Levers, not Buttons: non-combat resolution doctrine and how to prep for that

Pressing buttons on the character sheet

 There's a standing complaint against the mindset of seeing the contents of a character sheet as a set of UI buttons with hard-coded effects and specific appropriate contexts for use for a player to press to create effects ingame.

The mindset is artificially confining, turning an infinitely open-ended activity into an analog computer game that also forces you to be in a room for 4 hours with other people arguing semantics. Sometimes fun if the argument is stupid enough but we should aim higher.

The thing that pains me the most is the the TTRPG genre flows from following the golden rule: "that anything may be attempted". Of course, the sticky bit is being able to actually adjudicate what happens generally. I judge systems on whether they provide efficient and flexible tools for resolving the most common gameplay situations satisfactorily and how well they equip you to step beyond them.

People run/play games adhering strictly to RAW for multiple reasons:

• the game is functionally a contest, which must be fair
• players must be able to move between different tables and get consistent rulings
• the GM, the players, and the system designers aren't operating on the same fundamental assumptions on how the game works, and possibly are all aiming to play different games
• sometimes the different game that they're trying to play is "win at system mastery so I will be the Alpha Nerd"
• the system breaks catastrophically or leaves you with no useful tools if you don't keep to the safe processes it provides
• habitual thought; GMs and players are trained to expect that things will just go badly and awkwardly if they step outside the safety of the clear printed rule. Happens a lot when people enter the hobby from reading game theorycrafting online.

Attempting to overturn this framework is one of the big banners that the OSR rallies under. But you can't just "remove" a habit (including a way of habitual way of thinking); you must replace it.

Alternatives to the button-based mindset (which can be combined in varying amounts):

• roll for skills as they are attempted - repeated successes "reveals" (permanently) that you "have" the skill and don't need to keep rolling. Repeated failures proves the opposite. (Tim Kask described this in one of his videos but I'm sure I muddled it.)
• rule of cool (I hate it)
• total loosey-goosey; whatever makes sense for the character, which is defined only in relation to several (hopefully shared) cultural touchstones. Requires a firm grip on the ideas in question and a good memory to resolve things quickly and consistently. My memory sucks, I usually play with really creative people who are trying to push the limits of the system, and I like to chew on problems, so this doesn't work for me.
• The tag is the definition: if you have the word on your sheet you Have The Thing (to a useful, consistent degree). A short step from loosey-goosey. Glog does this kind of thing.
• No- or few-keyword definitions: phrase abilities in natural language with abstract phrases that may be fitted to the game fiction and as few keywords as is necessary to make it meaningful. Glog does this for most class features, and it's my current go-to.
• (Special) Take a -2: Player wants to do something clearly related (but different) to their printed ability. DM tells them to use their normal rules with a -2 penalty. I remember seeing this frequently playing PF1, it seems practically universal. Works fine to extend rules-heavy high-granularity systems while preserving meaningful character building choices.

My current Glog-descended WIP hack, Strange Moons, is based on using "tag as definition" for skills, and classes provide "no- or few-keyword definitions". The class bit is fine, but actually using open-ended skills in a game needs a bit of structure; GMs need clear intuitions and processes that can accept them, players need to be taught how they can use them.

Firstly, do not name skills as a verb (e.g. "fishing") but from origin ("swamp fisherman"). The term is effectively a pin connecting backstory (or played history) to a sphere of implied skills; you know your way around a boat in calm conditions, you know how to maintain and use normal fishing gear, you know how to navigate a swamp. We can assume that a character will simply succeed at those things under normal and unhurried conditions (that framing is important).

If you are what you repeatedly do, you can repeatedly do what you are!

My mental model is to not see the elements of your sheet as "buttons" but as "levers". You're still ultimately looking at your sheet for things to use but now you're thinking about how to creatively and appropriately apply them to the situation - approach must be specified and gives the GM information for resolving things. "I want to do X thing, using my skills from Y."

