A few weeks ago, after soliciting questions to use as blog fodder, this thought-provoking message landed in my Tumblr inbox, from Gameplaywright reader Narenfel:
Do you know of any examples of how extended illusion-based play has been successfully adapted to game terms? Or have any good ideas how it could be done?
This turns out to be a pretty big question, I think. The first part, about examples, I can answer easily enough, but that second question — the one about ideas — that’s… a big one.
The Question in Question
So, the first part first: The first game that comes to mind when I think about extended illusion-based play is Mage: The Awakening, which posits that all of reality is itself semi-illusory, projected around humankind as a prison of petty mundanity and relative powerlessness — a prison built by supernal gods intending to keep the power over reality to themselves. Mages, then, are those who see through the illusions to the real world, but they are also those capable of creating illusions themselves.
The idea here being that once you can see through the illusion, you have some degree of power over it, which is good because it trumps the big risk of illusion-based play: agency-robbing mischief. Being fooled isn’t a lot of fun, but being the people who see through trickery? That’s fun.
The trouble here, though, is that Mage‘s premise pretty much undercuts the effectiveness of the illusion, because players are almost always wise to each others’ illusions. It’s a pretty good game for the themes of illusion and trickery, though. It just centers on one big mutable illusion at the heart of the setting. Yet again, we see how Mage: The Awakening echoes the themes and power fantasies of The Matrix — a story about people who gain power by disbelieving a single overriding illusory reality.
But Mage and The Matrix are about those big, central illusions, and play in both settings usually presupposes that the illusion has already been penetrated by the main characters. That probably robs you of a key dramatic moment you’re after when playing an illusion-based game: the moment where you realize the illusion is fake.
My guess is that, for “illusion-based play,” you want multiple instances of that moment. You want layers of reality.
At which point we switch from the first question to the second, because I don’t have any one single game in mind that does layers of reality in a way that’s illusion-based. Unknown Armies and Over The Edge could both tackle the layers-of-reality issue in interesting ways. Of course you want to check out Jared Sorensen’s Lacuna Part I, a gem I’ve read but never played, which deals with questions of what’s real and what’s a dream, but isn’t exactly about illusionists either. But I think I’ve got an even crazier way of handling layers of realities, which I’ll get to in a second.
First, I’m curious if illusion-based play would actually be fun. When you say “illusion-based play,” I immediately think of players trying to fool each other with spells, which doesn’t seem like a lot of fun for long. That leads to — and, in fact, I think inherently is — an argument about what’s real and what’s not in the imaginary game-space. A lot of RPG energy is actually supposed to be about agreeing on what’s real, not arguing about what’s not. Illusion-based play can quickly devolve into the worst kind of “did not, did so” Cowboys-and-Indians spats. (See also, the mayhem of Mage: The Ascension.)
A game in which the PCs are battling an illusion-making force, Matrix-style, at least casts the players all on the same team, which may be vital to coherence in the midst of illusory mayhem.
Jeff’s gut reaction:
The real problem with illusion, as I think about it, is that it puts a massive roadblock in the path of maintaining the desirable separation of player knowledge and character knowledge.
I think it certainly can do that, and that such a roadblock could be a problem… but what if it’s not? What if the game is all about separating player knowledge from character knowledge? What if the players know that everything is potentially an illusion, and the metagame is about one-upping and revising each other’s illusions?
Off the top of my head, here are a couple of ways to handle this layers-of-reality style of illusion-based play:
- The Unreliable Narrator: I wrote about this play experiment a long time ago, but I think the post is still a good one. In this mode of play, what actually happened is left somewhat vague, and the account of the truth — the tale told — moves to the fore. This lets players vie over what’s real while their characters battle your typical in-game foes. Read this post.
