Truthing and Brainwashing
Many Guild games are based on a dynamic of trust. Every character that one meets in a game could be potentially trustworthy, unreliable or even treacherous. In turn, those characters may have built other relationships of trust that could translate into potential allies or enemies. The ability of players to establish and build trust with others, and to betray them at an opportune time, can be the keys to success in a typical Guild game.
Truthing and brainwashing mechanics are common in Guild games as they empower players who may not have the social skills necessary to determine the trustworthiness of others. The point of a truthing mechanic is to allow one player to require another to tell the truth. For a character under interrogation, the existence of truthing mechanics may very well bring an abrupt end to their goals. Without a means of bluffing one’s way out of trouble, truthing mechanics can uncover traitors relatively easily. If a player needs to work his or her way into a group’s confidence to discover some secret information about them and use it against them, truthing mechanics can make his or her job forbiddingly difficult. Furthermore, if it is possible for a large group of people to guarantee their trust in each other and if members of that group are publicly understood to be working for law-enforcement, save-the-world or other typically “good guy� roles, there is often very little that prevents the group from systematically attacking all the other players in game, subjecting them to truthing and removing their opposition by brute-force elimination. These groups are usually referred to as “good guy mobs� and can quickly destroy game balance in ways that GMs often fail to anticipate.
To prevent these sorts of occurrences, GMs often design truthing mechanics to permit only a small number of questions, perhaps limited by the effectiveness and availability of truth drugs or the constitution of the interrogatees. Truthing mechanics that kill characters in the process would discourage their misuse as “tests of loyalty� among potential allies. At the same time, the mechanic would be useful for procuring reliable information from characters that have already been determined to be members of one’s opposition.
However, a limited-use truthing mechanic can be rendered entirely useless if interrogatees have too much freedom in choosing the wording of their responses. Given a means to do so, any player will attempt to “stall for time� when being truthed by his or her opponents by cleverly sidestepping the questions and giving uninformative answers. With a limited-use mechanic, this means that an unwilling player can often avoid revealing any actual information.
An ineffective truthing mechanic is often worse than having no mechanic at all, as the existence of the mechanic suggests that it is a way to determine the trustworthiness of characters or information without actually being anything of that sort. To address these issues, truthing mechanics often require questions to phrased in a way in which a “yes� or “no� answer would be unequivocal and sufficient. Alternatively, if the GM directly instructs players to supply the most informative and truthful answer from which their opponents could benefit, most players would recognize that the spirit of the rules frowns upon clever wrangling of the answers.
One can see that truthing mechanics can be extremely difficult to balance. Their dissociative properties enable players to achieve certain game effects without having to be overly suspicious or confrontational. Many players prefer the somewhat deterministic advantage of truthing mechanics to the much less reliable method of actually having to guess what players are thinking. On the other hand, a poorly implemented truthing mechanic can unbalance the game towards the truther or the truthee and result in unreasonable or unrealistic character interactions.
Some games allow characters to develop technologies and techniques of brainwashing that can make other characters loyal to their cause. It usually does not matter if the subject of the brainwashing was trustworthy or not, since the process of brainwashing will "make" the subject trustworthy. Brainwashing mechanics have been a staple of Guild games for more than a decade, although recent games have seen a slight drop in their frequency of use.
One would imagine that the ability to change another player’s loyalties would seriously upset the competitive balance of a game. However, brainwashing is often perceived by characters to be a much more hostile act than truthing, so a single attempt at brainwashing often requires a good deal of scheming and luck to incapacitate a character, move him or her to a secluded spot, place a blinky helmet on his or her head and keep the process from being interrupted for a period of time. GMs often make brainwashing “devices� difficult to create and simple to destroy, further limiting the mechanic of brainwashing. The successful execution of a brainwashing mechanic can undoubtedly translate into a powerful advantage but such an advantage would be commensurate reward for a lot of player effort.
More importantly, where truthing mechanics tend to abruptly end games for some interrogatees, brainwashing mechanics simply substitute or supplement preexisting goals with new ones. Players who fall prey to brainwashing mechanics still find themselves very much in the game. In fact, some players discover that being successfully brainwashed ends up giving them more exciting goals to pursue.
Brainwashing could be understood as serving the same purposes as a player’s skill at persuasion. Instead of having to convince players to switch loyalties, a clearly defined mechanic allows players to perform a systematic series of acts that, if successful, will result in bringing trustworthy allies over to their side. Although some characters may take issue with having their heads tinkered with, most players do not see brainwashing as “losing� but simply as a turn of events in their character’s story. Thus, many players are willing and eager to cooperate with their new allies. In games of minimal character complexity, brainwashing could easily end up being the most interesting thing to happen to a character’s emotional and intellectual development.
