My oldest daughter came in and told me she had aphantasia.
I asked her what that was.
“Picture an apple.”
Alright.
“What did you see?”
Nothing.
“Let me be more specific. Picture a green apple. What do you see?”
Still nothing.
“You have it too.”
“I have what?”
That’s how I found out. I’d been running games for years by then, sat behind a screen describing rooms to other people, and I’d never once done the thing everyone else does when you say “picture an apple”.
It isn’t a black screen
People hear aphantasia and assume the lights are off. Mine aren’t. It feels like the picture is sitting just off to the side, in the corner of my eye or slightly past it, and I can’t turn my head far enough to look at it. Something’s there. I never get to look at it.
There are levels to this as well. Some people have nothing at all. Some have a faint something. I don’t know exactly where I sit on that scale, because there’s no way to hold my apple up against yours and compare them.
A genre built on the thing I haven’t got
Solo roleplaying assumes a mind’s eye. All of it does.
You roll on a table, you get a result, and then comes the step nobody writes down because nobody thinks it needs writing down: see it. Read the room description and picture the room. Ask the oracle a question, get “yes, but”, and imagine what the but looks like. The whole genre hands you raw material and expects the picture to happen for free.
For me that step doesn’t happen. So on paper, the lot of it was closed.
The two that kind of worked
I’ve had a lot of goes at solo play over the years, and most of them died quietly inside a session.
The two that held were Four Against Darkness and D100 Dungeon. Both of them work the same way round. You walk into a room, you roll, and the room exists. You draw it on graph paper. Then you do the next one, and the next one, and an hour later there’s a dungeon in front of you that wasn’t there when you started.
There was no imagination step anywhere in either of them. The dice made the room and the pencil made it real. I wasn’t picturing a dungeon, I was building one, a square at a time, and I could look down and see it because it was on the table in front of me.
At the time I thought I just liked the procedure. Looking back, that was the tell.
Tables that work, and tables that don’t
The clearest version of this is what happens to me with random tables.
Maze Rats gives me “lanky, nine fingers, wine-stained clothes”. I’ve got the man. There’s nothing left for me to do. The words are already the thing, and I can hand him straight to a player. And once I’ve got him I can build off him. I can riff, I can add, I can point him at something. That’s the scaffolding I need, and the table handed it over finished.
Cairn gives me “altruistic + bounty”. Both real words, and I sit there. That’s a gap you’re supposed to cross with a mental image, and I don’t own the bridge.
I want to be careful here, though, because it isn’t a flat no. “Horses abundant, medicine scarce” is the same shape of prompt, and I can get a story out of that one. Somewhere in there is a village trading the wrong thing for the wrong thing, and I’m away.
The trouble is what comes back the rest of the time. It isn’t nothing. It’s words. I can assemble a sentence about a village and the sentence just sits there being a sentence, and I’m bored of it before I’ve finished writing it down. Put that next to nine fingers and wine-stained clothes, where the man is already in the room and I want to know what he wants. Same amount of effort, completely different thing arrives. And I can’t tell in advance which one I’m going to get. Maze Rats fires every time.
That’s not a dig at Cairn. Cairn’s structure is excellent and its process is better than most. Its tables just hand me concepts and ask me to synthesise, and synthesis is the part of my head I can’t rely on.
Cairn is where I started asking about this, actually. Not the aphantasia. I knew about that by then. What I didn’t have was any idea why some tables landed for me and others didn’t. I bought 2E and I wanted it to be the one. Get rid of everything else, run this, done. Then I sat down to build a world with it, the way the book asks you to, and I stalled. Why am I grinding to a halt on this, when Maze Rats has been my go-to for years? Same hobby, same head, same evening. That’s the question I’ve been picking at ever since.
So I’ve got a test now, and everything goes through it:
Can I see this immediately, or do I need to imagine what it means?
If I can see it, it works every time. If I need to imagine it, it’s a coin toss, and I’d rather not build a campaign on a coin toss.
What I’ve got instead
This is the part that took me longest to describe, because for years I only had a name for the thing I was missing.
I’m very good at space. Always have been. Putting things together, building things, knowing where everything is in a room I walked out of an hour ago. The best way I can explain it is that it works like modelling. Like putting dimensions into a CAD program. The program builds the thing accurately, it knows where every part sits, it can tell you the distance between any two points, and it can’t see what any of it looks like.
Describe a room to me and I get a map. A model. I know where the door is, what’s against the far wall, how far it is to the window, what’s between me and the thing that just moved. I know all of it like coordinates. I just don’t see one square inch of it.
That isn’t an empty room. It’s a room with no picture in it.
Where that leaves me
Everything I’ve built since that graph paper has been a way of asking whether the model is enough on its own. Whether you can run a whole campaign on coordinates and concrete nouns, with nothing behind the eyes at all, and have it be worth doing.
I don’t know yet. That’s where I am.
There’s a second wall as well, and that one’s got nothing to do with pictures. I’ve been describing it as not being able to get people to a table, and that isn’t quite honest, so let me fix it here rather than leave it standing. I can organise a game. I can get people online, and I have. What I can’t do, with work sitting where it is at the moment, is commit to the same night every week and actually mean it. And even when the night is clear, I can’t promise I’ll arrive with a head fit to run anything. Some days I’m spent and the social battery is gone. That’s an autism thing, and it doesn’t take requests.
That’s the next post. This series is me going at both walls in public, while it’s happening, and I’m writing it without knowing how it ends.
I still don’t know what anybody else gets, and that’s the honest end of this one.
If you’ve got this too, I’d want to know what you have instead of the picture, because I doubt it’s the same thing for everyone. And if you haven’t got it, I’d want to know what actually happens when you read a room description. Does something appear? Is it in colour? Is it sat off to the side like mine, or are you looking straight at it?
I’ve been asking people that since the apple. I’ve still no idea what I’m comparing against.