All right, kiddos. Change of plans. Big f$&%ing surprise, right? I change plans so often that changing plans practically is the plan. If I actually followed a plan just once, that would be a change of plans.

But this one’s your fault, so don’t give me any lip about it. I wanted to give you my simple step-by-step process for adjudicating wilderness travel. You’ve all been asking me about that one forever. But the volume on that general question’s gone up a few decibels since I did that AOWG thing. Because the players spend a lot of time wandering between dots on the map in an AOWG. Unless you’ve got a broken group of players like mine who just dick around in town every week that is.

Problem is, you ain’t ready for Angry’s Simple Step-by-Step for Crossing the Overworld. Not based on the questions you’ve been asking me lately about wilderness travel. And about the f$&%ing Tension Pool. I’m still getting questions about that. And you all wonder why I tried to make those mechanics as simple as possible. Could you imagine what would have happened if I made them complicated? Holy mother of f$&%.

Anyway, it’s clear that a lot of you still don’t know how to handle some very basic GMing s$&%. And the particular s$&% you don’t know how to handle today, unfortunately, underlies my wilderness travel adjudication process. Well, it actually underlies all of my adjudications. And it should underlie yours too.

I call it the Arbitrary Game Turn. And I’m going to explain it today. And then, if you’re really good, I’ll tell you how to get your players from point A to point B on your campaign map. Or, at least, strain them through an owlbear’s digestive tract somewhere in between.

Talking TTRPG Turn Order for the Umpteenth F$&%ing Time

It’s back-to-basics time. Again. Real basics. S$&% I covered a long, long time ago. And then compiled into the definitive work on game mastery: Game Angry: How to RPG the Angry Way. Why? Because some of you are having trouble applying the basics to anything but the most basic parts of the game.

So, I told you there’s two basic GMing skills, right? Narration and adjudication. Describing the world and dealing with the s$&% the players do to it. And I told you that TTRPGs follow a basic turn-order, right? Something like:

1. The GM describes the situation (Narration).
2. The players decide what their characters do.
3. The GM determines how those actions work out (Adjudication).
4. The GM describes the resulting new situation (Narration).

Do that over and over for four hours and you’ve got yourself a game of the tabletop role-playing variety. Go you!

And you’ve got that down cold, right? You can handle that. At least, you can when the characters only take quick, simple actions. Actions like stabbing orcs, picking locks, and searching rooms. But when the players take long, complicated actions, suddenly, you lose your f$&%ing mind. You can handle the party searching a dungeon room for discarded treasure. But if the party’s searching the hills north of town for a ruined abbey, you’re clueless. When the fighter stabs a foe, that’s easy. But when the bard wants to ruin a foe’s reputation in town? You got nothing. When the party picks the lock on the door and heads to the next room, no sweat. Spend two weeks walking from Tinyton to Biga$&topolis? You’re sweating.

What if I told you that there’s no actual difference between any of those things I carefully paired up? Searching a room and searching the wilderness? No difference. Stabbing a foe and smearing a foe. Same thing. Walking between rooms and walking between towns? That’s a horse apiece. You resolve all that s$&% the same way. With the same amount of effort. And the same amount of table time.

It’s down a thing I call The Arbitrary Game Turn.

Arbitrary Turn-Taking

Let’s be honest here: a TTRPG plays out over a series of turns. I know, it’s a narrative game and we like to pretend it’s not a bunch of turn-taking when we’re outside of combat and we even desperately wish we could get rid of initiative so it didn’t feel so damned turn-takey mechanical. But that’s how it be. Every game’s about taking turns. And TTRPGs aren’t any different.

Not that the illusion’s not important. All that narrative crap that lays over the turn-taking — the veneer of story and setting — that’s what lends every in-game action meaning and context. And that’s what creates emotional engagement. But it’s still an illusion. And, as the GM, you’re the guy behind the curtain pulling the levers and operating the fire-breathing ghost head thing.

You’ve got to understand this. Hide it from your players, sure, but understand it.

