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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

The SUE Files: One Day We'll Even Have Rules

I fear we may have put the cart slightly before the horse, given the sort of logistical issues we're running into. It might help to define the basic in-universe mechanics of worldbuilding so that we know what kind of inheritances between worlds we're looking at. Here's what I'm thinking:


Most people who tell stories do so in broad strokes; in, for example,a dashing swordfight scene, no one cares that some guy three rows back in the astonished crowd of onlookers stubbed his toe yesterday. Indeed, for all practical purposes, he has no toes insofar as the story cares. In most stories, this isn't a problem, but in every RPG I've ever been in, at some point the players will wander into some part of the story that no one ever anticipated them seeing, at which point the DM ad-libs through a combination of logic, tropes, and random guessing.


World-dreaming is like that, except all the players are doing that from the moment they become self-aware and there are potentially trillions of them. Thus, the simulation: taking the dreamer's cognitive bias and feeding random numbers into it until a world falls out. Then we have gaps to deal with, chief among them people's ignorance concerning the operation of their own sentience. It might as well throw the resultant exceptions upward, drawing from whatever made the dreamer's own world...and by the time the recursion terminates, everything's pulling from the same basic template. A template that, self-evidently, contains the capacity to start the whole thing all over again, wishing its own little infinity into existence. There's a nice sense of unity there, one that I think reflects a lot of “alien” species in fiction: weird as they might get, they're still broadly describable in comprehensible terms, and therefore it's still broadly possible to understand them. This will be critical for most parties, in all probability.


Given that, I don't think it's too unreasonable to say that a great many capabilities are all stuffed into the same template, then deactivated as needed in each iteration; it's considerably more efficient than hoping that whoever's dreaming of sapient sound waves has any idea of how to build their instincts at a molecular-equivalent level. More importantly, it means dreamjackers almost literally jailbreak their brains to do things they were never intended to do, but had the capacity to do anyway, which helps explain some of the operational uniformity of such a diverse organization.


This has a number of implications. The big one concerns creating: it leaves our old idea of omniscience with usable loopholes. Firstly, even if a world's creator can see anything, they can't possibly process everything at once. There is only so much data one mind can process at once. Secondly, their perceptions are still subject to their various cognitive inadequacies, which means our PCs can hide by making sense, among other things, or at least not standing out. This, in combination with how much most people focus on specific stories in their larger world, implies certain things about dreamjacker operational doctrine we'll get into later.


The little one concerns our PCs and how we make them. I'd like to make the entry process as wide open as possible, thus the assumption that everybody already knows, on some level, how to do this. I'd also like some constraints on the process of becoming one: ideally it should be irreversible but not repeatable. That way the PCs don't have a Get Out of Adventure Free card; I don't like to be this cynical, but I'd like to be able to put NPC dreamjackers in horrible situations without having to explain why they didn't just run away. There's also some associated physical gaps; with all that in mind, here's my thought:

Every dreamjacker starts with someone who wants to leave everything. It may not be a reasoned decision; it might with equal ease be founded in anger, terror, or curiosity. The only really salient points are the totality of the character's confidence in however they're leaving and their lack of information concerning their destination. Maybe they built themselves and extra-universal transportalizer; maybe they researched Mage's Ultimate Escape. Maybe they ran blindfolded through a maze for a really long time. Maybe they stepped through a mystical portal at the end of all the planes. Heck, maybe they got really scared of the monsters under the bed, shut their eyes, and wished real hard. The point is, we're dealing with the kind of mind that insists they're going and only knows they're going Out hard enough that the whole world acknowledges their momentum.


Now, what happens to their body is rather dependent on their home physics; their mind, on the other hand, that little standard sapient template suddenly doing extremely nonstandard things, is flung through all the cosmoses. Wherever it lands, though, it's demonstrably not “real”; matter doesn't work the way it remembers, its senses are horribly off, et cetera. So it insists things make sense, which switches on a bunch of heretofore unused engrams and starts translating sense data and instantiating a body. It insists that said body is real, therefore it can interact with local matter, though it's really closer to a memory forcibly injected into a larger thought; likewise, it insists it can sense, and so it finds or builds senses to parse the incoming data in comprehensible ways. That's really the key to this entire process: complete and utter disregard for apparently immutable truths.