Like a real physical lever, it lets you apply your energy more efficiently and effectively to the situation than if you lacked it (often making the difference as to whether you can do the task at all). It can be more or less appropriate for the job at hand. You can combine multiple levers (multiple different semi-appropriate skills) on the same job, but there are limits - you can't lift a truck with a crowbar, and having 20 crowbars doesn't help much.

Prepped materials and game processes that are compatible with that mindset

You make playable material with reusable components and maintain a library of those components that is optimised for quick access - and preferably committed to memory.

Locked Door toy example (untested).

• The "locked door" idea is decomposed into two different tables; the door and the lock, since you can have many ways of securing a door that aren't locks, and you can have locks on many things and different ways of putting locks on them. This makes each table more reusable.
• The door doesn't have a row for "open unlocked door" or "knock on door politely" or "cast disintegrate"; the lock doesn't have a row for "use key". The tables are for both preparing and running material when the component presents an obstacle and how it responds to obvious approaches. If the door is unlocked or the players have the key, it's not an obstacle and you don't need the table!
  • Obstacle == risk or resource cost (usually time) and some kind of meaningful choice between options. Free options shouldn't be listed unless you're likely to forget they are possible, and there should never be an option that is 100% better than another.
• to assist in prep (including sneaky-during-the-game prep), add flavour text, links to inspiring material, other tools, perchance rollers, hp-vs-break-time-vs-material-vs-size calculators, whatever
• to assist in running the game ongoing, they need to accept game notes to evolve with you over time. Include blank rows. In-game annotations are simulated with italics here. Include links to critical rules. Ensure that what you're writing is compatible with those. If you foresee that you'll be referring to multiple different pages regularly, try to combine them into a single quick lookup / flowchart document.
• The reusable component table suggests defaults, but specific examples always override these. You could say that the goblin hideout is filled with 10-second doors, secured with random rotting crossbars that contain biting grubs.

Door

Doors! They promise passage through the wall and block you from simply doing it. They may be locked or not, barred, barricaded, stuck, secret, big or small, trapped, squeaky or quiet, and perhaps talkative.
Listed values represent a strong door intended to slow down an attacker.

Approach	During	Then	Notes
Schmuck (bash, targeting lock)	6DR, 24HP / 5 minutes Noisy!	Flesh vs. fatigue	Groups don't reduce time but do eliminate fatigue  breaking down the whole door (no identifiable weakpoint) takes twice the effort
Massive damage: Breach, battering ram/explosion	as action	Noisy!
Bypass security / reach the unlocked side	5 minutes to make tool, 1 minute per blind attempt, Hard		wrong guesses about the other side make this Fruitless
normal door	3DR, 12HP, 1 minute	no fatigue	HEEERE'S JOHNNY!

In trying to make this I realised that I had made a silent assumption (that the door is strong) and that there was a lot of variation there. My personal solution was to add that fact to the top clearly, and then force an additional door type as its own row since it almost the entire rest of the table was reusable as-is. You could make multiple tables, multi-level tables, pull that information into a header block.... this one seemed good enough.
Now here's another problem I've created for myself: I've asserted that with these concrete (high-granularity) DR and HP values it will take the average adventurer to break through (good for quick resolution), but I have no actual rules to substantiate that.
The DR and HP is the part that I don't know, and the expected time is the part I do know; the times have been left in place, and the DR/HP model for them can be added back in when I'm able to do the math.
In fact, it's possible to draw a direct link between expected time needed, a default weapon, and a specific DR and HP. That can be its own general-purpose chart!

Lock

Every lock was made with its keys. The gods have thus far kept the secrets of perfect security all to themselves, via self-explanatory means.

Approach	During	Then	Notes
Rogue, pick lock	3x (finesse vs. DC 10), 1 turn per attempt	-
Strike off (padlock)	1 Action, flesh, DC 10
Break out of object	object's normal destroy time		This is the normal way

Writing this one forced me to re-examine how doors break and being distinct about whether an attacker is chopping the lock out of a door, or if they're breaking the whole thing down (e.g. in the case that it has a couple of bars securing it).

