Iterated Crisis Phases

So I got the chance to run another playtest session of Protoplastic, this time with an entirely different group of players. I ran essentially the same scenario as the last session, but with the tweaks identified in between: no virtues and no sleep debt, making it harder to avoid almost all consequences like before. These changes worked as hoped: this time around, the heroes succeeded and failed in a roughly 50/50 proportion, ultimately slaying the monster to free the island but suffering heroic hardship in the process.

However, the players simply didn’t care for the dice bank, the core mechanic of the system. Although choosing pre-rolled dice from a collective pool created more opportunities for meaningful choice, the choices weren’t meaningful enough to offset the loss of excitement provided by random chance in the moment. This version didn’t include the dice result-based special abilities I intend to add once the basic rules are solid, but frankly if it’s not working at this foundational level then something is going wrong. The prior group responded positively toward the concept, though, so I don’t think it’s unsalvageable, it just needs to be looked at in a somewhat different way.

Acceptable Losses

One part of the adventure garnered praise from both play groups: the crisis phase. This is a concept I derived from reading the “scramble” minigame in Deathmatch Island: a time-limited situation in which the players are presented with a handful of threats that will come to pass if they don’t stop them, and opportunities to claim advantages that will be gone later. Since each person only has one action to take before the scramble is over, the players have to strategically choose which casualties are tolerable and which prizes are worth the risk. This concept slotted perfectly into the idea of pre-rolled dice: you roll a number of dice equal to the number of players, then allocate them to the threats and opportunities. In the playtest scenario, the heroes were presented with an unnatural lightning storm setting various parts of the island on fire and leaving the village elder in critical condition, but also creating enough chaos that they had the chance to investigate the caldera (the thunderbird’s nest) to learn a useful secret. Ultimately, they chose to put out the fires and investigate the caldera, but let the elder die. That kind of difficult moral/practical choice is, in my view, one of the best things tabletop RPGs have to offer.

Therefore, let’s expand upon it. Let’s see if it’s possible to build the entire game out of iterated crisis phases.

Infinite Crisis

First of all, instead of “crisis”, we’ll generically call a situation a “challenge” – think the “skill challenges” so popular as a concept (yet rarely satisfying in practice) in years past. Typically, each scene is a new challenge, be it a business negotiation, a car chase, an occult ritual, or otherwise. In between challenges, players engage in the normal gamut of dialogue, roleplaying, and choices of what to do next, which leads to the nature of the next challenge. The GM (or collective group, or look-up table, depending on the style of game) also introduces a change in circumstances in between challenges, either in a procedurally generated fashion (like a random encounter), or as a linear progression of scenes in a countdown timer.

More involved scenes can be split into two or more challenges: so, a battle might consist of a couple back-to-back, building upon one another. In cases of a single situation taking more than one challenge, a substantive change should still occur in between, such as a shift in location, or a boss revealing their true form.

A challenge is built out of two types of aspect: risks and rewards. Risks are undesirable events that will occur unless stopped: harm to player characters, death of side characters, loss of reputation, or generally any sort of “hard move”. Rewards are opportunities to claim resources – equipment, allies, information – that the player characters might want. The GM explicitly lays out the situation with all of the relevant risks and rewards, erring on the side of more specific details about what will come to pass rather than less. Each of the other players then rolls a six-sided die and collects them into a shared pool in the center of the table. Rolls of 3 or less are failures, rolls of 4 or more are successes.

As a group, they then decide how to allocate those dice to the current set of risks and rewards. Each success allows them to either negate a risk or claim a reward: if a failing die (or no die) is allocated to an aspect, then either the threatened event comes to pass, or the chance to acquire a resource passes by, respectively. Whenever a player allocates a die, that represents their character taking an action, and should narrate it as such. Once all dice are used up, the challenge ends, with the GM narrating the resolution of any unthwarted risks and the overall aftermath of the situation.

So, for example, say you wanted to handle a journey through the wilderness. You might structure it like this:

Journey

Risk 1: You’re attacked by local predators – one PC takes an injury.

Risk 2: You get lost and waste time – roll for an event.

Risk 3: Your rations run short – deplete your party’s supplies.

Reward 1: Complete the journey.

Meanwhile, a combat round can be easily rewritten into the challenge format by making each enemy action into a risk, and each ally action into a reward. More interestingly, though, it easily scales up to mass battles:

Battle

Risk 1: A quarter of allied troops are killed or captured

Risk 2: Allied forces retreat from the area.

Reward 1: Kill or capture a quarter of the enemy troops.

Reward 2: Make the enemy force retreat from the area.

Challenges don’t need to conform to specific templates, though. They can be assembled in a modular fashion on the fly, taking into account the present state of the fictional game world. They also have the handy property of “zooming out” with barely any extra effort, allowing the PC’s efforts to unfold in multiple locations simultaneously and over longer periods of time than games normally allow.

Escalation

Of course, sometimes you’ll be faced with situations where you cannot abide by certain risks coming to pass. To avoid having to compromise, you can add extra dice to the pool. You do so by bringing in (usually through expenditure) an asset of some kind: an apt tool, a crucial secret, a spell with an effect you can argue would be useful. Skills and abilities could also give you bonus dice for relevant types of challenge. Most interestingly, if you’re losing, you can alter the situation in two different ways, even after the dice are initially rolled.

One, you can create a new risk to roll an extra die. This might involve pushing yourself so hard that you now also risk exhaustion, or doing something unethical to give yourself an advantage at the risk of censure.

Two, you can escalate a conflict by bringing in a new asset that wouldn’t previously have been relevant: the classic case here is pulling a gun on someone during negotiation. This allows you to now add an extra die for the weapon, potentially giving you the high die result you needed to convince them to give you the Macguffin, but also provoking them to do the same, if also armed. The GM is free to add a new risk to represent this.

Many dials to turn and levers to pull. As always, time for more playtesting.