Resonance
The name comes from a simple intuition: Resonance looks for continuity of meaning between what the player does, what the character experiences, and what the fiction becomes. As much as possible, the terms, gestures, objects, and operations handled at the table should mentally extend the fictional experience rather than interrupt it with unrelated abstraction; their rhythm should also resonate with the rhythm of the fiction and the intended experience. Resonance therefore names no particular mechanic, but a quality sought through design.
This site is not the presentation of a finished theory. It is an organized trace of ongoing research.
Do not simplify the world. Simplify the way into it.
That sentence is a compass. Not a conclusion.
Examples of problems explored here
A three-rule game can be exhausting to play.
A fascinating universe can remain difficult to inhabit.
Removing a mechanic can simply transfer its work to the GM or the players.
And a tiny rule can sometimes make things appear that nobody had prepared.
These are examples of the kinds of problems Resonance tries to study — and to solve in its own way.
Enter the research
Questioning
The questions that resist today: accessibility, burden, the blank page, otherness, imagination, and the boundaries of role-playing games.
Trying
Games and prototypes built to put possible answers under pressure: Regard, Glorantha Perspectives, Scooby-Doo, Unmind, Situation, and other experiments.
Learning
What seems to have resisted enough to be kept provisionally: useful distinctions, design observations, and tools such as the cognitive, diegetic, perspectivist, and ontological axes.
Others
Games and work encountered elsewhere that shift Resonance's questions, reveal other answers, or prevent an idea from being claimed as new too quickly.
These four entries are not the steps of a method. An experiment can create a question; something learned can become a hypothesis again; another game can force the research to restart elsewhere.
Some words also keep returning because they have become problems to work on in their own right.
Game — what do we still call a game when some of its usual forms are removed?
Universe — content for imagination, or a structure that transforms how we imagine?
Fiction — what is established together? what is imagined? both?
Imagination — what each person uses to think and transform what is proposed to them.
Player — the real person, with their attention, experience, fatigue, and habits.
Immersion — perhaps less the disappearance of reality than a particular organization of attention and relevance.
Main experiments
Regard is a TTRPG framework centered on fictional relevance.
Glorantha Perspectives and Scooby-Doo are two games built with Regard that take it in very different directions.
Unmind emerged directly from Resonance and adopts an entirely different architecture.
The fact that they do not look alike matters.
About
I am AleaScript. I design role-playing games, and Resonance is the laboratory in which I try to understand what I am doing when I design them.
This site therefore assumes a point of view. A distinction or hypothesis shown here is a working tool that has resisted enough to be worth showing — not a general law of role-playing games.