Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was this guy named Angry. When Angry was just ten years old, he discovered these things called role-playing games. And he fell in love. Angry started running role-playing games for all of his friends. He did it all the time. All through junior high and high school and through college and even beyond. Role-playing games were part of Angry’s routine. He pretty much always had a game going. Or two. Or more. And no matter how difficult things got in Angry’s life and how much was going on and how hard it was to schedule, Angry made sure he had a regular game that met at least twice a month. Usually, it was once a week. And that’s not counting one-shot games run at game stores, gaming clubs, conventions, parties, and special events. The longest Angry ever went without a game was about four months. And that didn’t happen very often at all. And these were real-life games. Angry didn’t run games on the Internet very often at all. Because Angry hated running games online. And because, for most of Angry’s life, there was no such thing as running games on the Internet. For almost half of his life, there was no such thing as the Internet. Well, there was some Internet. But most people didn’t have it. And Angry was late to that party even after everyone had it.

And then, one day, after twenty-six years of running regular role-playing games like that, it all stopped. Angry moved to a city far, far away from anywhere he had ever lived. And while he tried to make new friends and run games for them, things didn’t quite work out. There were lots of problems. Angry was struggling just to eat and pay his rent for a while. And Angry really didn’t know how to meet new people anymore. And, even though the Internet was a thing now and Angry could have used it, it wasn’t the same. For three years, Angry didn’t really have any games to run. Except for Internet games. And occasional one-shot games at conventions. And the occasional games at game stores stopped because Angry’s local game store closed down and the other one was almost an hour away by train. Except the one run by obnoxious, constantly offended hipsters who spent every hour of their lives complaining about how terrible life was to them. Even though they lived in a big city and had jobs and got to spend hours every week in game stores playing games, they decided to spend their free time complaining about how terrible life was to them instead of being happy about the hours every week they got to spend playing games and having fun. Angry hated those people.

But then, Angry found himself living in a new place. A nice place where people actually weren’t miserable all the time and hateful and mean to each other. And where they actually appreciated the great stuff they had around them even though they had far less and had to work much harder to get it. And, by accident, he happened to meet a person who was the same age as him who also loved games and hadn’t had a game in years. And that person had a friend who was in the same boat. And they knew this other person. And then, Angry’s girlfriend knew someone else who was a little younger but was also happy. And suddenly, Angry found himself with gamers. Gamers who actually enjoyed games and were capable of having fun.

And that’s how I find myself starting a new campaign. A real life, weekly game. In my own damned kitchen. With people, I actually seem to like. And thank god. Because, if I went any longer without a regular, real-life game, I was going to kill myself.

I am literally in the process of starting the campaign. I had a short session zero. Character generation is coming up soon. And, when I mentioned that in my Patreon Discord chat, some folks mentioned how it’d be nice to see some examples of an Angry Game in action. They started asking me what I was allowing, which of my personal mechanics I was using, what class and race options were available, what the story was, and so on. And, gradually, it became clear that they wanted to see what I actually do at my table. How I make my decisions and why. And as we kept chatting, what emerged was the idea of instead of doing Random Bulls$&% rant stuff every month, maybe, once a month I could use my game to provide concrete examples of what I do and how and why. Well, I’m not ready to commit to that sort of thing regular thing. But I’m willing to see if it works.

That said, there was a pretty strong agreement that people wanted to see more concrete, practical examples of stuff from me. Concepts and theory are fine, but practice is better. And since I’ve been talking a lot about campaign and world-building already, well, here I am building a world and starting a campaign. Seems like a great time to share some practical, concrete example stuff. Right?

So, with character generation around the corner… sort of… this is a real timey-wimey mess, actually. Character generation has already happened. But I’m pretending it didn’t. Because I actually started writing some of this article last week before it did. Well, part of this article and part of what will become the next article. I just didn’t have time to post and revise it because of the book fiasco But, interestingly, the conversation in Discord about this series of articles happened after I did that. But before you’re reading it. But after character generation. So, I repurposed the stuff I did have. Especially because an article I have about mapping a dungeon adventure for another series won’t be finished until next week. So, basically, the existence of this article looks like the sort of closed time loop that makes Primer seem like Ocarina of Time by comparison from the outside. But it makes sense to me.

