Trying
An idea becomes much more interesting when something has to be built with it.
Resonance experiments can be complete games, frameworks, scenarios, table procedures, or abandoned prototypes. Their purpose is not to illustrate a theory that has already been decided.
They make an answer vulnerable.
Regard
Play / read Regard · experiment note
Can resolution start from what matters in the fiction rather than from a predefined catalogue of properties?
Regard became a playable framework, but it also revealed a new burden: collectively recognizing what is relevant requires judgment.
Glorantha Perspectives
Play / read Glorantha Perspectives · experiment note
Can cultures and cosmologies become operative without being translated into a single mechanical physics?
Prisms are one experimental answer to that question.
Scooby-Doo
Play / read Scooby-Doo · experiment note
How far can a genre be compressed without losing what lets it generate recognizable situations?
Unmind
Play / read Unmind · experiment note
Can psychic unraveling emerge from the game apparatus itself?
Unmind does not use Regard. That break is an important result: Resonance must be able to lead to genuinely different forms of play.
Situation, Vector, and the blank page
How can player and GM invention be supported from what already exists without writing the trajectory for them?
La Voie Lunaire and solo play
Solo play is used here to dismantle some functions traditionally concentrated in the GM and to observe how a Situation can produce its own consequences.
Next
The most useful experiments are those that can break an idea that has become too comfortable.
For example: produce a game with no dice and no equivalent of a Bet; build two incompatible games from the same universe; have another designer work using only Resonance's questions; push written or asynchronous play much further.
If an experiment can only confirm Resonance, it probably has little left to teach it.