Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8974770" data-attributes="member: 4937">This doesn't really have to be illusionism.  It can be.  If you look at something like Mass Effect the video game, where you don't have a GM, then there is a lot of this sort of illusionism going on by necessity.  You get a lot of choices in the game that seem to be important, but if you do multiple playthroughs you quickly realize that the vast majority of your decisions didn't have any real import or change the outcome in any meaningful way.   In fact, part of what undermined the series as it went on is that the Devs had been publicly announcing "your choices will matter" but the longer things went, the more obvious the illusionism was.  This doesn't mean that Mass Effect wasn't a great cRPG - I consider Mass Effect #1 maybe the best cRPG ever made.   But it does mean that even in the context of a cRPG where you don't have any reason to believe that the game can adjust to your choices, pulling back the curtain to show the illusion can eventually undermine the experience.  But, conversely, if you think about it the "Three Clue Rule" is an example of making sure that three paths eventually lead to the BBEG and in this case you don't have illusionism even though the roads lead to the same place.  It's generally realistic that there is more than one way from A to B.   Unlike the Mass Effect case, no one is being tricked into thinking that they are being offered a train ticket to station B or station C, when in fact they go to the same place.  In this case, the party is really trying to get to station B and if they get there on foot, by road, or by rail it is a different story created by the player choice.  If I pull back the curtain here the response of the party is, "I can't believe we missed that!" and not "You tricked me!"  Illusionism in this case would be presenting the players a mystery game where they are encouraged to do investigation and are led to believe that they solved the case, but having a back up plan where the players are ultimately involved in solving the case even if they put together no clues at all.  And I have seen this in a published adventure and it was absolutely as lousy as you might think.  We dutifully did all the investigation and had all the pieces together and knew the backstory, but none of it actually helped point the way to a resolution or garnered you any advantage leaving us confused as to what we'd missed or where we were supposed to go from there.  And when the resolution arrives, it arrives quite without any of the adventure to that point actually mattering.  And that was one of the worst RPG experiences I've ever had, and it was the designer's fault, because the GM was normally a very good and reliable GM - he just failed to evaluate the scenario well and put too much faith in the designer.</blockquote>

Verification