- Make Specific Illusions Into Treasure: Construct a single, overarching play experience in which the characters (and thereby the players) may discover that certain things (their spouses, an ally, Australia, etc.) are illusions, and then award them certain illusory objects (tanks, buildings, Australia, etc.) as treasure. The aim, then, is to acquire and deploy illusions of their own to fool their foes (and their allies?), perhaps by capturing illusions from the world around them. I’m thinking you need to do something terrible to an illusion to capture it, so that if you’re wrong about an illusory person, say, you are jeopardizing your relationship with them by attempting to capture their code. Maybe the illusions are the result of world-wide cybernetic uplink or sorcery. I’m just spitballing here.
- One Campaign, Many Games: Create a layers-of-reality campaign in which each layer of reality is a different RPG. Create a list of RPGs you’re willing to play. Give each player a currency (perhaps one Realization Point per player) that they can use to realize that the current reality is a psychotropic drug-induced shared psychic hallucination, a computer-projected illusion, or whatever. When they trigger it, they can declare what the next game system (and thus adventure) will be, maybe even taking over the role of GM, when the next session starts. The characters must still survive or solve the current session, though, to make it to the next layer of reality. Again, just brainstorming.
- The Disbelief Police: If the PCs have the ability to project their own illusions — perhaps by adding Aspects to scenes, in FATE lingo — maybe their antagonists are those who can dispel them through disbelief. The players’ strength isn’t in breaking the illusions but in protecting the world through trickery — working to disguise the truth that everyone’s dead, maybe, and dwelling in the afterlife. (There’s a free game idea for you.) Their enemies dispel illusions. In this model, I’d say that every PC can have 10 points’ worth of illusions going at one time (or something like that), and that choosing what lies to maintain and against what challenges is one of the core choices of play. Still brainstorming.
(When it comes to layers-of-reality games, remind me to talk to you about Databank sometime — I really do intend to finish and publish that game one of these days.)
I also want to bring up the film, The Prestige, which is all about competing to see through each others’ illusions, only to discover, frighteningly, that not all the illusions are illusions at all. But I’ll say no more, here, ’cause that’s a whole other thing.
Ultimately, though, I want to toss it to the Gameplaywright collective audience, which is much smarter than I am: How do you make illusion-based play fun? How do you keep it from being un-fun? I’ll keep cooking ideas over here if you share some of yours below.
No joke, I’ve been scratching up a post-matrix action movie knockoff to chew on this question. Not that I have a full answer yet.
My first instinct to consider his is to turn it on it’s head: what is a TRUTH based game about? This might be something like a twist on the underlying reality model, except with the Big Truth being unknown and subject to interpretation, but it need not be so cosmic.
The trick, I think, is that you can have ubiquitous illusions provided that everyone knows it. This was an idea that had a lot of legs when virtual reality was the hot new thing: if everyone is in a virtual environment, then everyone knows that everything is an illusion, but that makes the few true things all the more valuable (and difficult to identify). This is, ultimately, very very playable until it isn’t. The points where it breaks down (usually related to player knowledge) can be rough, but if the setting has very strict rules about how illusions work, that can mitigate a lot of pain.
One interesting upshot of illusion-based play is that it can entirely remove the idea of character risk, either because everything encountered is unreal or (more usefully) because the character is operating remotely, as with some sort of avatar. Given that model, the real challenge is giving the players something to _do_ rather than just futz around. The best solution to this is probably the Amber model, granting infinite cosmic power but making people the things that really matter.
I do know that more than a few GMs have done the “The first half of the game was a simulation, and now we’ll pull you out into reality!” trick and it is almost universally reviled as a dickish bait and switch, so as log as the topics on the table, let’s not do that.
-Rob D.
I’d check out Kult, as its very much in this style and has a lot of very insightful thoughts for running in this style. I’ve heard Mage: The Awakening described more than once as Kult light.
Not to take the discussion off-track, but when I first read this question, I interpreted it as “Are there any games that use optical illusions as central game mechanics?”
And so that got me wondering… are there?
This first thing that springs to mind for me when thinking of ideas based around layers of illusion is a game based around repetition.
