The System Agnostic Mentalics EngineTM (Post 1 of 3): What Prompted Me to Define Yet Another Mentalics Game System?

Well, it has been a while since I threw a blog entry up here, but I was recently motivated by @dampscot on "the Twitters", who had mentioned he was interested in checking out other alternative mentalics game systems. I was going to offer him the HiBRiD^TM game but realized he probably didn’t want to spend the time having to slog through the whole rule set, so I took some time off of my GenCon 2017 preparations and spent the last few weeks de-HiBRiDizing it and making it as system agnostic as possible.

For those of you who don’t know me particularly well, I wanted to take this entry and explain the reason why I designed the system the way I did. In my next entry, I will explain the basis for the system, and in the final entry of the series, I shall present the engine itself...

So let's get started... 

What Prompted Me to Define Yet Another Mentalics Game System?

I first encountered mental powers as “Psionics” in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back in 1983. I always wanted to play a character with such abilities but never could find a game director who would allow them. I first got my chance to see such a character in action in 1986, when I was introduced to a “new” roleplaying game called The Morrow Project. The director introduced a teleporting NPC to the game that teamed up with my PC (a biochemical specialist that was pretty good with a sniper rifle) to break into a biological weapon manufacturing facility. The combination of the NPC’s “psionic” powers with my own character’s skills enabled the two characters to work together to great effect and accomplish our party’s mission objectives. After the game, I took the chance to review the rules and discovered that the abilities possessed by the NPC were nowhere to be found. I clearly remember asking the director how he managed to run the game session with no such rules. I also clearly remember his answer: “I thought it would make a cool character so I made it up to see what would happen”. The way the director used the teleportation to enhance the game rather than simply make an über-powerful NPC renewed my desire to play more games that featured “mental abilities”, so I began to seek out other game systems and groups playing them. In the process, I encountered systems that took primarily mechanistic approaches that were burdensome and complex as well as narrative approaches that were too subjective and inconsistent for my taste.

When I finally began running my own roleplaying campaign, I started with the stock psionics rules provided by the game system our gaming group was using . Soon, after being bogged down by mechanics, however, I began tweaking the rules by implementing parts from multiple other systems with the hope of allowing the players to use psionic powers while simultaneously preventing the powers from slowing down play and wrecking my campaign in the process.

Eventually, like many gamers, I made the break from other systems and decided to write my own. As luck would have it, it was about that time that I started as a psychology major in college and was inspired to begin writing my new powers system to reflect (and help cement) my knowledge and understanding of psychological phenomena. As I set to work, however, I discovered that someone on Usenet had beaten me to the punch and written a system based on the DSM-IV, the standardized set of guidelines and descriptions of mental disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association used by those within the professions of psychology and medicine. While I was impressed by the work, I realized quickly when I attempted to implement it that it was too unwieldy, too detailed, and just not aligned with the goals I had for the system I was attempting to design, specifically, to be easy to understand and quick to play.

Several years later, luck intervened once again. I encountered a paper entitled, A synaptic model of memory: long-term potentiation in the hippocampus ((T. V. P. Bliss & G. L. Collingridge, Nature 361, 31 - 39 (07 January 1993); doi:10.1038/361031a0A). The article described a model for memory based on molecular biology that completely supplanted pretty much everything I had learned about what was important in the field of behavioral psychology. I became dissatisfied with psychology’s subjective and descriptive nature, and realized a stronger attachment to this new model’s ability to explain behavior from a functional standpoint in a more quantitative, objective manner.

Two things happened the day I read that article. The first thing that happened was that I went to University Hall and changed my major from psychology to biology with an emphasis on molecular biology and biochemistry. The second thing that happened, an event much more relevant to this article, was that my entire approach toward designing a system of “mental powers” for my game changed. Instead of thinking in terms of game mechanics and game balance, I instead shifted my focus and began by asking the question, “From a functional standpoint, what would it take for mental powers to exist in our own world?” From there, I derived a number of questions that, once I had answered, I hoped would define the core concepts for my new system.