Today’s a Table Tale with a twist. But I’ll let you spot the twist yourself. I was going to do a whole Long, Rambling Introduction™ about the twist and why I was even writing this article, but f$&% it. I need to stop writing about s$&% and start just writing s$&%.

That said, the feature you’re about to read — and the point it makes — is one-half of a bigger point. I made the other half of the bigger point during my September Mostly Monthly Supporter Live Chat and I’ll be turning it into an article soon. But, if you’re a supporter and you attended the Live Chat — or you listened to the recording — you’ll probably see the parallels to today’s point.

Anyway… let’s get Table Taling.

The Engine Goes Under the Hood

Game mechanics are important. I know I just got done telling my supporters that game mechanics are not important during my September Mostly Monthly Discord Live Chat. And I stand by what I said then. But also stand by what I’m saying now.

I promise I’ll reconcile this s$&% in a couple of weeks.

Right now, my assertion is game mechanics are important.

As a GM, you’re a Game Designer by Proxy. That means mechanics are the only thing you’ve got to impact your game. But RPGs are unique. Playing an RPG is about pretending you’re not playing a game even though you are.

For there to be satisfying challenges and tension and drama and s$&% — which is the stuff that makes the game a meaningful cooperative experience and also that leads to a compelling story — an RPG’s got to have all the elements that make a game a game. And the right mix of elements to make a good game.

But RPGs present uniquely immersive, emotional experiences. They give you the chance to be another you in another time and another space. Or they give you the chance to participate in an exciting fantasy story. Or they give you total freedom to do whatever you can imagine. None of that s$&% comes from saying, “during the Gather Mana phase, I take six Mana Drops from the Mana Fountain.” And it doesn’t matter how much descriptive fluff you add about how your character recalls the kindly master who first taught him how to tap the Mana Fountain.

Good RPGs are like those animatronic slow rides at Disney World. The ones where you get in a little boat and travel from sickeningly whimsical scene to sickeningly whimsical scene. The riders — in this case representing RPG players — know it’s a trick. They know Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck are just gears and servos and armatures and s$&%. But they play along. And — Penn and Teller’s Transparent Cup and Balls spiel notwithstanding because that was a performance piece that missed its own point — and, if you can see how it all works, you lose the magic.

Want proof? Ride an older animatronic ride. Or a cheap one. One with bad animatronics and jerky motions. One where the rubber animatronic skin has worn away and you can see the Terminator-like exoskeletons beneath. One where you can hear the sounds of grinding gears and the wailing spirits of the children who were devoured by the evil robots.

The point is, as a GM, it’s your job to hide the robot exoskeletons. To keep the engine under the hood. To keep the curtain closed. To hide from the players how the trick works.

You just can’t do that too well.

Yes, there is a Table Tale coming. Thanks for asking.

You’ve got to hide the game from the players. But you can’t hide the fact that a game exists. The players have to know there are rules. And they have to know those rules are consistent and fair and reliable. And that the outcomes follow logically — if not perfectly predictably — from the choices they — the players — make in the game. And they should even know what some — maybe even most — of the rules actually are.

Basically, they’ve got to know it’s just a ride and that there are safety features in place. That there’s a lap bar and a braking system and that Mickey Mouse is just a mechanical puppet, really, and not a horrific evil robot that’ll kill them and everything they love given half a chance.

But that’s all they have to know.

Smoke and Mirrors

I’ve got a fun idea! Let me share a story from my own game table to show you the difference between players being aware of the rules and being able to see the robots under the cartoon skins. If you’re a supporter, you probably heard this story recently. But don’t worry; the real Table Tale starts below.

In my Tuesday night campaign — On Winter’s Edge — my brilliant Tension and Time Pool mechanics are in play. Sort of. I don’t use them like I should. But that’s another story and it’s to do with that other half of the point thing I hinted at above. So let’s pretend I just use my Tension and Time Pool rules right.

What’s that mean? It means that I occasionally roll a big pile of dice to determine whether a random Complication arises to f$&% with the player-characters’ lives. And those occasional rolls arise based on the passage of time and the characters’ recklessness. The more time that passes and/or the more recklessly the characters behave, the more chances the dice have got to ruin their adventures.

So, the party’s escorting a gardener — Ananda — into the wild. And her mischievous pet fox. That’s the mission. But last Tuesday night, they had a layover in a little farmer’s market.

My Tension and Time Pool rules told me they’d wasted enough time to deserve a screwjob and the screwjob that came up was Spoiled Supplies. So some of the party’s adventuring consumables — food, light sources, rope, tents, skill kits, or potions — had to go bye-bye.