Play out a series of linked scenes- the masked ball or an important meeting, say. Then let a player change an assumption or ‘reveal’ an illusion (possibly by spending metagame currency). Then revisit the scenes or part of scenes that are changed in the context of this new information and play them out again, or add new side scenes that occur simultaneously with already described events.
After a few iterations, the original story will be nothing more than a façade, but because all the players had input into how it changed there’s little chance that good suggestions and ideas will have been trampled on.
This also ties into the essence of secrets, doesn’t it? Because a successful illusion is a secret that hasn’t been revealed yet. So thinking about how one preserves and gains value out of secrets is key, here.
And as Rob has said elsewhere and before, one strong role for secrets in gaming is not that they are kept, but that they are to be revealed. How well the build-up to that reveal is managed is important, because that’s what adds power to that reveal when it lands.
Right on, Fred. Like I said, a game of illusions is probably actually a game of revealing illusions, else the fact that they’re illusions don’t really matter.
Unless, maybe, the characters are the ones trying to maintain illusions for the sake of some good or mission, in which case you derive suspense from the fact that an illusion might be revealed when you don’t want it to be. Ideally, a game would be a blend of both, right?
What if each player is responsible for a different part of the illusion — the sight, the smell, the touch, and so together they can fool people but alone they’re just trickery? That way you’ve got teamwork.
Still just brainstorming.
Or if the players *are* illusions. “Don’t disbelieve me! I am plausible!”
Great stuff, Rob!
That bait-and-switch is only a trick if the players didn’t know it was a fair-game option, right? But switching out the game system for another one (a grittier one?) as part of the campaign premise is still valid, I think. The suspense comes from not knowing what game is coming next and how your character will translate from one to the next.
Not necessarily something I’m excited about, but I think that the simulation within a more real simulation within a more real simulation is a viable trope.
Thanks for reminding us of Kult, Jere. I need to look at that game — I’ve never perused it at all.
Royce, I don’t know of a single game that uses optical illusions as a central mechanic. I’m not even sure how that would work. Hmm.
What if the game is all about separating player knowledge from character knowledge?
That’s interesting. So, imagine a game where you have a player character, and the things your PC knows are somehow mechanically described. These mechanical descriptions are probably tied to actions he is allowed to take. So, your PC knows that his wife loves him, and as a consequence, that PC is now allows—by the rules of the game—to do things to his wife that are not consistent with love.
However, the mechanics of this illusion-based game might allow other actors in the world—NPCs, and perhaps even other PCs—to interfere with the things your PC knows, and therefore manipulate the actions he’s allowed to take. So, he might be hit with the illusion that his wife has betrayed him. I can’t think of any reasonable way to conceal that from the player in the long term, but by making it a mechanical restriction that the PC is now only allowed to take actions with regard to his wife that are consistent with “betrayer,” you reflect the illusion mechanically.
So, clearly it could be done. But it still doesn’t really seem worth it, to me. The drama of roleplaying comes form making interesting decisions as some alternate persona. From time to time, having the facts that underly a decision turn out to be illusory might be interesting, but to take as your premise the idea that those facts are often or mostly illusory, I think you undermine the fact of choice-based, dramatic gameplay.
But I also think it’s possible that I’m not really understanding the basic premise of what illusion-based play is.
See, for me, some of that alternate-persona fun comes from making decisions for that character the way that a writer or an actor does, even though the writer and the actor may know what else is going on in the story — what’s real and what’s not — they make decisions for the character who knows only his own limited viewpoint. So, even though the player knows what’s real and what’s not, part of playing is portraying a character who doesn’t.
It is definitely a narrower experience, and not necessarily a scratch for the typical roleplaying itch, but it’s something.
But I’ve been allowing my brainstorming to operate off a pretty broad definition of “illusion-based play,” thus far.
Also, I really like this idea of describing characters based on what they know… or think they know. I may steal that idea for something else.
I thought the question was about player characters deploying illusions, which is basically every con artist and heist story since the beginning of time, right? Couldn’t we look to the Leverage RPG for this?
