Physical Representations for Complex Tasks Part 2: Time

I created two tools to provide something physical for your tabletop RPG scenes and I realized that they can be used for any system to help you run your games. So I wanted to talk about how you can do just that. Furthermore I will go into how you can use the mechanics, to help inspire your creativity to liven up complex tasks or add complications to encounters and scenes.

The first mechanic, named boards, track the progress of a complex task with cards being added or disappearing from the spread of cards. You can read more about it here from my first post about this topic.

The second mechanic I use to encapsulate a scene is a countdown clock with cards. This system is much simpler than boards. 

1. First an amount of time is set and everyone at the table is informed. 

2. Each round of actions lasts 1 minute and each player will say what their character is doing during that round.  The Dealer/GM will set the real time between each card pull and can pull a card whenever they feel an appropriate amount of time has been given to respond.  

3. When the Dealer feels it is time to pull a card, draw one card and reduce the time remaining depending on the suit:

   1. Diamonds or clubs, 1 minute passes, or 1 round

   2. Hearts or the Black Joker, 2 minutes pass, or 2 rounds

   3.  Spades or Red Joker, no time passes, or 0 rounds.

4. When all the time runs out, the scene is done and the danger presents itself. The players now have a new problem to deal with.

Here is an example of how this works in a game:

Emily, Jace, and Tasha sneak into a noble's house and just make it to the bedroom when they hear the front door open.  The Dealer decides a reasonable time until the action occurs and states it to the group.  The Dealer does not always need to state what will occur exactly, only that something will occur.  This builds tension as the clock ticks down.

In this case the Dealer decides 4 minutes.  Emily searches the desk for the documents they need while Jace goes to check the hallway to see how much time they have left.  Tasha also begins her search starting with the bed, chest, and bedside tables.  The Dealer feels like these actions would take about a minute and draws a card: it’s hearts, meaning the group took 2 minutes and now only 2 minutes remain.  Tasha abandons her search and starts unlocking the window.  Emily finds the documents and begins copying the signature. Jace returns and pockets some jewelry. The Dealer draws again, this time clubs, 1 minute left.  Emily finishes her forging job and applies the noble house’s seal to complete the look.  Jace starts tossing the room to make it look like a regular burglary.  Tasha doesn't decide what to do in time and the Dealer draws again: spades, the team got lucky.  They all make a bolt through the window and begin the climb down.  The dealer draws the final card, clubs, and therefore the timer ends.  The noble enters the room, and the event is complete.

Now this system can be used for a variety of different time scales to match whatever your players are doing.  Here are a few example situations:

The wraith that has been plaguing the nearby town has an effigy somewhere in the nearby forest, the effigy is only visible in twilight or at night but the wraith appears every night. The players begin their search during sunset, and night begins 2 hours after.  Set each round to be about 30 minutes as they choose what to do to either search or prepare for the coming wraith.

The boat the heroes are on is heading straight for a whirlpool.  They just started escorting the few passengers onto a helicopter to escape.  They have 3 minutes and each round is 30 seconds.

The large stone doors of the temple are beginning to close at a cinematically slow pace.  The players have 30 seconds to reach the doors and dodge past all of the skeletal guards.  Each round is 6 seconds.

Health is not the only resource the players should lose. What are some other tools you use to build tension in a scene or encounter? Let me know in the comments or on reddit or @C22system. If you like what I am doing let me know and follow me @c22system or join my discord for C22(https://discord.gg/gAJpjZXuYq)

Physical Representations for Complex tasks Part 1: Boards

I created two tools to provide something physical for your tabletop RPG scenes and I realized that they can be used for any system to help you run your games. So I wanted to talk about how you can do just that. Furthermore I will go into how you can use the mechanics, to help inspire your creativity to liven up complex tasks or add complications to encounters and scenes.

The first mechanic I made, I named a board. If you have played Blades in the Dark, it works very similarly to clocks, but with a bit more depth. If you have not, do not worry.

A board represents a complex task, something that requires more than two Skill Checks to be completed. A board is constructed by first drawing 3 or more cards from the Dealer’s Event Deck, or a standard deck of playing cards for other systems, and placing them in a row. The Players start from the left and progress to their goal on the right.  The goal should be marked somehow, be it with a different card a bottle or your favorite figure.  This goal may shift, or remain stationary, it depends on the type of task being performed.

A character will perform Skill Checks to progress along the board. With each success, they place their successful card, or some other marker on the furthest open spot on the left side of the board.  If they fail a check, they place their card, or marker, face down on the furthest open slot on the right side of the board, preventing the character from reaching that level of success for this task.

When the character places a card on the goal spot or the last open spot, the complex task is completed, and the results are described.

Here is an example of a board in use within my system.

The Dealer sets up an small but difficult board of 4 in length with the goal card on the third slot.  This requires the Players to have 3 successes before two failures.  Emily starts by using Investigation – Mechanical Working and gets a 6 on the check, and she successfully identifies the trigger device. Next, she uses a Tinker Disable Device Check to try to cut the wire and gets a 5.  Her hand slips and she cuts the wrong wire. The bomb remains ticking but doesn’t explode. Her crew member Jake attempts to calm her down with a Persuasion Clam check to help her succeed.  Jake succeeds with an 8. Her other crewmate Chelsea attempts to repair the wire with Tinker Repair Skill, but she fails with a 3.  The wire touches part of the circuit board, triggering the explosion.  Their professor comes in the room an announces how they would all be dead had this not been a simulation. Better luck next time, Emily and team.

