It is said by some that I share a feature in common with the djinn.  It is not that I grant wishes, or make the impossible a reality, or even that I vanish into a small space unseen by others.  Rather it is said that I may be summoned, and will answer the summons whenever it calls.  The magic incantation to summon me is, according to this, to type the word Multiverser into a forum posting.

  I cannot say whether this is true; however, it is just this that brought my attention to a forum thread elsewhere about game design.  Multiverser had been recommended as among “the most thought-provoking and/or consistent” games for dealing with in-game physics, and as offering “some of the best current answers” to the problem of the tension between character death and story priority.  But the thread called my attention to a new name for an old concept in games, a style of refereeing now called illusionist.

  The idea of the illusionist referee is to give the players the impression that they are affecting the outcome of events when in fact the referee is controlling everything.  Choices are made, dice are rolled, doors are chosen, but in the end the referee is telling a story, and the players are being taken for a ride.  They are never at risk; they only feel like there is a risk.  The story seems to unfold in response to their decisions, but it is actually being revealed as they move through it and would never come out any other way.  They believe they have solved the mystery, when the answer has been given to them by sleight of hand while they were distracted.

  There is a bit of the illusionist in all the best referees, I expect.  We’ve talked about some illusion techniques in some of these articles.  Invisible Coins was very much about using dice to help you discover what you truly want the outcome to be, so you can steer the game that direction.  Who? suggested ways to reveal secrets about player characters the players did not know, when they become important to the story.  Left or Right? suggested ways of creating a scenario map which would unfold with the events in the sequence desired regardless of the player choices.  Possibilities considered the idea of devising open-ended scenarios and deciding the truth in response to player actions.  All of these are related to illusionist techniques; they enable the referee to create the appearance that the players are in control of events when they are not.  Almost every good referee uses a measured dose of illusion in what he does to keep the story moving toward something and maintain the level of excitement.

  But this thread was not about using some illusionist techniques in the pursuit of a good game.  The author was attempting to design an entire game around illusion, to create a rules system which ultimately boiled down to “everything happens the way the referee desires” but which consistently attempted to fool the players into believing otherwise.  The more I considered this idea, the more certain I became that it must ultimately fail, if for no other reason than that it is not now possible to keep the players from peeking behind the curtain.  I have been there; I saw it happening.

  The referee was well known for the wonderfully exciting games he ran, and for the detailed world in which these adventures occurred.  We created characters, each of us giving consideration to what might be survivable in the game we expected to be playing.  He started the game moving forward, and for several months put us through adventures which had us on the edge of death time and time again.  We believed we were playing well; we believed we were beating the odds.  We had succeeded in a scenario which he insisted was much tougher than we should be able to handle, and came through without casualties.

  Then as we prepared for the next adventure, the veil seemed to thin a bit.

  It started with one player whose character was getting brazenly above himself.  He was now a third level character of considerable power, and he struck a bargain with one of the creatures of evil who controlled the streets at night to permit him free passage there.  Flaunting this supposed success, he ran into a different group of evil creatures who owed no allegiance to the one whose favor he had bought, and things were taking twists and turns that no one could predict–no one, that is, but the referee, who was overheard chatting with a couple of the other players about what was going to happen in the days ahead for this character.  The player recognized that nothing he did would make any difference to the outcome, and never came back.

  The rest of us, somehow, were not moved by this.  After all, it was a rather haughty player running a rather haughty character, a local guy who had wheedled an invitation to join us from one of the younger players.  I would miss him, but I don’t know how many others at the table cared.  It was easy to see how his path could be predicted; everyone knew what he was trying to do and how he was likely to do it, so the fact that the referee could predict the results there hardly impacted us.  We, we believed, were still in control of our characters and the situations they faced.

  Those situations demanded that we go on an even riskier venture for our next mission than the first had been.  I was worried.  It promised to be longer and more dangerous, with less chance for aid along the way.  But I had acquired a magic device, a sort of scroll which I believed would summon assistance if it were needed, and I as a player assured myself that I could bring my character through alive because he was carrying this.  (The character was one of those sort who put honor first and had no fear, so there was never any possibility that he would not go.)  I called it my Trump Card, and considered it a safety net.  We began the journey.

  It took a couple of days of play before we were truly committed.  That is, there was some time during which we could have turned back.  We did not.  As soon as we were solidly committed to the mission, we had our first real battle, a fight which taxed us to the limits, even with our carefully planned and executed strategy.  We were overmatched, and managed to pull through by what seemed luck.  But just as had we defeated this enemy, before we were able to do much more than ask each other if everyone was all right, their reinforcements arrived–a force easily ten times that which we had barely defeated the moment before.  There was no place to run, no way to escape.  We were doomed.  I did the only thing that made sense:  I played my trump card.  The summons brought creatures to fight on my side, and they immediately took action.

  As the enemy saw our reinforcements arrive, they immediately began their retreat.  They had a way of escape we could not follow (and we were in no condition to pursue them).  Casualties were minimal, and we made modest gains in objects captured.  But as I surveyed the scene, I realized what had happened.  I had been snookered.  I had been pushed to use my safety net so that I would no longer have it, and as soon as this cushion had been stripped from me the fight was over.  The whole scene had been staged with the sole purpose of getting me to give that up, or so it appeared from that vantage.

  We played only once or twice more.  I cannot say that we stopped because we all realized the futility of our actions; there were real world issues that forced the group to separate.  But my heart was not so much in the game after that.  I knew that my character would live as long as the referee wanted him to be alive, and die the moment the referee chose to kill him, and nothing I did or did not do would make any difference to this.  I was playing the role primarily to lend color to his story.  My part did not much matter.

  Thus I see that the illusionist referee has a very difficult task at all times.  If once the players believe they have no control of the outcomes whatsoever, the game is over.  In a sense, it is the game that never started, as those who are called players are not playing, but watching.  They are a bit like the fans playing the roles in front of the screen at The Rocky Horror Picture Show, unable to affect the movie behind them as they are coerced into the predetermined outcomes.  As long as the referee can maintain the illusion that we, the players, control something–anything–the game continues.  If once we discover that we control nothing, he has lost us.

  This was not such a difficult task for that referee.  Had it not been for his mistake of telling some of the players what was going to happen to others, we might never have recognized what was happening.  But to design an entire game with this principle at the core faces an essential flaw.  When I started playing role playing games, it was a simple matter for the referee to announce that no one was to read the rule books for his game, and everyone honored that.  But it has been decades since then, and before the end of the first decade I was dealing with players who were all too eager to correct me on my reading of the rules–rules which I had instructed were for the referee alone.  If the game lasts three sessions and people enjoy it, one of them will buy the rules and discover what is really happening.  Even if no one buys the rules, information about game systems is bantered about on the Internet like cookie recipes at a sewing club meeting.  The players will know that the referee is deceiving them with the illusion of control almost before the referee has figured out how to make it work smoothly.  The curtain can no longer be closed to hide the mechanics of the game; and if those mechanics clearly say that the referee is telling the story and the players are merely steered through it, the game will fail.

  I’d like to think there was a way to get around that.  The game was truly exciting as long as I was fooled into thinking I was winning.

  I should append that the game under discussion in that forum thread was still very much in the design stages, and that there is some evidence in the existing threads to suggest that the designer does not mean quite what at first blush appears.  I would not wish to prejudice the readers against a game which may well break new frontiers.  My purpose in writing this is to recognize the flaw in making illusionism a core principle in a game system.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.