Once upon a time, I invented this mechanic called the Time Pool because I was trying to help other people deal with the fact that players will search every inch of the dungeon for secret doors and traps if you let them and they will try the same skill checks over and over again if you let them. And, while lots of people were of the opinion that traps and secret doors and s$&% were useless relics of a dead era of gaming, thankfully forgotten, those people weren’t the sorts of people anyone wanted to game with. The rest were frustrated that there just wasn’t any sort of downside to this sort of behavior. They WANTED to add secrets and hidden things and obstacles that required exploration and analysis because otherwise, the game is just slogging from combat to combat, or worse, one of those insipid game sessions Twitter GMs brag about that are “all ‘role-playing’ – sarcastic quotes – and don’t involve any die rolling at all.” So, I came up with this mechanic for those people. And I tested it. And it worked really well. So, I wrote up an article about dungeon exploration. And then I promptly forgot about the mechanic because I can’t be bothered to use all these brilliant rules I come up with. And this rule was neat, but nothing I couldn’t do better with just my f$&%ing brain. Except that people kept using the mechanic. And telling me about it. And they started to expand it. And when I looked at it, I realized it was actually a powerful, open-ended tool to add risks and costs to almost any action in any encounter or scene in any RPG.
And so, I wrote about it a few times more and, more importantly, I started using it myself. And once I did that, I also discovered that whenever I stopped using it because I didn’t want to be bothered – I’m really lazy – it made my game worse and created frustrations. I also kept expanding, tweaking, refining, and – above all – simplifying the mechanic.
And finally, I wrote one last article about the whole damned thing and called it finished. At least until I decide to publish my own role-playing game and use it as one of the core structural mechanics for adventure and encounter design. But two things happened. First, I kept getting feedback about it. And comments. And getting drawn into discussions about it. And I discovered people were doing some really weird things with it. Not good things. Things that missed the point and broke the system. Which is fine if they were doing that on purpose. GMs should break whatever the f$&% they want. If they have a good reason and they know what they are breaking and why. But they were breaking it because they were missing key points. Second, I mentioned that I used it in an adventure I was writing – that’s the same article I linked a few sentences ago – and casually dropped the fact that I would write a follow-up about a specific part of the system if people wanted it. And yes. Yes, they did want it. They wanted it a lot. Because I didn’t stop hearing about it for… well… what day is it?
Point is, I realized I only explained half the system. Because the Tension Pool is only half the mechanic. The other half is the Complications. And the third half is understanding what the Tension Pool DOES NOT and CAN NOT do and covering it with other aspects of your design.
So, long story short – or more correctly, Long, Rambling Introduction™ brought to its conclusion – I’m going to talk about the Tension Pool one more time. I won’t say “one last time” because I’ve said that s$&% before and it never is. And this time, I’m going to focus on filling in the second and third half of the mechanic.
The Tension Pool. Again.
Before I launch into the real topics of today’s article – properly incorporating the Tension Pool into your adventure design and building lists of Complications – I want to make sure everyone is on board with the most current iteration of the Tension Pool rules. That’ll save you all the trouble of having to go back and read several articles on the subject. Because the Tension Pool is actually really simple. It’s not worth the 25,000 words I’ve given it.
The Tension Pool is a game mechanic that makes players think twice about spending time and actions and makes them choose between fast, risky actions and slow, careful actions. It pushes back against players spending hours searching every square inch of the dungeon or just throwing skill check after skill check at the same problem until they succeed. Instead, it makes them think about the best actions to take and when to take them. Before they search for traps, they have to think about whether a trap is even likely to exist and where it’s likely to exist. In short, it’s a mechanic that makes the players question when an action is actually “worth it” by letting them see the cost of wasted time and effort.
To that end, the Tension Pool is a visible dice pool that grows with every action the players take. To use it, you’ll need six six-sided dice and someplace in the middle of your table to put the dice as they accumulate. I like to use a small, transparent container that dice make a nice, loud noise when dropped into. A glass bowl or tumbler works really well.
The Tension Pool can be used when the players are involved in an extended scene or activity which is likely to involve many actions or several encounters. For example, it’s useful when the players are exploring a dungeon. Or when the players are running around town questioning witnesses and chasing suspects during a murder investigation. Or when the players are traveling across the wilderness. It can also be used in an encounter like social interaction. Basically, whenever the players will be taking a lot of actions in a given location and they need to take the best actions to ensure their success or else their lives will get more complicated.
You need to decide what each die in the pool represents. They are either going to represent time spent or actions taken. For example, during dungeon exploration or wilderness travel, each die should represent a specific amount of time that has passed. In those scenes, tension rises whether the party does anything or not. If the party sits around on their a$&es doing nothing, there is still a risk something is going to go wrong. During social interaction, though, or while the party is shaking down criminals for information about their boss, things likely won’t get any worse unless the party does something. If everyone just stays quiet for a minute or the conversation turns to light chitchat and small talk, nothing will explode.
The important distinction is this: when the dice represent time, each member of the party can take an action in the same chunk of time. So, everyone gets to do something for every die added to the pool. During dungeon exploration, in the same span of time, Alice can search the treasure chest for traps, Bob can search the east wall for secret doors, Carol can cast detect magic and analyze the magical aura of the weird statue, and Dave can keep watch.
Alternatively, when the dice represent actions, every action by each player adds to the pool. If Alice accuses the NPC of taking bribes and then Bob says the party can help the NPC stay out of trouble, those are two separate actions and each pushes the tension in the scene higher and higher.
When using the Tension Pool to measure time, you want to assume that most actions take about the same amount of time to do. I usually set a scale of actions taking “seconds,” “minutes,” or “hours.” If the party is disarming a bomb or trap, everything they do will be on the scale of a few seconds. If the party is exploring a dungeon, they tend to do things in chunks of time that take a few minutes. Wilderness exploration involves actions that take a few hours.
When using the Tension Pool to measure actions, you can still assume a certain time scale to keep timing in your head and keep player actions in synch. But it’s not necessary. During a conversation, time tends to flow at a herky-jerky pace. An action might be a thirty-second speech about honor and duty or a two-second threat to punch someone in the face. Doesn’t matter.
Got all that? Good. Now, what can you do with the Tension Pool?