The easy way to handle this s$&% is just to decide on — or randomly determine — some amount of some supply that goes poof, wait for the players to go looking for it, and then say something like, “bad news! Some of your food’s gone rotten, Complicating your adventure.”

Instead…

While the party was dicking around town on their own, Ananda and her fox were wandering around unattended. And her fox got onto a grumpy farmer’s land and killed one of his laying geese. The farmer chased the fox right to Ananda and then called the local sheriff-equivalent.

As luck would have it, this all went down just when the party decided it was time to go looking for their NPC ward. So one of the PCs came on the sheriff shaking Ananda down for coin to compensate the farmer for his loss. Ananda didn’t have the coin, but she did have some medical herbs she’d brought along to help the party later. The PC faced a choice: either pay the fine for Ananda or let Ananda hand over the useful medicine to the sheriff to satisfy the fine.

Mechanically, that was a very complicated way to destroy the party’s valuables. Either take their medicine or let them pay to keep it. Narratively, it was a story about the NPC’s pain-in-the-a$& fox causing the players trouble because they took a layover in town. And it involved a choice.

The players had no way of knowing whether all this s$&% was a planned encounter or a random Complication or punishment for not keeping Ananda on a tight leash or just something I pulled out of my a$& for funsies. Technically it was most of the above, but that’s another story for another time. The point is, they don’t know why it happened. Just that it happened.

I know I made a big honkin’ deal about letting the players see the Tension Pool. And I stand by that. It’s important that they — the players — know the more time they spend adventuring and the more recklessly they adventure, the more problems they’re likely to face.

My players know I’m doing the Tension Pool thing. And that means they’re often sometimes usually occasionally thinking about how dangerous it is to waste time. Especially to do so recklessly. And that’s all they have to know. They just need to know time’s a dangerous thing to waste.

Going beyond that — “bad news, the dice said I get to break your potion bottles because it took you three attempts to pick the lock” — is basically ripping the skinsuit off Freddy Fazzbear.

That’s my point.

When You Can’t XP But You Know You Should

Let me tell you about Under the Ashen Sky. That’s my Friday night game. And it put me in a tricky-a$& position. One I’m still struggling with. Which is a whole other story.

Anyway…

I agreed to run what I’m calling a short-shot for a few friends. What’s a short-shot? Well, it ain’t a one-shot, but it ain’t a campaign. Basically, it’s an adventure path. In this case, one with a prologue and three short adventures. And maybe an epilogue. I don’t know. I’m making it up as I go. Kinda.

Anyway, I’m running a three-to-five-part adventure path wherein each part’s a short-to-medium-short adventure.

The story — not that you asked — is to do with a volcano that erupts because some ancient deity no one believes in anymore cursed a prideful king centuries ago for his hubris and the deity decided it’s high time that the king’s descendants’ descendants’ descendant’s paid for that s$&%. The party’s got to set right what once went wrong. Or figure out what’s really going on. Or something.

Sorry. I can’t spoil too much.

Basically, it’s a branching path setup where the party gets to decide what s$&% to handle how and whether to treat this as an ancient mystery or a treasure hunt or a chance to punch some ancient mythical monsters in their ancient faces.

But the whole setup stuck me with a tricky mechanical problem.

See, my D&D du jour these days is the third-point-fifth variety. And if you ever ran the three-point-fifth edition of D&D, you might already see what’s vexing me. It’s to do with advancement. In D&D 3E, advancement’s kind of slow. And it ain’t just about levels. It’s also about equipment. And if you know Angry, you know those are really problematic problems because Angry always starts games at the lowest possible level.

Advancement’s a big deal. Unless I’m doing a one-shot adventure over two or three sessions tops, the characters have to grow. They’ve got to advance. And that means they’ve got to level up. And D&D 3.5 has this fairly robust equipment-advancement track that runs alongside the level-advancement track. Basically, if you weren’t finding equipment on your adventures and you weren’t also finding enough gold to upgrade equipment and buy consumables between adventures, your later adventures were going to suck.

Which is normally a totally awesome way for s$&% to work and I support it a hundred-thousand percent.

The problem with short adventures is they don’t offer as many opportunities to gain XP and to find treasure. In D&D 3.5, it takes about three normal-length adventures to level up. That’s totally awesome when you’re running a long-form campaign. I support that a hundred-thousand percent. But if you’re running a mini-campaign made of shortish adventures, that means the party’s going to be stuck at first level for pretty much all of it.

