Game Ideas Un limited: Stalling

  There's a somewhat unsung hero in the Multiverser story.  His name is Richard Lutz; what I know about him might fill a thimble, but he was a gamer, an atheist, a soldier, and a friend of E. R. Jones.  He appears in the credits in the referee's rules, and I'm told comes from Florida, although where he is now I have no idea.  I've never met him, and to my knowledge have only met two people--one of them Mr. Jones--who have.  Yet before I knew anything about Multiverser or my partner in its development, Richard Lutz was not only playtesting the game concepts, he was running games with them.  He conceived The Zygote Experience, which has been praised as one of our more insane notions.  I've heard tales, but have little knowledge.

  Among those tales are stories of worlds he ran, and among the worlds he ran are several that mystified their player, the aforementioned Mr. Jones, long after they had lost contact with each other.

  One of those worlds was the top of a mountain.  It was a snow-covered peak, with bitter winds, driving precipitation, and slick surfaces.  Three or four times the player found his character here, fighting for survival.  Each time he struggled to work his way down the mountain into the valley, to find out what was in this world apart from snow and ice.  Each time he slipped and plunged to his death, moving to another world.

  As an aside, you might think this was the inspiration for The New Ice Age, the survival scenario which was for a time our free world and then was included in The Second Book of Worlds.  Although I did know of the mountain story before I wrote that world, it was inspired by the setting of a rather silly book by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, Fallen Angels, which is more a good-natured swipe at sci-fi fandom than a science fiction story.  The solid information about the science behind a modern ice age contained in an appendix of that volume was supplemented by some public television specials on ice ages, the impact of the Himalayas on world climate, dates of mammoth bones, and Inuit survival, followed by a lot of research.  Although there is a marked similarity between them, there is no connection.

  In another of Mr. Lutz' worlds, the verser found himself near a lake, near a village.  As he approached, he was greeted by a large smiling group of short green-skinned people.  They seemed friendly, so he said, Hi--and they immediately and viciously attacked him, until he was overwhelmed, dead, and on to the next world.  The story is often cited for the importance of understanding an alien culture before making contact.  The player still wonders what Hi meant in their language.

  Long after I heard these stories, I realized that Hi didn't mean anything in their language; and that there was nothing at the bottom of the mountain.  Richard Lutz had developed the technique I've since come to call the stall scenario.  He used worlds which contained nothing but an immediate probability of death as a delaying tactic to give himself time to think.  Oh, you versed out, I need another world, what have I got?  I don't know.  Here, let's do this for a few minutes while I think of something interesting.  It will take you a few minutes to die in this world, and by that time, I should have something else ready to go.  I have a reconstructed list of the worlds to which that character traveled, and always after the mountain, and the one time after the lake, there are very interesting world ideas.  The first time he fell off the mountain, he landed in Zantac, a world built entirely around gladiator combat (which reminds me that Lutz was a medic, and found it humorous to name an insanely violent world after a pacifying psychiatric medication).  After the second visit, he was in Psi Cop World, a 1984 variant where the thought police really can police your thoughts.  After encountering the people by the lake, he went to Disneyland, where they hired him as a secret agent to do corporate espionage.  I've no guess how many more of these stall scenarios Mr. Lutz used; but he managed to use them and keep them secret at the same time.

  Those of you who aren't playing Multiverser, if you're still reading, may think this is no help to you.  You really can't drop a character off a cliff or have a thousand screaming aliens attack him so that you can think for a minute.  Well, maybe you're playing the wrong game; but maybe not.  Maybe you just need to take the idea into a different context.  After all, there are few referees who never need a moment to think.  I believe Brett Bloczinski recently wrote an article, Expanding an Idea:  Everyone Take 10, in which he suggested taking a break to get yourself organized.  That's a good strategy.  This is an alternative.  Wandering monsters need not be random, and they need not be violent.  Less than a year ago we spoke of Encounters with people the characters already know; and not all animals that are not dangerous don't require time and care to get around.  If a skunk crosses your path, you're probably going to wait until it's on its way before proceeding.  Similarly, player characters can encounter someone or something with which they need to interact, which you as referee can run easily while doing something else.  Whether it's combat or conversation, a quick rescue of someone in trouble, or a strange inscription they need to study and consider, dropping something into the game at this moment delays the next moment long enough for you to think, to get a handle on what you want to do, to focus your ideas into something better.

  Of course, I could be entirely wrong about Mr. Lutz.  It might be that there was something at the bottom of the mountain, but Mr. Jones never managed to find a safe way down to it.  It might be that Hi did mean something terrible to those little people that incensed them.  I could be attributing to him a brilliant idea that he never had.  Yet as I offer it to you, I credit him, as I doubt I would ever have had it had I not mulled so long over his strange worlds.

  Next week, something different.

-----

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.