Immersive Roleplay, or The Mystery Box and Your Imagination

I've grown up on D&D and like many, it's been my number one game and has served me well. Even still, after running so many games with various levels of preparedness, from almost fully improvised to thoroughly plotted out, I'd become disenchanted with it. On top of the issues I was having with some group dynamics, I felt the rules were somehow getting in the way of what I was subconsciously trying to achieve. Frustrated, I decided to give up on roleplaying for a while.

It wasn't until a few days later that I found the old spark again, the one that drew me to the hobby in the first place, and this time, it lit a flame.

I was reading The Knight by Gene Wolfe, and that old sense of wonder started to fill me. That feeling that there's a whole other world just behind the pages, filled with fantastic possibility. I caught myself wondering what exactly caused that feeling. The answer I came up with was the Mystery Box.

The Mystery Box is an idea J. J. Abrams presents in his TED Talk. The Mystery Box is a question, one that entices the audience to keep watching because they're so curious about what's in the box. It hit me that it was because I didn't know what else was out there in the world of The Knight that created that sense of wonder. There was such realism in what was presented that my imagination was able to create the sensation that there was a ton of stuff that wasn't presented but which existed. This is the power of allusion and illusion, and this is what creates wonder. Not knowing things is the key to immersion.

I knew right away I wanted to make this happen in an RPG, that it was what I'd been looking for. I started thinking about experiences I'd had in the past that were immersive, that created that sensation of fantastic possibility. Books, of course, are on the list. I thought about the immersive video games I've played and I realized that the best one don't give you a set of rules you need to learn before playing the game. You just go into the world. 

You can't see the rule set in a world. You don't walk around seeing lines of codes like Neo or something. You make choices based on what you perceive to be true about the world with your senses. That got me thinking about MUDs (text-based roleplaying games if you don't know), which really combine the best of both video games and books: the sensation of fantastic possibility, and choice. The rules are hidden from the player in books, immersive video games, and many MUDs. Just like the rules are hidden from us in the real world. Therefore:

The rules are the Mystery Box.

The Experiment

In order to create the Mystery Box, the players can't know the rules. After realizing this, I decided I needed to do away with an abstract rules interface like D&D if I was going to achieve total immersion. Having no rules or playing a narrative or storytelling game wasn't going to work because the realism, the sense that unchanging laws govern the world, would be missing. I decided I'd have to keep the rules behind the screen so the players would be aware that there were a set of laws governing this world, they just couldn't see it.

The system I'm choosing to use is Fudge because of its simplicity, customizable complexity, and simulative nature. Using Fudge, I'll create a custom rule set and keep it hidden from the players, making all rolls for them and me behind the screen. That's the Mystery Box taken care of.

In order to create the sensation of fantastic possibility, I'll need to use a deeply realistic setting. To achieve that, I think it will need to be a sandbox. I'll be following Rob Conley's How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox, which is a rather large 32-step endeavour which Rob claims should take about 24 hours. I'm pretty sure it's going to take me a lot longer than that, but I think it's necessary for the experiment. Besides, I'm a GM: I love worldbuilding. I toyed with the idea of using Hârnworld, but I think it's just as much work to learn and internalize someone else's setting as it is to create your own.

Now I'm ready for step one: creating the campaign map.