Here’s the point. I’m going to talk about starting my campaign in this article and one other one. The rest of this article – and this is going to be a little shorter – is going to be about the mess of house rules I’m adopting for my campaign based on stuff I’ve written previously on my website. That way, you know what my current mechanical experiments are. The next article will be about the mess of a session zero, the document I sent out outlining the options for my game, and the crappy map that started it all. And it’ll show you how to pitch a campaign based on absolutely freaking nothing. In a few weeks, after I get the mapping thing done and fix the schedule, I’ll come back and talk about how character generation went and how we built character backgrounds in a campaign with basically no premise. Assuming they give me permission to write up some stuff about our game. And then, I’ll check in every so often about the campaign to let you know what’s going on. Okay?

So, let’s talk about the system and the house rules for my new campaign. Why I chose the system I did. And how I’m fixing it. And what I’m testing.

But No One Plays Vanilla WoW Anymore!

So, what game am I running? Welp, I’m running Pathfinder. Nope. Not the playtest for Pathfinder 2: Electric Boogaloo. Pathfinder. The original. And when I say that, I mean it. I’m running CORE Pathfinder. At least, that’s what I’m starting with.

Now, when I say, “I’m starting with Core Pathfinder,” what I mean is that I’m not allowing any character generation options from any other sourcebooks. Sort of. I’ll come back to the sort of. And, until I need them, I’m not adding rules from any other sourcebooks. So, there’s no gunslingers. No alchemists. No base classes. No hybrid classes. None of that crap. That doesn’t mean I won’t be adding rules. I might find, later, that I want to add ship combat or downtime rules or give my libraries hit points or have kingdom building. But it’s going to be an additive process. If I have a need in the game for new rules because of something the core rules don’t cover, I can add them in.

Now, you might want to know how I ended up running Pathfinder and why I imposed this core only business. Well, I’m sorry to say that the reason won’t give you any great insight into my brain. It was an accident and a compromise. And, to be honest, that’s why this campaign will probably serve as a great example of how to run a campaign. Because, it’s kind of an unfocused, unplanned mess that happened completely unexpectedly. Which means that, while I am dedicated to running the best game possible and utilizing all of my considerable skills, the practical reality is I’m trying to herd a bunch of kittens through a game I have zero time to plan and almost zero time to run. Which means a lot of compromises have to happen.

Here’s how the system got chosen. My girlfriend, the Tiny GM, was looking to start a gaming group with some friends after we moved to her hometown. And one of her friends is married to a guy who is also looking for a gaming group. He and his buddy have been gaming together for years, neither of them wants to run a game, and they couldn’t find anyone to run a game for them. And so Tiny referred them to me. I started talking to the first guy, the husband of the friend, and it turns out that he’s only ever played one RPG. He’s played it for years. And, while he’s open to playing other games, he’d rather stick with what he knows and loves. And that game is? Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition.

Yeah. I kid you not. That’s his jam.

Now, I have no problem with D&D 3.5. In point of fact, if I had my pick of any edition of D&D to run right now, it’d be 3.5. I’ve thought about going back. But 3.5 was clumsy and clunky and, after running it – and 3.0 – for seven years, I got to see all of the warts. That’s why I changed to 4E. And when 4E caused me more issues, that’s why I went to Pathfinder. Which is basically just D&D 3.5 with SOME of the clunky warts covered with medicinal ointment and bandages and partly healed. And because of that, I’m kind of confused by anyone who stuck with 3.5 instead of just going to Pathfinder.

