't look any different. This sort of thing would make such tests give meaningless information until they had carried a high cost. Presumably, this would negate the tendency of players to want to use up screen time calling coinflips and scratching lotto tickets.

This could also give the right dynamic with firearms. Since people have mana reserves, shooting a gun at a reality manipulator is going to accomplish jack and also shit. So logically, they'd want to take a golf club or a claw hammer instead. But on the flip side, reality manipulators aren't going to want to stick around and drink tea in a shooting match, because doing so may be depleting mana reserves and end badly.

But I wonder: do you think the mere knowledge that people do have invisible point reserves to draw upon would make players behave in a pink mohawk style as if their characters were invincible action movie stars? Because I think that might be bad.

-Username17

[JigokuBosatsu]

I think some would. But not all, and maybe that can make sense. The 'reckless' Doubters get killed sooner rather than later, either through simple chance or immoderate spending of points ATTRACTS something badong.

[TheFlatline]

/
But I wonder: do you think the mere knowledge that people do have invisible point reserves to draw upon would make players behave in a pink mohawk style as if their characters were invincible action movie stars? Because I think that might be bad.

-Username17

To an extent. You'll always have players reading the MC chapters of the book, seeing how the math works underneath. You simply can't avoid that unless you figure out some way to actively punish the use of metagaming knowledge, aka the treason system in Paranoia punishing players for demonstrating any mechanical knowledge of the rules.

What you *will* have is people being willing to pull pink mohawk stuff at first, and then quickly reverting to safer options. Because the time to pull the pink mohawk is when your pool is full.

The knee-jerk reaction to that is to say "never start with a full pool". Which means you have to have some way or ways of filling that pool up. Preferably in some way that reinforces the doubt in a character's mind that they might not have powers.

Otherwise, it's a decent idea.

[Grek]

It seems like a good idea to seperate the tracks for the powers that let you predict coin tosses from the ones that let you dodge bullets. That way, the only way to test if you can still dodge bullets is to get shot at a few times and see if they all miss.

[JonSetanta]

It's called "To See the Invisible Man" from the 80's version of the series.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734749/

Thanks!

[fectin]

To expand on my previous idea where the primary way to Douse things is by consulting your hallucinations and assorted delusions, a simple way to do that would be to have X number of Dousing types [angels, shadow people, voices, morgellons, ghosts, aliens, goverment radio] and have reality shifts switch up which ones are helpful, are which are out to screw with you, which aren't actually real, and what each source knows about (if anything). Then we let characters take a number of Dousing types that they personaly receive/beleive in and then let them consult with only those and receive results appropriate to the disposition and knowledge of the types they have available.

I think you're looking for "dowsing" (sort of means divination). Same pronunciation and kind of an obscure word, but either one could have a (radically different) meaning in this context, so it's worth being particular.

[For Valor]

Concerning the dodging of bullets...

If someone was in front of me, whipped out his pistol, and started firing shots, I could have the powers to deflect them easily. Say 1 hit from a dice pool.

How about if it were a sniper. I see the sniper, and I know he's got his scope adjusted to shoot me in the head.... how easy would it be to deflect the bullet then?

Or, in both cases, what if I didn't know the bullet was going to hit me? Are passive bullet-blocking skills legal?

[fectin]

If players don't know which of several reality alteration paradigms they have, it leads to players being more cautious and mistrustful of their abilities. Unfortunately, it encourages players to go on what are essentially training montages of testing the limits of their abilities. The first is desirable, the second is not.

What if the players had Edge that was spent on their behalf to make their abilities work, and the amount that was spent was a hidden number based on how short their die roll was? This way the players would get a bunch of positive results if they did a series of cold tests, and some of the tests would deplete the fate point reserve and some of it wouldn't, but that wouldn't look any different. This sort of thing would make such tests give meaningless information until they had carried a high cost. Presumably, this would negate the tendency of players to want to use up screen time calling coinflips and scratching lotto tickets.

This could also give the right dynamic with firearms. Since people have mana reserves, shooting a gun at a reality manipulator is going to accomplish jack and also shit. So logically, they'd want to take a golf club or a claw hammer instead. But on the flip side, reality manipulators aren't going to want to stick around and drink tea in a shooting match, because doing so may be depleting mana reserves and end badly.

