Paper vs Electronic Notes

 OK, for real: paper is extremely hard to beat. Paper has specific qualities: it has a higher energy cost to commit things to paper or rewrite them and you are always constrained by physical space. These might seem like disadvantages but the effects are positive: I am a firm believer in the effort principle (it's shown that students that write things down retain information better than those that write electronic notes), and you are naturally encouraged to be concise and clear.

Physical material can be physically organised - less-used stuff can be moved completely out of your field of view, you can quickly learn a specific and natural sequence of movements to access the information you need. The workflow of annotating paper notes is also just.... nicer. A mouse can never be as dextrous as the pencil. Going keyboard-only helps but maybe we don't want to learn Vim just to run elfgames.

If you're going to go electronic it needs to be because paper either isn't an option at all (impractical to physically bring the stuff with you) or you need electronic features like hypertext, word-search, indexing, file-linking, or versioning.

So personally: I'm leaning into the electronic stuff but with the mindset that you need to invest heavily in the underlying skillset+tools to make it good.

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.

The Price of Ignorance

Experimentation and discovery: important and fun elements of the game. We should examine how we can deliberately include them in our games. Traps that only interact with your Saves, and Obstacles that only interact with your Skill Check, lack these elements, and are generally not fun. Let's do something else.

I want to define a broad category of things that I can't think of a good word for. I can, however, define their likely qualities. I suspect that you could break any and all of these rules and have the thing still serve the same purpose in the game, or have the thing obey every rule and yet not serve that purpose.

• They serve as an obstacle or impediment, preventing or dissuading access to something behind them (possibly metaphorically)
  
• Their operation is deterministic, or at least somewhat predictable
• They respond to certain specific inputs, possibly in the form of triggers, sensors, behaviours, or manipulable controls
• Experimentation combined with Thinking is usually the best way to find out how they work. Possible alternatives include getting the information out of an NPC or institute that does know, or expending resources (divination spells)
• Knowing how they work is usually the best way to cease being impeded by them, though one may be able to remove the impediment (temporarily or permanently) by expending resources; either personal things like spells, or equipment, or money, or time. Or, just by taking a risk.
  
• They provide enjoyment by being something to play with.
  

Things that are part of this broad category:

• Some puzzles (if you do them right)
  
• Traps (if you do them right) 
• All manner of unique, possibly arcane, machinery in your dungeons, workshops, and wizard laboratories
• Most Black Doors
• Magic items (maybe)
  
• Golems (maybe)
• Bound devils/demons (maybe)
• A north/south passage that you can only walk through while facing south
• A 20' chasm with no bridge and the ghosts of 10,000 angry geese
• An immortal Skeleton Jelly that steadily splats wetly after you without getting tired
  

 If all the relevant information of the obstacle is immediately obvious, then you get a closely related group in which the experimentation, discovery, and play exist only within the mental process of nutting out a good solution, as you consider different possible options:

• Other puzzles (if you do them right)
• Other Black Doors
  
• Very obvious traps
• Guardians with Riddles
• Other magic items (maybe)
• A cylindrical tunnel, lined with frictionless material, sloping upwards
• A 20' chasm with no bridge
  

Some things that I believe do not belong in this group:

• People that must be spoken to and negotiated with, or killed, avoided, etc.
  
• An ordinary locked door, because everyone already knows the main options to deal with ordinary locked doors and thus require no thought. At least: the first locked door may be part of the prior category, but the 50th one will not be. Same logic applies for the 20' chasm if you see a lot of chasms.
  

You don't have to know what is behind these obstacles for them to work. The impediment may be metaphorical rather than physical (if the only reward is knowledge). I think you could potentially have something like this with nothing behind it at all, if you wish to either teach your players how something works (and equip them better for a similar obstacle) or simply waste everyone's time.

 

Unique "correct" solutions are not necessary, and in extreme cases no intended solution need be prepared at all (as long as the GM is reasonably confident that the party could come up with a way to proceed).