Meanwhile, that guy’s friend is also a 3.5 fiend. But, along the way, he also discovered Pathfinder. And that’s HIS jam. So, when I mentioned to the first guy that I was happy to run 3.5, but asked him if had any experience with Pathfinder – he had none – his friend started working him. So, by the time we sat down together with the two other players, I knew I was going to be running either D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder and preferred Pathfinder of the two, the first guy wanted D&D 3.5 but was open to Pathfinder, and the second guy was gung-ho for Pathfinder. The other two people included someone with limited gaming experience who had some experience with Dungeon & Dragons about ten years ago under D&D 3.5, but hasn’t played in forever and someone who has never played a role-playing game before.

So, Pathfinder it was.

Why core only? Well, I’m going, to be honest, I haven’t kept up with Pathfinder at all. The last time I ran Pathfinder for reals, Ultimate Races was all the rage. I’ve glanced through Ultimate Campaigns and Pathfinder Unchained, but I really don’t even know from Base Classes or class archetypes or any of that other crap. And I don’t want to buy a whole bunch of other books. But what I did know was that I didn’t want everyone to need a phone at the table to refer to the SRD every time they wanted to use some weird class ability. I know the core rules of Pathfinder VERY well. To the point where the only reason I open a rulebook at the table is that I get it confused with all the editions of D&D stuck in my head and can never remember which one has five-foot steps. Which ones.

With one complete newbie, one decade lapsed gamer, and one gamer who decided he was happy with where RPGs had gotten to by 2003 and just stopped there, I knew I was going to be shepherding everyone through character generation. I hate doing that, by the way. I much prefer to tell people just to make their own characters. But I’m the only one who owns the rulebook. Much less who knows the game. So, there we go.

The other problem was that with three inexperienced players and one very dedicated Pathfinder fan, I was looking at a potential disaster. Because a dedicated Pathfinder fan with every option open to him can build a very complex, very powerful character compared to what’s in the core rules. And it turns out that my dedicated 3.5 fan is also pretty capable of coming up with some interesting ideas about splashing a level of this and a level of that to build a really powerful character. It’s not that these people are power gamers. They aren’t. It’s just that they are a lot like me. I noticed it while we were talking. They build characters around strong concepts, and they want to play a role-playing game. But they also want to build a really good character. And they know what they are doing. It’s not malicious min-maxing. It’s just “well, I figured out exactly the hero I want my story to be about; why shouldn’t I make sure I get the most effective version of that hero.” I can’t fault them.

So… core only. The two inexperienced players wouldn’t care. The 3.5 player was happy to simplify since it was an ostensibly new system. And the Pathfinder fan compromised.

Except…

I grabbed my copy of Pathfinder Unchained. Because I knew they had rewritten a few of the core classes for that book to fix specific issues. And I reviewed each of them and decided to adopt them instead of the core versions. Well, except for the summoner. That’s not a core class. I liked the fixes. The rogue got a little more to do in combat, which it sorely needed. The barbarian has been tweaked, so their ability scores aren’t constantly changing because ability scores changing is the worse mechanic from both D&D 3.5 AND Pathfinder. And the monk… well… they didn’t make it any worse. Which is the best you can say for the 3.5/Pathfinder monk. But, we’ll talk more about the monk in the next article.

So, that’s it: Pathfinder Core Only was the base system I was working with. But now, let’s talk about what I’m changing. What rules I’m adopting. Starting with my changes to XP and leveling up.

Encounters, Experience, Empowerment, and Empushing Forward

Let’s talk about XP, levels, and encounters. I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on the discussion of whether Pathfinder and D&D actually make it clear that XP isn’t just about killing monsters and that chasing monsters off is a valid way of defeating them and whether you should get XP for completing quests or overcoming non-combat challenges or whatever. The fact is that both games discuss all of this crap and that, in the end, the XP system isn’t nearly as systematic as it appears and that the GM is supposed to fiddle with things.

I’m just going to talk about how I’m doing things and why.

