I held off on posting this earlier because the link to the game itself was broken, but 20×20 Room has some very interesting comments about a new one-shot PDF RPG called The Mountain Witch. What caught my eye about this at first was that there’s an actual stat for Trust – you assign points to it at certain junctures in the story and can use them later – just because of the whole systems-for-things-other-than-hitting-things, um, thing. But this isn’t necessarily a Paranoia-esque betrayal-fest, oh no – the folks quoted in this post say they’d trust the other players more after playing this. You don’t see recommendations like that every day. Besides the underexplored possibility space of what can be turned into a stat besides strength, maybe “mainstream” RPGs could stand to explore the kinds of psychological effects that arise from “role-playing” in other contexts – even therapeutic ones.