So, I saw this conversation the other day in the Angry Discord. That’s the Discord where my awesome Patreon and SubscribeStar supporters get to hang out. And you should all be grateful to those folks because, without them, you wouldn’t be reading this s$&%.

Anyway, the Angreons were all yammering on about removing the combat swoosh. Dropping s$&% like initiative and turn order to make combat feel a more natural part of the roleplaying game instead of like its own minigame. Cool, right?

Well, five years ago, I’d have agreed. Cool. In fact, I did agree. Hell, I started folks using the term combat swoosh to refer to how initiative rolls make combat feel like a separate minigame. Inspired by video roleplaying games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. And I said it was a bad thing.

That makes this series pretty f$&%ing ironic. Because the series you’re about to start only exists because my thoughts on RPG structure have changed substantially in the last few years. The thing is, while this series is ostensibly about building and running TTRPG towns, that’s only a surface-level thing. Really, it’s about using towns — or Town — as a structural hook from which to hang your other game structures. Seriously. I s$&% you not.

Really, it’s about how to structure an RPG campaign. This is really useful if you’re creating your own RPG and want to help GMs get this s$&% right.

I don’t want to ramble too long about this s$&% — even Long, Rambling Introductions™ have their limits — so I’ll just say this: we all know exploration feels pretty crappy in modern D&D. And guess what? All those good reasons you’ve got for removing the combat swoosh? They’re basically the same reasons the designers had for breaking exploration the way they did.

But that s$&%’s a story for another time. Today, we’re talking…

Town Mode: Building, Running, and Playing in Town

Greetings. I’m Professor The Angry GM. And that ain’t just a clever nickname so don’t give me any s$&%. Just sit down, shut up, and pay attention. Because it’s time for another amazing masterclass in running homebrew fantasy tabletop RPG campaigns and adventures.

This series is a sequel to my previous masterclass: Let’s Start a Simple Homebrew Campaign. In that series, I taught you how to build a simple hometown from which to launch your campaign. But I suggested there was a hell of a lot more to building a town that I could cover in one, short lesson. And that it was also really important to do it right. Because towns are — or rather Town is — the key to running a campaign that feels like a campaign. And one that stays fun for a good, long time.

Naturally, a bunch of y’all asked for more about towns or Town or whatever. And some of you pay me to write this crap. Which technically makes you my boss. Except that you’re not. Not in any way that matters. So don’t get uppity.

The point is, here we are again: me the brilliant, handsome master; and you the ignorant, acne-riddled student. And the topic’s Town. How to build good RPG towns, how to present Town, how to run sessions in Town, and how to train your players to play in Town right.

And by the end of this course, you’ll understand why I keep capitalizing the word Town. And why I don’t when I don’t. Hell, you’ll understand that by the end of today’s lesson. You’ll know the difference between a town and Town. And you’ll know how Town can be a city and how you can have a town that isn’t Town.

Before I confuse you with this s$%& any further though, let me just pad out my word count by outlining this entire series.

The Map of Town Mode

It’s easier to get around Town with a map. So here’s the roadmap I’m using in this course.

1. Town Mode Introduction and Core Concepts
2. What Happens in Town Mode
3. What’s in a Town
4. Building Town: A Practical Example
5. Running Games in Town Mode
6. Training the Players for Town Life
7. Advanced Town Mode for Experts

As with the previous series, each one of those topics will get a single article. Though a couple might need two. And I’ll release one Town Mode article every two weeks or so, as the release schedule allows. Hopefully, by the end of summer, you’ll be an expert townie. And then I’ll teach some other course. Probably about some other mode. Because I’m going to pump this mode dry as dust.

But that’s the future. Today’s today. And today’s all about Town. With a capital T.

Why the Capital T

Oliphaunt on the battlefield time, let’s talk about that capital T. In the last series — out of the blue — I suddenly started capitalizing the word Town. But only sometimes. Lots of you noticed it. Hell, I called attention to it. Dared you to notice it and then teased you about what it might mean. And I even started treating it slightly grammatically differently. Capital Town was always singular. Always specific. A sort of proper-ish noun. A campaign could have many towns. But RPG campaigns just have Town.