First, the PCs gain XP every time they overcome an encounter. An encounter is a scene in which the heroes must overcome one or more conflicts in order to accomplish something. And that something is generally in the pursuit of an adventure goal, side goal, or subgoal. In order to count as an encounter, the PCs must also risk some sort of loss, setback, or consequence. None of this should require any sort of detailed explanation. The encounter as the basic unit of adventure challenge is a pretty well-established part of fantasy adventure RPGs. And if there’s any ambiguity about whether something counts as an encounter or not, I’ll make a judgment call. Yes, an arbitrary, subjective, GMing judgment call. I know that rankles some GMs. The idea of some sort of non-systematic, subjective definition is just offensive to some GMs. But the GM exists precisely because RPGs rely on arbitrary, subjective, non-systematic calls. All the objective, systematic stuff is covered by the rules already. And the reason we don’t stop there is the reason we play RPGs instead of video games.

I should note – and I’ll talk more about this in a little while – that random encounters, dungeon restocking, and non-goal-oriented crap like murdering boars in the boar wood? Those don’t count as encounters. Encounters must involve conflict, risk, and movement toward an adventure or campaign goal, subgoal, or side goal.

So, encounters are worth XP. Specifically, when the party permanently overcomes an encounter, they earn ONE XP AWARD. I’ll come up with a better name for it, probably. Permanently overcomes means that there is no chance they will ever have to deal with that specific encounter again. If they chase off all the goblins or kill all the goblins or get the information they need from the mob boss, that encounter is done with. They won’t have to come back and do it again.

If they temporarily overcome an encounter, they get a HALF XP AWARD. The first time. If they sneak past the goblins such that they will have to keep sneaking past them, for example, they’ve only temporarily overcome the encounter. If they avoid a trap that remains a hazard, they’ve only temporarily overcome the encounter. If they ever, in the future, finish off the encounter, they get the other half.

If they permanently overcome an encounter but suffer a major setback or loss because of their poor handling of the encounter, they also only earn a HALF XP AWARD.

And that’s the basis of this greatly simplified XP system. There are awards and half awards. And, there can also be double awards. Achieving a major story objective is worth a double award. Achieving a minor story objective is worth a single award. Achieving a side quest is worth a half award. And overcoming a combat encounter or trap whose CR as designed is at least 2 greater than the average party level – what Pathfinder calls a hard encounter – that’s worth a double XP award.

How much XP does an award or half award or double award actually earn the party? Each player earns exactly as much XP for an award as a character of their level would earn from a challenge of an equal CR. That is a party with an average party level of 1 that overcomes a CR 1 encounter earns 400 XP. That means a level 1 party earns 400 XP for each award. And 200 XP for each half award. And 800 XP for each double award.

So, you might notice that all I’m really doing is saying that overcoming an encounter is worth one encounter worth of XP. And I’m also following the Pathfinder guidelines for major and minor story goals. The only thing I’m not doing is varying the XP by much for Easy, Average, and Challenging encounters. So how is this a change?

First, the reason I’m doing this is so that I can use an XP Pool. Because I have awards and half awards, I can use tokens to represent them. One token for an award, two of those for a double award, and a different token for a half award. That means, at the end of every encounter, I can literally throw a token in a little pile or bowl that everyone can see. Which means the players know exactly what challenges are earning them XP. And they can see their victories filling their XP bar in real time.

Moreover, when they accomplish a story goal, they can see that too. It’s visceral. It feels good. And even if I – or the players – improvise a minor goal into the game, the token system allows me to give out XP for it without having had it planned in advance. So, if one of the players strikes up a conversation with the local alchemist and asks if the alchemist has any work that needs doing, I can just come up with something on the fly, some random root or berry to find, make sure I place it in the adventure, and then provide a story award later just by throwing a half-token in the pool. It makes it easy to give out systematic XP for any sort of encounter or story goal on the fly.