There are only four things you can do with the Tension Pool. You can add a die to the Tension Pool. You can pick up all the dice in the Tension Pool, roll them, and then put them back. You can add a die to the Tension Pool AND THEN pick up all the dice and roll them and put them back. Or you can roll all the dice in the Tension Pool and then put them aside, clearing the pool.
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- Add a Die. You add a die whenever the party does something that chews up whatever amount of time each die represents OR whenever a player takes a careful or deliberate action.
- Roll the Pool. You roll the dice whenever the party does something reckless, crazy, or dangerous that might cause them trouble OR whenever a player takes a reckless, brash, or crazy action. If there are no dice in the pool when you roll it, one die and then put it aside again. You always roll at least one die when you roll the Tension Pool.
- Add a Die, Then Roll the Pool. You add a die and then roll the pool whenever the party does something reckless, crazy, or dangerous that also chews up whatever amount of time each die represents.
- Roll and Clear the Pool. And finally, whenever you add the sixth die to the pool, no matter what, you roll all the dice in the Tension Pool and then put the dice aside, clearing the pool.
Whenever you roll the pool, if any dice show a ‘1,’ that means a Complication arises. Something happens to make the situation worse. Throw it in.
And that’s how you use the Tension Pool. As the players do things, they can see that each action they take or each chunk of time they waste makes it more likely something is going to go wrong. Meanwhile, you, the GM, can use it to keep track of how much time the party has spent on things.
When using the Tension Pool to track time, basically, it breaks down like this. When tracking actions that take seconds, each die represents about 10 seconds of time passing and every time the pool clears, a minute has passed. When tracking actions that take minutes, each die represents about 10 minutes and every time the pool clears, an hour has passed. When tracking actions that take hours, each die represents about 4 hours and the pool clears once every day. When tracking actions that take even longer – like really long-term scenes like preparing a town for war, each die represents one day and the pool clears once a week. Yes, I know weeks are seven days. But it’s close enough. And everyone needs a day off.
And that’s it. Those are the full and complete rules for the Tension Pool the way I – and now, many others – are using it to enhance their games. And, in the past, that’s where I’ve stopped explaining. But, there’s two big holes in that explanation. First, there’s actually understanding what the Tension Pool actually IS and what it DOESN’T DO because it WON’T do any good for your game by itself. Second, I spent literally one word on explaining what happens when everything goes tits-up. And that isn’t enough. So, you need to actually understand how to make a Complication list.
Muscles Come in Pairs
The thing you have to understand about the Tension Pool is that it’s a muscle. And when you’re building adventures, you have to think in terms of muscles. That’s because, as a GM, your job is to force the PCs to make choices. Meaningful choices. And meaningful choices come from resolving internal conflicts. And internal conflicts arise when there’s two things inside a person’s head and they want both, but they can’t have both. So, they have to decide which of the two things is more important.
Or, you can forget about your girlfriend and give me your cash by clicking on the tip jar.
Imagine, for example, you have fifty bucks to spend. You go into your local GameScam and there’s a display showing two different new games on sale for exactly fifty bucks. And in this magical world, there’s no sales or use or value-added tax or anything. You can pick precisely one of the two things. There’s the latest copy of Red Souls: Borderlands, which you really want and you’ve been waiting on for months but you didn’t preorder because you know that s$%& is an anti-consumer con that does you no amount of good and benefits the publisher at your expense, and there’s a copy of Pokemon Quest No-Kuni, which you know your girlfriend really wants. You’d like to buy it for her. Just to be nice. But she just got some other insipid JRPG she’s been playing. And you’ve had a hard week and want to treat yourself.
That’s an internal dilemma. You want to buy the game you want, but – assuming you’re not an a$&hole – you want to surprise your girlfriend with a gift. But you only have enough cash for one of those things. And now you have to decide which is more important and why. And whatever you choose, it reveals something about your character and how you think and what you value more.
In an RPG, you always want to give the players the chance – hell, you want to force them – to learn and then reveal something about their character and how they think and what they value. Which means creating dilemmas. And D&D and other table-top RPGs are really bad at that s$&%. And so are other GMs. See, it isn’t really role-playing if you can make any choice you want without any consideration of external factors. External constraints and how we deal with them is what defines our personalities and values and s$&%. If the only rule is “do whatever you want,” all you learn is that “people are self-gratifying a$&holes who make crappy choices if left to their own devices.”
ANYWAY…
Take, for example, the idea of traps. There’s these things in the world called traps. And some classes are really good at disarming them. Providing they can find them. Which is good. Because traps suck. They are just surprise screwjobs that leap out and hurt you. If you’re an adventurer, you don’t want anything to do with traps. Of course, dungeon builders use traps to protect their valuables. So, because you want valuable things, you’re going to run into traps occasionally.
So, you bring along a character – or create a character – who is really good at finding and disarming traps. Great. And you decide to search for traps everywhere. Because traps will kill you if you blunder into them. You never want to blunder into traps. But you can’t just search for traps everywhere, can you? Because…
Oops. It seems like there’s no downside to searching for traps everywhere. I mean, sure, in the game, it takes ten minutes or an hour or whatever to search for traps. And every time you search every room and hall for traps, your GM is going to say something like “do you really want to search this whole room for traps because that’ll take a whole hour.” But you know that it doesn’t matter. Because your character has as many hours as they want. And the GM may nag you, but he’s still going to cover that entire hour in one sentence of narration.
So, you don’t have to be smart about searching for traps. Don’t think about where the traps might be. Don’t pay attention to patterns and clues in the environment or that old journal you found in room 14B. Just search everywhere. And isn’t that just fun gameplay?
Lots of things in D&D aren’t actually choices because they have no downsides. And the place that gets hit the most with this is exploration. There’s never a reason not to explore, not to check every room, to ransack every piece of furniture, to search every square inch for secret doors and traps and treasure, to open every door, to wander down every path, to expose every corner of the map. And that’s great, right? Because exploration is fun, right? Except, it kind of isn’t when it isn’t a choice. There’s no excitement in uncovering the trap if all you did was roll dice over and over until you found it. Nothing is satisfying about covering every corner of the dungeon if everyone always covers every corner of every dungeon. And that means all the stuff you find – assuming you find anything – feels less cool than it otherwise would. Because you didn’t give up anything.
