Forgive me if someone else has raised this point already--I haven’t seen anybody do so, and it seems like such an essential part of what makes procedures in RPGs great that I feel like I need to do so myself.
There’s been a lot of great discussion of procedures in RPGs lately, largely stemming from Necropraxis’s original 2014 post. The core idea is extremely useful--that a major part of every RPG is the procedures that people use to direct and resolve play as it occurs. These overlap with and work with a game’s mechanics, and tend to take the form of a “when, should” statement and are more about setting a context to play than resolving a single moment. For example, when you are in a dungeon you should track the passage of time, check for wandering monsters every 20 minutes, and replace torches every 60 minutes. When you are in combat, you should roll initiative, take turns, end your turn once you take X actions, end combat when one side surrenders, escapes, or dies, etc.
Procedures are great--they’re my favorite part of RPG design. That said, my favorite thing about them is that they are ultimately non-binding. They offer guidance to play, but they can also absolutely be changed or ignored when appropriate.
RPGs are games where anything can happen--language is your only limitation. This is what makes RPGs cool, but it’s also what makes them tricky--total freedom without context and structure is dizzying, stressful, and boring, not fun.
Procedures give that context to play--they give a default answer to how to handle the situations that come up during the course of a game. However, they are also mindless--they are simple systems meant to facilitate complex narrative situations. It’s inevitable that situations in the fiction will pop up that will contradict the procedures normally used to handle them. In such cases, you can simply change your procedures.
This might make more sense if I also make the point that procedures are absolutely everywhere. You get some of them from rulebook mechanics, like most combat systems, but you get the vast majority of them from a mix of the play culture you’re immersed in and the habits you’ve picked up through actual play. For every explicit procedure you use, like Wandering Monster Checks, you probably have dozens of habit-procedures you’ve picked up, like the way you describe the contents of a room, or how you prep for sessions, or how you ad-lib NPCs you didn’t expect the players to interact with. Odds are, for just about every situation that pops up repeatedly in play, you have an implicit procedure that you tend to follow to adjudicate it.
This is, incidentally, my take on System Matters--system does matter an enormous amount to how play resolves, but ‘system’ is the sum of all the mechanics/procedures/etc that get used at the table, and only a fraction of those come from specific rulebooks. Most of them come from habit and absorbed play-culture.
If you look at Procedure as ‘any pattern of behavior used as a default method to deal with a certain situation cropping up in the game’, my point that they should be viewed as non-binding should make more sense. Habits are necessary to prevent one from being overwhelmed by decision-paralysis, but when the game’s fiction is at odds with a procedure, it’s the procedure that should change. Most procedures are fluid, changing over time and full of variations in how they are applied instance to instance.
For some good examples of people discussing implicit procedures in RPGs check out these blog posts:
Wizards HATE Her! How to Play D&D for Free by Marcia B.
The Invisible Rulebook by S. John Ross
The Basic Procedure of the OSR by Prismatic Wasteland
Part of why I want to make this point so badly is that these implicit procedures are one of the greatest stumbling-blocks making it difficult for new GMs to get into RPGs without first learning from an existing play-culture. Most of these implicit ‘good habit’ procedures we use are ones we picked up, usually subconsciously, by watching more experienced GMs run games and copying their techniques. It is extremely common for RPG rulebooks to have enormous blind spots when it comes to teaching these methods--my dream is that in the future explicit discussion of the procedures used to design scenarios and adjudicate common situations will become much more common. Certainly, there are a few rulebooks (B/X D&D, Apocalypse World) that have done excellent jobs of this.
As another aside, I think this is part of why tables are so popular in OSR spheres. Most tables I’ve seen on OSR blogs would not make for especially good hard mechanics, but are excellent at communicating the ways that the authors approach certain situations. Tables can be seen as the crystalized products of procedures, and half the fun of reading them is reverse-engineering those procedures in your own mind.
Even mechanic-driven procedures can benefit from some fluidity--Wandering Monster Checks happening every 20 minutes is a good default method for handling them, but it also makes sense to roll an additional one every time the player characters make a loud noise--or possibly to roll them less frequently if the players are hidden away in some low-traffic hidden nook. If the players are being pursued by an angry NPC within the dungeon, maybe you should make the ruling that on a rolled 1 you have a normal random encounter, but on a rolled 2 that NPC finally finds you. Procedures are wonderful ‘defaults’ that describe how to handle play under normal situations, but some of the most memorable play happens precisely during abnormal situations--either ones baked into the scenario by the GM or created by the unexpected behavior of the PCs.
The dungeon creation rules in early D&D editions deserve some special notice, as well. Trying to make a dungeon purely from the AD&D random dungeon tables or the B/X room contents tables would create a pretty dreadful dungeon, but those two sets of tables do more to teach new GMs what they should be thinking about during dungeon creation than I’ve seen in almost any other system. The tables give you a baseline to work off of, but require more fluid customization to be made fun.
Of course, some procedures are more resistant to change than others--the combat round system is generally pretty inviolate, with its high stakes and dense mechanical subsystems. A GM modifying how combat works can easily make a player feel like they’re being cheated, or like the careful decisions they made during character creation are being made irrelevant (this is possibly a larger issue in more modern games). Still, even combat can be changed in a pinch--a fight between six high-level PCs and a single goblin can be abstracted down to a single roll or simply hand-waved without it feeling like too much of a betrayal.
In summary, there are three concepts I want to introduce to the Procedures discourse:
1) Procedures are everywhere in RPG play--both in explicit mechanical form, but also existing as the implicit patterns players and GMs fall into when deciding how to design or resolve the situations that come up in play.
2) Procedures offer ‘default’ methods of handling situations--methods that are designed to create fun play during the usual state of play.
3) Procedures are non-binding and fluid, and when unusual situations come up in play they can be modified to better reflect the unusual state of the fiction.
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