Second, the XP Pool is just a pile of potential XP. The heroes don’t actually earn that XP until the adventure is over and they can spend some downtime training, meditating, reflecting, and whatever. They don’t need any specific facilities or anything. I’m not adding training rules. But they have to be able to spend at least two days in a row resting and honing their skills. No hunting, no keeping a watch, they just have to be able to focus. Why? Partly because it keeps them from being able to level up in the middle of an adventure and it creates a narrative break so that it makes some sense that the hero suddenly develops new spells and abilities.

Third, I can manipulate the XP Pool. See, I’ve been playing with this idea of using XP gain as a way to drive certain behavior. Like pushing the players to adventure without resting. Or as a way of introducing partial failure states into an adventure. That is ways of grading how successful the adventure was. For example, if the heroes are escorting five pilgrims to a temple through hostile lands, each pilgrim they allow to die is a setback. I can set conditions in an adventure – conditions that are part of the narrative – that will cost the PCs XP from the pool. And, if they screw up badly and suffer one of those major failure states, I reach into the pool and take one of the XP back.

Now, while that is punitive and punishments always feel worse than bonuses, I have this theory that it won’t be as bad as subtracting XP at the end. And I’m curious to see how it works. And the advantage of a punishment over a bonus at the end is that it’s visible immediately. When the PCs get one of those pilgrims killed, they can actually see right then and there that it cost them some of their precious XP. It won’t be an abstract modifier at the end of the adventure or session to the total XP. And that means it’ll create some stress. Losses and setbacks will actually stress the players right then and there. I want that tension. That strain. I’m just betting that it won’t be as bad as penalizing an XP total.

That’s also why I’m using tokens. For the same reason casinos use chips. The losses suck, but they don’t feel as bad when they are abstract symbols that will be converted to a real resource later.

Using this system, the PCs can’t build up an XP debt. If they get a pilgrim killed – which I have decided is a setback worth a half award – and there are no tokens in the XP pool, they don’t lose anything. And they can’t lose more XP than they have in the pool.

This also means that if the PCs fail at an adventure, I can provide a failure penalty, say a double award. They still earn XP for all the stuff they DID do during the adventure, but their failure hurts the total.

I fully admit this is an experiment and I don’t know how it will go. So, I’ll let you know.

Dying, Disabled, Dead

I am making two slight changes to the Pathfinder rules for hit points, dying, and death. If you’re not aware of how Pathfinder handles dying and death, I’ll explain. Pathfinder uses negative hit points. After you lose all of your HP, you roll down into the negatives. Once your HP is negative, you are rendered unconscious, and you start dying. After that, you lose 1 HP per round until you’ve stabilized with a Constitution saving throw or until you hit a number of hit points equal to your negative Constitution score, you’re dead.

Now, this system is pretty standard, but it creates a few problems. First of all, the whole 1 HP per round until your negative Constitution score then dead means that, unless you took a lot of damage on that last hit and you were very low, to begin with, you’ve got A LOT of rounds before you die. And you can see exactly how many. Even if I enforce the rule that you have to keep your total a secret, there’s still a lot of time to get to someone. In my previous experiences with D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, this system wasn’t very stressful. And no one panicked when you dropped. Bleeding out is such a long, protracted process that it very rarely created an “oh crap, we have to do something now” situation. I watched a lot of parties leave their dying allies on the ground for many rounds because they knew it took a long time to bleed out and most combats were over long before anyone might bleed to death. Even with keeping HP a secret.

Meanwhile, the other problem with it is one I’ve talked about before. And I’ll just refer you to the article I wrote on Fighting Spirit. In that, I pointed out it would be much better if there were an emergency state during which a PC was close to death, but wasn’t actually incapable of doing anything about it. For example, if they could stay conscious while they were dying. At least for a little while. And that way, they could retreat or drink a potion or something.

Now, Pathfinder – like D&D 3.5 – has this very interesting conditioned called Disabled. It comes up in the event that you have exactly 0 HP. You took just enough damage to knock you down precisely to 0 HP. Not -1. Not 1. 0. As you can imagine, it never freaking happened! The condition never got used. But the condition is really interesting.

