What can we do with the blank page?
This page consolidates two still-experimental research notes: the work on Situation / Vector / the GM role and the player's blank page. Names and procedures are not considered final.
The same accessibility problem appears on both sides of the table.
For the GM:
“Improvise what happens.”
For the player:
“You can do anything. What do you do?”
These formulations are extremely short. They may nevertheless require substantial expertise.
Resonance is trying here to reduce dependence on instant inspiration without reducing fictional freedom.
Situation: prepare causality rather than trajectory
A Situation is a local world already under tension: truths, relations, forces, obligations, and possible transformations that exist before the protagonists act.
A Situation does not prepare what must happen. It prepares what is able to react.
This changes the GM's burden.
Instead of memorizing a sequence of scenes or arbitrarily inventing the next complication, the GM can look at what already exists and ask:
What here cannot remain indifferent to what just happened?
A Force acts. A Pressure advances. A relationship tightens. A debt returns. A truth changes meaning. An earlier consequence finally becomes important.
Story can then emerge from the world's causality and the participants' decisions.
Vector: reduce possibilities without drawing the path
A Situation may be locally fertile yet generate a sequence of consequences that eventually loses all sense of direction.
The Vector answers another question:
What are we moving toward?
It prescribes neither scene nor ending. It provides a direction for choosing, among several equally plausible futures, the one that advances, complicates, distorts, or re-tensions what matters to the game.
It is therefore a reduction of the possibility space without a prescribed trajectory.
A working architecture
Current categories include:
- Situation — what is true here and now;
- Vector — direction without a prescribed path;
- Forces — what wants something and can act;
- Truths — relations, constraints, objects, taboos, beliefs, wounds, or properties of the world;
- Pressures — what keeps evolving if nobody intervenes;
- Promises — images, revelations, or moments that may happen if fiction opens the opportunity;
- Transformations — important changes actions can genuinely produce;
- Latent questions — places to look when the next handle is not obvious.
This vocabulary remains provisional. The research is less about the names than about the function: provide enough causal structure to avoid ex nihilo invention without pre-writing the story.
One language between world, scenario, and play
One strong hypothesis inherited from Regard is that an important fictional sentence should remain directly usable.
“Humiliated by his brother”, “blood debt”, “the river refuses passage”, or “the convoy leaves tomorrow” should not necessarily need to be compiled into technical blocks before becoming playable.
Such continuity may reduce a major burden: constantly translating the world into a second mechanical language.
It must nevertheless remain a design hypothesis, not an invariant imposed on every Resonance game.
The player's blank page
The symmetry becomes obvious when the player's real answer is:
“I don't know what to do.”
In many games, this moment is treated as a problem outside the system. People wait, the GM proposes something, or another player takes over.
Resonance explores another possibility:
“I don't know what to do” can be a valid input to play.
The system should neither punish slowness nor decide in place of the player. It can search for a handle in what already exists.
Internal response
Something in the character becomes active: fear, loyalty, desire, contradiction, memory, habit, attachment.
External response
Something in the Situation acts: Force, Pressure, danger, opportunity, relationship, pending consequence.
Relational response
Someone interprets the silence, hesitation, or lack of decision and the relationship changes.
In all three cases:
When the player loses their grip, fiction should try to return one from what already exists.
Do not punish differences between players
Automatically turning every real hesitation into fictional failure would make verbal or cognitive speed a hidden character stat.
The blank page must therefore be distinguished from hesitation under fictional urgency.
If fiction has already established that a decision must be immediate, real time may legitimately become relevant. Outside such urgency, however, the role of the device should be generative rather than punitive.
Urgency may make hesitation costly. The blank page should make the Situation fertile.
The intended symmetry
For the GM:
not having to invent the next interesting thing from nothing.
For the player:
not having to instantly invent the next interesting action from nothing.
In both cases, the laboratory is searching for the same operation:
look at what is already there and build a device that lets it act.
Questions to test
- Does Situation/Vector actually reduce burden for a first-time GM?
- Does the structure generate emergence, or only hide a prepared plot under another name?
- Are the preparation categories themselves too complicated?
- Can “I don't know” become a valid input without encouraging systematic delegation of decisions?
- Does an internal, external, or relational response genuinely return a handle to the player?
- Can the player be supported without transferring all authority to the GM?
- Should each game design its own response to the blank page?
Success would not mean a scenario with no preparation or a player who never hesitates.
It would mean a game whose structure carries just enough invention that participants can devote more attention to the choices and consequences that actually matter.