Neuroshell Playtest
Last night was the first time I got to play Wiley’s Neuroshell - a game that takes the direct approach to simulating Disco Elysium’s parliament of ideas.
All player characters are nameless and bodiless “neurons” in the head of an amnesiac. They know nothing except what they can extrapolate from their environment and the context they find their body in.
Actions occur when the neurons reach quorum, with each player having their own “hand” of skills that they roll when relevant. Unless it’s the one player who gets to be czar for that turn, in which case the Master Mind - and I’ve never actually asked Wiley if the Napoleon Hill reference was intentional, but I find it funny anyway - can just make them roll for it without anyone else having to agree.
The setup alone is genius. Every player is immediately thrust into having to decide what situations they can use their skills in to succeed, and highly motivated to get the game into those situations however they can. A process I noticed was largely unconscious or unvocalised within the group. This frequently leads to odd, monomaniacal tangents and running themes developing, as players learn what can reliably get the rest of the group on their side.
That’s the other part of the experience. Everyone thinks their way of doing things gives them a better chance to succeed, so we were all arguing with each other “in character”. But none of us had real names, just vague concepts of our abilities and spheres of influence. I’d say this was one of the two important conceits which kept the game from ever feeling truly oppositional. Discussion was directed toward the entire group by default, or referencing the growing background of quips and inside jokes resulting from the evolving personalities of the others.
The second conceit/boundary is that everyone is literally sharing a body. There’s no ability to leave and “do your own thing” - you’re locked down in the pilot’s seat with your combination flight crew, flatmates, siblings, and enemies.
Combined with the secretive nature of how many points a player has put into their skills meaning no one really knows how good anyone is at anything from moment to moment, and the overall feeling of having to bluff your confidence between good “hands” and the wild cards as a result of skills being semirandomised, I summarised the game to Wiley as “like playing poker, except if anyone loses you all die.”
We Are But Worm
The actual scenario was, we later learned, written entirely on one post it note, but managed to extend to an hour and a half of game time and could have gone on longer - something which fills me with a newfound sense of scale for how much game you can get out of how little prep if you know every single thing is going to be used.
We were something. And we were on fire.
I bunked my Sensory roll, and our eyes did the same to figure out what was going on, so we only knew that we were burning and very injured.
Our bottom half was missing, and we were being chewed on by…things. I think our memory kicked in there, because these things were ants. We couldn’t push them off of us, because we had no arms either. We were, probably, a worm. Or a crazy person who believed they were a worm. I said it didn’t matter.
We tried commanding the ants, bashing them, and chewing them somehow, and crawling away. Our higher intuition even started begging for help from worm-god, but received no answer and declared he was now a staunch atheist. It was decided to just keep crawling, since that would hopefully work out for us, There was no digging into whatever we were on, and a voice was calling to us from what looked like grass. Our best bet.
The voice was another worm. One half of one worm. Who was us, until twenty minutes ago when we got ripped in half while trying to cross “hell” to get to the nicer grass on the other side.
I was all for trying to merge our two halves again, and seeing how that went. Authority won out, the one who said we were the king of all worms, and declared ourselves Arthur and our second Lancelot. On the other side of hell we would build a great kingdom and see all acknowledge our divine right to rule.
I was the one who said we should find something to carry us across the burning road. Something with legs.
So, then we found a beetle nearby, and tried to convince him as best we could. And this was more appeals to worm-god, this time as a political instrument, and promises of riches and duty and honour.
I said that worms could dig things up for him to eat.
I think he only helped us out of pity. But I named him Hercules and he carried Lancelot and Us to the other side. The burning, dry heat once we left the shade of the grass was excruciating, but we were making progress. Until lancelot fell off his back.
This was a moral quandary for the ages: do we stop and get him, or keep marching? It was Authority which won out, and we were trying to pick him up when we saw a shadow, and then we were in the air.
Everybody lit up like christmas lights - “Bird! Bird!”
So we were in some kind of cave, and hercules was pinned between the roof and the floor. Literally between them. He’d gotten bent up like an AMC Eagle trying to fit through a dog door.
We crawled again, toward the light on one side of the cave, and then we were dropped into some kind of dry, rough bundle of sticks.
Our Visual Calculus chimed in with a report,
“Gentlemen, I think we might actually be a worm.”
After we stopped laughing at that, I asked if anyone wanted to try praying to worm-god again. The consensus was that whatever wrath he would bestow on our enemies, we shouldn’t be there at the same time. So I tried to dig up a stick from the floor, enthusiastically proclaimed as our excalibur. Not that we could actually hold the thing.
But it gave us a hole. We had another dilemma, to abandon or help hercules and lancelot. The third choice was “flee, and pray to worm-god.”
Which happened to roll a crit success, and the bird’s nest we were in was struck by divine power cables, exploding with enough force to send us hurtling into the grass.
We Won!
Overall, the one thing that detracted from the experience was how the results of dice rolls were so…vague. There were so many levels of obfuscation between whether or not an action more abstract than “pick up a stick” succeeded or failed that I never even used my one Cognitive skill.
I have to recognise the symplexic value of it though, as something which subtly divides “decks” with a physical focus from those with a more mental one. It primes the deep thinking types to get lost in theorising that only sometimes actually means something in the real world.