@Zachiel That there can exist magic that science is incapable of comprehending, as shown by the actions of the entities that provide that magic... aka the players
A few professors at my local university (I live on Guam, which is not yet really post-colonial) have asked me to help incorporate it into their curriculum.
You might also look at 14 Days, which is a twosie game about managing chronic pain.
And from a design perspective, you'll probably want to delve into the old Forge articles, as that's the original community of designers focused on learning how to make games with the primary goal of making players feel something.
@Anaphory Each player is a non-human entity (presumably either immortal, or a very well-organized society) with a good deal of power but some goal or goals that they are unable to accomplish without mortals' unwitting aid. Each entity therefore arranges for elaborate deceptions in order to trade the power they do have with mortals for reasons and with limitations no mortal correctly understands.
Dogs in the Vineyard (later revamped into a slightly less problematic setting with The Princes' Kingdom) is a good example of a Forgeite game: in it, the PCs are a group of teenagers with absolute authority to enforce morality however they feel is necessary.
The Forge is not the end-point for this kind of design theory, but it's definitely one of the earliest starting points.
Later design work towards these goals builds on Forgeite thought and practice, or is in direct response to problems the later designers see in the Forge.
[thinks]
I recently listened to a podcast that might be helpful; it discussed how "fun" is not a useful goal for an RPG designer to have, and mentioned many games (including Dog Eat Dog) with other goals that are engaging and rewarding but definitely not "fun."
Hrm. I'm not really sure I want to be the kind of designer that makes a game that nobody likes but everybody considers a classic, any more than I would want to have written Catcher in the Rye.
@Anaphory Dog Eat Dog isn't a game that terrifies you with its story. It's a game that challenges players to think about themselves and their contexts and assumptions in ways they probably aren't comfortable with.
My group was less emotionally affected than many I've read about, because we already think about and talk about those ideas.
I also suggest seeing if you can get your hands of Nightmares of Mine. It's about running horror games, but it's got some brilliant analysis of the nature of story structures in RPGs (and how they aren't like anything else) which I've found helpful as a player, a GM, and a casual designer with all sorts of games.
Well, I'm of the opinion that every RPG text can be read as a philosophical manifesto declaring the kinds of elements and structures which create a certain kind of value in stories.
@NathanTuggy So, āScience cannot prove or disprove magic if the powers of magic don't trade with the scientistsā? And not āA clever deception is indistinguishable from real magicā?
14 Days asserts that chronic pain limits the resources you have available to act. It then asks you to think about what implications that has on your life and how you would deal with it.
Dogs in the Vineyard asks what risks or compromises you'll take in order to enforce a moral code.
Dog Eat Dog asks how you will deal with being on one side or the other of a systemic power imbalance.
Each of them contains, encoded within its rules, postulates about the context in which you can act and the power of your actions.
Implicit in the play, then, is the question of whether you agree with those postulates.
There's a card game Marrying Mr. Darcy, in which players are Pride and Prejudice style society women who collect handfuls of cards about how intelligent, beautiful, skilled, and well-connected they are.
But they can only use those attributes when a card is drawn from the deck representing a man interacting with them in a certain way.
So players sit there with handfuls of excellent qualities, unable to act until the deck deigns to randomly permit them a moment of empowerment.
Then there's Kagematsu, an RPG in which a samurai is petitioned by a series of women begging him to save them. For each woman, the samurai judges whether he loves or pities them. Those are his only options.
But every game does this to some extent.
D&D places limits on the nature and resolution of action, making claims about the absoluteness of morality and the supremacy of combat as a mode of conflict resolution.
Cards Against Humanity makes explicit assertions about the nature of humanity.
Yes, and coded into its premise is not only the assertion that people want permission to say those things, but also a postulate about what kind of permissions are necessary.
@BESW Following that train of thought we're about two hours and three bottles of vodka away from declaring that by limiting available gameplay options to a couple not-too-long lists you can choose from D&D posits that life is inherently limited and creativity can only be exercised within prescribed boundaries set in place by an almighty Gygaxian creator, who can be, however, overruled by his descendant, the GM, thus proving existence of a Christian god.
At the end of the day, though, I see all games as saying --though most not deliberately or consciously-- "This is a set of rules you will find value in following."
"Philosophy" or "issue" games are simply ones whose designers decided to make that the primary point rather than a tool or accident on the way toward a different goal.
EG, games in which the value in the rules is found at least in part through the thoughts the rules make us think, not just the actions the rules have us take.
(Monopoly is a biting commentary on the injustice of the free capitalist market, but that's not why we play it.)
The Game of Life is more explicitly commentary on the American Dream.
...but whiles its rules and randomisation do effectively critique the assumption that the American Dream is something we can earn through hard work, they make it a gruelling experience with little reward except the trite social commentary.
By comparison, Monopoly (especially with its original bidding-war rules intact) encourages strategy and social interaction between players which simultaneously blunts the drudgery of its randomised premise and effectively encodes its postulate that the primary skill of the successful capitalist is not hard work, but the ability to exploit chance and manipulate others.
(Worth remembering that Monopoly was a Depression-era game.)
So, to go back to your original premise, @NathanTuggy.
Incidentally, any ideas on balancing the two different viewpoints? Playing as the magic-granting entities is essential, but playing as mortals who are necessarily unaware of the truth is also important.
It's a game where there's only one PC, shared between the players who also take turns GMing scenes and deciding what's really going on based on what happens in each scene before they move on to the next.
The whole theme of the game is that the PC is a hapless Lovecraft-style protagonist caught up in something far bigger than he may ever be able to understand.
That's a decent start, although another factor is that my system needs to cover, at least in principle, all of history... though not necessarily in any one game, I guess
You might also want to look at Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, where each player has "their" PC, but the rest of the group gets to narrate the PC's failures while the player only gets to narrate their PC's successes.
@NathanTuggy microscope is the go-to game for non-chronological collaborative history-building.
I don't know if it'd be useful, but you might also want to check out great-ork-gods as an example of players controlling both mortal characters and the gods who preside over them.
The Great Ork Gods hate the Orks they preside over, and have Spite points to make the Orks lives harder, which they earn every time an Ork succeeds on an action in that god's portfolio.