You might think this s$&%’s a silly thing to waste time on, but it ain’t. A town’s a thing. A place where people live. In the Angry RPG Lexicon, a town is specifically a middle-sized settlement in the fantasy world. Home to a few thousand fantasy people-like things. Fantasy worlds have all sorts of settlements and the Angry RPG Lexicon classifies them as outposts, villages, towns, and cities. Mechanically speaking. Because those classifications encompass hamlets, market villages, camps, forts, monasteries, city-states, metropolises, dwarven clanholds, Elrond’s Homies House, and so on. But I’ll cover that s%&% later.

Today’s about Town. And Town’s different. It’s a concept. An idea. When the heroes are between adventures — when they’re buying supplies and doing research and training levels and hunting down adventure hooks — they’re in Town. Even if they’re in a village or outpost or city, the heroes are still in Town. When that next adventure starts, generally the heroes leave Town. And when that next adventure’s been and done, the players return to Town. Even if the heroes undertake an urban fantasy adventure, in a well-structured game, they’re still leaving Town and returning later. But we’ll talk about that advanced s$%& later.

The idea of Town is pretty central to the whole fantasy adventure thing. This is why, even if your campaign’s not about leaving Town to explore the wilderness or delve a dungeon and then coming home, you’ll still want to build your game around Town. If you take away Town, you lose the fantasy adventure genre. Which you can totally f$&%ing do. I’m not saying you can’t. It’s your game. Run whatever you want.

But that ain’t what I’m teaching. That ain’t what I want to teach. Because whatever else I do with D&D, I always do fantasy adventure. Because fantasy adventure is f$&%ing awesome.

Throughout this series, I’m going to talk about towns and I’m going to talk about Town. When I talk about towns, I mean dots on the map. Settlements that exist in the world of a given size. When I talk about Town — being in Town, returning to Town, Town Mode, Town Sessions, anything with that capital T — I’m talking about the idea of Town.

And when I say the idea of Town, I’m talking about a mode of play.

Playing à la Mode

Modes of play. Game modes. Super f$&%ing important. And I wish RPG designers understood that. Hell, I wish I’d understood it five years ago. Because I took my games — and my articles — down some bad roads. But I digress…

Modes of play. Game modes. Conceptually and qualitatively, they’re easy to grok. An RPG campaign comprises several different distinct kinds of gameplay. You know that intuitively. When the party’s delving a dungeon — when they’re moving from room to room and picking directions and tracking light source durations and searching for secret doors — the game feels different than it does when the party’s in the middle of a fight. Or when the party’s traveling across the wild landscape.

Basically, when certain kinds of things are happening in the game, there’s certain ways of resolving things and certain things to keep track of, and certain ways of pacing and structuring the game. Each feels like its own little game within the bigger game.

And that’s how it should be. Argue if you want, you’re wrong. A lot of the tiny little nothing rules and systems that the designers have dumped over the years have taken a lot of the feel of certain aspects of the game with them. Players and GMs these days have a lot of trouble handling anything other than single actions with immediate results. But this s$&%’s a topic for another time. Maybe a supplemental bulls$&% article.

Modes of play. Game modes. You know they’re there. You know there’s Combat Mode, Wilderness Mode, Town Mode, Dungeon Mode, and so on. You can feel them, even if you don’t what the game’s actually doing to make the different modes different. And even if you don’t realize how important they are. How vital they are.

And the only reason you think some of them might be a bad idea is that it’s always possible to take a good thing too far…

Hard or Soft Serve à la Mode

Modes of play. Game modes. You can do them hard and you can do them soft. Hard modes of play are unmistakable and unbreakable. The rules of the game are different in different modes. And you can’t do certain things in certain modes. It’s forbidden. Or impossible. And you can only transition from one mode to the next under certain conditions. If at all.

Tabletop RPGs don’t do hard modes of play. And they absolutely shouldn’t. I know you’re all thinking “but combat.” But not combat. You’re wrong. If combat’s a hard mode of play, that’s because you’re doing it wrong. Start dancing for the combat swoosh article if you want to know more. I can’t keep getting distracted with this s$&%.