When you’re disabled, you’re not unconscious. You’re not dying. But you’re pretty close. When disabled, you can only take either a single move or a single standard action on each turn. Normally, you can take one of each. And, if you take a standard action or do something particularly strenuous, at the end of the round, you lose 1 HP. Assuming your standard action didn’t involve healing in some way. So, you can move around. You can heal yourself if that’s something you can do. You can even take a more strenuous action like attacking, but you’re going to fall over and start bleeding to death if you do. It’s not a great option, but it is an option.

It’s a GREAT condition. It’s perfect for that “one foot in the grave” state between “healthy” and “bleeding to death.” It provides limited options to withdraw, defend yourself, or heal. Or you can decide you don’t care and get in a dying action before you pass out. It’s a shame that it never comes up.

And all I need to do to take advantage of it is to stop hit point loss at 0. That is, nothing can take you from positive HP to negative HP. You have to stop at 0 first. Anyone who takes a hit that’s enough to drop them ends up at 0 HP. If they take another hit or take a strenuous action, they drop into the negatives and proceed as normal. But they have that moment when they are merely disabled to fix their situation or, at least, remove themselves from danger.

The only exception is that if the damage you take is enough to knock you from positives all the way down to dead, you die.

But that makes the bleeding to death thing worse. Because now everyone starts dying at -1 HP and has somewhere between 8 and 18 rounds of making tick marks. So, here’s the other modification. Each round, you make that Constitution saving throw. Succeed, and you stabilize. Fail, and you lose 1 HP, you lose 1d6 HP. And that also goes for the strenuous action while Disabled thing. If you’re at 0 HP and Disabled and take a strenuous action, at the end of the round, you take 1d6 damage and drop to negative whatever.

That means that, on average, most normal characters will last for about three rounds dying. Maybe four. But it’s variable. And unhealthy characters might only have two rounds. But they can’t die in one round. Because a PC with a Constitution score of 6 is almost unheard of. And rolling that die is stressful as hell. And if you make the players keep it secret, that means a dropped PC is an emergency after even one round. But, at the same time, everyone had a chance to avoid dying. Because everyone stops at 0 HP and gets one round of Disabled.

I realize this gives everyone basically the same advantage as a half-orc with the Ferocity racial ability. But we’ll talk about that in another article when I reveal there are no half-orcs.

So, that’s the second major change. Now, on to the third and final major change.

The Tension Pool

Once upon a time, I was struggling with the rules – or lack of rules – for exploration-type stuff in D&D 5E. And that was a result of playing the Hell out of Doom (2016) and loving it. Pun intended. The problem was that D&D really didn’t carry any good consequences for wasting time. So, if the party decided to ransack a room over and over to make absolutely sure they didn’t miss any hidden treasure or secret doors, it didn’t create any tension. No one worried about standing around in the same place in a monster-infested underground labyrinth. And because most GMs didn’t want to be bothered tracking time – which also created a minor problem for durations on long-lasting spells and light sources and things – and didn’t want to use wandering monster tables for everything, the system’s few “solutions” – read those as big, sarcastic air-quotes – really didn’t do any good.

So, I invented this thing called the Time Pool. Basically, it was just a pool of dice. Whenever the players took an action – or stood around doing nothing – that took something between five and fifteen minutes of time, the GM would pick up a die and add it to the Time Pool. Once there were six dice in the pool, the GM would stop adding dice to the pool. Instead, if a die had to be added, he’d pick up all the dice and roll them. If any came up a one, something bad would happen. A wandering monster, for example. Either way, he’d then empty the pool and assume one hour had passed. Durations could be ticked off.

