PhilDickian: like the writings of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick. Obligatory immature joke. Most often, this means a protagonist who has to solve mysteries and otherwise struggle inside an environment that may or may not be real. Other common tropes include psychic abilities, addiction, and nonhuman entities striving against each other through the use of human proxies.
Now there's a lot of overlap between these two. Virtual worlds are a prime setting for a Dickian "what is reality?" climax; Psychic abilities have a lot of overlap with information technology and even show up outright in some notable cyberpunk writings; Addiction is a common component of characters in all sorts of gritty settings and is a key part of the conflict between individual freedom and profiteering pharma corps, and the various AIs in cyberspace are easily indinstinguishable from Dick's nonhuman entities that may be aliens may be space probes or may be angels from the old testament. So the two fit together pretty well, and with the gritty film-noirish big screen adaptations of many of his works (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Second Variety, Paycheck, Minority Report, etc)
Dick is sometimes called a forefather of cyberpunk, even though his written works weren't exactly cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk is a pretty snap-tite fit for the usual conceits
of a TTRPG, The PCs get to be a set of "punks" using spiffy new technology to influence the game world, while striving against powerful and reactionary fictional institutions.Or they can be specialized cybersecurity forces for the entrenched order trying to rein in the malicious actions of such hooligans. Either way, there are instant hooks for how PCs can participate as a team in a meaningful conflict that influences the setting.
Yet while Philip K. Dick's writings have a lot of elements that can make for cool RPG elements, and a lot of neat examination of how those elements influence a setting, the central question of Philip K. Dick's fiction is very problematic for a TTRPG. The central question of most Phildickian heroes is "what is reality?", and a TTRPG is a shared fictional experience, where all the participants know that it is fictional. So there's an issue of meta-narrative in used layered realities which have some layers more and less real than other layers. Unless your entire playgroup is dropping LSD, the reality of the players sitting at the table will always be the most "real" of the layers, undermining a lot of the suspense and mitigating the mystery.
So any attempt at a Phildickian RPG has to accept the reality of the players at the game table as design constraint on asking "what is reality" and expecting the PCs to be able to come up with a meaningful in-game answer. Here are a few possibilities off the top of my head
- Count on the players to be really good actors have their characters act as if they didn't have players, even especially when things get all trippy and metaphysical.
- Run adventures where the correct answer to "what is reality" is "it doesn't matter, what's important is what you do no matter where you are". This has some really interesting moral and philosophical ramifications for a hobby about pretending to be murderhobos, as adressed by John Tynes's Power Kill metagame.
- The Over The Edge angle: run the adventure where the PCs find out they are RPG characters and transcend to meet their players. This only works once.
- The Dream Park angle: the players themselves play players at some sort of VR arcade (or other conceit) and those fictional players are the ones running characters in a game inside a game. This opens up several possibilities but also runs a risk of turning into layered Cartesian Demons if it isn't handled well, or if the playgroup isn't on board with the idea.
- Ignore the question entirely and just use secondary elements from Philip K. Dick's writings, you can do a game about anti-precognition, android hunting, or narcing on your slacker buddies as an unwitting agent in the governments secret inner-city drug sales progam just fine.