Finally, seeing this all in action

Player, faced with obstacle, suggests some plan for getting through it.

GM asks themselves:
"What's the expected skillset for solving this problem in this way?" (the prepared material might tell me)
"How much of the appropriate skillset is overlapped by what is being used?"
Finally, decide:

• pick a row on the table and use it directly
• pick a row and adjust it to be better or worse (consider annotating that line in the notes)
• create a new row and write it in
• interpolate between two existing rows  

Then you just do that. You resolved the situation consistently and flexibly and retained information to keep doing that consistently. Mission complete. 

 

Q: Where's the post introducing this obstacle-table thing properly?
A: It doesn't exist. I invented it and then refined it on the fly while writing this post. This is where it it is introduced. The top-level doctrine, the process for how it is carried out, and a material implementation of that process are too connected - they must be explained together and in relation to each other to be meaningful and useful.

Q: What's your stats and resolution system?
A: I'll tell you when I know :)

Q: Are you meant to do this with electronic or paper notes?
A: You actually run games?

Prepping from first principles, OR, I wrote this meandering advice post so that I could get the ideas out of my head and focus on writing a completely different post

 

General Advice

• Own your game. Hack, modify, extend, and experiment. Almost all the published stuff is crap. Most of the blog and youtube stuff is crap too. The best system is the one you will make.
• Time, both ingame and out of game, is the most precious resource of all. Usually, we have better things to do than spend our lives prepping games: we work on it to learn to do it better so that we can do less of it. However, if you enjoy some element of it, you can spend as long as you like; if you want to write an entire setting guide, go for it.
• GMing should not be seen as taking your turn in the barrel. You should like doing it!
• The GM's three game duties are: to keep track of what is true, to resolve what players do, and to communicate the current situation to the players... and doing these things should be an enjoyable social activity.
  • Your processes, material, and skills can be tested by how quickly and how enjoyably you can perform these three things. See prioritisation below.
• Reading blogposts and watching videos on how to run games is useful but you should never spend more time reading and watching things than prepping a game, running it, and thinking about it afterwards. After the first couple sessions, no more than 10% of your system (your entire toolkit) should be new to you at any time.
  • Three overlapping processes (can be used for the same situation) is a problem, not a solution.
• Go take a walk. It will help you think.
• What is impressive to you probably seems that way because it seems difficult. However, forcing yourself to work in difficult and unnatural ways and use content you don't understand does not give good results. Experienced GMs pick tools that work well in their own tool ecosystem: you cannot just transplant them. You cannot satisfactorily use anything not properly integrated with the rest of your kit.
• Simpler processes are better than complex ones. Less notes is better than more. Delete steps. Going faster usually means doing less.
• The Quantum Ogre, the Rule of Cool, and Skill Challenges are bad tools to reach for first, and should only be used in situations where the results really don't matter.
  • They break coherence. They are disconnected from the rest of the work, robbing you of value that you should be getting from that work. They create new information (partial information) without foundation, without examining what is implied by new established fact.
  • I believe that it's fine to decide that some things should just happen, but when a player asks "why did that happen" the answer they give themselves should never be "because the GM wanted it that way" or "because the GM rolled on a chart and that's what came up"
• There's an amazingly large amount of overlap between GMing effectively and being good at lying. Be bold and confident. 

 

The priority chart: doing less when you run games

The way that you use your system and processes, what you prepare and how; when the game is on, you must make judgements, resolve actions, and supply information, and better tools let you do this faster, by involving less steps.

Zero steps: Immediately Knowing
One step: Instant Lookup; Improvise; Lie
Two steps: Fill information (all immediately known) into memorised process, resolve
Three steps: Getting a player to give you the answer
Four steps: Look up right process, look up right information, fill it in, resolve
More: Rolling on charts, nested processes, undisguised generating new content
Failure: Searching your materials for the information that you don't know the location of; searching materials for information that may or may not even exist; doing a google search; asking chatgpt; trying to work out what the text means; trying to work out where an error happened

Special: creating things when the players know that the results will be exciting is still engaging (anticipation). Curate your random tables carefully.