Now, I built the Time Pool as the centerpiece for a set of rules modules for D&D that… well… I’ll finish them someday. And I played with the Time Pool a bit at the table. It worked pretty well. It created the stress I wanted it to create because it was visible. And I liked it overall. But then I stopped using it because I wasn’t running regular games and the games I was running were all online, and VTT software didn’t play well with trackers made of piles of dice.

In the end, I kind of forgot about it. Until people in my Discord chat kept talking about it. And I kept getting e-mails about it. Although the original mechanic was kind of rough, people were using it. And tweaking it. And getting really good results. And that’s when I started looking at it as a broader structural tool.

So, I will be using the Tension Pool. And I’m calling it the Tension Pool rather than the Time Pool because I want to broaden its use a little.

So, the Tension Pool is a visible pool of dice that represents the increasing chance that there will be some sort of even or happenstance or complication or reversal in the game. The most obvious example is, as I said, a wandering monster. For my new system, I’m using only d6s.

The basic use of the Tension Pool is for exploration. When the party is exploring a dungeon or sneaking around an enemy stronghold or pulling off some kind of caper, it becomes a Time Pool. Whenever the party takes an extended action – one that will take around 10 minutes – I add a die to the Tension Pool. When there’s six dice in the pool, no more dice can be added. Instead, the pool gets rolled. And if any of the dice show a 1, there’s a Complication. Either way, the pool is emptied, an hour is ticked off, light sources go out, spells expire, and so on.

However, the Tension Pool doesn’t just have to represent the passage of time in 10-minute increments. For example, if the party is exploring a wider outdoor area, like tracking goblins to their forest lair, each die can represent about 1 to 2 hours of time, and the pool represents the sun going down. Basically, dawn till dusk. Then the party makes camp. Complications could involve bad weather, wilderness hazards, getting lost, losing the trail, spoilage of supplies, or, of course, monster attacks.

For long treks across the wilderness, each die could represent a day or travel. Add a die, mark off rations and water, and be done with it. And clearing the pool represents a week of travel time. Yes, I realize a week is six days and not seven. But we can be abstract. And complications still represent anything from bad weather and supply shortages to getting lost or getting attacked by grues.

Also, though, if the party takes a reckless or loud action – like breaking down a door instead of picking the lock or hustling quickly overland and not keeping watch – the GM can roll the Tension Pool right then and there. Basically, cautious and time-consuming actions add dice to the pool. Fast and reckless actions roll the dice in the pool. And the GM can define reckless or dangerous actions as befits the situation. For example, if during a long overland travel sequence, the party decides to cut through goblin territory instead of going around, the GM might roll the Tension Pool rather than add a die. They saved time, but they took a risk. Remember, though, that rolling the pool in this way doesn’t clear the pool. The pool only gets cleared after it has six dice. And it’s always six.

The Tension Pool can also be used in adventures without connecting them directly to time. For example, during a murder investigation, each scene the PCs play out could add a die to the pool. The actual time spent can be abstract. Because it’s actually more about how much they have to do to close into the villain. And Complications might involve anything from assassins to witnesses leaving town to the murderer claiming another victim.

The Tension Pool can also be used as a way to manage a particular scene. For example, if the PCs are in a tense social interaction, each social action might add a die to the pool. And the pool represents the NPC’s patience with them. When it fills up and gets rolled, if there’s a 1, the conversation might be over. Or the NPCs mood might degrade.

In a sense, the Tension Pool is a time-keeping, narrative-pace-management, and skill challenge tool all rolled into one. One that visibly represents the fact that the longer it takes the PCs to do anything, the more likely something is going to go wrong. And that means that, because the players themselves can see the passage of time, they themselves will feel the same tension their characters feel as they spend more and more time in dangerous situations trying to accomplish a goal.

Not only will I be using the Tension Pool as a Time Pool for dungeon exploration, but I’m also going to push it hard and see how much narrative load it can bear. Because I think if I can polish this thing, and provide some definitive ways to use it in different types of adventures, I’ve got a mechanic that will work very well in an unspecified future thing I am definitely NOT working on.

I’ll let you know.