RPG-ology #84: Possibilities

This is RPG-ology #84:  Possibilities, for November 2024.

Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles.  This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited:  Possibilities, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].

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The Christiana Mall, in Christiana, Delaware, some years back started a promotional campaign to encourage people to shop at its stores.  Signs went up inside, I suspect there were newspaper ads, and the slogan got around.  But the most brilliant use of it that I saw caught your attention right from the beginning.  As you drove up the main entrance, the road divided such that the left lane would go clockwise around the mall and the right lane counterclockwise, the center lane being able to go either way.  Of course, there was a road sign directly on the dividing point, arrows pointed left and right so you wouldn’t go over the curb straight ahead.  But right below that sign was another sign on which the slogan of the campaign was inscribed:  Oh, the Possibilities!  From that moment you were made aware that there were many stores from which to choose, many things you could buy; it opened your mind to consider alternatives.

I am hoping that this article may similarly open your mind to recognize alternatives.

Sherlock Holmes was famed for his powers of deduction.  Perhaps unfortunately, in life deduction fails us; we are required to rely much more on induction.  Yet often we confuse inductive conclusions with deductive conclusions.  Deductive reasoning draws the logical conclusion from the facts, and if the facts are complete draws the only possible resolution of those facts.  Inductive reasoning, on the other hand, assumes that we do not have all the facts, and so derives an answer by inventing information that could make sense of what is known.  This is the way life usually comes to us.  We have some of the facts; we assume something else which, if true, makes everything else fall into place.  But this approach is too often taken as certainty, when in fact there are many other conclusions which could be reached were we to make different assumptions.  Permit me to illustrate.

One Saturday afternoon[ last year], about quarter after four, I called the lawn mower repair shop; they didn’t answer.  Obviously I must have called too late; they must have closed at four, or even as early as noon, on a Saturday afternoon in the summer.  Yet even as I drew that conclusion, I recognized that it was an inductive solution, not a deductive one; I had resolved the problem by suggesting a plausible explanation, and then concluded that it was the correct one.  Since my purpose in calling was to determine at what time they were going to close, my thinking was already skewed toward that answer; it might well be that there was a different reason for them not answering the phone.  Recognizing that there might be an article in this experience, something which would be useful for our consideration of creative thinking, I sat down at that moment and compiled a list of other possible explanations, reasons why they might not have answered the phone even if they were open.  Here is that list.

• Perhaps they were involved in a complicated repair.  If the mechanic had asked the clerk to please hold this part very still while he secured it, and no one else was in the store, they might have decided that whoever was calling would try back later if it was important.  Certainly there have been times when I have not run to answer the phone because my hands were full, or I was in the middle of typing something I did not want to forget.  To think that the people at the local shop would never find themselves in a situation in which they were unable to drop everything just because the phone rang is foolish.
• It is possible that their phone was broken.  We’ve broken phones from time to time; they’ve fallen or been banged, or had something spilled into them.  I’ve tried to answer broken phones–I specifically remember trying to answer a payphone once, picking up the receiver and hearing it continue to ring because the switchhook was stuck.  They might even have sent someone to buy a new phone, or to call the phone company to come repair the problem.  After all, just because I can hear the signal that says the phone is ringing doesn’t mean it’s ringing at their end.
• And that brings up another possibility.  It could be that the ringer is turned off.  Many phones have buttons or switches that will shut down the bell.  At one time, it was phone company policy that there had to be one phone on the line that would always ring, that could not be shut down; but now that there is no Phone Company there is no such policy.  It could be that someone talking on one line shut off the noise of the other for a moment so he could hear, and then forgot to turn it back on.  It could even be that it was turned off by accident.
• The phone itself might have become disconnected.  My cat once tripped my phone line, yanking loose one of the connections.  Rats and mice (and there might be such vermin in the back of a lawn mower shop) have been known to chew through wires, and could have severed a phone line.  Their phone might be shut down, and they not know it.
• Everyone who has ever owned a cordless phone will relate to this next one:  perhaps they couldn’t find the phone.  Our handset has turned up in the sofa, in the bedroom, in the basement, out back, on my desk, on the kitchen counter, and once even in the car.  Perhaps someone is wandering around the store trying to figure out whence the ringing comes, so they can answer it.
• Maybe it’s something as simple as that they can’t hear the phone from the back.  I was in a Rite-Aid® one night when they couldn’t find the manager.  They called him on the loudspeaker, sent someone outside, checked his office–he just wasn’t anywhere.  It turned out he was inside the walk-in refrigerator, stocking the milk shelves, and couldn’t hear anything.  If the phone rings out front and in the office, but the clerk is in the garage talking to the mechanic, it might ring and ring and ring and never be noticed–particularly if in addition to that noisy compressor that powers the pneumatic tools there’s also an engine running while it’s being adjusted.
• And it could be that the place is open but no one is there right this moment.  That is, the one person running the shop could have just stepped into the bathroom, or gone out front to have a cigarette, knowing that if someone walked into the store they would be there soon enough, but not realizing that they wouldn’t hear the phone from there.
• Maybe at that moment they just didn’t want to be bothered.  If the shop closes at four thirty, whoever is working might be trying to sweep up and get ready to leave, and the idea of answering some customer’s phone call which might delay them just doesn’t appeal.  Ignore it and they’ll go away; they’ll just assume we’re already closed–and the last time I answered the phone and said we were closing in fifteen minutes, the guy said he was coming right over, and ran in one minute before closing to keep me another twenty minutes overtime.  So they didn’t answer.
• I know that people have called my house and no one has answered the phone.  I’ll be in my office, but think that the kids are in the living room because that’s where they were a few minutes ago; they’ll have gone downstairs to do something else, and assume that I’m close enough to get the phone.  By the time anyone realizes that no one else is going to pick it up, it’s already rung four or five times–and it still would take a couple rings to reach it.  So maybe whoever is there was assuming someone else would get the phone, and no one actually did.
• And maybe they just all went on break at the same time, no one quite aware that no one was minding the store for a few minutes.