The Tension Pool provides the downside. It provides the dilemma. It provides the cost. The risk. You COULD spend an hour searching the room, but something terrible might happen. Is it worth it? Well, maybe it is. Maybe it’s worth searching THIS room for an hour because the clue in the journal said this room probably has a secret door in it. But maybe it’s not worth searching THAT room for an hour because it’s just an old closet. Can the party pick the lock on the door? It’d be quiet and keep the element of surprise on their side. But it’d also be slow. And who knows what’ll happen in that time. Maybe the cultists will complete their ritual or Strahd will find us or the walls will start moaning and bleeding again.
Lots of people get confused by the Tension Pool because it provides half a dilemma. And that’s what it’s supposed to do. It builds a universal, generic way of adding a “downside” to actions that otherwise don’t have any. An open-ended “downside” you can tailor to the scene.
The Tension Pool only discourages. And that’s all it’s supposed to do. The rest of the stuff in the adventure has to encourage. It has to provide the upside. That way, skill checks and actions during exploration and interaction aren’t just buttons the players can hammer on over and over without any thought until they win. They have to think about what they are doing. And the more careless or thoughtless they are, the worse things get.
As a GM, it’s your job to put reasons to want to do things in the adventure. The players have to be motivated. They should be motivated to search for treasure because money is valuable and magical items are cool. They should be motivated to explore because exploration yields interesting or useful discoveries. And I think, for my next trick, I need to write an article about exploration, discovery, and how to build interesting and useful discoveries into your game properly. Not that anyone would want that.
And the Tension Pool, by itself, is actually just a simple, growing sense of dread. Which, again, is precisely what it should be. It’s just the awareness that should sit at the back of every character’s and player’s mind that they probably shouldn’t waste too much time in dangerous territory. Which means it should be inexorable and unrelenting.
That’s why there’s no mechanics for reducing the Tension Pool or turning it off or ignoring it. Because those things run counter to what the Tension Pool does. And that’s why it never leads to anything good. It only leads to Complications. And that’s why Complications shouldn’t really provide more than trivial rewards. You should only earn a nominal amount of XP from dealing with a Complication and any treasure a Complication might have should be pocket change.
You can build encounters into your adventure that provide extra, random opportunities for levels and treasures and stuff. You can have a random table of “discoveries” – good and bad – that populate the empty rooms or represent points of interest on the road between Cityburg and Townshire. But those are other mechanics. They are not the Tension Pool.
The Tension Pool represents inefficiency. It represents the fact that time – and actions – are always a limited resource and if you don’t respect their value and think carefully and act efficiently, your life is going to suck.
The Tension Pool is also very simple to grasp. Every time you spend some time or perform an action, it ticks up. And when it hits six, it might explode in your face. There’s no f$&%ing around with different sizes of dice or ways to interact with it or fiddle with it or tweak it because it has to be as clear as f$&%ing crystal and as unrelenting as the f$&%ing tide. It is a force of the universe. It just is.
As a GM, you can have other mechanics alongside it. You can run a timer that says, “in six hours, the dungeon will explode, so you’d better get out before then.” And every time the Tension Pool clears, another hour ticks down. And you can even have mechanics that use it. Like, if the party stumbles into the shrieker nest and the shriekers start doing what their name implies, the GM should immediately roll the Tension Pool. And if a Complication arises at some point during the next day and you need to know when, roll a f$&%ing d12 and a f$&%ing d2 to determine the hour and whether it’s AM or PM. I mean, holy s$&%. I shouldn’t have to explain how to randomly determine a time if you can’t just PICK ONE with your GM brain. But, man, you really should be able to get your GM discretion to do SOMETHING.
See, discretion is very important for open-ended mechanical tools. For example, using your GM discretion, you can add a die to or roll the Tension Pool whenever you want. If the party takes an action that, in your judgment, would take 30 minutes to complete, you can add three dice to the Tension Pool instead of one. If the party stands around in the dungeon arguing loudly about how to divvy up the treasure, you can roll the pool. If they decide to spend an hour burrowing through a wall with their digging tools, add a die and roll pool and do it again five more times, basically add a die and roll the pool six times. If the party travels safely for four straight hours, just add six dice to the pool then roll and clear it to cover the whole four hours of travel time.
But you can NEVER remove a die from the pool unless you’re clearing the pool. And can NEVER clear the pool unless you put six dice in the pool first. And you ALWAYS roll the pool when you add a sixth die to it. You can NEVER not roll the pool after there’s six dice. Those things break the mechanic. And I won’t be responsible for how badly the pool works as a result if you do that s$&%.
So, if you’re not allowed to remove dice from the pool or change how it works or do anything except add dice to the pool and roll the pool and you can’t even change what kind of dice are in the pool, what can you do to affect how the pool works and what it does for your game?
Well, that brings us to the third half of this article. Complications.
Making Things Complicated
In addition to figuring out how to use the Tension Pool in whatever scene or adventure you’re writing, you also have to come up with a list of possible Complications. Those are the events you’ll inject into the game whenever the Tension Pool is rolled and a one shows on any one die.
Now, people like to make things really complicated here by using colored dice and saying that different complications arise depending on which color die shows the one or making the complication more severe depending on how many ones come up and all sorts of other s$&% like that. Which, to me, is f$&%ing crazy. Because the nice thing about the Tension Pool is that it’s generic, it’s obvious, and it’s simple. And because there’s a much easier place to build all of that complexity that isn’t sitting in the middle of table filling players with a sense of dread that absolutely shouldn’t be f$&%ed with.
The place to putz around and make things complicated is in the f$%&ing list of Complications. It’s in the name. That’s where the complexity goes.
Let’s start simple: a Complication is a random event that you drop into your game to make the players’ life a little worse as a result of the fact that they let the Tension Pool fill up too many times or forced you to roll the dice once too often. Again, it’s the downside of exploration and taking actions.
When you’re using the Tension Pool, you should have a list of potential Complications to drop into the game whenever it’s time for one. But how you create that list and what’s on it and how you pull items off the list, that s$&% is all up to you. And it should be based on whatever you’re the Tension Pool for in the first place.
For example, if the Tension Pool is just tracking time while the party explores a dungeon, the list of Complications will probably mostly consist of the same sorts of things that used to appear on wandering monster tables. Sort of.
See, you have to understand a few things about probability and how the Tension Pool works and how it should work. First, it should fill up a few times throughout a scene or adventure or wherever you’re using it. If it won’t fill up at least twice assuming the party behaves in a reasonably efficient manner, then it really isn’t doing your game much good.