Soft modes of play are the opposite. They’re easy to transition into and out of. And they’re malleable. They don’t restrict so much as enable. Or maybe suggest. While the game’s in one mode of play, it’s still possible to do anything. At least anything possible in the context of the world.

Hard modes of play are like the phases in a Magic: the Gathering turn. You must draw a card during the Draw Phase and that is all you are allowed to do. You can’t summon a monster in the Upkeep Phase. That kind of s$&%.

Soft modes of play are more like the phases in a real-time strategy game. Starcraft or whatever the Koreans are playing these days. During different parts of the game, you’re doing different things — exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating — and the game mechanics support that s$&%. But they’re not a&$holes about it. It’s up to you to move from one phase to another and all the actions you can take are available in all the phases. As long as you’ve got the units and the resources.

TTPRGs have soft modes of play. And that’s for the best. GMs do get that s$&% wrong — especially with combat — but that’s mostly on GMs. The systems could help, sure, but GMs really should know better. The lines between the modes of play aren’t big and bright and firm. And they’re not walls. They’re not even fences. They’re more like transition zones.

Look at it like this: there’s nothing in the rules that stops someone from picking a lock during combat, right? The rogue can say, “I’ll get this lock open and get us out of here; you guys keep the zombies off my back for six rounds.” And only crappy GMs tell the rogue, “no, sorry, you can’t sneak up on the unaware guard and knock him out with your sap because I already rolled initiative.” Not that there’s not plenty of crappy GMs.

That said, there are mechanical differences between the modes of play. In Combat Mode, for instance, everything gets resolved sequentially in a hard turn order and most actions are pretty instantaneous. But still, the rogue could take six rounds to pick the lock. It ain’t a straightjacket. And smart GMs know to leave Combat Mode before the fight’s actually over when the game situation demands it.

The easiest way to look at this s$%& is to imagine the different rules and systems and mechanics as drifting in and out of focus. Outside Combat Mode, timekeeping is vague. The GM can just wing it. Inside Combat Mode, timekeeping comes into super sharp, precise focus. Thus there’s a mechanical way to handle that. Initiative and turn order. In Wilderness Mode, timekeeping’s important, but on the order of hours or days, not minutes and seconds. And resource management and encumbrance are big deals.

Makes sense when I put it like that, right? But there’s another wrinkle.

The Explicit Flag

Game modes come in hard and soft varieties, and they also come in explicit and implicit flavors. And this is all about what the players can see. Not the GM. Are there game mechanics that tell people — in clear, unmistakable terms — what mode of play they’re in? Is the game in your face about it? Or does it keep it on the down-low? Leave it up to the players to feel that s$&$? Or maybe not even notice it at all.

Combat Mode’s pretty explicit in D&D. There’s initiative rolls and battle maps and minifigs. When a fight breaks out, everyone knows the game’s in Combat Mode.

Meanwhile, Wilderness Mode, Town Mode, and Dungeon Mode are sneakier beasts. Sure, the players know when they’re actually in the wilderness and when they’re in town and when they’re exploring a dungeon, but only because they know what’s happening in the game world. The mechanics don’t change from one mode to the other. But what’s important to track? How s$&%’s resolved? That does. Or rather, that should. A little.

Keep in mind that you can mix and match your flavors. You can have soft, explicit game modes and hard, implicit game modes. What does that s$&% look like? Well, hard, explicit game modes are the phases in M:tG. Soft, implicit game modes are the phases in Starcraft. Hard, implicit game modes? That’s when a game just quietly takes away some options or disables some actions. You know how your attack button just doesn’t work in some action-adventure games’ towns? That’s a hard, implicit game mode. Elden Ring does that s$&%, for example.

Soft, explicit modes are a little harder to describe. Have you ever used a piece of productivity software — say a graphic design tool like InDesign or a programming console — where you’re allowed to set up custom layouts? Where you can switch from, say, Design Mode to Proofing Mode or Debugging Mode? And when you do, some buttons and tools are right there, front and center, and other options get buried in menus? Those are soft, explicit modes.