An Arbitrary Game Turn starts when a player declares an action. That is, when the player identifies something they want in the game world and decides what their character’s going to do to make it happen. And then they communicate that to you. For example:

I think there might be hidden treasure in this room; I search the room.

I want to make an herbal remedy for this disease; I search the woods for herbs.

While it seems like those two actions are somehow different — because searching the woods for herbs is big and complicated — they’re not. At my table, those two things would play out exactly as follows:

Player: I search the room.
Me: Roll a Wisdom (Perception) check.
Player: I got sixteen.
I check my notes, see if a 16 turns up anything, see if there’s any hazards the character might blunder into, take note of the time-consuming action, and then…
Me: After ten minutes of thorough searching, you find a leather purse. It’s got 17 silver coins inside and a small piece of cut rosy quartz.
Player: Yay!

Player: I search the woods for medicinal herbs.
Me: Roll a Wisdom check and add your proficiency bonus for your herbalism kit proficiency.
Player: I got sixteen.
I check my notes, see if a 16 turns up anything, see if there’s any hazards the character might blunder into, take note of the time-consuming action, and then…
Me: After four hours of thorough searching, you find enough herbs to make seven doses of medicine and a small piece of cut rosy quartz.
Player: Huh?
Me: I think I screwed up the cut-and-paste job in my notes.

I know it seems weird to say a four-hour search in the dangerous wilderness is the same, mechanically, as a ten-minute search in a nice, safe dungeon. But in terms of running the game at the table, it’s totally true.

The Decision’s Not the Important Thing;
The Decision’s the Only Thing

In my seminal work on action adjudication, I told you to never use more than one die roll to resolve any action. However long or weird or complicated the action, you need one — and precisely one — die roll to find out what happened. And I said that because TTRPGs aren’t video games or sports. They’re not about hitting the right buttons with the right timing or about throwing a ball into a goal with perfect aim. They’re not about reflexes and coordination. A TTRPG’s about figuring s$&% out and making decisions. And that’s all a TTRPG’s about. The only skill a player has to help them is their brain skill.

That’s why, by the way, letting players play characters smarter than themselves — while technically possible with a smart GM and enough Intelligence checks — is a misguided, stupid thing to do. You can do it, but you shouldn’t. Because then all the player’s doing is maintaining a character sheet and generating random numbers. And yeah, that player is fun to run a game for.

Rolling dice is fun, but it’s not interesting. It’s tense, but it’s not challenging. It’s not meaningful or rewarding. It’s just watching funny shapes bouncing around until they reveal the whims of a chaotic universe. Once a player figures something out and makes a decision, all the player-participation parts of the game are done. For the moment, anyway.

The characters learn that some of the locals in town have caught the rattlelung. And the players want to help out. Or make money. One player realizes she wasted a perfectly good proficiency choice on the useless herbalism kit. But suddenly, it occurs to her that herbalists can make medicine. So, she says she’d like to make medicine. She figured s$&% out. Good for her. The GM says, “well, you can make medicine with an herbalism kit. But, as the name kind of implies, you need herbs to do that. Do you have herbs?” The player says, “no. But don’t herbs grow in the wilderness? And isn’t there wilderness outside of town in the form of those woods we passed on the way in?” The GM says, “yes, the wilderness is the primary place where herbs grow and the woods are indeed a kind of wilderness wherein herbs grow.”

That’s the interesting part done. All that’s left is to determine the plan’s outcome. And there’s no reason to stretch that s$&% out. You — the GM — could make the player roll three checks or roll a check for every in-game hour, but that’s just rolling a bunch of extra dice. There’s no choice involved. “You haven’t found any herbs yet; do you keep looking for herbs?” That ain’t a choice. That’s press-X-to-continue bulls$&%.

Can things happen to a character while they execute a plan? Bad things? Or things that change how s$&% plays out? Sure. Characters can get attacked by owlbears when they wander in the woods. But characters can get bitten by spiders or jumped by wandering monsters in dungeon rooms too. If it’s a particularly dangerous patch of woods, maybe a complication arises. But if the players are searching a ruined alchemy lab and there’s broken glassware and bits of rusty metal and strange fluids around, complications might arise there too.

