The Zone has different rules
Posting about this mainly as a reminder to self that it is a thought I want to think more on.
Also because it dovetails with notions Liam and I discussed over on Toa Tabletop, about how you can portray subjective fantasy worlds in TTRPG play---essentially: Oh, the party visits a culture with different mores / cosmology / etc? The actual rules of the game change.
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Over on cohost, Amanda Franck poses the following question:
How do you make rules/problems for a place that is supposed to be inexplicable & mutable & impossible to understand (like fairyland or dreamland or roadside picnic zone)? ... My experience in playing through a few of people's dreamworlds where anything can happen has been mostly bad, because it's hard for all the players to understand the physical space that they are in, and frustrating to try to interact with a world that doesn't respond in a sensible way.
To which Scampir proposes:
If i really wanted to get the point across that an area was under the influence of different logics, I would just use a different game for that area. Maybe a smaller game just so it can be quickly integrated.
(Attribution to make it clear I'm building on other folk's ideas.)
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So here's my idea:
Say you are running a campaign using D&D or retroclone. Your players encounter Faerie / the Dreamlands / Area X / the Zone.
When they slip into its borders, you tell them things are gonna getting weird. But you don't give them new character sheets. You just start organically calling for resolutions and mechanics from a game that isn't D&D.
Maybe a dice-pool game like RuneQuest or WFRP. Or Blades in the Dark:
GM: "So you rest? Okay, tick your healing clock."
Player: "Wait, wtf's a healing clock?"
This does a few things:
Discombobulates players. They have to figure out the ways in which assumptions of reality differ.
The choice of new ruleset you use signals the specific ways that this specific Weird Zone is weird. (Use a game with more story-game mechanics and you imply that the Weird Zone has a different relationship with causality.)
Players learn / jot down / use new mechanics on the same old character sheet---implying that the Weird Zone changes their characters.
Abilities / mechanics they pick up remain when they leave the Weird Zone, and return to boring normal D&D rules. A signal that the Zone has changed them in uncanny ways.
Player: "Hey, I've still got this '+1d to gather info' ability, right? And this counts as a gather info situation? Can I roll two d20s and total them?"
GM: "Yes."
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So yeah: bashing incompatible game systems together.
Maybe that's a fool's errand. But I feel like it should be possible to create a procedure for ruleset mash-ups, so that there's a process to follow? Best practices for how it happens.
Consistency at the layer of play culture, even if there isn't consistency at the layer of mechanics.
I'd like to pursue this more, because---as mentioned above---I'm interested in portraying subjective fictional worlds, and this "different place, different rules" thing seems like one way to do that at a conceptual level.
Also I like it because jury-rigs and mash-ups seems quintessentially "rulings not rules"-sy, to me. It seems to be in that OSR-y spirit.
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( Image source: https://sciencefictionbookart.com/roadside-picnic-arkady-boris-strugatsky-1979/ )