There was a lot of discussion back in the day about running Planescape with Sorcerer. The idea being that Humanity was your ability to apply your ideology in healthy productive manner. As zero Humanity you're a perfect believer but the idea has taken precedent over application, congratulations you and everything you care about slips away into another dimension.

That interpretation makes "shaping reality" hard though. You either do it the hard way (i.e. the way we do it in reality) through application and outreach or you do it the Sorcerous way (summon Demons to force reality to your will) or you do it the Catastrophic way (let your Humanity slip to 0 and take you and everything else with you into your perfect plane of choice, See Chanel Gods for a similar mechanic).

I don't know if that would be interesting to you. Given your previous choices it seems you want something a little more insta-gratification. I believe and ZAP this happens. Sorcerer isn't designed to do that.

Jesse

Shameless plug alert

I'm designing Principia specially to address questions of changing the social order in a way that's wrapped up with what the character do. It's not so much belief changing reality on a one-to-one basis, but rather a bunch of people with strong beleifs trying to change reality, and reality changing, but not always the way any one character would want. Planescape's pretty much exactly the kind of setting I'm buidling for: competing factions with different views of reality struggling to realize their visions. If you're interested, I can send you the relevant mechanical section from Principia in a PDF. It's designed to sit on top of TSOY, but can be adapted for a lot of other systems too.

End Shamelessness

Posted By: JarrodGestalt is built upon using your spiritual fortitude to change the world around you, often retroactively, while enduring ripples of paradox. Unfortunately I don't quite have it written up tight enough to ashcan itquiteyet, but it's been through an internal playtest and it might suffice. What are your goals for the beliefs shaping reality paradigm, exactly?

Okay, I'm already drooling over Filip's Illumination!, but I can spread that around for another game or two. Count me in as interested also.

And yes, I've already drooled over Solipsist, and will continue to do so.

Hey Vinicius

I think Solipsist is exactly what you're looking for. I may biased, though, as I published the book.

David has some APs linked here. It also got reviewed (very positively) in Knights of the Dinner Table #141.

Oh, the good news for the future is that David, who wrote Solipsist, will soon be taking over the publishing as he gets himself set up as a publisher.

I found it really easy to run as a GM, actually, and I had a lot of fun with it. The world around the characters fluidly changes to match the Obsessions and Limitations of the PCs really organically. I had 3 players at a game of it at GamesExpo UK in June. That number of players worked very well.

Speaking of Illumination, I playtested it from the beginning and it's finally taking shape. But I'm a friend of the designer so what can I know?

Solipsist has a rather wacky base setting, I'd find it difficult to run as anything but comedy without some heavy preparatory thinking. However, the mechanics seem rather interesting, and provided that you're not going to do the basic milieu anyway, rather interesting.

Perhaps the central notion of the game is that the mages with the power to change reality need to balance between their wishes and fears and magic in a way that allows them to act constructively in this particular world instead of slipping off into a reality of their own. In Mage they had these... Marauders? Guys who'd given up on consensus reality altogether and gone into the void to live in a world of their own? That's much more in the fore in Solipsist, so much so that it's really the largest danger the characters have arrayed against them. They don't really need any skill or power to affect huge changes in the world, the only thing reigning them in is that doing too much will separate them from reality instead of changing the reality itself.

Using Solipsist for Planescape would be pretty difficult because while both have this belief -> reality thing going on, Planescape doesn't really concentrate on all-powerful guys who shape reality on a whim. As the setting is depicted, the reality-shaping is more of a color thing and lots of GM fiat - at least nothing I've read about Planescape treats the belief thing as an operative method for getting anything done in the game. I could imagine a Planescape campaign that was all about slowly propagandizing local community to make the town slip into another world, but that's the exact opposite of what Mage or Solipsist do: in those games you're not doing real-world politics to shift the local metaphysical balance, but rather shifting the metaphysical balance to affect the local politics. It's the exact opposite process!

