A game for a group of GMs without players.

The basic premise of the game is that you are a patient of a mental institute suffering from amnesia. The institute has developed an experimental drug allowing people to share their minds, which their hope can be used to restore your memories.

So now you and other patients are sitting around a table, taking a trip down the memory lane, trying to recall what led you to this situation in the first place.

The game isn’t attached to any specific setting. Various examples of gameplay are written with the assumption that your stories take place in the real world, but the game also suggest a super spy action and Lovecraftian horror as possible backgrounds. Or you can use some other setting of your choosing. As long as you can imagine the institute and the drug existing, the game works fine with any environment.

So, how does it work?

Each player is going to tell a story consisting of three scenes. The nature of the scenes is determined by a questionnaire and a memory trigger. The questionnaire simply tells you what the three scenes of your story are about. By default it’s pleasant memory, unpleasant memory and the way you’ve lost your memory, but there are variant questionnaires provided, including one in anachronistic order, plus setting-specific questionnaires. Personally, I mostly played using a homebrew urban fantasy setting for the game, so I went with “your first encounter with the supernatural,” “what have you sacrificed” and “how have you lost your memories.”

The memory trigger is something strongly associated with the memory. It can be a smell or an object, or a place, or something else. Players write five triggers each, mix them all up, then one is picked at random and becomes a foundation of the scene.

The combination of a questionnaire and a memory trigger serves as a sort of inspiration for players and prevents them from losing focus of the overarching narrative by defining the limits of the story. It’s an important function, since without limits it’s pretty hard to tell a story. If someone were to ask you to “write something, anything,” chances are, you wouldn’t write anything at all. But the game provides you with enough material that a creative mind is capable to conjure something entertaining.

Within those limits, the player has the power to describe and define everything except his or her own actions. For example, let’s say that your first memory is about you running away from a crazy Russian captain whom you owe money, and who wants to kill you. You can describe all this, you can describe finding yourself in a dark alley, all of this is a setup. You then can describe some shady guy approaching you and punching you in the face. The events after that, however, depend on your reaction to the guy, and that is not something you can decide for yourself. Instead, you are supposed to ask “What did I do?” and indicate two players who would give you answers. Let’s say one said, “You punched him back” and another said, “You ran away.” Then you pick one of those options and proceed to tell the rest of the scene.

Only important decisions receive this treatment, naturally. If you want to describe how you walk around or have a small talk, you can do it without asking other players for advice.

The number of decisions you can make during a scene is limited, however. Each player has a number of coins – one at first, more each turn – and every time you make a decision, you give a coin to the player who suggested it. Once you run out of coins, it’s time to wrap up the scene and give turn to another player.

That mechanism serves to establish the pacing of stories. The way it works, each scene gets longer than the previous one, which is good since some players are likely to stumble at the beginning trying to come up with ideas for their stories, but are likely to loosen up later.

It also sets a hard limit on how long each story is going to be, those preventing narratives from spiraling into grant epics that the game wouldn’t be able to handle.

And, of course, it gives the game its name. A factor that shouldn’t be underestimated.

Once the player has finished with telling a scene, another player, the one with the most coins, starts their own tale, answering the same question. Once all players have finished with their first scene, the circle starts anew. Once everyone have finished with all three scenes, the players face a choice: to keep their recovered memories or to forget them for good. It’s a nice touch that doesn’t affect the game itself much, but enhances immersion.

Speaking of, the game is big on immersion. First of all, you might have noticed that what’s going on in the game and in the real world match almost exactly: the players sit around a table telling stories about forgotten memories, and so do their characters. The game encourages you to immerse yourself in it and imagine that you truly are an amnesiac patient of a mental institute. It also provides various methods to enhance the effect: key phrases to say at certain moments, holding hands when a scene is complete, lighting a candle when someone starts telling a story, etc.

Honestly, I didn’t use them because I felt too much like a cultist imagining myself doing this stuff, and I prefer to be on the other side of the summoning circle, thanks. Still, some may find the advice useful.

Another thing of note is that, in contrast with DRYH, A Penny for My Thoughts provides an exhaustive advice on how to run the game. Pretty much every possible problem is addressed and discussed at length. How to create good memory triggers, why it’s important to be on the same page regarding the setting used and how to play without a defined setting, whether or not stories of different players should be connected and how to do cameos, etc, etc. It even provides a full transcript of a game played by devs to demonstrate how the game is supposed to look in motion.

That’s something I really appreciate. It’s always interesting to learn how devs think their game should work, even when I end up deviating from their designs, and it makes A Penny for My Thoughts very approachable for both new players and fans of other game set in their ways.

One of the biggest problems in playing and running TRPGs is an unwritten social contract: what is expected from players and the GM (if there is any), what are the hard limits, what narrative rights everyone has, etc. It’s hard to change gaming groups because there are always many unspoken rules that you are just expected to know because they seem obvious to everyone else. Like, in one group PCs are expected to always work together while in another double-crossing your comrades in pursuit of personal agenda is normal. So someone from the former group joining the latter would have an unpleasant surprise waiting.

A Penny for My Thoughts address most potential issues, turning unspoken rules into articulated social contract, those allowing for a clear flow of communication. And given how TRPGs are all about communication, it’s a great achievement.

So, now that I’ve described the game, what do I think about it? Well, it certainly deviates far from more traditional games. Even games heavy on conflict resolution typically stick closer to the root, with players concerned mostly about their characters rather than controlling the whole world except their characters. The game is closer to a creative writing exercise than what people normally call TRPG. As such,it can be alienating for those who want to play a TRPG and picked A Penny for My Thoughts not knowing what this game is like.

When taken on its own merits, however, it’s great. It provides a framework stimulating creativity and giving inspiration for improvised storytelling. It’s a unique experience, and I wholeheartedly recommend to check it out.

Besides, you need it. It’s going to be a part of your treatment for the next three month, patient 0037.