Three Cups of Bullshit

I'm sure that by now many of you are aware of the recent revelations that Greg Mortenson was pretty much full of shit about a great many things. I had heard of him before and my bullshit detector went off for a variety of reasons. Despite being a secular progressive, I didn't drink the Kool-Aid on this dude like many of my friends in the political science world. And turns out I was right.

I think there are some nuggets of learning here for everyone, both in the political/media sense and in the RPG gaming sense.

First, I think we have to face the fact that a sizeable amount of the information being presented in the media is completely fabricated lies.That we have prominent cases like Mortenson and if you remember James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) and his fiasco with Oprah seems pretty compelling evidence that a lot of the minor stuff that doesn't get even the paltry level of scrutiny we give to major trends is probably chock full of bullshit too. Our society is not that much different from those in the past in terms of the volume of bullshit being passed around as truth. If things like this don't convince you we need more hard-hitting journalism than the 24-hour news moron cycle, you are beyond my ability to help.

Charlatanism occurs when people accept things on faith, not evidence. It doesn't matter whether you are an evangelist, a faith-healer, a UFO chaser, a conspiracy theorist, or apparently even a liberal progressive humanitarian. When people accept the things you say on faith alone, they are easy to decieve.

I have noticed that the industry doesn't include a lot of these things in RPGs. In general, most lies are specific and provable. The baron tells you that he wasn't involved with the bandits, but he was. The cultist lies about their loyalty. And so on. I think the certainty provided by divine magic has eliminated a lot of the mystery of the cosmos (one more reason to play Errant, no Clerics and no divine magic) and this kinda undercuts the whole faith issue. When you can wave your hand and summon beings from another plane, how mysterious is the divine really?

So aside from playing Errant where the cleric is replaced by a scholar or Synapse where magic can come from a variety of sources (note the double plug here, woot), how can you add mystery to the game in a way that allow charlatanism in.

Well, first off you need to abandon obvious effects. We are so conditioned to see "drink potion, +5 HP instantly" that we don't think of potion effects as mysterious. Hard to sell snake oil if the person drinks it and says "uh... nothing happened. This potion is defective". We have inherited a modern product reliability into a medieval world where it isnt appropriate. We are treating magic as technology.

So I think you need to start to add lags and uncertainty to potions and magic. Drink this potion and maybe you will be hitting at +1 for the next few days. Then again, maybe you will just think you are. Maybe you just drank swamp water with a little turtle egg swirled in. And we need to distance ourselves from deities. They cannot be as reliable or predictable as presented traditionally. Add some "well, maybe Torm will help me..... hopefully........ please Torm?"

And we need to put a lot of BS on the table with the good stuff. If everything that "has that special glow that makes you think it is magical" ends up being magical, then of course you will not be skeptical. Why be skeptical, it always works. Add a little mystery. Throw in a bunch of items that look magical to muddy the waters. And take out the identification spells that give you guaranteed answers. Or keep them in, and make the odds of accuracy lower.

To borrow from the greatest villain ever...

Introduce a Little Anarchy