Normally, I’m not a fan of fast advancement, but, in this case, the characters really should be gaining levels after each chapter. Including the prologue. And they should be doing so off camera. And they should also be able to keep their gear upgraded and their backpacks stocked with consumables. Sure, there’d be treasure to find in the adventures themselves, but they’d need some supplemental upgrades. Especially if they missed anything.

Basically, off camera, between adventures, the PCs would need to level up and get a few gear upgrades and free consumables.

The Simplest Solution is Sometimes the Worst

Go ahead and say it. I know you want to.

Ha! Angry has to use Milestone Advancement! That means he has to admit that sometimes, Milestone Advancement is the best solution. And that means he has to admit he was wrong about something. Angry got it wrong! Angry got it wrong! Hahahahahahahaha!

Did you get it out of your system? Do you feel better? Good. Now shut up.

You’re not totally wrong. There’s a time and place for Milestone Advancement. And this is that time and place. My game’s structure practically demands it. Because there’s no way I can work the right amount of XP and treasure into every short adventure without a whole lot of crappy contrivance.

But isn’t “now you can have a level because I said so and you can turn your weapon into a masterwork weapon because I also said so” basically ripping the skin off the robot puppets and turning them loose on your unsuspecting riders?

Yes. Yes, it is.

No matter what kind of advancement system you use, everyone knows that you — the GM — are in absolute, total control. You place every encounter and every treasure. You stock every shop. You decide what’s on the critical path and what’s hidden down optional side paths. You hand out story XP and bonus XP and magical rewards for a job well done. It’s all you. Advancement is all you. And the only time the players have any control over any of that s$&% is when you let them have whatever degree of control you decide they should have. By, say, making treasure missable or encounters optional.

But your job’s to hide that fact from the players. That’s why you do your damnedest to connect advancement to the players’ in-game actions. That’s what makes XP such a great tool.

“Yes,” says XP, “the GM puts encounters in the world, but the GM doesn’t know which ones you’ll overcome or even find and which ones you’ll skip or bypass or f$&% up so, really, advancement is on you. The GM gives you the opportunity to advance, but you’ve got to earn that s$%&. It’s all you.”

Milestone experience sucks because it doesn’t say that. It reminds the players that their characters advance whenever the f$&% the GM allows it. But sometimes, the suckiest solution is also the least worst solution.

I could have rewritten and repaced level advancement and constrained my short-shot adventures around it. But, frankly, I didn’t have the time and I wasn’t sure I could pull it off right and still present the short adventures the way I envisioned them even though I’ve failed, thus far, to pull off the short thing and my players have been stuck in the single, short prologue for three sessions now.

But that’s another story.

The point is, I knew I was going to have to suck up Milestone Advancement. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to let it ruin the whole ride.

It Isn’t Always Easier to Destroy Than to Create

Milestone Advancement had to be a thing. No way around it. I’d have to hand the characters a level after every short-shot adventure. But the robust equipment advancement and crafting system in D&D 3.5 gave me a way to make up for it.

I knew that somehow, while the characters were strapped into little train cars and stuck on the Milestone Advancement rails, I had to make sure their Equipment Progression — gear, consumables, and magical items — was keeping up. And I knew I’d never be able to pile enough treasure into my short adventures to do it, even if I was willing to force a massive hoard of treasure into every adventure whether it made sense or not. I also wanted to dress up the Equipment Progression so well, the players would not only not notice it was on rails, but that they’d also forget they were strapped in trains in a theme park attraction at all.

Funnily enough, this is exactly the same problem as the one I described above with the Destroy Supplies example. Just backward. I had to find a way to sneak a bunch of equipment into the player-characters’ packs in an in-world, narrative way. One that followed from their actions. And one that wasn’t just about treasure scavenger hunts.

Want to try to solve this one? Go ahead. Pause the article right now and think about what you’d do given the campaign structure I described and assuming you’re a sexy gaming genius like me and you want to do this s%$& right even if it takes extra work. Unpause the article when you’ve got an answer.

First, finding treasure’s fun. So, whenever it is possible, I would hide some really good equipment and consumables and s$&% in the adventures themselves. Level-appropriate s$&%, but on the high end of that spectrum. The upgrades the players found through exploration and risk-taking and optional-challenge-overcoming? Those would be the best upgrades.

Second, I’d add a way to keep score to every adventure. That is, as I wrote each adventure, I’d figure out some way to succeed and some way to really succeed and some way to really really succeed and some way to succeed best of all. It’d have to be something that the players could see clearly. Or at least intuit. Something I wouldn’t have to spell out. And if the players didn’t see it or intuit it, it’d have to make enough sense that, when I docked them points at the end and revealed why — in a nice, in-world, narrative way — they’d say, “oh, yeah, that makes sense and we’re dumba$&es for not seeing that coming.”