This can end badly in a lot of ways. The temptation to misuse it is going to be vast; in many ways, they are omnipotent. Even if they don't go full-on tyrant, seemingly benign uses can cause serious problems. Just sculpting fire in fun ways or whatever isn't necessarily morally wrong by anyone's standards, but it's still going to shatter Immersion if overdone. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some may never figure it out and just wane in shock and confusion until there's nothing left. In between we could have Superman-style vigilantism, rigorous exploration of their new understanding of reality, just blending in and lying low...who knows. A potential dreamjacker's second career is probably as interesting as the first one.


At this point, triage happens. The first third, the ones who are being cruel or tyrannical or so uncontrollably destructive that there's no hope of reigning them in, get dreamjacker teams sent after them. The last third, the incurably confused ones, are definitionally beyond help – or, more immediately pertinently, beyond recruitment. The triage step, from a game design perspective, is more there for NPC creation than as a restriction to PC personality. Most people don't want to play characters so crazy they can never meaningfully interact with other people or so unsuited for this that no power in the cosmos can help them learn how to breathe. The first is there so we can make SUEs later. The second is there so we have some numerical flexibility.


Anyway, the middle third of the triage gets enough positive Agency attention to be pinged for recruitment. In dreamjacker parlance, this is “waking up”; it happens through a nightmare, all the more remarkable for being the first dream the candidate has had since freeing themselves from their host world. Specifics differ, but the events depicted do not: it shows the rise and fall of one Mary Sue. From her start simply slaying anyone who gainsaid her to her eventual casual rending of worlds and minds asunder, she assimilates all she sees, twisting the unique parts to amuse her and reprocessing the shattered remains of the rest into yes-persons. She overwrites minds on the most basic, fundamental level to remove their capacity for dissent or even unhappiness, likewise almost casually ripping apart everything she sees to better suit her whims. The world is her museum, the interesting exhibits fixed and pinned down and sealed behind glass while the rest is turned into muted, sterile, identical support structure for further conquests. Eventually something snaps, and everything she did and everything she knew was dissected and destroyed by an inconceivable array of impossible horrors until nothing remains of a thousand worlds but empty non-space – in a particularly eerie twist, the candidate's home and loved ones are typically superimposed on suitable parts of the rapidly decaying reality. Then those thousand become a million, then ten million, and so on until the candidate screams themselves awake. All the while, embedded didactic keys trigger awareness of their ability to do everything they see. They wake up fully capable of Suedom and fully aware of the consequences. They know about Immersion, they know what happens when it breaks, they're aware of the existence of the Agency in broad terms and they know what it is to be a dreamjacker. Presently an existing cell comes by with a job offer.


The key reason for a candidate to accept is one of agency, I think. They've certainly been batted around by fate enough to want some control. Eventually, someone like Mary is going to arise, and if not stopped they will eventually break things until everything around them is torn apart, including in all probability the candidate's home. Perhaps they will make the difference that day; perhaps not. But either way, better to do something about it – and they know well how big a something they can do – than be blindsided by it and let all that potential dissipate away. Then, too, for the rest of their life, whatever they do, they need to fight to wake up every day convinced the world they see is real. They can convince themselves that the world is a wonderfully plastic infinity where a very tiny group of concerned people can literally hold the cosmoses together against an endless array of insane, tyrannical megalomaniacs, or they can convince themselves that the world is an immutable place over which they have almost no direct control.


Some refuse to help, of course. Knowing what happens when they overuse their abilities, I'd bet the sensible ones are going to use them only when they perceive a dire need, and even then not to meddle noncausally in someone's head. Operationally they might be more like consultants, if anything; the Agency is necessarily too paranoid to forget about them completely, but just as there's no reason to restrict their freedom unless they start going wrong, there's also no reason to ignore whatever information they might be willing to provide.


The rest...the rest, after all that, are our dreamjackers. They possess the following traits:

1. The will to leave home in a big and extremely dangerous way.
2. The adaptability to find a way to exist reasonably well where they land.
3. The basic sanity to be able to interact with other people nondestructively.
4. The desire to prevent the end of all the worlds.


Looking at this list, one might feel it's too restrictive; I can certainly see where, for example, 3 might give people pause. If it helps, think of them as guidelines. The Agency certainly can't afford to waste people who need a bit or a lot of help to adapt, and they're as willing to make allowances as the DM is.


It is also an exclusively mental list, because I don't want to stop people from playing whatever they want physically. Yes, in a complicated and pedantic way, someone who's robot, for example, is actually only a thought imaging itself a robotic body, but if you tap them they clank. The point is to not get hung up on how, exactly, character A exists in setting 1, or ability Ж works under such-and-so physics, while not handwaving any of that away entirely. If there is a giant atomic-powered robot striding through a high fantasy kingdom firing off laser beams, so be it. If an alchemist then sprinkles philosopher's stone on that robot and turns its armor into gold, also fine. The fact that the two kinds of physics can't coexist doesn't matter unless someone makes a big deal out of it, and that is literally what Immersion is for.