So, consider dungeon exploration. The two basic things that add dice to the Tension Pool are moving from room to room – which I always assume takes a few minutes and therefore adds one die – and doing a reasonable search of a room to loot the bodies of monsters, check treasure chests for traps, poke through furniture, search through old tomes, separate out the magic items, and so on.
So, a reasonable party’s actions will add – on average – two dice to the Tension Pool for every room they explore. If the critical path of the dungeon – the rooms they have to go through to get from the entrance to the goal – consists of six rooms, an average party focused only the goal of the adventure, will spend two hours plundering and fill the Tension Pool twice. It’ll never happen that way, but that’s about right. No party is reasonably efficient.
It’s also important to know a thing or two about probability. Specifically, it’s important to know how likely it is that a full Tension Pool of six dice will spit out a Complication because at least one die will show a one. And the answer is 66.5%. If you roll 6d6, the odds of seeing at least one 1 is about two-in-three.
That means every three times the party fills the Tension Pool, on average, they will have to deal with two Complications.
Now, some people have pointed that out and said that is way too many wandering monsters as if I never sat down and did the math. Well, I did. And I know the odds of a Complication are 66.5%. Which is why I never make my entire Complications table just about random monsters. The Complications need to vary in severity and impact. And the relative numbers of serious Complications – like combats – and minor Complications – like stubbed toes or spooky winds that blow the torch out – determine how dangerous the setting REALLY is. Because, remember, no matter what, the Tension Pool is ALWAYS filling. Dread is always growing. But the result of that Tension, that Dread, can vary a lot.
For a major dungeon, where I want there to be, say, a 50% chance of a wandering monster every hour, that means I need to populate my Complication table with one non-monster for every three monsters. That is, I want the table to be 75% monsters to 25% not monsters. Thus, the odds of a monster showing up in a given hour is the odds that any Complication at all will show up (66.5%) times the chance that the Complication will be a monster (75%). 66.5% x 75% = 49.9%. See? Easy.
Look, if you’re not a math wonk, don’t sweat it. Honestly, you’ll be fine if you split your Complications evenly between monsters and non-monsters most of the time and then adjust that ratio depending on the situation. During a murder investigation in the capital city, it’s pretty unlikely an umber hulk will wander up to the PCs confusingly and claw-claw-bite them to death.
Your Complication List doesn’t have to just be a list, by the way. It can be. You can just make a list of potential Complications and pick one whenever one is called for. Or you can make a random table. If a Complication occurs, roll on the table and throw that at the PCs. And you can also cross items off the list as you use them to ensure there are no repeats. In a kobold lair, it’s fine to have the same 2d4 kobold skirmishers show up multiple times. But it’s a bit weird if the party keeps running into the same unique, named NPC after they’ve killed her twice.
You can also build a Ladder. A Ladder is a list that you work through in order. A Ladder can be the same as a List or Table, but without needing a die roll. Just imagine putting the random encounters in the order you’re going to use them. But the best time to use a Ladder is when you have something in the adventure that is getting worse. Imagine, for example, the party is trying to close an elemental portal. It’s spewing more and more dangerous elementals with every passing hour. So, the encounters get more and more severe until, finally, out comes the elder elemental evil. And that thing has to be defeated even if the portal is closed. Or it escapes and creates new adventures.
Which brings us around to what sorts of Complications you can build onto the table. Obviously, you can put encounters on the table. That is, the party runs into some creature or NPC that’s wandering around of its own accord. And those, by the way, don’t have to be combats necessarily. They can be neutral creatures which may or may not pose a threat to the party depending on what the party does. Like a bear that would prefer to scare the party away over fighting them. I wouldn’t recommend putting allies on the list, by the way, because of the reasons I outlined above. But it’s probably okay if you do that as long as the ally isn’t a major boon. Especially if the party has to do something to earn the ally’s… alliance. That makes it a choice and a problem, not just a gift.
But what else can you put on your list apart from encounters? Well, the first thing I like to include a couple of is Flavor Effects. Flavor Effects do not really have any impact on the game. They mostly just bring the environment to life and spook the party into thinking something bad is coming. They are like warning shots. In a haunted catacomb, the walls might start bleeding, or a weird moaning sound might issue from down the hallway. In the twisted caves of a mind flayer, maybe the party experiences headaches or minor hallucinations or whatever. In a network of caves, maybe a small earth tremor might rock the area or the distant sound of a rockfall might be heard. Or a flock of bats might take wing, disturbed by the party, and panic the players for a moment before flying off and leaving them covered in bat guano. Just don’t use too many of these because the players can start to lose their fear of Complications if they are all just jump scares.
The next step up from a Flavor Effect is a Hazard Card. I call them that because so many board games include a deck of sudden, screwjob events that pop up, hurt the party, and then get discarded. Hazard Cards actually do something to hurt or hinder the party. They can deal damage – with or without a saving throw – or they can impose a negative condition on the party. Or they can make an area of the dungeon dangerous or inhospitable. In the haunted catacomb, an icy wind can extinguish all light sources, plunging the party into darkness and costing them resources. In the mind flavor caves, a sudden psychic shockwave might force everyone to save against fear or take some psychic damage and panic. In the seismic caves, a gout of superhot steam from a vent might blast the party. Or several rooms might be filled with sulfurous smoke which ruins visibility and makes combat more difficult.
The next step up from a Hazard Card is a Global Effect. That’s just what I call it. Basically, it’s something that makes the whole scene or adventure harder. And usually, it reflects the antagonists or cosmic forces in the adventure actively working against the PCs. So, it works better in adventures with some sort of major antagonistic force that becomes increasingly aware of the PCs activities and works to oppose them. In the haunted catacomb, it might be a cloying necromantic miasma that imposes a penalty on all Wisdom saving throws for living creatures. Or it might bolster the saving throws of all undead so they are harder to turn. During a murder investigation, the villain might start spreading rumors about the PCs which makes all their interaction checks more difficult. Or, while they are preparing a village for war, the villagers’ morale might start to falter and they become harder to train and command as a result. For obvious reasons, Global Effects work really well in Complication Ladders.
