This topic, more particularly Gillen bringing up that lost school of TTRPG, reminds me of some stuff Ive experienced. While I’ve heard about this in oral history, in particular Matthew Collville bringing it up and saying DND was often played that way for a time, I’ve actually experienced it in a world not too far from TTRPG’s, even if as a genre its more on life support than thriving or dead.
MUDS, or Multi User Dungeons, are proto MMOs. Quite litterally via both games being heavily inspired to the point of being called graphical muds, think Everquest or Runescape with only text for input and output. While many games are pure hack and slash, mmo esque rpg combat first and foremost to the exclusion of almost everything else, some are role play focused. Many games are based 1:1 on systems like 3.5/Pathfinder, Shadowrun 3rd, etc. There is a subgenre, called RPI, or Role Play Enforced, that most captures what was mentioned in brief here.
Games like Sindome, the recently defunct Armageddon, and Torchship, the former two have 30+ year histories and controversy, don’t actually tell you much of anything. On a litteral level, you know that you can level skills. You know what stats you have. But how the stats, skill rolls, and such contribute to doing actions is a black box. In Sindome, posting that luck and inteligence contributes to stealth rolls is a forum bannable offense. Theres no where in game or otherwise that could lead you to that conclusion. Your supposed to build and play your character ‘natrually.’
Games like Torchship do tell you that, they still don’t tell you how a stealth roll works, just that it requires dex and sense?, and derives from the mobility skill. But how Mobility, Stealth, Dex, and Sense work to actually get RNG’d into a result, how often you check stealth, how light or opposing perception or smell effect it… only the devs who’ve looked at the code know. That also ignores the reality that there are real secrets that in many cases handfuls of real people out of thousands know the answers to, both mechanically and lore wise. This sortve stuff is facinating, even if I disagree with a chunk of it and surrounding rules on principle.
Games like Arm on the other hand are based in existing popular mud engine DIKU, hide more in the realm of the extremities of its world and mmechanics. How magic work, what magic exists, and how to become someone who can wield it are hidden. You have to learn by experiencing it, or dying to it, at which point your character is dead forever. Reroll, even if you spent years playing them. Spells that require admin involvment that transcend the rules of what would otherwise be possible? A GM controlling a clone of a player character and players realizing that they are being tricked because of the change in dialect? Its crazy what you can do when you keep secrets like this.