Mage, on the other hand, would work with Solipsist pretty well, I think. I'd probably add some sort of illumination score to depict how the young mages begin thinking that their magical paradigm is real, only to shed it slowly through a couple of sessions, coming to realize that it's been their own will all along and nothing else. A sort of a throttle on the insanity that is the starting point in Solipsist as written. Without something like that you simply wouldn't get any of that occult stuff in the game, as it wouldn't matter a whit.

Yes, that Solipsist -> Mage is something I could get on-board with. Solipsist already has rules for corrupt mages... no chance I'd remember what they called that in Mage, but there were some sort of outer gods you could sell your soul to in exchange for power. Solipsist has a vaguely defined Shadow force that works like that, pretty much. As it already also handles reality-shaping wars between mages, it does almost everything Mage did... hmm... would need some sort of rules for rotes and consensus-based mundane skills such to satisfy my thematic interests, but those are simple to add, really.

Ah, yes, there is a mechanic for getting belief powers in Planescape! I totally forgot that faction stuff, probably because those powers seemed pretty weak and inconsequential, kind of throw-away color stuff. Also, it's downright bizarre how you only get powers from the factions, which are pretty weird and particular philosophies, instead of getting them from simple things such as, say, belief in the values of your particular alignment. So saying that belief shapes reality in Planescape is kinda true, but considering that a Fireball shapes reality so much more, I'd give latter the pride of place. Hmm... in general, I have to say that even the whole analysis of placing the crux of Planescape in the belief theme is somewhat misplaced, looking at the materials of the game. Sure, you get those towns that shift from one plane to another because of a philosophical shift in the people, but that's not any sort of ultimate solution in the setting, any more than dragons being flying creatures is. It's just background weirdness. Not that an individual group can't take that particular and make it the central tenet of their game, of course!

As for the mechanic you suggest, it seems like it'd reflect what you're trying to do pretty well! We don't really know enough about your particular group's preferences and goals, but I could imagine something like that to be very suitable for a group that likes light rules. Who gets to give out the points can easily be figured out based on what the group wants to encourage, too: if you suspect that the players would go hunting after the vision points, you can always let the GM dole them out a bit like experience points, or if you want to encourage the players to invest in each other's characters, you could let the players reward each other whenever their character acts according to his belief system.

One thing you might consider is how characters might have points in several separate belief systems, and how the points could be exchanged between them. If you don't allow some sort of batch conversion, then that'd mean that a character would be essentially stuck in whichever philosophy he follows, and the more stuck the more points they have invested in the philosophy. So if you want dramatic changes of attitude, then it'd perhaps be better to allow characters to sometimes make a drastic shift and move the points from one belief into another. That can always be rationalized as a character with deeper and more acute beliefs being more informed about the philosophical things in general, which then makes them more likely to be able to internalize their new philosophy.

Posted By: jessecoombsSeriously, read the crap out of Solipsist, it's pretty damned awesome.

That's the kind of quote you should have on your website, David.

Oh, Mortal Coil does a good job of setting up magic rules on the fly and in its theme document. You might want to read up on that?

Posted By: Gregor Hutton

Posted By: jessecoombsSeriously, read the crap out of Solipsist, it's pretty damned awesome.

That's the kind of quote you should have on your website, David.

Stealing it now Gregor :)

Oh, I certainly haven't played Solipsist yet, so I'm no sort of authority on it. It's just that based on reading it I find it strongly geared towards absurdist, almost dadaist sort of content. Perhaps I just have trouble visualizing how you do practical drama in a game where the player characters basically have no limitations to what they can accomplish. The game does a solid job of pointing the way towards something like psychological drama, where the characters are haunted by the base psychological impossibility of their goals, but in practice it seems somewhat difficult to accomplish this reliably, it seems to me. Another factor is that the game is by necessity pretty colorless: comparing to something like Planescape or Mage there isn't really scope for colorful NPCs, imaginative cultures, ritual magic or anything, really, as it's all immediately malleable by the PCs. That puts something of a hobble on trying to texture the setting in any detail, I'd imagine.

But I haven't actually played the game, so for all I know it's much more flexible in practice than I expect it to. And the core idea is solid either way, so I'm not personally very concerned - if I want to play something where the characters are omnipotent, but have to be very careful in their precarious position, then I know which game to turn to.