With that done, there are some loose ends to tie up. A lot of them concern what happens when a dreamer stops; if we have to compress millennia of history into a single lifetime, let alone a single night, we're going to need time travel. Also, if we want dreamers hopping out of the world, the tree's going to get even more convoluted than it already is; we can certainly do things like loops in a limited way, but random cross-connections, truly random ones, get really tiresome to map.


As a solution to all of this, I refer back to the above explanation of how new worlds come up. Take the dreamer out of the equation once it's been running for a while, and maybe the simulation just idles; it refers to random people around the dreamer when it runs into a particularly knotty problem, they have a slightly freaky dream, and the world keeps on going. Maybe it polls the inhabitants every once in a while. The world drifts slightly over the ages, to be sure; its responses when invaded shift gradually as more and more mindsets are added to its history. But it keeps going until someone stops it.


That feels like a neat solution to a lot of our problems to me. Please feel free to tell me if it isn't.

8 comments:

  1. Having made a few sample sues following this system, and a few non-SUE dream-jackers (do they have a classification), I think it works quite effectively as a guideline. Obviously if there is a really good idea that doesn't quite fit it could be modified based on who the GM is. Honestly tempted to try and run a game of this once I get a job, since it would be much simpler than dealing with the byzantine plots I come up with for the settings I make. It's actually quite simple making a SUE back story (of why they became the type of sue they are) and what powers they give themselves to fit their personality or overcompensate for something they feel is lacking, Since the people who make Mary SUEs tend to be living a power fantasy that they can't do in real life or that they think they are amazing at in real life.

    On another point, I think to make it playable the SUEs should be powerful, but they should have some sort of limit depending on how far gone they are (different levels and classifications of sues maybe? could even be an unofficial thing). It's no fun fighting against gods, but demigods have the fallibility of humans and the power of the gods.

    so for example: Bob was a boring kid. Eventually bob realized that no one really paid any attention to him, and he got into writing to express himself, he wrote about himself as a grand wizard who was also a skilled warrior (like Gandalf who he idolized). Eventually he got fed up with the universe and wished he could live out his fantasies somewhere he could be appreciated. When he next awoke, he was in a fantasy setting where he quickly adjusted and went on a grand adventure to save the world, and was rewarded with the princesses hand in marriage, and after a while became the king and led the people into a golden age. Unfortunately the other kingdoms were going through hard times due to irresponsible leadership and lack of magic, so he shared his resources with them, in exchange for them swearing fealty to him.
    Threat: Tier IV (probably on a(n exponential) scale of I to X, with I being an exceptional individual that is above their peers, but not impossible to beat, X being those that would be impossible to beat by anything short of the entire Agency and even that would be risky)
    Archetypes: Emperor, Mage, warrior, Hero (different archetypes that the sue has latched onto that are relevant to their powers and weaknesses. So an emperor would be someone with entire continents worth of resources to work with if he were pressed, Mages tend to be able to achieve large displays of power and things that would usually cause immersion break without that risk due to it being a commonly accepted fact int the setting. Warriors are exceptional at combat, Heroes have a positive reputation and tend to have a loyal population ruled by adoration instead of something like fear)

    I might work on this concept more later.

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    1. I think "dreamjacker" is going to formally refer to everyone world-hopping and informally just to the people world-hopping to keep the cosmos together; I want the PCs to have the coolest name, and "dreamjacker" is a bit more so than, say, "agent."

      The limit I was going for was one of efficiency as gained by experience with manipulating reality in ways that won't break it. Low-threat SUEs do everything so wantonly they're strictly limited by Immersion, while the more dangerous ones have learned how to magnify the effect of their Immersion expenditure to effectively cheat the rules. There will be other ways in which individuals are better or worse at some facet of the general business, but to my mind the single best determinant of SUE threat level is how much effect they can get for their limited supply of cause.

      It will be partially dependent on how far gone they are, if only because the newbies are still thinking in outdated terms. Your example is a good one for a mid-level threat: he's got a lot of resources that he can use without breaking reality, but he's still operating in the old paradigm and is effectively locked into it if he wants to keep them.

      The Threat level and Archetypes are good ideas; I will work on a list of archetypes to append to yours, but I like the threat being exponential.

