Monday 5 August 2019

Matter is What I Am Not: On Thin and Thick Tertiary Realities

Patrick S asked me to write a blog post about the Holodeck. This spurred me to think about tertiary realities in general.

What I mean by a tertiary reality is a subreality within fiction. Star Trek characters visit the Holodeck. A character in a novel has a dream or hallucination. Somebody in a film tells a story. And so on. In other words, something which is fictional or illusory taking place in an already fictional narrative (the secondary reality).

Tertiary realities are useful for doing various things. They can give an insight into the psychology of the characters or foreshadow an important event (think of the dream sequences in American Beauty, or Luke's imaginary duel with Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back). They can provide a space in which characters can develop outside of the normal framework in which we're used to seeing them (lots of Star Trek Holodeck scenes are like this - the one which springs to mind right now is "The Emissary", in which a "calisthenics" program provides the opportunity for us to see, er, a progression in the relationship Worf and Kehleyr). Or they can just be a cheap but possibly effective trick in which the viewer thinks they're seeing something purportedly "real", but it turns out they're not (the aforementioned scene in The Empire Strikes Back is an example of this, obviously - I guess Dallas is the most famous extended one in history).

What they are not particularly good at is provoking a sense of threat. If the viewer knows something is just a dream, or just a story-within-a-story, or just a holographic projection, it's hard to get interested unless there is known to be some impact on the "real" world - that is, the secondary reality. This is why filmmakers try to keep the "it was all just a dream - or was it?" motif hidden until the end (a la Labyrinth, or indeed Dallas), or make it clear that what is happening in the tertiary reality will have serious effects in the secondary one - like all those Next Gen episodes in which Something On the Holodeck Becomes Sentient and Tries to Take Over the Enterprise (or whatever). There is also a very narrow middle ground in which it's possible to communicate to an audience or reader that what they are experiencing might be a dream and might not - a lot of David Lynch's films do this, for example, as I suppose does Inception at the end. But in the main a tertiary reality only generates emotional investment if there is something about it that means something in the "real world".

(Inception is an interesting case inasmuch as it proves the general point that if it's clear what's happening is in a tertiary reality, the audience doesn't really care. There's no sense of danger at all in the action sequences in Inception in which the characters are mucking around in interior dreamscapes and fighting off the weightless ciphers they encounter there. It's only when something else is at stake that it's really worth watching.)

A DM is venturing onto thin ice when getting his characters involved in dreams, drug-fuelled hallucinations, giant illusions and so on for these very reasons - it's easy to get the players to join in for the fun of it, but not very easy to get them to feel a sense of danger. That has to come about either because they're  going to get trapped in the tertiary reality or something that happens within it is going to harm - or kill - their PCs for real. He steps onto even thinner ice if he does the "it was all just a dream" bait-and-switch; I can't really imagine that ever ending well, because if there is one thing that really ought to bind a DM as a point of honour, it's that he shouldn't out-and-out deceive the players about the purpose or nature of the campaign itself.

Yet I also think that such episodes are, on balance, worth doing, for precisely the reasons identified earlier in this post: they give the players an opportunity to think about their PCs in new ways and in new and unfamiliar frameworks. Something as simple as asking the players "What did your PC dream about while sleeping in the wizard's tower?" (or whatever) can generate highly creative answers which get the player thinking about their character as though they are a real person. And that is often the key to a successful campaign.

10 comments:

  1. The Holodeck is an interesting example, because it *is* real, in the sense that it's technology that's integrated with the ship, and the crew are flesh and blood when they're on the holodeck. It doesn't take much to have a threat cross over. As the writers demonstrated so, so thoroughly.

    Dreams (or any case where the nature of the link between the fictional world and the tertiary is not obvious) are harder, but it helps to make the threat clear before the tertiary trip starts. If PCs can die when you dream in the wizard's tower, have the PCs see some evidence of this before the dream starts. Maybe it's more interesting if death in the dream means something else in the "real" world, like everyone forgets the PC exists.

    My fav slice of holodeck weirdness is the one when Riker falls for the most late-eighties nightclub lady ever. That's another way to go, if you're feeling indie; have the consequences of a trip to the tertiary world be *emotional*. You can't force that nonsense though. It depends on the group.

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    1. I like that idea of everyone forgetting the PC exists...or maybe they become mute, or invisible, or something. Or maybe they are there as normal but...DUN DUN DUN... a different soul now inhabits the body.

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  2. I've been working through some dream-quest type mechanics for a WIP project, so this is great timing. A couple of observations:

    1. Tertiary realities need to have a strongly-established secondary reality before they can work properly. They're potentially fun as a change of perspective, but only once the default perspective has already been well established.

    2. Some games layer on the tertiary realities so liberally that they probably have a tendency to fail on this point. Something like Shadowrun with its multiple parallel dream worlds (the Matrix, Astral Space) comes to mind, as well as a lot of the White Wolf stuff with its multiple spirit worlds, underworlds, fairie realms and so on. In a way these are all simply extensions of the secondary reality of course, but they do undermine one of the pillars of solid world-building, which is the ability to present the players/readers with a concrete sense of place. If everyone is constantly blinking in and out of multiple levels of reality, the geographical and mundane details of any one level start to lose focus. This is fine if you're doing Inception, but for an RPG it could undermine players' sense of the game world as a concrete place.

    3. I think a DM could pull off the occasional "it was only a dream" sequence if they managed rewards properly. If the PCs get to keep any experience accrued during the dream sequence, for example, or if the dream reveals valuable information, I could see players being okay with this deception in exchange for a risk-free reward. But I agree that you'd have to be extremely careful in managing it, and it would probably be a serious gamble in even the best case.

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    1. I think I agree with you about the White Wolf stuff. The spirit worlds and underworlds and all the rest of it never interested me in the slightest. I have no idea why the writers even felt like they were necessary.

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  3. Dreams can be used in a game in much the same way as the traditional "rumors table" -- something that adds foreboding while preserving uncertainty

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    1. Yeah, I think I did a post about that ages ago which I can no longer find.

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  4. The fun in the "die in here, die in real life" setup is that it can actually be more intense than threats strictly in the secondary reality if it's clear that the tertiary reality is a place that's ostensibly "safe", like a dream (looking at Nightmare on Elm Street specifically here). Challenging viewers/players' expectations of safety is very effective at getting emotional response. One of my favorite examples is in one of the Resident Evil games (2 I think) where at some point hours into the campaign the developers put an enemy right next to the save point in what up until then has been a guaranteed safe room.

    I'm not sure how you would make that work in a tabletop game though, given that characters' dreams don't typically come up at all. Once you mention them, the players are going to immediately assume there's something weird going on. I'm not sure what other "safe zones" you could threaten, either. Traveller already shocked people with death-during-chargen decades ago.

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    1. Once you mention them, the players are going to immediately assume there's something weird going on.

      Yeah, you're right about that - you have to bill at as explicitly "not something weird going on", which then does ruin tension but makes it clear it's just for fun.

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  5. The illusio, if you will, is rarely value neutral. The participant will return bearing an insight, a boon, or suffering from trauma, all with short or long term mechanical effects in the secondary world. Would this approach avoid the need for a ‘bait and switch’? From a player’s point of view the latter is tiresome.

    SJB

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  6. I've been playing more and more with "fates worse (and more entertaining) than death" in my games. I think my next campaign might give the PCs complete plot immunity from death, but open them up to a wide array of "scars" that are physical, mental, and psychological. Under such a scheme, even knowing that what they face isn't real might not assuage their fear, as revelations or emotional trauma might be just as impactful (doubly so if the "visions" are potentially prophetic).

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