Effective prep is whatever makes you able to operate higher on that chart more often.

Trying to prep everything to instant lookup (effectively, scripted content) is the obvious solution to the novice, and it only works as long as you can still navigate instantly it on the fly; the failure mode of this style is having to search it and work out what it means.
Instead, aim to adopt a toolset that lets you operate across 0-3 steps 95% of the time; material that is instantly usable for generating things as you need it is often just as good or better than the thing itself.

Do not just think about whether your processes will help you solve one step in isolation, but whether they continue to be good after an hour of using them ingame and you have a mountain of results and new information that also needs to be tracked: ongoing informational load needs to stay low.

Surprisingly, writing static material (stuff that is written for one specific sequence of events) can be effective prep, as it forces you to get more specific about the underlying facts of the material. Steal "acting is reacting" and practice how characters and factions will react to different situations.

 

 

Make a copy of this chart and empty it. Try to work out how you will achieve each of the three goals with your processes, material, and skills. This lets you identify where you have gaps in your toolkit and you can look for things that complement the parts you do have.

	Processes	Material	Skills
Keep track of truth (especially new / evolving truth)	(Goal: Simulate a world that naturally puts the players in Situations, while tracking as little player-unknown information as possible)	Game-dated searchable notes. Calendars, weather flowers, random tables, moodboards.	Creating efficiently both before and during the game. Keep information organised.
Resolve what players do	Reusable, non-overlapping, quick, believable.	Clear, concise reference information; current situation is a direct lookup to get required info.	Able to perform (Situation x Process x Material => Resolution) smoothly, seamlessly, without hesitating
Communicate effectively with players	(the one, two, many technique is a good one)	Player-visible maps (tactical mats)	Entire books have been written about this.

Hybrid levelling system: XP for Treasures

What you award XP for has a massive effect. It's one of the best controls you have to change what goes on in your game; players will naturally seek out whatever action awards it, and you can switch out that thing (or selection of things) without having to think too hard about what else will be impacted by that change.

If you award XP mainly for killing monsters, players will begin to prefer plans that include doing that. If you award XP just for getting the gold out of the dungeon, then you're free to design in a space where all methods of getting past any obstacles between the PCs and the gold are equally valid. I've seen discussions about awarding XP for investing gold into settlements; the overall progress of a campaign is then inextricably reflected in the growth of their home base. You can award increasing XP for exploring a sequence of dungeon rooms without rest. And so on and so forth.

Of course, milestone levelling, i.e. just levelling up players when it feels right, is an option. However, that doesn't work so well for games where PCs may have different levels (as mine does), and I want to take advantage of having an obvious universal carrot for my players to chase after.

XP-for-gold is good, but I'm increasingly finding that I want to be free of the burden of math in my games (related: migrate to usage dice or any other method to avoid tracking exact counts of things), as my players are rarely as happy to whip out an excel spreadsheet and keep strict notes as I am - and I certainly have too much to do to want to do that for them. I also have an interesting conflict where I want mundane purchasing decisions to remain a part of the game beyond level 2-3, and for the first big chest of gold to NOT rocket a single PC to level 10.

I think I now have a way out of this problem. I was already familiar with the large treasures of Ultraviolet Grasslands, and this week I read Arnold's post on Popcorn Levelling, which are both very interesting to me. It is these two things that I have blended together into a new system, which works as follows.

• You need Treasures (that's a keyword) to level up
• Treasures are big, fancy, named things
• They usually have history and artistic value; being magical and having a function is more optional
  
• Treasures are immediately recognisable as such! These are an obvious carrot, remember!
  
• A Treasure takes up one* inventory slot, is worth 1XP, and is worth 500 silver* for every WORD in the name
• When you carry a Treasure out of the dungeon (or can be said to have "gotten away with it") you can have the XP
• Keeping a record of all the names of the things you've thus stolen as your XP tracker is highly recommended
• Levelling is a Fibonacci progression: 2XP for level 2, an additional 3XP for 3, an additional 5XP for four, 8XP for five, and so on
• Selling the Treasure, or keeping it, or throwing it into a lake, is up to you. You get the XP either way.
  

