Some TTRPG Hot Takes
Below I talk through a number of thoughts I have come to in my days of developing my own game, and reading/playing many others. There are plenty of hot takes around the hobby, and below are some of mine. I reference my game Rift Walker a lot, if you want to check out the play test for that, check it out here.
Hot Takes
Action economy adequately balances most game breaking abilities, if consistently stuck to in all scenes.
If you take any ability that can be seen a game breaking in many heroic fantasy games, they are often ones that are abused by players outside of combat situations. As combat situations “zoom in” to allow limited actions by players and foes, action economy is king in limiting making progress towards any combatant’s intended goals, and giving fair game play to all characters. Narrative and exploration scenes are typically handled freeform and so allow for some non-defined abilities to be left unchecked. The perfect example of this was the controversy around the Healing Spirit spell being game breaking outside of combat restrictions. Games like Shadow Dark and my game Rift Walker have an “always on” initiative order. This helps provide order, and shared table spotlight time. Limited actions types and numbers are pretty normal in most games’ combat scenes, but can be easily applied to non combat situates, like in Rift Walker. This can either be handled literally - “you have 2 actions what are you doing?” Or subtly - “ok, so while you are healing the warrior, what is the scoundrel up to?” This is a more narrative approach. Most games have rest rules that limit what players can achieve while recovering anyway. For Rift Walker this is just time spent and spending recovery points. Healing, bonuses to modifiers, magic, crafting etc, are all abilities that can be easily reigned in with action restrictions. Designers don’t even need to give a “once per scene” limitation, which is the common slap fix. If a player chooses to spend one of their limited actions in a round of area investigation with healing someone, that is fine, because they aren’t doing other things. To best achieve this, keep action economy in downtime, resting, narrative and combat scenes.
Tracking encumbrance and resources can be fun, actually.
When done correctly, resource and gear tracking can be fun. Games often make the mistake of calculating kilograms of weight that characters can carry. This is stale and way too much bookkeeping. Many games such as Mausritter and Knave have instead moved towards slot based inventory. This is what I do in Rift Walker. Commonsense should prevail when seeing if a character can carry a grand piano by themselves. But beyond this, these games use inventories as a way of defining a character (as many do in the OSR space). What gear they have means they get access to those abilities. Resource tracking can be similarly tedious and frustrating for some players, but if done in a slot or procedural way, can be very fun. This is done in games like The Black Hack and Blades in the Dark. In Rift Walker I take this one step further by tracking not only Gear and Resources, but Contacts and Skills (outside of the core ones for their archetype) also. This not only gives them a sense of accomplishment of seeing what they have collected, but helps remind them of what is available to them narratively, as well as in combat. Maybe a player could be reminded that they have formally made a contact with someone in this city, so will go forth and ask them for information. Maybe a character will try and learn a new skill outside of their normal wheel house. This gives them the ability to do so. Even in High Fantasy games, there is a power fantasy created from having these “slots” filled and tracked. It shows they what they can do and how they have made impact on the world. It also just helps players keep track of all the stuff they can do in context of the game world.
Give players more open information about everything - or meta gaming can be good.
There is a typical GM want, to hide things away from players; to build a sense of character immersion in the world. This is so wrong, it is a game, and we are all people trying to have fun. There is common GMing wisdom about not locking key narrative information behind checks, and to repeat information at least 3 times, because players don’t capture everyone you may communicate; but my thoughts go beyond that. In Rift Walker, I put the monster hit point bars for Morale and Health out in the open for players to see. This gives them a sense of accomplishment and tactical consideration (as the amount of specific blocks means targets of attacks that round from a foe). Games like Index Card RPG put target numbers for rooms out in the open for players to see. I do this in Rift Walker by giving players the target number of successes needed in montage scenes. Video games have been doing this for years, to give players a sense of knowledge in a world they would know so little about. It is a piece of meta gaming that helps give information to players, that their characters would likely see in the world. Meta gaming and open table talk from the GM to players, and players to each other, can facilitate understanding at the table and greatly improve pacing, if done appropriately (more on that below). Clarify player questions, remind players of potential consequences of actions, incase they misunderstood the situation. This is essential for good theatre of the mind play, so apply it everywhere.
Soft railroading can be good - or give players more structured choice.
Procedural gaming has been around since the beginning of the hobby. Procedures go hand in hand with mechanics. Often, GMs think that if they give discrete options and procedures, they are railroading (a loaded term that had been so overblown in my opinion) or limiting player agency. Education is in order about procedural play. They are done to give structure and mechanical weigh, but can still be left wide open for players to engage with however they like, but in a way that doesn’t make them stop and hesitate. There should be boundaries to the activities, to provide limitations that enhance creativity (like the wise teachings of Brian Eno in art). This is commonly used in OSR style games. Sly Flourish talks about this great method of the 3 choices for players. I do this in my game, as the 2+ infinite method. I like to give 2 prepared paths to go down, and remind players that this is an open world and do anything else they desire (the infinite option). This helps limit choice to stop analysis paralysis, but also gives them agency. Other examples of this are structured narrative scenes (see my 1st hot take); free form powers with predefined structures - as outlined here; and set consequences and rewards in Montage scenes. This involves the difference between the failure and success threshold of a montage scene (say travel or investigation) giving consequences to players, and surplus successes giving rewards. These come in a predefined discrete list such as damage, conditions or enemy progress for consequences; and treasure, information or contacts as rewards. I give these to the players to choose from, instead of determining what they find. This helps not overburden players with useless items in slot based play, as discussed above. This helps accentuate choice for something that has already been vetted by my prep. It is essential in giving a sense of structured pacing to sessions, as outlined below.
You can have a full adventure and fun session in 2 hours.
If you have been keeping up wth my work, you will know a lot about my GM style. I go through it thoroughly here. We play our sessions mid week after work. Our sessions normally go for 2-3 hours after dinner. I find it is the right amount of time to keep players engaged, have a fun adventure and then go back to our real lives. I learnt this skill around pacing and shorter adventures but having previously run my adventures for strangers in a FLGS, with set time limits. What this means is that you will need to change your prep and adventure structures. I like to have 1-2 pages of prep notes and try to run full 1 shots (that are narratively linked in a campaign format) each week. Some GMs do this by just prepping a few rooms of a dungeon and cutting the session off at a narratively exciting moment. If I feel like a session is going to be too long, I like to gauge this about half way through. Doing this I will usually split a session into 2. The first being the travel, investigation, NPC communications and puzzles, and the second being the big combat or detailed scene. That way nothing feels rushed. More on adventure structure can be found here. However, if you cut to the chase in your prep, stop hiding important information, you can get most adventures done in 1 session. This will also mean that using the structured choice and open information advice above is crucial to not wasting time. Direct table talk is encouraged, meta gaming can be ok if not abused. I regularly give players information in and out of character to move things along. I push for shopping and other long narrative sequences to be done outside of the session. This doesn’t mean I don’t like in dramatic in character moments; the opposite in fact! I just push out all the boring haggling, and “umming” and “arring” about stuff out of the game night. Pacing is essential. Long gone are range days of university, when I could play D&D for 8 hours on a Saturday with my friends. We are all adults that still like the joys of TTRPGs but also have lives. Mike Mearls has been talking on his Patreon about how to have 1 hour sessions of his game Odyssey (a grand goal indeed).