RPGs are all freeform and open-ended and s$&%. And that means soft modes are always the way to go. Everything’s got to be possible everywhere anytime. At least, mechanically. Within the context of the game’s world. And generally, implicit game modes are better than explicit game modes. But that’s only because players tend to mistake explicit game modes for hard game modes and assume they don’t have the options they actually do. And so do some GMs.

And don’t go all false dilemma bulls$&% on me. These are spectrums. A game mode ain’t either hard or soft, it’s just somewhere on a hardness scale. Likewise, it ain’t explicit or implicit, it’s somewhere on an explicicity scale. Which is a word because I said so. And some explicicity is unavoidable.

Town Mode? Town Mode’s best when it’s soft and implicit. And it’s on you to make it so.

And it’s also on you to train your players to play Town Mode properly without letting them know it’s actually a thing.

Towning for Dummies

There’s a problem with this Town Mode thing, though. And that is that most GMs don’t know how to do it right. And most RPGs don’t know how to present it right. Hell, most RPG designers are so bad with this structural s$&% that they often accidentally — but actively — sabotage it. I s$&% you not.

But because GMs don’t do Town Mode right, most players have never played Town Mode right. Which means they don’t know how to do it. This means, once you get this s$&% down, you’re gonna have to train your players. And no, I’m not going to give you a memo to hand them. Even if I could, I’d be screwing you if I did.

Besides, the best way to really nail down your understanding of a topic is to teach it to someone else.

What I will do is spend an entire lesson — later — on how to teach your hapless protagonists how to Town right. And how to do it quiet-like. Because you absolutely can’t hand your players a list of Actions You Can Take in Town. Because of that whole explicicity mistaken as hardness thing.

And the hardest thing to teach your players is also the hardest thing you’re going to have to learn.

The Heisenberg UncertainTown

You don’t know it, but modern RPGs have infected you with stupid. It’s a very specific kind of stupid. And the infection’s so deep, you probably don’t even know it’s there. And it’s mostly down to the structure crap I keep railing about.

Most players and most GMs play and run their entire games — every single scene and every single encounter — as a sequence of moment-to-moment, near-instantaneous actions. And if you’re thinking, “of course I do, Angry, because there’s no other way it could be.” Congratulations, you’ve got stupid. Fortunately, it’s not fatal. And I’m the cure.

Unlike actions in Encounter Mode — which is a parent mode and includes Combat Mode — actions in Town Mode tend to be less punctual. What’s that mean? Well, as Kurt Vonnegut explained in Sirens of Titan, punctual means existing as a point. Actions in Encounter Mode happen in precise places at precise times for precise durations. Actions in Town Mode are a lot more timey-wimey about it. Or timey-spacey.

When a character’s hunting for an adventure lead, they might talk to dozens of people over several hours. And they’ll likely wander between numerous locations. It just ain’t worth playing out every single conversation in every location and transitioning down every f$&%ing street and into and out of every inn and alehouse. And it sure as hell ain’t worth rolling twenty-five Charisma checks to resolve it.

In Town Mode, characters rarely interact with specific characters or specific objects in specific locations at specific times. Instead, they spend vague numbers of hours interacting with locales, neighborhoods, or even the whole damned settlement. And when you describe the outcome — which you determine with a single f$&%ing die roll — you summarize those hours and everything that happened in no more words than you’d use to describe the outcome of a single attack. Well, maybe a few more.

Because Town Mode’s soft, you can always drop into Encounter Mode — or Interaction Mode or Combat Mode or whatever — when the game demands it. When the character canvassing the neighborhood gets jumped by thugs in an alley, for instance. Or because the information they need’s the prize for winning a social encounter that’s got to be played through. And once that s$&%’s done with, you pop right back into Town Mode. Seamlessly. Without ever telling the players what you’re doing.

Building Town: More than Just Mapping

Now you know the difference between a town and Town. At least, I really f$&%ing hope you do. And I also hope you know what this series is really about. Because it ain’t about building D&D towns and populating them with interesting people and places. I mean, sure, we’ll do that s$&% too. That’s the fun s$&%. But what I’m really going to teach you is how to run Town like its own little game. And how to use the game of Town to structure and pace your campaign.

How’s that for great value? Makes you really want to visit my Support Page and make sure I’m around long enough to finish this series, huh?