There also doesn't have to be an explicit penalty for doing the "wrong" thing - it's pretty much the defining quality of a trap, some puzzles use it, the only cost may be time, or it could be entirely negligible if you and your players are happy just solving puzzles. Still, I think that I would recommend incorporating some cost, no matter how small, in general.

Update:

I'm going to refer to these as Special Obstacles until further notice. That differentiates them from creatures and the most common structural features and describes their function in the universe.

Alternative names included simply "Obstacle", "Hazard", "Toy", "Diversion", "Thingy", and "Jawn".

I had another discussion about the folly of trying to categorise things and whether this is fundamentally limiting, but I don't know what to think about that yet. I think my main purpose in digging into this concept is not to try to rigorously and rigidly define the pieces that I am using to stock my adventures; it is to analyse how all these different kinds of things may be presented best and most freely when encountered. So that I can see the similarities between the game structures in different places and save myself mental work.

I also realise that the role that anything will play in your game cannot be described purely by its own qualities and place in the universe. That has a major impact, but there is also the part of how the Party relates to it, which is based on what they think of it, which the GM cannot control. Things can even be deliberately misrepresented, or miscommunication can occur - for example, the story of The Gazebo is famous. Things won't be boxed in.

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.

Load-Bearing Design, OR What If Jeremy Bentham Ran Games, OR Utilitarianism In Gaming

This is going to be a short post, simply to define a rule that I intend to refer to many times in the future. It is so blindingly obvious one may wonder why I bother to say it at all, but I do think that there is value in saying it, so that we can make a more conscious attempt to follow it and, hopefully, grok it. I will make my thesis statement in just one sentence.

 "Everything in your game should actively support the goal of making your game enjoyable."

When I say "everything", I mean "everything": whether designing or modifying systems, worldbuilding, designing monsters, constructing an adventure or employing pre-written content, populating dungeon rooms, managing the activities of major factions or any individual, describing places and situations and people, resolving each action and process, running a conventional combat encounter, interacting with the people at your table, and the act of just being a player. The rule is so all-encompassing that I can't help but see it as more of a guiding philosophy.

We already collectively know that it this is true. GMs that do not follow it tend to lose their players. Systems that do not obey it are not popular. Games evolve as pieces are replaced with new parts that serve it better. That's why we write, research, test, and share houserules, after all.

Nothing is sacred enough in gaming to justify it remaining if a better alternative can be identified; life is short and playing no game at all is better than playing a bad one. This does not mean that we should all throw out our D&D 5e books and exclusively run our own beloved heartbreaker systems - there is enjoyment in being able to just sit down and play without spending the energy to learn a new system, to draw in players that want to be able to say that they're playing D&D, and to easily transfer content between editions.

For myself, I somewhat dislike that every game uses str/dex/con/int/wis/cha (try: strength/agility/wits/willpower, as strength covers normal str/con, agility more explicitly covers mobility, and the lines between the "mental stats" have been redrawn entirely), but I still decided that my own GLOG offshoot would use those same six, for familiarity reasons. While I regard it as a necessary evil, I also went over the definitions of these attributes and rewrote them to be more coherent and useful, trying to make the most of what I had, trying to make this structure serve common player expectations and my own expectations equally well.

If I follow this philosophy, I can easily find three things that I can actually do.

1. Go over my games (after the event) and analyse what went wrong. Try to work out why, and what could be altered to fix it.
2. Keep my eyes and ears open on forums that share their modifications to game structures and consider whether these would improve my own game.
3. Listen to my players and try to meet their expectations on what they want to do.

None of this is particularly insightful or groundbreaking. I rather think I am preaching to the choir: I believe that the true rallying cry of the thing calling itself the "OSR community" is not to resurrect the most ancient game structures of our hobby - it's just to play better games.

Good luck in your perpetual self-improvement!