You Awaken In A Strange Place, and Playing To Find Out

You Awaken In A Strange Place is an RPG.

Juuuust barely.

I mean, take a look at it; there’s barely anything there. The core tenet of the game is that everyone comes to the game unprepared. If you want to play this system, the first thing you have to do build the system itself. I mean, you have to call it a sandbox, don’t you? There’s nothing to railroad. The GM is given five minutes after building the characters to make notes before the game officially starts, like some perverse scholastic speech-and-debate competition.

This is what happens when the improv portion of roleplay takes over like a virus. Everything is invented on the spot and it is the collaborative efforts of GM and other players that create a coherent narrative — if a coherent narrative is even the goal. It is this question that gave birth to this ethos’s name. What happens next? You don’t ask the GM, you don’t check your notes, you don’t think about familiar stories or tropes; you play to find out.

What is “playing to find out?” It’s another one of those terms. Different people will have different understandings of the concept, and what I will talk about here is perhaps the more extreme applications of the phrase. Your millage may vary.

It’s not just going into an RPG without a plan. I’ve done that before and I promise you it’s not some great new kind of GMing; it’s cooking dinner with a weedwhaker. No, “Playing to find out” is a particular gaming style, specifically one that shifts the responsibility of story-telling from a GM’s pre-planned notes to the players, the system, and dice themselves, organically.

Consider the following situation: as GM, you have an adventure about a tyrannical warlord who has been possessed by a demon and is trying to conquer the world. As the hook to this adventure, a local thief stole a scroll bearing the demon’s name from the warlord’s tent and is slowly being corrupted by its whisperings.

The intent of this hook is to get the players to learn more about this thief who is suddenly behaving oddly, hunt them to their hideout, maybe learn some hints from their ramblings, take the scroll, and follow the ensuing trail of clues to wizard’s towers, knowledgeable priests, forgotten tombs, only to finally kill the warlord and save the world.

So, what happens if the party just kills the thief? What if they — rationally — burn the scroll before reading it, thinking it’s better to be safe than possessed? What if an over-eager wizard uses their warp spell to send the thief into an alternate dimension and think no more about it? What if, thanks to some awful rolling, the thief kills the whole party?

If you have a campaign plot outlined and ready to play, then there is always the chance that the players will, for lack of a better way of putting it, flub their lines. They might kill a vital character or ignore a significant clue. They might refuse to trust a character that they really need to trust, or trust one they really shouldn’t. They might go east instead of west.

This puts the GM on their back foot and sets them fumbling with the plot-important entities — making the scroll un-burnable, the thief un-warpable, or suddenly dropping a suspiciously similar character in the next town over — and in effect railroading the players into the pre-planned plot.

Alternately, the GM might forget about the planned plot altogether, and try and make up another plot on the fly. They might pull out notes on later plot-points, throw different NPCs across the player’s paths, and generally try to get the story “back on track.” This, in the view of the “play to find out” ethos, is wasted effort.

“Play to find out” says that players can’t flub their lines. Anything they say or do is correct. Protagonists are characters who advance the story’s action, and it’s not up to the GM how they do that.

Let me reiterate that: Anything the players do is correct. I don’t mean correct as in “will succeed,” or even “will help them;” I mean correct as in “was an important part of the story.” If they spend their time successfully pulling random NPCs from a fire, one of those NPCs is plot-important. If they spend all their time hunting down a bandit from a random encounter, that random encounter was actually an important adventure hook.

The truth of the matter is that by virtue of being players, our characters are the protagonists of the story. Therefore, their actions must be the plot, or else we wouldn’t be playing a game about them. The GM’s job isn’t to create an adventure the other players can walk through, but to build an adventure around them as they walk.

When it’s done right it can be amazing to experience: a heist gone wrong could lead to a player hunting the cause of their ill fortune. The local witch says they have been placed under a curse that can only be broken with a rare chemical from the nearby bio-factory. Inside the factory, they find this rare chemical being used to mass-produce curse-immune police, and a byproduct of the process is causing sporadic curses in the city. In a nearby room, notes spill across the desk detailing an attempt to unbind these police from the loom of fate, making them immune to not only dark magics, but the laws of physics as well. Someone is creating a police force that could replace natural law with their own.

Where did that story come from? A series of bad-luck rolls during the heist gives a player the idea that their failures were obviously because of a curse. They go to the witch and decide to steal the rare chemical from a hated corp’s biofactory instead of purchasing it at an exorbitant price. Once there, instead of just taking the chemical and leaving, they decide to search the bio-factory. The plot to create Fate-Free Police did not exist until some good investigation rolls revealed the hidden lab and secret notes.

This is perhaps the easiest way to explain “play to find out.” In a traditional RPG, a good investigation or perception roll will reveal anything the GM has decided is there to see. In “play to find out,” a successful investigation roll will put something there that the players just found.

It is, perhaps, the apex of sandboxing. In a sandbox, players are allowed to do whatever they want and deal with any consequences the GM imagines. In a “play to find out” story, the overarching plot is whatever the players do. The plot is created and discovered at the same time.

Does that sound familiar? It should. I said almost the same thing about Cobwebs when talking about GM-less games. They go hand in hand, “playing to find out” and GM-less play. One of the accepted duties of GMs is creating the story and playing to find out can shoulder that burden.

And, of course, there are degrees. A GM could craft a more railroaded dungeon or castle, and let the player’s actions outside the delving dictate where the game goes next. Maybe there are only specific occurrences where the players are given free-reign to push the story where they see fit. Maybe the players can do what they want, except for a few pre-planned “cutscenes” that dictate the immediate situation.

There is something delightful in “play to find out.” It asserts that players have as much responsibility to tell the story as anyone. It says that a story cannot be poorly told if the listeners do the telling. It says that play is an act of creation as well as a challenge.

It says the GM doesn’t have to know what happens next.