Currently, the XP for a single treasure cannot be subdivided, and there is no guidance for how treasures should be assigned to PCs when obtaining them is usually a team effort. At the moment I'm letting my players sort it out amongst themselves, and if that starts giving bad results I'll implement an extra rule or two. I mainly just want to discourage putting all the treasures onto one PC.

It might not be reasonable to know the "true" name of a Treasure when it's first encountered; in that case a purely descriptive name (of the same number of words) might be temporarily assigned, but identifying it properly will improve things somehow. It might be able to be sold for more (or it cannot be sold for the normal amount while unidentified), gain new/improved functions, become a plot hook, be usable as a plot token elsewhere, etc.

For example, you might obtain the AERIAL PHOTOPLATE ATLAS, TURBO ENCABULATOR, and ARTICULATED MODEL DRAGON; carrying all of them at once will take up eight inventory slots, they are worth a respectable 4000 silver, a single level-1 PC that managed to make off with the lot would jump to level 3, and only need to steal two additional WORDS of Treasure to hit level 4.

This whole thing conceptually echoes the GLoG principle that you should gain abilities that reflect your adventures; now your XP tracker will reflect what you've stolen and be a nice little summary history of your successes and a reminder of where you've been. The character sheet is a living document, steeped in adventuring history.

I've now deployed this in my game and I'll get my first set of results next session. Tell me if you try it for yourself, or just say what your preferred XP system is (and why)!

* To help you set expectations with the above numbers: a warhorse, suit of plate armour, or Fireball spell would all be worth about 1000 silver, and a skilled mason can comfortably save 4 silver each week (actual income and cost-of-living are more than that). Conceptualise a silver as being worth $10 in modern money and you won't be far wrong. PCs have their strength score in inventory slots. I'm also working with the Goblin Laws of Gaming, where you stop getting class features at level 4, which is about your life expectancy anyway.

Spell Generator for GLOG

 

 I want spells to be interesting. I want encountering them to be truly memorable. I want them to have personality. I want them to be alien. I want a practical and interesting social combat structure, or minigame, to represent the sheer amount of work it takes to catch one. I came up with a procedure for this, but I found that it was so unwieldy that I immediately realised that I needed a computer to do it for me. 

Prep procedure:

1. Get a copy of this grid in whatever format is most convenient for you. You want to be able to scribble on it. That (unmarked) grid is player-facing information for anyone that knows anything about spells.

2. Click this button. [This sentence will become a link to my next post which will be a spell mutation generator]

3. Eyeball the results. Modify as you like. Maybe reroll it if you don't like it. If it tells you to look at a particular wizard school, open up this page, find that wizard, and - assuming that a school has got 12 spells with the rarest ones at the highest numbers - take the LOWER of the two numbers in parentheses and look at THAT spell.

 4. Decide on the intelligence level of the spell. If you decide that this spell is as smart as a normal person (which I think should be rare), you can break away from this process immediately and play out any negotiations with them as you would any NPC. Do you want to see the fighter get into an argument with a talking rope while the wizard tries to break it up? I do.

 5. Mark the the Needs you rolled on the table, and the point value of each one. See how these Wants are grouped into three base categories? Decide now on the personality and the appearance - these should flow naturally out of what spell it is and those Needs. Making a guess at what a spell might do from its appearance and behaviour is a part of this game.

A spell might look like anything; it might look like an animal, vegetable, mineral, person, astral body, hairball, something a cat coughed up, an ordinary tool, something that a neural net created, a creature from Spore...

OK, your prep is done.

When encountered, it works like this.