And then, there’s the Plot Development. Plot Developments are very specific events that represent major changes in the adventure itself. The classic example from the original Ravenloft adventure and – to some extent – the inferior Curse of Strahd remake is that Strahd – the adventure’s villain – sometimes teleports to where the party is and f$&%s with them. One I’ve used to good effect is an Alert Status. When the party is infiltrating some lair or fortress or whatever, I set up two or three alert levels that change where the encounters are and what the NPCs are doing and how they respond to trouble. And then I build changes to the Alert Status onto the Complication Ladder. Of course, a Complication Ladder, by itself, can also reflect a growing alert status.
And that’s the thing. The Complication List is a very open-ended tool and it’s a great place to let your creativity shine. But it depends very heavily on what you’re trying to accomplish. Because it has to grow out of your adventure organically. That’s why I really can’t give too much hard and fast advice on how to build one.
What I can say is that you need to know how the Tension Pool works to build a good one. Know how many times it’s going to fill if the PCs handle things reasonably. Know the odds of a Complication. Decide how often you want minor Complications and how often you want Serious ones. Build about twice as many Complications onto the List as you think you’ll need but assume the party won’t see the ones highest on the list, so don’t put important plot moments too high up. Think about what the list might represent in the story and in the world so that the Complications won’t seem like random screwjobs but organic elements of the story.
And most importantly, STOP F$&%ING WITH THE GUTS OF THE TENSION POOL. YOU’RE GOING TO VOID YOUR WARRANTY AND PROBABLY HURT YOURSELF.
I’ve been doing it wrong then. I assumed that a complication must have a mechanical impact instead of allowing more mental tomfoolery. That does make sense given the nature of dread it tries to bring. I thought I knew and left my sense at the door at the last moment.
On the plus side, now I can do it right and properly give everyone the heebie jeebies about roaming the frigid mountains above the arctic circle as cold and madness grip their souls.
I got what I wanted out of this article! Brainstorming complications!
Higher ladder items I came up with is an obvious “going bad” odor coming from an expendable magic item (healing potion), breaking of a random bowstring (fixed on next short rest), and plot points.
I guess that’s it.
This is like the 4th time I’ve tried to reply to one of your articles, and I keep writing over 2,500 characters and then the browser erases what I wrote. Gah. I’ll keep it brief. I like the tension pool a lot. I think the only tweak I would do is, instead of having a 1 trigger the event, I’d have the sum of the dice be the trigger.
You could do it two ways, either the sum triggers a complication based upon the total, or the sum is compared to a table. I like the table better, but the total works with your cards and you can easily adjust the trigger mark based on the area.
I crunched the numbers. On 6 dice about 40% of the time it’s less than 20. About 39% it’s 20-24, 19% 25-29 and 2% it’s over 30. If you want to have complications occur just over 20 that is similar to watching for a 1. You could also have 3 tiers of complications for each category (>20, >25, and the rare and holy shit moment of >30). Having the party watch you roll and count 6’s might be even more nerve-wracking then just looking for a 1. Not seeing a 1 gives them immediate relief. Counting keeps them on the hook.
Alternatively you could make a table of events/encounters numbered 6 to 36, going from “you smell a foul odor” to “something large and hungry steps through the door or out of the bushes”. I’m leaning towards building encounter tables for each terrain type, dungeon types, cities, towns, etc. It lends itself well and has an old school random encounter table feel. Then you just mix up your complication types into the tables. This way SOMETHING always happens. It might just be a noise in the bushes, or an argument down the street, or any number of mundane things that could set the party on edge. You could also make unique complication tables for special areas. Maybe the evil overlord’s dungeon gets really complicated as low as 15’s. The players shouldn’t know if they are dealing with something mundane, or something horrible. They just know something is happening.
Two words: pacing curve.
Hey Angry, what’s the design intent of clearing the pool after 6th die, besides ease of tracking hours? What’s its goal when you’re measuring actions rather than time?
I can think of a few.
– Abstract tracking time without being fiddly.
– Sigh of relief. Adding dice is the inhale, the clearing the exhale.
– 6 is a nice number, isn’t it? Good chance of stuff happening, as is the intent, but they might get lucky and wipe the sweat off their brow. Build up more after and you need a buncha dice to spare. And 6d6 just looks nice. It’s like its own mental mnemonic. Also, 24 hours, 60 minutes/seconds, 12 months, and once you get to days in the week you can just say the PCs get one for free, or add one with ease.
As for actions, hrm. I imagine it’s because it’s not about time, but the concrete act of taking actions. It’s not about the time you take, but the actions you make. You can theoretically spend 24 hours with nothing going wrong sitting in a dusty corner of an Orc Compound, but the moment you start jumping between tents and noisily checking cupboards they might start suspecting things, finding footprints or open doors and the like.
As mentioned above, a 66% chance of complications feels like a good percentage because it balances odds in favor of a complication happening against a decent chance of escaping trouble, and 6 dice is the number of dice that provides this percentage. Drop down to 4 dice, and the chances are about 50/50, which seem too generous. Go much higher than 6, and you get diminishing returns from each added die. 5-7 dice is a good range, but the fact that 6 is also useful for keeping time distinguishes it as the best choice to use for the system. After all, if the system is going to use the number 6 for tracking time, it should keep things consistent when tracking other things as well; it would feel odd if the Tension Pool was rolled every 6 dice when tracking time, but was only rolled every 5 dice when tracking actions.
Because that’s how tension works. Tension cannot constantly ramp up. It’s emotionally exhausting. That’s why movies and TV shows follow fast, exciting scenes with slow, calm scenes. Tension doesn’t just rise, it wobbles up and down while trending upwards. The upward trend is covered by the growing difficulty of encounters and the dwindling of resources. The wobble comes from the ramping and releasing of tension.
Players respond to the rising and falling of tension by adjusting their risk-taking. When tension is low, they take more ballsy, bold moves and take big risks. When tension is high, they tend to be more careful and cautious. And that’s what you want. You want to give players a reason to adjust how they handle things.
And that same thing – which is called a pacing curve, by the way – occurs regardless of the length of the scene. Rising action, point of highest tension, falling action. So, even when you’re tracking abstract actions, you want to create a push and pull between pushing your luck and proceeding with caution. It changes the formula players have in their head about what actions are best to take. Otherwise, the best action to take is always the one with the highest modifier. Sometimes, with rising and falling tension, the action with the highest modifier is also the one that causes an extra roll of the pool.
