Non-Stop: Great RPG Mechanics

#RPGMechanics: Week Four

So this is a shaggy dog story. In the mid-2000s I was stuck in a kind of middle place between the trad of D&D 3.5, Mutants & Masterminds, and Exalted versus the more abstract, storygame Action Cards house system we’d been playing with for a few years. I was definitely leaning towards the latter side, slowly planing off the rough edges and over-elaborate ornamentation of nearly every game we played. 

I was following some designers online, though I wasn’t even aware of The Forge. By I remember reading Robin Laws talking about the proto-version of GUMSHOE and it really struck me. When they did the pre-order for The Esoterrorists I snapped it up. It actually arrived when I had very little in the way of other rpg materials. Our house had caught fire in the meantime and I lost the bulk of my books. So I poured over it and the few other things I borrowed from folks. 

The things which struck me most about GUMSHOE, mechanics aside was, a kind of honesty about the way games were often played. Here’s what it, in effect said (in my words):

Yes, GMs set up skill and problem-solving challenges which players have to overcome in order to move forward. They often tie these to rolls. Which means that when the players miss the roll, either they get stuck or they have to roll & roll again. That’s not just a GM-skill question, lots of modules have these things built into them.

And what usually happens is the GM ends up handwaving things, shifting the rules, or fudging the results. And you don’t have to do that. Instead you have to think about those problems in games differently.

GUMSHOE’s solution is not rolling. It’s building competency for those kinds of things– making them a moment to showcase what the characters are good at. Instead of these moments stopping the game, they spotlight what character’s can do. If something is necessary to move the action forward, the players have it. Any roll or spend isn’t about a binary pass/fail but about how well they do it, how much they know, how cool they look doing it.

And I know that seems obvious in an age of Fail Forward, but the concept that you’d approach play so that players always got the clue or element which gave them passage to the next location or scene is actually kind of radical. It was radical for a lot of GMs at the time. I remember some GMs on RPG Geek saying, a few years after Esoterorists and Trail of Cthulhu came out, that GUMSHOE solved a problem which didn’t exist. 

It did exist– I can attest to that from local campaigns. I can attest to that from the way I’d been taught to run and did run for a long, long time. I can attest to that from a half-dozen different rpg conventions I went to where inevitably the action would come to a grinding halt based on a shitty roll. 

I remember a player in a Champions game with a killing attack trying to quietly burn through the roof of a warehouse so that the team could get a jump on the villains. And for three straight rounds they rolled 1 Body on their disintegration attack, not enough to get through. And we all sat they as turn after turn passed. 

And I was GMing and no one thought there was anything wrong with it, except the player getting increasingly angry at their dice. 

But I honestly believe that GUMSHOE and other games have changed the table dynamic, even for OSR games. Even if a game isn’t explicitly fail forward, it says keep the play moving. There are consequences for rolls, the players have to take another tact, the world is sandboxy enough that things can’t become an absolute barrier. MOre often now than in the last century adventures takes into consideration what happens when there’s failure– and it's usually more than just it takes a lot of time. 

So maybe what I’m talking about isn’t a specific mechanic, it is more an approach to how we play. GUMSHOE provided one solid and clear approach to avoiding roadblocks and keeping play going noon-stop.