To be able to interact with a spell properly you almost always have to be able to usefully perceive its actual form. Some are plainly visible, some are not. ALL wizards have got some ability to sense them sufficiently. This ability can be developed with proper training or by doing irresponsible things to your eyes. Non-wizard spell-hunters carry a range of Doodads; each Doodad has a 1-in-6 chance of rendering a given spell visible (salt, a cat, and a layer of alchemical crystals stuck to a sheet of paper are the most common and cheapest types). Almost all spells become visible for a short period each day, but that exact time varies.

One attempt = 1 Turn (10 minutes). The wizard (that's how I'm just going to refer to the person trying to tame the spell) incurs a Stress just to try, as they begin the intense mental work of trying to utterly comprehend the being before them while simultaneously constructing a new space for them to live in and actually navigating the negotiations.

One Attempt == the wizard gets their Wis score in actions. An action may be used to try to meet a single Want on the chart (the Wizard is provided with an unmarked chart) or to ask a general question about what courses of action are more likely to be productive.

The wizard knows whether an action was successful or not. If they were successful but this did NOT yield any points, they are informed of that too.

The threshold that must be met or exceeded to win is usually the total number of available points -6.

If you FAIL, you can immediately retry by incurring an additional Stress. You can also lock any Wants that you previously achieved by taking yet another Stress (note that some Wants will stay locked for free).

If you SUCCEED the spell moves in immediately, taking the first slot that you put the Stress into. The rest of the Stress, you need to get rid of the hard way.

Rethinking Trap Procedures

Traps: they should logically exist in at least some places in our games. Kobolds are very popular at the moment, and kobolds love traps, so you almost can't get away from them. However, too often they're simply not fun.

Common potential problems:

• GMs slapping their players with damage they couldn't be reasonably expected to avoid
  
• Players neurotically searching and re-searching areas "just in case"
  
• Metagaming responses to low rolls or the GM's unfortunately-worded descriptions resulting in the PCs completely disassembling harmless bits of dungeon dressing step by step
  
• GMs slipping in false positives or intentionally suspicious language in an attempt to dissuade metagaming resulting in a lot of time pointlessly wasted
•  An absolutely huge number of perception/search rolls that don't mean anything
• Attempts to spend real time only on interesting content inherently telling the players that a particular spot is interesting, mysteriously making the heroes psychically aware that a hazard is likely near

 Existing trap procedures, each fixing some of these pitfalls, form an even longer list - which I'm not bothering to describe.

The goal, as always, is to have them exist in the game in a form that they actually make the game more fun, not less fun. This is my own attempt to design the trap process in games to mesh elegantly with existing structures. It is a modification of the process described in Many Rats On Sticks: it makes some assumptions about what you are already doing to run the game. It is also completely untested!

1. If the party proceeds cautiously, they are assumed to be trying to not set off traps accidentally, and get some indication of all traps.
   
2. If the party suspects something is a trap, they should be encouraged to investigate it without permanently expending resources (for reasons that will become clear).
   
3. Resolve their actions according to reasonable expectations, as normal
   
4. If the party begins to regularly employ techniques that DO consume resources when they poke anything suspicious, those resources should be added to the depletion process of normal exploration to indicate that they use it frequently (just like torches, and food)
   

Example: Poking every exposed surface with a long pole will not deplete the pole as a part of normal progress. If there is a trap that will grab/destroy the pole, resolve it at that point when they actually poke it. Same thing for driving livestock in front of the party; they keep the livestock until they actually run into something that would deprive them continued usage of said animal.

Example: Sprinkling dust should not deplete, or deplete extremely slowly, because you can just collect it back up and reuse it. Again, special circumstances that would make the dust irretrievable would reduce your inventory.

Example: Pouring water to look for seams, bubbles, or low patches should definitely be added to normal expenditure of consumable items unless the party has some explanation of how they are getting all the water back. 

I suggest just keeping a section of notepaper where you list their common approaches to strange things - a new technique gets written down, and a checkmark for each repetition. Outliers get added to the depletion list. Of course, it's up to you to decide about how fast each thing should be used up.

This procedure can also be combined with the Click Rule for extra excitement whether or not anyone is in actual danger when they set off a trap (say, by poking the trigger intentionally). I think I'll be using it.