But the idea that a longer, more complex action needs more distractions and complications? I get it, but it’s wrong. It’s a bad way to run a game. “You came up with a clever plan, but the plan will take a few days to execute so I’m going to distract you and waste table time for the next session-and-a-half?” Whee! What fun!

Besides, modern GMs really suck at assessing the likelihood of random danger assailing the players when they venture more than spitting distance from town. They always greatly overestimate the short-term danger and greatly underestimate the long-term danger.

What good is it, from a gameplay perspective, to fling five times as many complications and distractions at the herbalist as the treasure hunter? Both had a single goal and a single plan and were willing to pay a cost or take a risk. The herbalist’s plan isn’t actually bigger or more complex. It’s still just based on one use of one skill and one interaction with the environment. It only seems bigger because of the size of the environment and the amount of time it entails.

Time’s an illusion. Game time doubly so. An action isn’t a unit of time. It’s not measured in time. It’s measured in decision. One choice, one action.

That said, understand this: when I said every action needs only one die roll, I didn’t literally mean you should only roll one die once. I meant you should resolve the whole action with one resolution step. But that’ll be clearer in a moment.

The Arbitrary Game Turn Order

As noted, an Arbitrary Game Turn starts when a player declares an action. And it ends when it ends. I’ll get to that in a little while. In between, there’s three phases. And as I explain them, I’ll use two examples:

I think there might be hidden treasure in this wrecked alchemy lab; I search the room.

And:

I want to gather herbal ingredients for medicine; I forage in the woods near town for herbs.

Step 1: Evaluate the Action

First, you evaluate the player’s action. You make sure you know everything you need to know to resolve that action. This is when you make sure you know exactly what the player’s trying to accomplish and how. And this is when you ask yourself whether the action can succeed and whether it can fail and whether there’s a risk or cost or consequence. And, if you’re using the Tension Pool, this is when you determine whether the action is Time-Consuming and whether it’s Reckless.

Point is, this is when you ask yourself — and the player — all the questions you need to ask so you can work out what happens in the game. And make sure the player’s fully informed about the action they’re proposing. Sometimes, you’ll even negotiate the risks and rewards with the player.

Both of the example actions are clear. They can succeed and they can fail. Because I keep track of time and introduce random complications based on time and risk — the Tension Pool makes this s$&% easy, kids — both actions have a cost. They use up precious time. That might be true even if I wasn’t using the brilliant Tension Pool for some crazy-a$& reason. I mean, some GMs roll for random encounters every hour. And spells with long durations and light sources expire when the players spend time doing things.

The treasure hunter’s action is Time-Consuming and Reckless. And he’s got to know that. So, I say, “it’s going to take you several minutes to search the room and there’s a lot of broken glass and jagged metal and strange fluids around. Rooting around could be dangerous.” He says he’s okay with that.

The herbalist’s action is also Time-Consuming. But foraging for a few hours in the woods near the town isn’t particularly Reckless. I know some GMs think differently, but I’m a smart GM. I know better. Don’t be one of those other GMs. That said, the area near town is safe enough, but if she goes into the deep woods, she might blunder into danger. Of course, the deeper she penetrates into the woods, the more likely she is to turn up the rare herbs she needs. So, I say, “you’ll be out in the forest for a few hours at least. Possibly longer.” And she says, “that’s fine, but I want to be back before dark.” I nod and then say, “the woods close to town are pretty safe, but the unspoiled woods farther from town will probably yield more herbs. But there’s a chance you’ll run into trouble if you go too far from town.”

She thinks this over for a minute and then says, “I’m going to gather the rest of my party. ‘Come on, guys,’ I say, ‘we’re going flower-picking in the dangerous woods. Watch my back, okay?’” Once she’s bullied her allies into accompanying her, she says, “okay, we’ll concentrate our search in the deeper woods.”