As for why it’s six dice? And always six dice? Because, as I’ve explained numerous times, you want the rule to be simple and universal so that everyone always know exactly how it works and what to expect since it’s a player facing rule and it changes behavior. And six is a good number. It makes the time work out really well. It could have been five or ten or whatever. I picked six because it felt best and it works well in play. That said, old schoolers will remember the time when there were six turns in an hour.
I am totally going to use this. It’s way better than the random monsters table and it’s so visceral. Time tracking is about resource management, but to add complications to the mix, mmmmmmm
Angry’s examples of Complications that aren’t just ‘2d4 kobolds’ reminds me of Dungeon World’s GM moves:
> In the haunted catacomb, an icy wind can extinguish all light sources [Use Up Their Resources]
> …rooms filled with smoke that ruins visibility and makes combat more difficult [Reveal An Unwelcome Truth]
> …a gout of superhot steam from a vent might blast the party [Deal Damage]
etc
For those struggling to think up non-combat encounters, perhaps looking at this list of GM moves could provide some inspiration.
Plus there’s already written advice out there on using these on the fly. I know the Dungeon World subreddit has a big old list of potentially useful info / examples in the sidebar.
You mention that other mechanics can utilize the Tension pool, such as rolling the Tension Pool when the party stumbles into a shrieker nest. However, I believe what you are actually looking for is having other mechanics utilize the complication list, and the Tension Pool dice happens to be one way of doing that. A better method would be to roll a number of die determined from the event causing the disruption to see if a complication arises, instead of rolling the die in the Tension Pool.
After all, rolling the Tension Pool for shriekers creates a noticeable disconnect between the actions of the party and the actions’ consequences. If the party stumbles upon the shrieker nest with a pool of 5 dice, disrupting those shriekers was a grave blunder. However, if they had happened to wait another 10 minutes before stumbling on the shriekers, then the shriekers are likely inconsequential. It is feels wrong that the severity of a scenario is based arbitrarily on what minute it happened to occur on instead of on how noisy and disruptive shreikers are.
It makes a lot more sense to determine a certain number of die, say 3, that represents how much noise shriekers make when disrupted. When the party stumbles on the shriekers, you roll 3 dice to determine whether a complication arises.
This method has the added benefit of being able to more finely tune the “noise factor” of a scenario. If the party makes a bit of noise by dropping a sword, you can roll 1 die for potential complications, while if the party mage accidentally fires off a fireball causing a large explosion, you can roll 4 dice for complications. If the party makes these same blunders during the dangerous time of night, the number of dice increases by 1. If they are in a dangerous area of the dungeon, the number of dice increases by 2. Et cetera.
While the complication mechanic was made with the Tension Pool in mind, you don’t have to roll the Tension Pool to utilize the complication mechanic. In fact, when you want to utilize the complication mechanic, you should not go through the Tension Pool to do so if the action triggering the complication is unrelated to the passage of time, because the results created by Tension Pool will be related to the passage of time, and this creates a disconnect between player action and consequence.
It does, and it doesn’t. Because mechanically yes, the 10 minute difference with the shriekers makes little sense- if dnd was an adventurer simulator with a focus on realism, that would be a better tool- but for most of us, it’s not.
Dnd is a way of telling stories, and the tension pool is the way of building /tension/ in a game that doesn’t have a lot of options for it. Mechanically, the shriekers might not make a difference, but narratively, you want them to be super careful and tense right up until the big bad thing does or doesn’t happen, at which point you want them to relax- the feeling of the timer hitting 0 and the bomb not going off, even if there are more bombs to disarm.
Or at least, that’s my interpretation of Angry’s point
A Die in the Tension Pool is a representation of some amount of time or effort.
A Roll of the Tension Pool is a representation of something potentially going wrong as time passes or effort is spent.
The disconnect is that the Roll of a Tension Pool feels like it should also be an abstracted representation of the severity of the mistake/event. Since it can’t really be both, the described solution is separating “events that could induce complications” as a separate DM determined roll, and have the tension pool strictly represent “events caused by the passage of time”. To fully make sense, this change should include the removal of rolling the tension pool at 5 or lower dice, because it wouldn’t make sense to roll things based on the passage of time.
However, I think the solution is to describe the Tension Pool as a rough representation of time passing, but primarily as an abstracted version of the PCs adventuring intuition during that period of time. The PCs have information that the Players don’t since the DM cannot describe everything, so they are able to intuit better and worse times for doing things. The sawtooth wave pattern is just to make it easy for the Players to understand and create a nice loop of play. A real situation would have constantly changing levels of risk, but distilling it down to a 6d6 Tension Pool and ordering it makes it easier to keep track of.
That way, there is less of a disconnect since the relative danger of the situation during that time is roughly represented by the tension pool.
If the Shriekers are encountered at 1d6, then they could try to go around (which would raise the dice pool to a ?d6; if they can even find a way around) would be worse than clearing them from a distance(which may roll a 1d6, then raise the dice pool to a 2d6) or running through them (which if they were not Shriekers would not raise the dice pool, but if they were would cause a couple of 1d6 rolls and raise the dice pool to 2d6 to represent future time where they were forced to slow down due to raised alarm). They will make their decisions based on the intuition that risk is lower right now.
If the Shriekers are encountered at 5d6, then it would have been their choice to go forth after seeing the fungus despite the heightened risk of the situation and the possibility of Shriekers.
Yes, rolling separately for complications would replace rolling the Tension Pool with 5 or fewer dice; the only Tension Pool rolls would be time induced complications caused by the Pool filling up with 6 dice.
The “adventuring intuition” take on the changing danger levels is quite interesting. It gives a logical grounding to the otherwise disconnected saw tooth pattern, which I appreciate. Keeping the “roll tension pool” method for event induced complications also adds an element of situational strategy where you have to take the current moment’s “danger level” into consideration when taking risks, so that is a positive as well.
I think there is still an argument to be made for rolling set dice numbers for event induced complications due to being able to control the degree of punishment for a blunder. If you want to punish a really noisy mistake more severely, or only mildly punish a light mistake, then you have the option to do so, while rolling the tension pool is a binary choice of whether the pool is rolled or not: either you punish the action or you don’t. There is no room for disincentivizing huge blunders with a larger punishment, or for mildly punishing a small mistake that wouldn’t warrant a roll of the entire dice pool.
