This was originally a Twitter thread
A short blog post about the mechanics at the heart of my new ttrpg “My Girlfriend Has Turned Into A Car (And We’re Escaping This City)”
Zener Cards And Their Quirks
The game is built around Zener cards. These cards are used to test for ESP. If you’ve seen the first Ghostbusters movie, you’ll likely be familiar with this test as it’s the one Peter Venkman is performing at the start. However, they’ve been used since the 1930s!
But the Zener card experiment has a quirk. Usually, your chance of guessing each card correctly is the same as the normal distribution (e.g. you would do just as well using a roll table). However, this changes if the examiner and subject can see each other.
If the examiner and test subject can see each other, the number of correct guesses slowly increases. This is because the human brain loves finding patterns, and over time, the subject will learn the examiner’s tells.
In the moment, humans are terrible at hiding their thoughts. So, if you spend long enough with someone, you’ll spot patterns and tells. Be it body language, posture, or even word choice. Of course, during the experiment, you want to prevent that from happening.
MGHTIAC actually does the opposite. During the game, the player not guiding the story will be laying out Zener cards for the other player to guess. But as the players can see each other, they’ll slowly get better at guessing the cards over time.
And this fits the theme perfectly. As the players try to escape together, they fall more and more in sync as they learn more about their situation and their skill sets.
The Utena Influence
The game is inspired by the film “Adolescence Of Utena” where the titular Utena turns into a car and helps Anthy, her love, escape their situation.
The whole sequence is brilliant. But one of the most beautiful elements is how it builds. At first, Anthy is nervous about driving Utena and they struggle to deal with their first foe (who is undone by their own vanity). But over time you see them improve.
This culminates with Utena becoming an even more powerful car, and the pair skillfully navigating a maze of wheels. A feat other characters describe as impossible.
And I wanted to recreate this feeling during play. Over time, the players will fall in sync with each other and thus overcome obstacles and issues easier as their ratio of correct predictions slowly goes up.
Basically, at its core, MGHTIAC is taking a famous experiment, and purposely doing it badly. When I appeared on Pod Of Blunders, I said that the game is the logical conclusion of this meme.
Jonathon Greenall is a freelance writer, artist, and tabletop roleplaying game designer who has written for CBR, Polygon, Nintendo Life, Gayley Dreadful, Enbylife, and many other publications. They have also published several popular and highly-praised tabletop roleplaying games including “You Have One Ability….The Ability To Fuck This Up,” “Macarons, Milkshakes, And Magic,” and “Wander Wizards.”
Jonathon has always been fascinated by media, from the big hitters to the small, obscure, and often overlooked titles that linger on the sidelines, capturing both the on and off-camera stories that make these shows so fascinating.
Jonathon is also a major anime fan, having been exposed to the medium through shows like Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena. Since then, Jonathon has maintained a passion for anime, watching most new shows each season and hunting down overlooked gems from previous ones.