But I wonder: do you think the mere knowledge that people do have invisible point reserves to draw upon would make players behave in a pink mohawk style as if their characters were invincible action movie stars? Because I think that might be bad.

-Username17

...I'm on ignore, aren't I?
Righto, moving on.

[TheFlatline]

Concerning the dodging of bullets...

If someone was in front of me, whipped out his pistol, and started firing shots, I could have the powers to deflect them easily. Say 1 hit from a dice pool.

How about if it were a sniper. I see the sniper, and I know he's got his scope adjusted to shoot me in the head.... how easy would it be to deflect the bullet then?

Or, in both cases, what if I didn't know the bullet was going to hit me? Are passive bullet-blocking skills legal?

Sniper would be more difficult. You're dealing with a professional who takes variables into account.

That being said, a particularly windy day, at distance, would be plausible. At long range you have to take wind and the curvature of the earth into account along with bullet drop.

You'd have to be aware though of a sniper attempting to shoot you though. The bullet would arrive before the report, so the first shot would most likely be a complete surprise to you.

[Parthenon]

Just putting out random ideas that crop up in my head while reading this:

[*] The PCs find a trap room at random, and never find it again when anyone is with them. Or trap rooms/roads used to exist, but now the only record is assumed to be a fake as part of copyright protection.

[*] Strange people come out on April 1st since they know people will write it off as an April Fools while its happening and forget about it after.

[TheFlatline]

If players don't know which of several reality alteration paradigms they have, it leads to players being more cautious and mistrustful of their abilities. Unfortunately, it encourages players to go on what are essentially training montages of testing the limits of their abilities. The first is desirable, the second is not.

What if the players had Edge that was spent on their behalf to make their abilities work, and the amount that was spent was a hidden number based on how short their die roll was? This way the players would get a bunch of positive results if they did a series of cold tests, and some of the tests would deplete the fate point reserve and some of it wouldn't, but that wouldn't look any different. This sort of thing would make such tests give meaningless information until they had carried a high cost. Presumably, this would negate the tendency of players to want to use up screen time calling coinflips and scratching lotto tickets.

This could also give the right dynamic with firearms. Since people have mana reserves, shooting a gun at a reality manipulator is going to accomplish jack and also shit. So logically, they'd want to take a golf club or a claw hammer instead. But on the flip side, reality manipulators aren't going to want to stick around and drink tea in a shooting match, because doing so may be depleting mana reserves and end badly.

But I wonder: do you think the mere knowledge that people do have invisible point reserves to draw upon would make players behave in a pink mohawk style as if their characters were invincible action movie stars? Because I think that might be bad.

-Username17

...I'm on ignore, aren't I?
Righto, moving on.

Nah, it was just earlier in the discussion. We've come back around to it.

[kzt]

Which means the way to kill these guy is an ambush. That's an interesting idea.

Then their is the sword guy who has a group of mooks with SMGs, they keep the other guys busy while he runs up to them and cuts their heads off.

[Ancient History]

Sort of an interesting counterpart to the Registry would be entities that deliberately edit out or place themselves in memories. So you'd be talking to your wife about your friend Jack...and she looks at you like you're nuts because she's never heard of Jack before. At first you might think you're sane and everyone else is crazy, until you go to find a photo of Jack...and there isn't one. You go to his house and it's empty, his call and his number is disconnected. The only place Jack exists is in your head.

Actually, it would be pretty fun if the Registry and the Memory Guys had a conflict.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Sort of an interesting counterpart to the Registry would be entities that deliberately edit out or place themselves in memories. So you'd be talking to your wife about your friend Jack...and she looks at you like you're nuts because she's never heard of Jack before. At first you might think you're sane and everyone else is crazy, until you go to find a photo of Jack...and there isn't one. You go to his house and it's empty, his call and his number is disconnected. The only place Jack exists is in your head.

Actually, it would be pretty fun if the Registry and the Memory Guys had a conflict.

That is exactly what would happen if Jack was killed by The Strangers.

