Building tension in your game, part 2

“Aren't you beginning to feel time gaining on you? It's like a predator; it's stalking you…in the end, time is going to hunt you down... and make the kill.” Dr. Soran, Star Trek: Generations

“YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.” Gary Gygax, Dungeon Master’s Guide p. 37

Okay, I hope you get the message that this post is going to talk about time.  The Gygax quote was indeed in caps in the original DMG, so Gary must have thought it was pretty important.  Excusing the High Gygaxian Commandments style of writing, the salient point is that time is an important element in an RPG.  “A meaningful campaign” is really determined by the characters in the game making meaningful choices, and those choices are made meaningful by adding the stressor of time.  The remainder of this series of articles is going to talk about using time in your game to increase tension in all modes of play.

Time stands still

There seems to be a metagame conceit among my players regarding adventure paths.  This may be true of other groups as well: As the players move through the chapters of the adventure path, there seems to be an assumption that each chapter will roll out exactly as detailed in the published adventure.  The bad guy will be on the verge of completing his evil goal just as the characters reach him at the conclusion of the adventure path.  If you’re a lazy GM like me, this assumption is valid, particularly so if your group has been with you for a long time.  Let’s face it: Game preparation is hard enough as it is without adding “STRICT TIME RECORDS.”  You know it, and your players know it too. If there’s no ticking clock, the characters can charge through the adventure at breakneck speed, or they can take a two-week holiday in the Mwangi Expanse; either way, they’ll reach the bad guy just as his evil plot is about to be fulfilled.  There’s no impetus to drive the characters forward, no consequences for taking their sweet time. The players are able to set their own efficiency threshold, whatever that may be. It could be once all characters are below 50% of their hit points, and they’re out of healing spells. Or maybe it’s once the sorcerer has cast her three black tentacles spells for the day.  Regardless, the players determine when it’s time to rest for the day, or teleport to safety.  And because time is frozen for the bad guy, waiting for the PCs to show up just in time to stop her from achieving her nefarious goal, they can make this choice without the consideration of time.  Because there are no consequences for resting after each combat, the player’s decisions about when to rest becomes meaningless.

The same principle holds true at the level of the adventure.  By this I mean the individual 6 chapters in each Paizo Adventure Path.  Each adventure features a sub-bad guy whose goal is probably connected (either directly or indirectly) to the goals of the main AP bad guy.  Sub-bad guy sits around until the PCs show up and kill him. No uncertainty = no tension.

But what if this assumption wasn’t true?  How would the decisions the players make be changed if there was a ticking clock and the characters didn’t know how long until the alarm bell rang? 

At the beginning of the adventure, the characters don’t know anything but the inciting event that brings them together. From that moment onward, the main villain of the story begins forward progress towards his ultimate goal.  The hands of the clock begin to move. By the second chapter of the adventure path, the characters have probably learned at least some elements of the overall plot, but still won’t know the time frame involved. It is at this point when the players can make decisions about how to proceed.  If they are not at all interested in finding out how much time they have, that is a choice, and that choice can have far-reaching implications as the adventure progresses. But if they decide to gather some information, they have means of doing so. Aside from what information the adventure presents them, there’s this well-known but little-used school of magic called “divination”.  Divination magic lets you learn things you didn’t know before. You can ask questions to a celestial entity and get yes/no answers. You can scry on places to see what’s going on. If time is a consideration in the campaign, and the characters don’t know what time it is, they will be much more willing to learn and prepare divination spells. 

I have a player in my Giantslayer campaign whose character is a Diviner.  Aside from using his Prescience ability during combat, I don’t think I have ever seen him use a divination spell.  He doesn’t need to use them, because he knows the bad guy is just sitting around reading Sports Illustrated and waiting for the PCs to show up.  The PCs don’t care what time it is, because time isn’t a stressor.

What is needed is a mechanic that is useful in all modes of play, that is simple to understand and use, and that effectively makes time a resource that characters waste at their own peril.

The core mechanic

As with any game element, the trick to adding a new system is to make it easy to use, simple in its design, and effective in its intended goal.  Presented herewith is just such a system (I hope), which I have shamelessly and unapologetically stolen from The Angry GM (a really great blog if you can get past the “I’m smart, you’re stupid, so shut up” schtick).  This system is called The Tension Pool.

The mechanics are simple:  Grab 6d6 and keep them at the ready.  Place a glass, metal or ceramic container on the game table.  This is the tension pool. For each defined period of time (which we’ll talk about in later installments), you add a d6 to the pool.  When the pool is filled with 6d6, you empty the pool and roll the 6d6. If a 1 is rolled on any of the dice, a complication occurs.

There are a couple of things that either add a die to the pool, or make you roll the pool before it’s full.  We’ll delve into this more deeply when we talk about how to apply the tension pool to each mode of game play, but we can generalize as follows:

Add a die to the pool whenever the group does something that takes a long time to accomplish, like search a large room or cavern, divert from the most direct route during travel, or try to find a seller of an expensive magic item.

Roll the pool immediately if the characters do anything reckless or noisy.  If the pool is empty, roll 1d6 and then add it to the pool. Reckless actions would be stuff like breaking down a door or a chest, taking a shortcut through the wilderness, setting shit on fire or using Intimidate to bully townsfolk.  Again, we’ll examine this further as we explore Combat, Exploration, Social Interaction and Downtime.

Complications result when the pool is rolled and a 1 appears.  Complications will vary based on what mode of play you’re engaged in, but will mostly involve random encounters, environmental hazards, unexpected reactions, etc.  The important thing about complications is that they are always bad, never good. The tension pool doesn’t do its job if something good can come of it. Your players will come to dread the tension pool.  Dropping a die into the pool is a great way of engaging the senses of the players; that clinking sound as the die hits the pool will be one the players come to loathe.

They will hate it because each die added to the pool brings them one step closer to a complication. If complications are universally bad, the players will do whatever they can to avoid them.  And since most of the tension pool mechanics are based on the passage of time, the players will need to make frequent risk/reward decisions based on the knowledge that time is a limited resource.

I’ll spend the balance of these articles looking at each mode of play (dungeon exploration, wilderness exploration, downtime and social interaction) and see how the Tension Pool can be applied.  We’ll also look at various types of complications that can be used and define standard time frames for the Tension Pool in each mode of play. Next up: Location-based exploration.