Darkness in roleplay
A couple of years ago I mastered a homebrew adventure as part of our campaign. At the time I was interested on House of Leaves and how the concept of space is managed into a session.
The concept was simple: The party was searching for their past mission handler, her who betrayed the group and made arson of their HQ for unknown reasons. The party searched on the handler's home city, last place she was seen. They started sneaking into her house, searching around for letters, objects of interest and that sort of stuff, but without success.
The only thing the party found was ivy, a lot of ivy. This plant was itself magic, but the property of this magic was unknown, like a secret project of their handler, and possibly of the people working with her.
Another interesting fact were the thick curtains, capable of covering light completely.
The party suspected that something was hidden and revealed in total darkness. A couple of the party covered the windows and closed the door to test this theory, the others continued the usual search.
A couple of minutes passed inside the dark room before the mates outside start noticing something: The room was totally silent.
From the outside, the mates irrupted in the dark room to see what's happening, but probably too late: The room was empty.
What happened?
From the inside, the dark became noisy, like a million ants were traversing every wall, floor and ceiling of the small room. by just turning around to hear the extent of the noise, the mates inside the room already lost their direction.
One tried to touch a wall, slowly moving across the room with one hand in front of them.
One step
Two steps
three steps
...
The room wasn't that big, yet the party member didn't reach the wall. It is going straight somewhere out in the darkness.
Moving a player
I don't expect to have chilled you out with that. It is clique and an obvious one. But it begs a question: How do you move a player into space?
During a session, a character is not moving like on a videogame. The player doesn't ask to move 5 meters forward, 2 meters on the left, turn 30° clock-wise. Movement in roleplay is closer to classical text RPGs and some point and click adventures. A player asks to put their character close to the window, or sitting on the table or close to the door, ready for assaulting the person entering the room.
This movement style is structured like a graph on both the player and master minds.
/images/darkness_graph.jpg
Because we don't share minds, one essential work of the Dungeon Master is to explain the graph so the player graph is complete enough to do what they need to do (in one or more ways). Lack of knowledge will result in a reduced graph while a complete knowledge should return a graph equals the one of the DM.
Usually DMs explain the graph trough description, which require preparation and good explanation skills on the DM and a concentrated and present party. DMs can also use pictures to explain the graph, or both description and pictures.
The problem with darkness
Once the characters disappeared in the darkness, I closed the session. I went home with one question: What the player can do in the darkness?
I cannot describe a place that cannot be seen, neither I can picture it. The players can reunite by using their voices, so that's a possible node (which interestingly enough, connected unidirectional) but once reunited what can they do?
Because they were teleported into another dimension, the room graph is no longer valid (the party knows, they tested it by looking for the wall) and I cannot explain any graph to them because of the lack of light. Echolocation is not a skill between party members, so sound cannot be used. Their hands are the only tools.
Funnily enough, the party didn't reunite, but separated into the darkness. Just a couple of minutes in the darkness and they lost communication between one another. So that's where we are: one player, lost in a darkness where they can't really move.
Embrace the darkness
Here I decided to "embrace the darkness". The player cannot see, therefore they cannot move. This mean that traditional graph is no longer possible. But movement is not the only thing players can do. A list of what's possible
- getting down, standing up
- jumping
- draw weapon
- hear
- speak
- use object from bag
- cast magic (character cannot do that)
The player decides to hear and so they hear: steps are herd in distance. Those steps don't resemble the one of their mates and actually don't resemble human steps at all. Here the player want to move the character away from the steps, but because in this darkness movement does not work, trying to escape does nothing. In the time the character tried to escape, the steps became louder, they are not coming from any specific direction, but rather they are getting louder, closer.
Here the player started freaking out.
By removing the ability to escape from the player I let them in a stressed state. The character has neither information (where sound is coming from, what is that sound and so on) nor options (as escaping didn't work). This situation is enlarged in the player mind: They feel powerless, not knowing when they will be hit and how. The absence of information leave the player to think the worst nightmares are ready to attack them. This can leave a player paralysed, so I have no troubles leaving them doing some metagaming by hearing other players suggestions.
Now, if we check what we can do the options reduced:
- getting down, standing up (makes no immediate sense)
- jump (same as above)
- draw weapon
- speak
- use object from bag
The character decides to be ready. They draws the weapon and cry. An intimidation effort that lays flat on the unknown: No response, just louder steps. The weapon is ready to hit, but both the DM and the player know that getting to use it is really, really bad.
Before that, we have one last option:
- use object from bag
The character starts checking from the bag really distressed, using their hands to identify the content. The player on the other side is frantically checking the sheet for something. An idea is to use a light: because the dimension is darkness, it is possible that light can undo the spell and take them back. Luckily, really luckily, the character has a new lantern in their bag. The lantern was taken "just in case" and never used. Now that random lantern became the character lifelight.
The steps are really loud, meters away. A stroke of the lantern, just covered by the steps being dangerously close and light comes back. The character have their shoulders at a wall into an empty, lit room.
Alternatives
The darkness dimension get its own way, but I was really interested on different outcomes. What kind of movement is possible in this dimension. It is possible for a DM to define a palace of darkness, made of rooms, objects and characters which interaction does not use movement and view.
The idea of moving with speech is like moving characters into a roleplay session. I'm not moving my real body when I move my character in the game. I don't think that using speech to move the character in the dark dimension makes sense, it would just flatten out into moving as normal.
Using jump, getting down and standing up as movements makes it really confusing.
Probably object use and magic could be interesting, especially combined with speak and hear to identify where are the players. Teleport could be used over listening instead of viewing.
I'll wait for the next time I have an occasion for something like that, in the meantime:
CYA