[Manxome]

What if the players had Edge that was spent on their behalf to make their abilities work, and the amount that was spent was a hidden number based on how short their die roll was? This way the players would get a bunch of positive results if they did a series of cold tests, and some of the tests would deplete the fate point reserve and some of it wouldn't, but that wouldn't look any different. This sort of thing would make such tests give meaningless information until they had carried a high cost. Presumably, this would negate the tendency of players to want to use up screen time calling coinflips and scratching lotto tickets.

If so, your points should be refreshed by reality quakes. That means you can't ever perform the tests and then get your points back without rendering the tests invalid, and it helps counteract the temporary disadvantage of resetting your knowledge with the temporary advantage of a full tank.

Unfortunately, in addition to making the tests meaningless until you run out of points, this also makes your secret magic school meaningless until you run out of points. You're burning points faster depending on what you do, but you get no feedback at all about how fast you're burning them until they're gone, so you've got a period of having "all" powers, which lasts for an essentially random number of spells, and then at precisely the point your school actually matters, the reason not to do a training montage evaporates. I doubt that's an improvement.


Fectin's original idea (at least as I understood it) was that you pay a fixed cost to try to use an ability, and your odds of success are based on your current magic school. Which means that performing a bunch of tests is an entirely effective way of determining your school, but it also reduces the value of that knowledge, because your school only matters until you run out of points (rather than only mattering after you run out of points). If you calibrate the numbers correctly, you can probably make it so that the most efficient option is usually to figure things out as you go along, "testing" in the field so that you don't waste points (still takes approximately the same number of points to figure out, but you accomplish useful stuff in the process).

However, you'd need to ensure that there isn't too much difference between schools in the effectiveness of critical survival skills (like blocking bullets), or else PCs couldn't afford not to test before getting into a firefight.

That also has the disadvantage that at some point, the players run out of reality manipulation powers, and can't get them back until the next reality quake. Maybe instead of turning the powers off entirely, someone who runs out of points just reverts to the "default school of magic" which is the worst at everything. The key thing is that, once your points run out, you no longer care what random school of magic you were assigned - otherwise, you'll do the training montage then, if not before.


I suppose you could also say that, rather than limiting how much you can do, your points are just a countdown until your magic school is rerandomized. So, whether you train or not, your school suddenly shifts right around the time you were starting to become sure you knew which school you were. That would require shifting on an individual basis, though, rather than using the reality quake idea.

Though it also means you could conceal from players exactly when their powers shifted, so they're never sure whether their last 3 attempts failed because of a run of bad luck or because they're now a Cancer instead of a Sagittarius or whatever. That may or may not be a good thing.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Let me just put it out there that a game where the players don't get to roll the dice is barely a game at all.

[Username17]

Unfortunately, in addition to making the tests meaningless until you run out of points, this also makes your secret magic school meaningless until you run out of points. You're burning points faster depending on what you do, but you get no feedback at all about how fast you're burning them until they're gone, so you've got a period of having "all" powers, which lasts for an essentially random number of spells, and then at precisely the point your school actually matters, the reason not to do a training montage evaporates. I doubt that's an improvement.

You have a point there. What if players could choose to have an action succeed (spending however much juice was required), but there was a chance that their juice would get expended anyway if they were short? That way you can still fail at actions while there is juice in the tank, and you can still get information about how it works, but any tests you do are going to drain the tank, thereby disincentivizing you from doing so. Heck, we could go one step forward and even have the player's decision to spend mana be just an extra secret (or open) die to see if mana is spent.

Fectin's original idea (at least as I understood it) was that you pay a fixed cost to try to use an ability, and your odds of success are based on your current magic school.

Yeah, I think he was talking about players getting their mana pool and spending it to attempt any action. Mana in that sense would be a proxy for charge casting instead of a proxy for hit points.

That also has the disadvantage that at some point, the players run out of reality manipulation powers, and can't get them back until the next reality quake.

If I were to do that, then the reality quakes would be a daily occurrence. They'd happen at a specific time (like 17:43 Eastern Standard Time), and evidence of Hollow Men activity would always completely vanish during a Reality Quake. However, I'm not super thrilled about the idea of people spending points every time they got shot at.

-Username17

[Manxome]

You have a point there. What if players could choose to have an action succeed (spending however much juice was required), but there was a chance that their juice would get expended anyway if they were short? That way you can still fail at actions while there is juice in the tank, and you can still get information about how it works, but any tests you do are going to drain the tank, thereby disincentivizing you from doing so. Heck, we could go one step forward and even have the player's decision to spend mana be just an extra secret (or open) die to see if mana is spent.

