[Torg] Reality Storms (was metapower vs advancement, reconsolidation)

[Scott Schultz]

My players steered clear of invoking reality storms. I think I had it happen once, ever and the end result was a cyber-dwarf if I'm remembering things correctly.

The novels tended to treat the "player characters" as being unaware of the whole reality-bending nature of the possibility mechanic. The High Lords were the only ones who regularly spoke about "possibilities". I tend to visualize the game world similarly. The players rolling the dice know about possibilities because it's a game mechanic and they have to know. In the "real world" of the PC's, it's a nebulous idea and, while they may have an inkling that different realities are at war and that those realities interact in some fashion, they don't think in terms of "possibilities" when they think about it.

A good example is the gadget design rules. Terrans had weird science, but they certainly didn't call their power sources "possibility capcacitors". That's a game mechanic. Before the Mystery Men followed Moebius to Core Earth, they would have had no mental framework for thinking in terms of "possibilities". The game rules work in those terms because that's the underlying foundation of the game and one of the tropes is that "possibility manipulation" is at the heart of all kinds of science whether the scientists realize it or not.

Granted, that they had to do a lot of dubious hand-waving in order to make that idea work. 

It's a good point about the reality storms as a source of possibiltiies. Likewise, gaining them from tapping eternity shards. It's clear that from the standpoint of the players, if not the PC's, that they're more than just a kind of XP. The "problem" that Masterbook tried to solve and that Ben proposed to solve is that some people insist on treating them as XP anyway, or at least on treating the XP aspect of them as more important than the game resource aspect.

I find it telling that there are still people who know Torg and remember it fondly even if they don't play, while I don't think I can find anyone who knows what Masterbook was, let alone played it. (Maybe that was a poor choice of source material. I mean, Tank Girl? Was there really a big demand for that setting?) I have to think that at least part of the problem with Masterbook was that in trying to generecize the TORG system, they took some of the unique aspects of the game and pounded out the very features that made them unique.

I suspect that they would have had better luck with the Storm Knights setting that they were envisioning, but it's always easy to make calls after the fact as an armchair game designer. *heh*