Third, I would somehow, in some way, using my creative brain, connect the scoring element in each separate adventure to the off-camera, between-adventure Equipment Progression in a way that makes total, in-world, narrative sense. In other words, the better the players win each adventure, the better the gear their characters get between adventures. For reasons that make perfectly clear, narrative sense.

Fourth, I’d barely explain any of this s$%&. I’d let my players know they’d gain levels by succeeding at their adventures and that they’d have a chance to upgrade their gear and buy and craft supplies between adventures and that it’d be totally based on their successes in their adventures, but I wouldn’t explain any more than that.

What would that actually look like in practice? Let me tell you how it’s all playing out in the prologue adventure, Waylaid.

Your Fox Ate My Goose; Have a Masterwork Greatsword!

The adventure and the campaign opened with the PCs — strangers at this point — on a ship headed for the town of Mitrios. Which just happens to be in the part of the Angryverse where all the classical-mythology-inspired s$&% lives. Each PC is heading there for his own secret reason and most of those reasons are totally unrelated to ancient myths coming back to life to punish people based on millennia-old crimes of hubris.

The PCs met each other and they also met a traveling church scholar. She’s part of a secret order and she’s on a mysterious mission and she won’t tell the PCs about any of it. Might that be part of the story to come; who can say?

Anyway…

Near Mitrios, the ship’s caught in a weird non-storm that’s pretty obviously a volcanic ash cloud. And it seems like all’s going to be fine except that the sky is completely blacked out and only lit by the occasional flash of lightning. Then, lightning hits the ship’s mast, splintering it. The debris crashes through the deck and the ship starts taking on water. Time to abandon ship. The party, the scholar, and the crew escape the slowly sinking ship with crates and sacks of cargo and supplies.

And that’s when the adventure really starts.

Party, scholar, and sailors are stuck on a beach surrounded by high bluffs. They’re in near-total darkness and it’s the middle of the night. They scout the beach, find a safe place, set up camp, bring up the supplies and cargo, and settle in. So far, so good.

Before everything went to hell, the ship’s lookout was able to sketch a map of the beach. So, the party got a map with a few points of interest. The scholar, meanwhile, has an old map of the region that shows an ancient coastal highway above the beach that’ll take them to Mitrios. Those high bluffs surrounding the beach are going to be a problem though. It’ll be tough to get the sailors and the cargo and supplies up the cliffs.

Either way, the party had a goal and a direction. Get off the beach, up to the highway, and continue to Mitrios. And they could start working on that right away or they could take some time to explore the points of interest scattered around the beach. And obviously, those were all potential places to find optional challenges and useful treasures.

But then, s$&% went bad. It turned out the beach was a little horribly cursed. Angry skeletons emerge from the sand and attack the living. The party was forced to defend themselves and the camp. They lost one sailor and another was gravely injured.

And that established the scoring element: keep the sailors — and the scholar — alive. The more NPCs you get safely to Mitrios, the more you win. Not only that, but the more unbroken sailors available to carry gear, the more supplies and cargo the unmerry little band of refugees can carry. See where this is going?

The more cargo the captain gets to Mitrios with, the more he can pay the party. Or the more supplies and consumables he can give the party. Or the more crafting materials. Whatever. Cargo equals Equipment Progression in a way that’ll make perfect sense when it comes up between adventures and back at Town.

The scholar, too, equals Equipment Progression. She’s part of a mysterious religious order and she’s on a secret mission. If the party helps her not get dead, she — and her order — will owe the PCs. And they’ll make good with magical consumables or other equipment. Probably. I mean, her secret order is all about magical items and artifacts and s$&%, but the players don’t know that yet.

Spoiler Alert for My Players: The preceding paragraph contains spoilers. Don’t read it.

Meanwhile, the party can also push their luck and explore the little delving spots on the beach. That’ll mean leaving the sailors alone while they scout. And also hanging out on a cursed beach instead of getting the hell off it immediately. And if the camp’s bothered all night by skeletons, the PCs are going to be fighting fatigue if they stay too long. So the sooner they can evacuate — assuming they can find a way up the cliffs and off the beach with the sailors and the cargo — the better.

At this point, I have no clue what’ll happen next. I don’t know what my players will decide. But it’ll sure as hell be motivated by the terror of actual skeletons and not of the animatronical skeletons of the game’s mechanics.

Unless they read this article. That’ll probably ruin everything. But whatever.