Back in the day and after being amused by #DnD from a distance, I was there to witness the rise of #Numenera. It uplifted what I liked most about DnD - the vivid storytelling - and sidelined the tactical battles (not that there is anything wrong with that if well executed). I'm not a veteran from the times when the genre was conceived, but I have been around enough to know that this is nothing new in #TTRPGs, or the philosophy of various sciences for that matter. The approach to unshackle human creativity through effective guidance is an age-long quest that led to the experimental, narrative-embedded nature of #NSR, and especially established the "weird" as a label genre.

Though while we say weird, we do mean conventionally inexplicable and often far-out worldbuilding instead of a real genre. The genre itself of the "weird" is often a mixture of horror, heroic fantasy, post-sci-fi, some kind of grit and followed by a peculiar flavour. This borderless mixture of styles with self-confident abandon that subjects all other aspects of the medium is what The Bride! was to me. It puts the genre tropes to the side to favour contemporary techniques that enliven the subtleties of what we are as beings.

#Stellaris is one of my favourite video games because through the sheer volume of mechanics, content and striking just the right balance between the abstract and suggestive nature of its presentation, it nails emergent narration to such masterful dimensions that the player keeps building the story, the very world of their playthrough, even after shutting the PC down and doing other, unrelated tasks. The main mechanic, despite the intricate interstellar society management system, is the memetic story evolving in the player's head. One of my most cherished empires from years ago - the United Hearthsea - to this day makes me actively ponder how its story might have continued developing.

The Bride! and other similar movies work with the observer in a similar fashion by respecting the viewer's agency. They are more than what was put on film, their stories fuse with the spectator's soul more so than the usual, much more cohesive content. This is not easy to pull off, as such attempts sometimes end up in the camp territory, or are oftenly forgotten.

The modern DnD adventures all have a clear structure of what is to be done and how. Sure, the game emerges through the interaction of players, but the framing is what holds it together. Numenera, and some other daring games (such as Sig: Manual of the Primes) flip this idea around and give the players much more to associate. They do this by centring the world first and distributing the influence over its threads among all players at the table.

When I go and play DnD 5.5e at meetups, I miss this trip of the mind, the emergent storytelling of alternative realities screaming in our heads and hearts, and mechanics that adapt to this way of playing, instead of whipping the tale into moulds inherited from times when true alternatives were scarce.

I crave all the daring experimentation in gaming. I want more creative catalysts that trust their own integrity enough to offer agency that can bring out the suppressed parts of ourselves to light. So that we can observe them, play with them, and finally embody them - everything between the divine and the monstrous.

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#TTRPG