Step 2: Resolve the Action

Once the player has given their final answer — that is, you’ve reached an agreement with the player about what they’re doing and how — it’s time to resolve the action. That is, it’s time for you to figure out how the action actually turns out. This is the dice-rolling phase.

The treasure hunter rolls his Wisdom (Perception) check. Meanwhile, I pick up the Tension Pool dice — plus one more — and roll them to see if a Complication arises. Or I roll for a random encounter. Or whatever. A Complication arises. I consult my notes or pull something out of my a$&. I ask the player to make a Constitution saving throw. “Why,” he asks. I just shrug and say, “don’t worry about it, just roll.” He rolls and announces the result. I roll another die. And eventually, I know how everything happened.

Meanwhile, the herbalist rolls her Wisdom check and adds her proficiency bonus for her herbalism kit proficiency. I go through the same rigamarole with Tension Dice and random encounters or roll to see how many hours pass or whatever. I consult my notes and make a few other rolls. Scribble a few things down.

In other words, I do all the little mechanical s$&% behind the screen that tells me exactly how everything worked out. I don’t communicate with the players yet. Not until I know everything. I’m just doing math and paperwork right now.

Step 3: Describe and Apply the Results

With the entire action entirely resolved, all that’s left is to tell the players what happened and apply the results.

I tell the treasure hunter:

You spend ten minutes rooting through the detritus of the ruined lab. While you’re searching, you scratch yourself on a jagged piece of metal. The seemingly harmless cut blossoms with burning pain that spreads up your arm and into your shoulder. Take three points of poison damage. The pain dulls a little but doesn’t subside. It’s not getting any worse though. So you finish your search, turning up 17 silver coins and a piece of rosy quartz.

And I tell the herbalist:

You and your party strike out from town into the woods. You spend a day foraging for rare herbs, moving slowly through the natural splendor of the flavor text around you. Your allies keep watch while you search. By evening, you return to town with enough herbs to make seven doses of medicine. And, just by luck, one of your allies happened to find a piece of rosy quartz half-buried in the ground.

And that’s it. That’s how you resolve an Arbitrary Game Turn. Any Arbitrary Game Turn.

Except…

How Long is an Arbitrary Game Turn

It should be pretty obvious by now that if you’re counting real-life minutes at the table, every Arbitrary Game Turn chews up the same amount of time. Stabbing an orc, searching a room, foraging for herbs, or traveling for six days to the next town. All the same.

In terms of game time, though, the answer’s a lot different. Because every turn chews up an arbitrary amount of in-world time. Hence Arbitrary Game Turn. Normally, in-game time doesn’t matter so much. It doesn’t matter if the players spend four hours or eight hours out in the woods hunting for herbs. But, sometimes, it does matter. And smart GMs make it matter. Foraging in the woods is a lot different at night when the monsters come out and you can’t see anything. And foraging in the woods for a week means the party eats a week’s worth of rations.

Most Arbitrary Game Turns run until they’re done. You evaluate and resolve the action and narrate away all the time it took to get that action done. Might be seconds or minutes or hours or days. Doesn’t matter. You just sweep those hours or days away in a sentence. Done and done.

But some actions change as time goes on. Like foraging in the woods. In those cases, you can establish the timeframe upfront as I did with my herbalist player. Remember, she said she wanted to be back before dark? Otherwise, you can just run the action out until something changes. Something that makes the decision the player initially made different.

The sun is getting low in the sky. You have enough time to get back to town with the seven doses of medical herbs you’ve already gathered, or you can keep hunting into the evening. You’ll have disadvantage for the failing light and you’ll probably have to camp in the woods. What do you do?

Finally, sometimes the players themselves will intervene and decide enough is enough. There’s no accounting for it really. Players are just f$&%ing weird sometimes. But it’s hard for the players to abort an action halfway through a week if you sum up the entire week in one line of text. So, you’ve got to be ready to retcon things a little bit if the players backpedal.