As long as the PC's school affects anything at all after he runs out of charges, then he might as well do a training session at that point, because he's got nothing left to lose. Whatever system you use for spending juice, I think you really do want to have everyone revert to identically bad casting when they run out of it. That can be "just the basic package" rather than "none", but as long as it's different for different players, training sessions are rewarded.

Otherwise, this sounds pretty close to the "mana as charge casting" system, except with randomized expenditures, and a guarantee that a failure costs you nothing. It's debatable whether that's worth the additional complexity, but it sounds playable.

However, I'm not super thrilled about the idea of people spending points every time they got shot at.

But spending a random amount of points, that might be (but can never be guaranteed to be) zero, is OK? I don't really see the difference there.

You could certainly have different costs for different spells, and some of those costs could be "zero".

You could also tell people that they have the option of casting with the "basic package" stats for free even if they have points left that they could theoretically spend to use their secret random school, thus allowing people to conserve their points when they don't especially care about the outcome.

But I don't see how "sometimes, randomly" losing points when you get shot at is substantially different from "every time" losing points when you get shot at. Both of those statistically require the expenditure of points to survive gunfire, one of them just involves more dice.

[Maxus]

Maybe that's looking at it in the wrong way.

I don't know how many of you read Discworld, but an early book (honestly one of the worst in the series, but useful to look at for this purposes) has Death take an apprentice who starts taking on more of Death's powers--the ability to be everywhere, to move a little outside of normal time, etc. The most noticeable is that, seeing as how Death is the ultimate reality, Death can choose to ignore some things. He walks through walls because they are less real than he is.

This leads to the apprentice literally being immune to things he isn't aware of. He waved a hand through a pillar he didn't see and didn't notice it. At the extreme test, someone loaded a crossbow behind him, aimed it at his back, and pulled the trigger--and the bolt went -through- him without harm.

So, the Doubters could have a passive ability that's at the heart of their powers--stuff they don't know about literally can't hurt them.

And they can deal with threats they -do- know about pretty well, too, by being able to actively screw with reality, but that takes actual effort and you can only do it so long before you have to rest and recharge.

But this encourages direct confrontation and all, and does solve the "Snipers win" thing.

[For Valor]

So you have points in passive defense, active offense/defense, and clairvoyancy?

[TheFlatline]

Part of this "training period" is going back to one thing: The character is testing the limits of his abilities. The whole point of the system is that you're not supposed to even really be sure if you *have* abilities from a character's point of view.

You might be able to completely hand-wave the training period concept by saying "the power doesn't work that way". When you're trying to test out what works easier than other things, the power just turns the fuck off. If you could base the ability being available based on a character's need then you avoid the entire argument.

I mean, how many people *really* need a coin to come up heads on any given flip? Maybe if you have a gun pressed to your head or you just bet your friend's life on it, but if I had a PC who flipped a coin or picked a lotto ticket, that'd be the logical point when the damn power turns off.

How about this: say you're rolling with a D10 system. As part of your character sheet you have an "ability" score. Say it's a 4. When you try to push reality, you make your roll, and the DM rolls a D10 to see if the power fires. A natural 10 means that the player succeeds, but not due to his power: it's due to serendipity. 5-9 mean the player fails at altering reality regardless of whatever his reality manipulation roll, a 1-4 means the player has pushed reality with his ability and may succeed based on the roll itself.

Target numbers can vary at this point, so the player himself is never entirely sure if he just didn't roll enough successes or if the power just didn't work for him. It's a generally unreliable thing.

Then, if the player *needs* the ability to come through with him, he can burn a point of Push for the session, and it's on for one scene. He's pushed his abilities and believes in his abilities long enough to seemingly derive some use, but after that his ability is less reliable, re-establishing doubt.

So in a combat the player needs his ability. He burns a point of Push, dropping from 4 to 3 until next session (or next day, or whatever), and the DM doesn't roll to see if the power is active or not that entire scene. The player can always rely on it. After the scene, for the rest of the session, there's a lesser chance that the power will turn on, unless the player burns another point.