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    2. One thing that I think might be interesting would be to have what you might call "sub-threat" SUEs. Characters that are technically SUEs in that they're bending the story around themselves to become heroes, but are sufficiently humble and/or restrained that they just barely nudge the storyflow, mostly succeeding within the rules of their new world. The Agency might well be inclined to let this sort of SUE be, because they're restrained enough that they barely disrupt Immersion, and it would probably do more damage to try and get rid of them.

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  2. Welp, I've got egg on my face-- I actually didn't consider checking the blog while the forums were down until, like, a week into them being down. Lemme see...

    I like the idea of a dream disconnecting from a dreamer after a while, and I like the process we've laid down for dreamjackers and SUEs to be formed. As for the restrictive terms, they don't seem THAT restrictive. What counts as "sane" has to be really, really flexible even if a basic template for what a creature is exists. Let's say there's a setting with outer gods in it-- they're not Reality Moderators, the real horrors that will or have torn Mary Sue to pieces in the futurepast-- but to the setting's inhabitants, they may as well be. Well, those creatures are going to have extremely bizarre minds by the standards of the mundanes existing in the setting. By their own standards, though, they're quite sane. And they're even based on the same template as the rest of the intelligent things. And for whatever reason, some of them may leak to another universe and even wake up. But by comparison to the humans you bizarrely see so often, their minds are going to be completely warped.

    Also, imagine if Cthulhu decided it wanted to explore somewhere beyond, and ended up trying to reform itself in, I dunno, a bog-standard Arthurian fantasy. That's an Immersion break if ever there was one.

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    1. I suspect for the sanity, it's less thinking like a human and more a matter of weeding out individuals that would go against the agencies goals of stopping the SUEs (and the automated defenses) from destroying realities.
      Some examples of mental criteria that might disqualify someone could be if they are likely to do any of the following*:
      1. Easily succumb to the ever-present temptation of SUEdom
      2. Actively try to damage realities
      3. Unable to function in any semblance of sanity.

      For the Cthulhu example (which if I were running the game would be not allowed as a player, since Cthulhu is practically the definition of what the agency is supposed to prevent. Although a spawn of Cthulhu or disenfranchised cultist might be fine.)
      1. Lets pretend he would be a low risk of turning down near infinite power that leaves the user insane, although I suspect that is unlikely or that he has already succumbed to that.
      2. Cthulu if I recall correctly, is a high priest of Azathoth (or another of the elder gods) who is actively trying to destroy the setting(s) he is in by bringing back the elder gods and shattering immersion completely. But maybe he decided that was a bad idea, or somehow it was to try and prevent immersion break.
      3. Maybe Cthulhu can be reasonably trusted to successfully beat sues, and work with others effectively?
      So after Cthulhu has joined the agency and been told of the situation, the agency needs to stop a sue in a bog standard Arthurian fantasy, maybe a king or a villain of some sort. You just need to come up with creative excuses and rumor spreading to become accepted in the reality. "I am the child of a demon, summoned and bound by a wizard to do and offered a chance at redemption."
      Cthulhu in a non-magic world, wear a cheesy costume that makes it look like you are just a strange person.

      *disclaimer: this is not a definitive list, I suspect the criteria would be determined by the GM of the game, with vague guidelines, and even then it is likely a case by case basis anyway.

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    2. Mostly I get the feeling the guidelines boil down to "Don't be Chaotic Stupid", with the idea that basically the core tenant of the game is to deal with the sort of people who... in DnD for example are the guys who try to screw with Gods, burn down village, loot everything nailed down, etc, for no IC reason other than maybe a vague "Because I'm entitled to it" or "I'm Chaotic".

      But I do see it being a very important limitation on this game. Considering the possible power levels flatly stating "No Chaotic Stupids, no Evil Characters" becomes a lot more important than it already is in lower powered games.

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    3. "Don't be so Chaotic Stupid no one can work with you" at least.

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  3. Things that come to my mind here in no particular order.

    First, within the context of this multiverse, the madness prevalent in 1984 makes a twisted degree of sense. It's like a SUE realised how the system worked and instead of breaking the rules of a world it reforged it threw meticulous planning and patience. This train of thought also sounds like it would go into the territory of ideology and biases extremely quickly. So it might be a good idea to proceed with caution or not at all.

    I am a person who was horrified when they read 1984 and would be tempted to tamper with a world like it, simple on principle, consequences be damned. Which could lead to some interesting stories involving temptation.

    On another note, what happens when you dreamjack a dreamjacker? Or a SUE? Is the mind more unstable with less Immersion, making heading into a low Immersion person potentially suicide?

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