And it’s not as if rolling set dice numbers for event complications will undermine the Tension Pool system. The purpose of the Tension Pool is to deter frivolous use of time by having a tangible representation of the looming danger that wasting time will cause, and as long as you drop physical dice into a pool which will inevitably cause a complication, this goal is achieved. Whether or not the time pool is also used to determine the severity of event-caused mistakes is incidental to the main purpose of the Tension Pool.
That being said, the “adventuring intuition” perspective is something I had not considered and it gives me a better appreciation for the roll Tension Pool method.
I disagree with what the main goal is. The goal is to give Players choices that are meaningfully different.
The Tension Pool focuses on tackling the issue that time is extremely abstract and it can trivialize choices from the Players perspective.
I think that having a set amount of dice rolled for an event would take away from the choice overall.
This is just intuition, but assuming they know all rolls are constant regardless of the time, the choices reduce because circumstances won’t change.
When you add the variability with the tension pool, you give the party the ability to wait. Waiting is pretty big, I think. There’s a cost (the tension pool will roll and the next tension pool will have that much more dice if you didn’t wait) and there’s benefit (if bad event that Rolls does occur, then risk is mitigated).
The choices there are more interesting.
However, if you did want to add “levels” of blunders, it would still be best to tie it to the Tension Pool and keep it simple.
Small blunder. Roll Tension Pool twice. If a 1 shows up both times, complication. Minor things out of control of the players, like rolling a 1 on stealth.
At 1d6, this is a 3% chance.
At 5d6, this is a 36%.
Average blunder. Roll as normal.
1d6 is 16%.
5d6 is 60%.
Big f*ckup.
Roll the entire Tension Pool with advantage. If a 1 shows up at any time, complication. Should be sparingly used for when the Players are at fault.
1d6 is 30%.
5d6 is 84%.
You could always do what Angry says you should, and that’s use your head first, and the rules second.
If you are in an exceptional situation that defies the core of the rules? Then make an exception that works. Roll a full 6d6, it’s not illegal. You’re not rolling for TENSION over TIME, which is what the tension/dread of the Tension pool is for, you’re rolling for tension in a moment, AKA any d20 roll in the game.
Obviously, in exceptional situations use your head. However, I am not discussing what to do in exceptional situations, but rather what to do in unexceptional situations. Which method is more useful to default to when rolling for tension in the moment?
You yourself point out that there is a difference between rolling for tension over time and tension in the moment. Nothing inherently requires in the moment tension to be directly determined to the level of tension over time, so to decide whether doing this is the best choice, we should weigh the pros and cons of each.
Making the number of dice be intrinsic to the situation connects the severity of the consequences directly to severity of player blunder, which is good. It also gives you the GM versatility to incorporate other factors such as location or nighttime into the severity of the consequences.
However, rolling the Tension Pool adds an interesting element of situational strategy depending on when you encounter an obstacle. And while the saw tooth pattern to the strategy is arbitrary, it can be explained as an underlying pattern to danger levels that the PC’s are aware of through adventuring intuition. (thanks to pldl for pointing these arguments out)
It only makes sense depending on how you make sense of it. And no, there is no noticeable disconnect. Honestly, I don’t trust a GM who gives a hypothetical situation they can imagine and then insists it makes no sense. As a GM, it’s your job to make sense of things. Anyone can find plot holes, but a good GM can explain why a plot hole isn’t.
So, let me explain: the Tension Pool can represent how much the players have alerted the dungeon to their presence. Before they came along, everything was nice and normal and quiet. All the monsters had their own routines. Occasionally, some rat or spider would blunder into the shriekers and monsters would mostly ignore it because it rarely turned out to be anything interesting. Until today. Today, there is something new in the dungeon. Strange sounds, corpses, signs of battle. Something is moving around. And all the monsters are on edge. Disturbances that were dismissed as normal once are now worthy of investigation again.
Of course, monsters mostly calm down pretty quickly. After things are quiet for an hour or so – when the Tension Pool clears – everyone assumes the danger has passed. Or else, when something really big happens – like a massive battle that the heroes win – the creatures instead become risk averse and go into hiding. Like when the Tension Pool clears after a complication is rolled and the players kill a wandering monster.
I mean, sure, you could load up your game with all sorts of special rolls to roll every ten minutes or inside of every encounter and really complicate the f$&% out of it. Because complication is great. So much to keep track of. It makes sure no one ever really knows what’s happening and it drastically increases the likelihood that people will overlook something or make bad decisions because they forgot to consider rule seventeen B. But, call me crazy, I like the mechanical parts to be simple, universal, and easy to keep track of and I trust my imagination to make sense of s$&%.
But that’s just crazy old uncle Angry being crazy again.
The change wouldn’t be complex. You would simply replace the rule “When the party does something reckless, Roll the Pool” with “When the party does something reckless, roll a number of die based on how reckless they were being”
When I said rolling the tension pool for reckless actions was “disconnected,” I meant that it didn’t connect the consequence of the party’s actions to their level of recklessness.
However, I now see that the purpose is not to connect the consequence to how reckless the party is, but to connect the consequence to the dungeon’s “awareness” of the party.
It would be MORE complex.
But, hey, it’s your game. So try it. I assume you’ve already tried it my way because no one would provide such an extensive analysis of a mechanic they hadn’t tried. So now, try it your way and see which one really works better. I’d love to hear about the results. It’s thanks to the sheer number of people testing this out and letting me know how it works that I’ve been able to refine this all down to a good, solid, approachable system. I welcome your results.
I’d certainly appreciate some ideas from this community on suitable complications for social interactions. Say talking with a bunch of townsfolk who are secretly cultists, for example. I’m DM’ing this weekend and have good complication lists for the overland travel and below ground exploration parts of the adventure but not for the social interactions.
Thanks for the added explanations, Angry!
I’d suggest a good way to generate complication on the fly is to start top-down.
First, I identify general threats for the party and their motivation.
Examples:
– Reclusive villagers. Want to be left alone.
– Stormy weather. “Wants” to drive people indoors or else freeze them to death.
– Evil Cult. Wants to summon Great Old One.
Then, I list a couple of general methods each threat usually resorts to, and a couple of resources it commonly uses.
Reclusive villagers:
Methods:
– Shun outsiders
– Lynch the wicked
Resources:
– Simple food and supplies (can deny)
– Torches and pitchforks
Stormy weather:
Methods:
– Making people wet and cold
– Destroying man-made stuff with the power of elements
Resources:
– Cold, rain, blizzard…
– Refuges whose homes were destroyed (can encounter)
Evil cult:
Methods:
– Corrupt townsfolk
– Kidnap victims
Resources:
– Connections
– Rituals
I never prepare detailed actions, because this framework allows to easily improvise them on the fly.