JD, we sure could. (I took out a paragraph I wrote about spies and hucksters as illusionists, because I felt it was too punny.) But I didn’t want to assume that magical illusion necessarily correlated to showbiz or heist-style trickery, though. You could tell a heist-style story about real illusionists, but that’s so plainly a storytelling trope rather than a literal one, that I didn’t think it answered the question. That is, if you just tell most con stories straight through, without leaving something out, they cease to be con stories.
Leverage uses flashbacks to show how unlikely to unexpected things were pulled off. That may be a viable way to frame a story about illusions, but it doesn’t seem to address how the illusions themselves are handled. Do players simply declare, via flashback, that such-and-such NPC or murder or Australia was in fact an elaborate illusion? That might work.
Maybe the Leverage RPG has a profound solution for illusion-based play, but I don’t have money to blow on a quickstart so I couldn’t tell you.
I’ve both read and played it and…that’s exactly what they do. They flash back at the end and the players fill in the gaps of “what really happened”.
I should’ve italicized “might.” That might work, but I’m not sure its satisfactorily magical. Flashbacks are a narrative device, and for illusions to feel like they’re magical, inherent parts of actual play, I think they need to be literal illusions. I use flashbacks in games with great frequency already — it doesn’t exactly make the characters illusionists in the AD&D style that Narenfel was talking about.
For sure, it’s a fine narrative fit for cons, but are con tropes the only way to handle illusion-based play? Is that our only choice?
(Maybe I’m biased, because I ran successful heist and con-style games for years and am admittedly a little tired of them. I’m looking for something that illusion-based play uniquely makes possible, as opposed to another con game.)
This question hit all of my cerebral hotspots at once. My brain is quite literally fizzing. You were warned.
Mage: The Awakening is probably my favourite RPG for its setting and game world metaphysics. Its had a massive influence on the stories I write and want to keep writing – and probably no small effect on the way I think about issues of perception and belief in general.
As an inspiration for any world that deals with illusion, IMO the old Mage system provides a really good metaphysical bone-structure on which to build more solid story ideas and game mechanics.
The basic premise is that reality (or its perception) is malleable: it is (theoretically) what you want/expect it to be. As an ‘awakened’ being, you work it in your own way, and can twist and tweak it to reflect whatever dark or delightful shapes you desire.
The illusion need not necessarily be used to fool others, either. It could be the place you use as a conscious escape from harsh, banal reality, the place from which you draw internal strength, or the place which keeps your demons at bay. The game is sustaining the illusion for as long as you need to in order to achieve your aim.
The forces characters struggle against are embodied by anything that threatens the illusion: discovery, disbelief, crumbling self-esteem, failed purpose. Ultimately, the mechanics need to reflect the constraints, opportunities, conflicts and consequences you’d like to emerge in the story.
System-wise, I have a few ideas. The first is where players have certain feats that allow them to attune themselves to NPC awareness (what they hear/see/smell/feel, their emotional state, their knowledge), and others that allow them to affect them in some way (hallucinate, misapprehend, forget, believe, physically/emotionally feel)
So, based on what they understand an NPC perceives, the player outlines an illusion and its target. GM determines a time frame for which that illusion needs to be maintained, determines the strength/immediacy of threats to that illusion – combines these factors to produce a test for whether the illusion is maintained or fails for a given reason.
A little sketchy, details wise, I’ll admit. But my point is that illusions have a reality of their own – and can be more real to the individual than the ‘shared’ reality in which we co-exist. Illusions play with expectations, and I believe that ultimately expectations are formed on an individual level.
I’d also like recommend that anyone who likes the themes of this thread track down Satoshi Kon’s ‘Paranoia Agent’ – a series of deftly interwoven stories on the nature of illusion, fantasy and self-deception. It is my all time favourite anime anything.
Ahh. Well, I’m addicted to con artist characters/games, and nobody else in my group is even a bit interested, so I am always going there.