Engagement & Flashback: Great RPG Mechanics

#RPGMechanics Week Three

I have sat through hundreds of in-game planning sessions. There’s an objective, maybe specific, maybe general, maybe— god forbid— we’re discussing which objective we want to approach. These can be wonderful and interesting moments to explore character and role play to show what your PC values. They can be. But those are exceptions rather than the rule. I can look back at many hours sunk into those which ended up in painful, circular, player-tension exacerbating, and time-consuming bad meetings. 

My particular pet peeve from this is the player who listens and waits until someone has proposed a line of action and then says they don’t like it. They point out corner-case problems and wild possibilities which *could* make things collapse. But when pressed for fixes or alternatives, they shrug their shoulders. I loathe them. I’ve seen many of them. Playing them at the ttrpg table made me that much more ready to flip out when people did this in actual work meetings in the real world. 

Don’t get me wrong– I love it when a plan comes together. There’s few things more satisfying as a GM than to watch the players consider a problem, develop a solution, and reveal how their individual talents can save the day. But setting a planning session into motion is like lighting a stick of dynamite. Sometimes the players gel and manage to extinguish that fuse. More times the dynamite goes off and blows a hole in the session. 

So that has long been an established problem that GMs have worked through, usually by degrees of heavy-handed riding the whip. 

Blades in the Dark provided another solution and one, honestly, which completely changed my approach to this at every table I run. You have a job, a score, an objective. You can keep choosing that tight by filing down the number of options. Once you know generally what you want to do, you define the kind of task and what’s your key element. Then we go to the Engagement Roll. 

That roll is based on the challenge of the situation, the resources and information you have, and preparation (but only in the loosest sense). Good stuff gives you more dice, bad stuff takes away dice. You roll a pool of d6s and check the result. If the highest die is a six, we start the scene on the job with your characters in control. They’ve gotten past the easy layers and are in the more challenging part, but in a good spot. On a 4-5 it's more a mixed bag– you start out with some things at risk. You have to overcome a standard challenge right away. On a 1-3 we drop you in the shit. You’re in but things have gone wrong and the situation’s desperate. 

But it's the other half of the system which completes this and makes things brilliant. Players can flashback to preparations they’ve made. They can improvise these on the fly. These can cost stress and require a test, but that’s dependent on how wild or impactful that prep is. Combining that with the flexible loadout system makes the players feel OK about rolling into a situation without having spent an hour working out all the possibilities. 

And at least at my tables, the secret is that flashbacks don’t get done that often. Sometimes PCs will get jammed in a corner or a player will have a particularly clever concept. But flashbacks IMHO provide a mental cushion for risk-adverse players. It’s the GM saying, “let’s get to playing, I’m not going to screw you over, and you’ll have the chance to pull cool stuff out.” And it works– and I promise you I use it in just about every game I run. We still do meetings and planning discussions, but I know I can wrap it up and move it to the play if that begins to look like it is going to blow up. 

Side-note: Blades isn’t the first game to lean on flashbacks as a key element. I think that would be Leverage, which is an amazing ground-breaking game by a dynamite team of designers. It uses that to model the reveals of the TV shows it's based on. There may be others, but that’s the one I remember.