Me: You strike out into the woods and start foraging. The morning passes. At noon, you rest and refresh yourselves by a small stream and then resume. As the sun starts to sink in th…
Player: Whoa! I didn’t want to waste the whole day on this? How much medicine can we make with what we found by noon?
I do some quick math.
Me: You can make three doses.
Player: That’s enough for right now. We head back to town at noon.
Me: Okay. You reach town an hour after noon…

If for some reason, an Arbitrary Game Turn’s aborted before it’s done, it’s usually a pretty easy call to adjust the action for partial completion. If that even means anything. If you’re foraging all day, it stands to reason you don’t just find everything you’re going to find at once at the end of the day. But if you abort picking a lock? Well, that lock’s still locked. That’s actually why you resolve the whole Arbitrary Game Turn first. It’s a lot easier to adjust an already resolved action than it is to go back and decide how to resolve a partial action. And it usually takes the same amount of table time. That’s why I know how a whole day of travel’s going to go before the first random encounter on the road leaps out and eats the wizard.

And the game just flows better if you follow the whole Evaluate, Resolve, Narrate cycle and occasionally adjust an already resolved action as needed.

Thus, an Arbitrary Game Turn lasts…

• • …until the action’s resolved.
  • …until something changes.
  • …until the players intervene.

Interruptions and Encounters

Sometimes, the players have to stop in the middle of long, complex actions to deal with some s$&%. For example, while the party’s foraging in the woods, they might wander near an owlbear. And that means determining if the party sees the owlbear, if the owlbear sees the party, doing the whole intercept-or-evade thing, rolling initiative, playing out a combat, and making new characters.

Technically, that treasure hunter was interrupted. He cut himself in the midst of his search. Instead of resolving the whole thing behind the screen, I could have interrupted him.

As you root through the laboratory debris, you feel a scrape on the back of your hand. A minor cut. Or so it seems… but make a Constitution saving throw! Suddenly, burning pain spreads through the wound and up your arm. Three points of poison damage…

Interruptions — be they random encounters or minor happenstances or interesting diversions — don’t usually change the action itself. The poison deals its damage and then the treasure hunter keeps searching. The owlbear eats the wizard and goes to sleep and the herbalist can go on foraging with her remaining friends. But sometimes, the interruption does change things. And you just handle that like any other aborted Arbitrary Game Turn.

Fighter: That owlbear wrecked us! We’re heading back to town.
Herbalist: But it’s only been four hours. There’s still hours of daylight left.
Fighter: Questor is dead!
Herbalist: He’ll still be dead when we get back to town. What’s the hurry?
Fighter: …
Herbalist: No one really liked Questor anyway.
Bob: … ouch.
Herbalist: Sorry, Bob.
Fighter: We’re heading back to town. Right now.
Herbalist: How much medicine can I make with what I’ve already found?
Me: You can make three doses of medicine.
Herbalist: Well, I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to Mrs. Wallaby and her four sick children.
Bob: I’m sure Mrs. Wallaby won’t say, ‘well, no one liked little Walter anyway.’
Herbalist: I said I was sorry, Bob!

While He’s Doing That…

There’s one last issue that needs special attention. Individual actions versus party actions. Most TTRPG parties act as a single, cohesive… bwahahahahahaha! Nope. Sorry. Couldn’t finish that sentence with a straight face.

Most TTRPG parties are dysfunctional to the point of being useless. But, in theory, they usually act as a single entity. They delve into the dungeon together, travel across the wilderness together, fight together, ransack together, and so on. But sometimes, individual characters do individual things by their individual selves. And that leaves a bunch of other characters standing around with their individual thumbs up their individual a$&es. Just waiting for the end of the Arbitrary Game Turn.

Once one player starts an Arbitrary Game Turn by doing a thing, you — the GM — have got to know what the rest of the party is up to. You’ve always got to know where everyone is and what they’re doing at all times. If only so you know who’s in the kill zone when the Arbitrary Game Turn takes a turn for disaster. While the treasure hunter’s searching the room, what’s the wizard doing? What’s the fighter doing? Are they just standing around waiting? Are they helping? Keeping a lookout? Or are they moving on because they’re tired of the treasure hunter scrounging for copper pieces everywhere and don’t feel like standing around while he wades through a medieval fantasy toxic waste site?