Using the cards to inspire your players

Since the board is a physical thing that can be touched and manipulated, it gives a reference to the Player’s actions. By marking which card your Skill Check was, you can see how you contributed, or did not, to the team’s efforts. Finally, it also allows the whole table to see what it would take to complete a task, it makes the goal visible, clear, and tangible.

I often use boards for preparation or to complete a scene. Lets say the party is setting up an ambush. I set out a board of 4 cards, with no goal, and ask the party to offer up Skills they would use to complete the task. This inspires the Players to offer the Skill checks and explain their reasoning, rather than me asking for a set of Skills. This has two effects, it allows the Players to be more involved in creating the world and the story since they decide what their ambush looks like, both narratively and mechanically. Secondly, it draws on the creativity of the table rather than just the GM.

To resolve the scene, take each Skill Check contributed as one of the cards for the board. You do not need to indicate whether each individual check was a pass or fail at this time, you will take the collection of all Skill Checks and their results and create a whole unique resolution based on the inputs of the players. In this way you can pull from the Player’s creativity to make the resolution description that much more unique.

Using the cards to inspire yourself

You’ve done 5 scenes already this session and you are running out of creative steam. Let the cards help.

Instead of having the cards face down, just representing spaces to be filled, you can play the cards face up and use the suits as a basis for your check. Here are some examples of how each suit can inspire you.

Diamonds is Power. Think about how mental or physical power can either cause or solve the problem. Maybe there is a rusted sewer grate blocking the way. The players could either use physical strength to rip the weakened gate apart or instead they use their mental power to devise a way to accelerate the rust, targeting the weak points so it falls off.

Spades is Flexibility. Think about how mental or physical flexibility can either cause or solve the problem. Perhaps a country has closed its borders due to worsening relations with the neighboring country. The players could use mental flexibility to talk and falsify a story to get past border patrol, or maybe they can use their physical flexibility to slip through less secure sections of the border.

Hearts is Resilience. Think about how mental or physical resilience can either cause or solve the problem. Perhaps the party is moving through a spider infested cave to clear it out. The walls are thick with spikes dripping with poisons but they use their physical resilience to endure any of the small scrapes they experience. Conversely, their mental resilience allows them keep their wits and not be afraid of the dangers that jump out of the dark.

Clubs is social. Think about how social presence or social charisma can either cause or solve the problem. Perhaps the party is investigating the testimonies of some street urchins when a gang comes up to mug the party. The party not being well armed, uses their social presence to appear tougher than they are and intimidate the gang off, or using their social charisma, they make friends with the gang to see why they are robbing people in the first place.

This is just one way you can use cards to spice up your tabletop games. In the next post, I will talk about how to use cards to make a countdown clock to drive tension in a scene.

Try these out and see how it enhances your game. Let me know how it went in your sessions if you do. Finally, if you find an improvement at your table, tell me about it! I would love to know more ways to enhance my gaming.

As always, thanks for reading and if you like what I am writing about, follow me on Twitter @c22system or join my discord for C22. If you want me to talk about a particular design topic let me know!

What you need for every encounter

Today I took the time to write up a section for the Dealer section for my player handbook for my system C22 and I thought this section would help with many other GMs and designer with their encounter design. If you have any suggestions for what I missed, or how this is different in games you’ve run, let me know in the comments below.

At its heart, every encounter is a challenge, something we are unsure if they can overcome.  We are playing it out to see how and if they resolve it. For every encounter you need three things: a goal, a threat, and a stake.

  The goal is usually the simplest aspect of the encounter.  What do the characters want? It likely the giant gem sitting on the pedestal over there, or they want to go to the Duchesses’ gala. In either case, the goal is clear to you the Dealer.  Now that is where the important part of encounter design is.  The goal needs to be clear to the players.  If they were trapped in the room and the ceiling was lowering until they took the gem, the gem cannot be hidden behind a secret panel if it is the goal.  In the same case for the party, the players need to know it is happening and that they need to attend. But a goal allow is not enough, a gem on a pedestal can just easily be taken, while a party can easily be attended once you the time and place. A goal itself does not warrant an encounter, more is needed, there needs to be a threat.

The threat is what stops the players from reaching their goal. A combat encounter is the easiest way to imagine a threat. The dragon, the bear, and the group of bandits are all threats. In our pedestal example, there could be a lava rive between the character and the gem, or a giant being made entirely of ice.  These threaten the player and prevent them from reaching their goal. One pieces that make threats some of the most fun and interesting parts of encounter design is that they do not need to be immediately clear.  It is important that players know there is a threat, but what that threat is can be revealed later in an exciting surprise.  But to truly make a threat work, there needs to be something to threaten. There needs to be a stake, and while the threat can remain hidden, the players need to know what is at stake. 

  The stake is why there is a chance of failure; the reason a check is required. In most cases, the stake is the hardest part of an encounter to create, but something that will help us is that our threat and our stake our intertwined. Imagine again, our gem on a pedestal, let us say that if the gem is not replaced after it is removed then a trap is triggered, causing the door to close. There is your stake, the character’s time is at risk. You could instead have something like a boulder rolling down to crush the character as they run away with the prize, and now their life is a stake, but that is not practical in many dungeons. In the same case with the party, there needs to be something more prohibiting the players from attending, perhaps an invite list.  So now they need to get an invite.  Time can be the stake here but let us say they already have someone willing to sell them the invite for an absorbent fee, then wealth can be their stake. If they do not get an invite by other means, they will lose a large amount of wealth, or delay their goals even further by missing the party.

In both previous cases, time made a good stake, but there are plenty of others that can work when you need them.  To list a few, time, wealth, health, progress on their other goals, gear, their companions, or the potential rewards. When we go through the different encounter types, we will discuss more, how these different stakes can be applied to different encounters.

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