All of these answers are inductive; and they are not an exhaustive list.  Perhaps you could invent other possible answers as to why no one answered the phone at that moment.  It occurs to me that if someone was robbing the store, they might tell the clerk not to answer the phone.  The point is that there might be a hundred possible reasons why something might be the way it appears.  It is shoddy thinking to believe that whatever explanation you’ve devised must be the correct one.

Life is like that.  Most of the time, we don’t have all of the facts; we have some of the facts, and we try to make sense of them by inventing facts to fill in the gaps.  When I called the shop and they did not answer, my reasoning went like this:

• They are not answering the phone at the lawnmower shop.
• If they were already closed, they would not answer the phone.
• They must be closed.

Note, however, that the inductive reasoning works just as well for any of our other solutions:

• They are not answering the phone at the lawnmower shop.
• If the clerks are being held at gunpoint by a robber, they would not be able to answer the phone.
• They must be in the middle of a robbery.

From a referee perspective, this means open up your options.  Set up a fact set which is not what would be expected from the evidence; provide a situation which might have any of a number of explanations which you are flexible enough to establish later.  Rarely do we know all the facts about anything; we draw conclusions by providing possible missing pieces.  Offer puzzles with missing pieces, in which it is possible or even probable that the wrong pieces will be assumed.  Let your players draw the wrong conclusions, and see where it takes them.  Maybe you’ll decide to meet them there, rewriting your scenario to match their assumptions; maybe you’ll stick to your original version an[d] let them discover the big twist in the plot, the one they created by their guesses.

From a player perspective, it means don’t jump to conclusions.  In a recent D&D game in which I came in as a late addition to the character party, they were investigating orc raids on the elf villages in the area.  There had always been orcs in the area, but they had recently become aggressive.  That struck me as odd, so when the opportunity arose to catch one alive I insisted that someone question him.  We determined that someone else was pulling the strings–someone who was not an orc was terrorizing them and forcing them to raid the elf villages.  We realized that ultimately we could forget about the orcs and go for the boss, and that would fix everything.  But until we asked those questions, everyone assumed that the orcs were just being orcish villains.

Remember, role playing games are about possibilities.  In figuring out the puzzles that confront us, we should have to make assumptions.  At the same time, we should also have to be aware of which things we know and which we only think, so we can recognize the alternatives to whatever solution seemed obvious to us.

Next week, something different.

Previous article:  Tactics.
Next article:  Common.