So, during that evaluate the action phase of every Arbitrary Game Turn, make it point to ask the other players what their characters are up to. Often, they’ll take actions of their own. “While he’s digging through the sludge, I’ll go into the hall and work on translating that rubbing we took from that stone tablet.” S$&% like that. Sometimes, every party member will end up doing their own thing.

I’m going to head down to the waterfront and try to track down Nicky the Squid. Bob, see if you can get the blueprint for the Dulcimer Building from the county records office. Carol, go down to the police station and try to squeeze some more information out of Detective Branson. And Dave, why don’t you go to the emergency clinic and have that leg looked at. It’s looking nasty.

When that happens, evaluate each action, then resolve each action, then narrate the results of each action in turn. You might need to scribble a few notes to keep track of everything, but that’s GMing for you. That way, everything feels like it’s happening at once. And if one of the players’ actions takes longer than all the others, hold off on narrating the results of that action and give the others a chance to do other stuff in the meanwhile.

So, if Alice, Bob, and Carol need four hours each to do their things, but Dave’s stuck at the crowded clinic for eight hours, that whole thing might play out thus:

GM: Alice, make a Streetwise check. Bob, are you willing to bribe the clerk? How much? Okay, make a Bureaucracy check with a Boost. Carol, are you being nice to the detective or are you being an a$&hole? A$&% it is. Make a Coercion check. Dave, what’s your Fortitude and Health Insurance stats?
I scribble a bunch of notes and do a bunch of mysterious GM stuff behind the screen.
GM: Alice, you spend four hours questioning longshoremen. You find out Nicky the Squid hangs out at the Elderberry Club. But neither the bouncer nor the barman has seen him in two weeks. Bob, you slide the county clerk a sawbuck and he lets you take a copy of the Dulcimer Building blueprints. You’re back by noon. Carol, Branson’s unimpressed by you’re a$&holry and proves himself to be a bigger a$&hole by kicking you out of his office. The three of you meet back at the motel just after noon. Dave must still be at the clinic. What do you three do next?

Note, by the way, that I could have played out the opposed a$&holry between Carol and Detective Branson as an encounter. Or the bribing of the country clerk. Kind of like how if Alice had gotten jumped by the club bouncer, I could play out the fight. But I could also just roll some dice and tell Alice she’d had a scrape with the bouncer and lost six HP. Which is an option that just never seems to occur to GMs.

It isn’t always easy to decide what’s worth an encounter and what’s a single action in an Arbitrary Game Turn. There’s an art to it. Some GMs make every damned thing an encounter. But then, as I said, some GMs are bad at this s$%&. Some s$&% just isn’t worth a scene. If the whole Carol versus Branson thing would have been Branson saying, “I ain’t telling you nothing” and Carol saying, “is that because you don’t know anything you jumped-up, overpromoted meter maid” and Branson yelling, “get the f$&% out of my office,” then — amusing as it is — there’s no encounter needed. It’d just bog the game down.

Think about movies. Sometimes, the action plays out on screen, second by second. Usually because it’s tense and exciting and uncertain and the protagonists have to think on their feet and make things happen. Sometimes, we just see a quick camera shot of the character walking into the detective’s office and then a cut to her walking out again with a stunned expression while his assistant says, “sorry, he’s just like that.” And sometimes we just cut back to the motel with the character saying, “Branson’s a dead end. He won’t tell us anything.”

That’s called good pacing, kids.

And that’s what all this s$&%’s about. Good pacing. Keeping the game moving at a good clip by controlling the flow of time and deciding how much detail to show on-screen. Too many of you GMs don’t seem to have any f$&%ing clue that you can wave away hours or days of dull non-action with one line of narration. And that sometimes — a lot of the time — that’s exactly what you should do.

People are always asking me how to make wilderness travel exciting. The question they should be asking — and should already know the f$&%ing answer to — is “how can I run wilderness travel so I can keep the exciting parts, jettison the rest, and still make travel and distance matter?” And that’s the question I’m going to answer.

Next time.