Then whenever I need to make a complication, I take a look at the threat players currently face, identify what it “wants”, look at what it should be able to do and choose the next logical step for it to take.
You can also take a look at how Fronts work in Power by Apocalypse games.
When you move between scenes how can the tension pool track time consistently? If the party is disarming a bomb in one scene that is measured by seconds but then after they finish disarming they go back to exploring, which is tracked in minutes, do you just note that the party spent 40 seconds disarming the bomb and now is spending 20 minutes exploring? I guess basically my question is what happens when the tension pool doesn’t accurately reflect an hour but still has 6 dice in the pool? Maybe I am still misunderstanding something. The problem also reoccurs when you talk about the dice representing an action or time. When using the pool to represent action is it fair that a players timed spell runs out because all of a sudden we are disarming a bomb? Like if I have 20 minutes to go on my spell, but now we’re talking with the guards, and my buddy says something stupid to the guard that increases tension. If it took only 1 second to insult the guard and raise tension, does the tension pool still clear even if the 6 dice don’t fully represent 1 hour? I love this mechanic and I want to understand it to implement it. I can already see great ways of using complications to make the story more immersive.
When a scene ends the tension pool goes away and a new one starts. Remember, scenes are periods of continuous action in a given location. The time covered and the size of the location can vary a lot, but it’s still got to be contiguous. Once there’s a serious disconnect between locations or in the passage of time, it’s time to end the scene and start a fresh one with a new tension pool. If you need a timer running across an entire adventure, you need to track that separately.
Thanks uncle angry that makes so much sense. Where did I miss that?! This eases my mind a lot. Once you enter the scene and begin exploring tension begins to rise. Time isn’t just throwing problems at you every hour willy nilly, only when you’ve entered a scene that requires tension. Brilliant. Time to come up with some complications.
Another thing that could add dread is to add timers to certain things, like whenever the pool is rolled in a dungeon, they each need to eat 1 set of rations or 1 torch only lasts 3 die rolls and if they are in darkness they begin to get dread like in darker dungeons.
The tension pool can’t do everything. If you need a timer running, have a timer running too. But if the only timer is the passage of time before stuff expires, use the tension pool. And torches last for one hour. In normal exploration, that means every time you clear the pool, the torches expire. As for food, you do know human beings can go for days before they start to feel actual ill effects from not eating, right? Those losers in Dark Dungeons started to whine about food after 30 f$&%ing minutes. Maybe they should eat breakfast before they go adventuring.
The practice of making meaningful complications is excellent, and I’m glad the Tension Pool works for some people, but I just can’t understand why as a GM one can’t just MAKE time matter instead of just discarding it as a resource. Always make stakes in the adventure the players are on. There are prisoners that will die if they don’t hurry up. They’ll lose a gold bonus from the quest giver if they don’t finish it by a certain day. The temple is unstable and will collapse in 20 hours.
Or even better, focus on the actual decisions of the characters (not the players): Sure, as a game mechanic, a character CAN spend 13 hours combing a dungeon for clues, but WOULD they? The player may want their character to do that, but I don’t see any reason why the GM can’t call for a Wisdom or Constitution saving throw for their character to actually get the mental strength to go through with such a tedious undertaking without saying “To heck with it. Let’s just move forward.” Or if they try more than once between short rests, they could get a penalty to their mood represented by a level of exhaustion.
The player may want their rogue to pick a lock a hundred times until they succeed, but if you think of it from the character’s perspective, the rogue would likely give up after trying for 10 minutes, or even 5, just accepting the lock as being beyond their capabilities. Even if the player rolled a 2 and a 3 both times, the character shouldn’t recognize that as bad luck of low rolls. It should just be part of the story.
Again, the Tension Pool makes for an exciting game mechanic, just like rolling dice, hit points, and ability scores and whatnot; but I don’t think the problem it fixes is as big of a problem as it’s made out to be here. I think it’s important to think beyond “game mechanics” and focus on what those mechanics represent in the game world itself.
1) It’s a contrivance. People get sick of a ticking time bomb hanging over every frigging adventure. And, hell, you can have a really fun adventure if the players get to set the pace. Exploration and sandbox adventures tend to – and SHOULD – allow the players to explore at their leisure.
2) It’s emotionally exhausting for the audience – the players – to constantly labor under high tension. That’s why the pace, stakes, and tension varies throughout books, movies, video games, and television shows. And it’s tiring for players to constantly be told to hurry up or people will die. That, by the way, doesn’t really provide a choice. It’s just nagging and cajoling and punishing the players for wanting to explore.
3) Yes. You’re right. If the players see things from the character perspective – the risk of wasting time, the danger all around, the time it’s taking to try this task over and over – they wouldn’t do it. If only there was some kind of mechanic that would hang on the players the way wasted time and danger hangs on the characters. But how could we possibly do such a thing. Other than, of course, yelling at players who try to waste hours and hours. Or making that incredulous GM face and saying “so, you’re really going to spend another WHOLE HOUR searching this entire room AGAIN?” until the players get sick of hearing it and grudgingly moving on.
4) Yes. It is important to think about the world that is represented by the game mechanics. It’s also important for there to be game mechanics that reflect different aspects of the world. Like the weight of time and the danger of the situation even when the whole dungeon isn’t going to explode if you don’t clear out in 30 seconds.
I brought in the pool after the blog post before this and it’s gone down a treat on both sides of the table. I ordered a cheapo whisky glass online from a place that does bespoke printing. Our game is a steampunky vampire setting so it has THE BLOOD POOL in big letters on the side. Ah, their little faces every time a die plops in.
First pool roll was during a jaunt through an enchanted forest – I didn’t have a single complication ready, just winged it, which was The Wrong Way to do it. But, I stumbled on the stats for a Wood Woad, and it all worked just fine. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
It’s a game we play in the office at lunch time so we get an hour, maybe a bit more, each time. Sometimes it’s clear that the session’s going to be a tension-free one – largely shopping, or scenes that won’t get tense. I’ve taken to just not bringing the pool out for those. It does telegraph what’s going to happen but I prefer that to having it sit there empty.