Scale Dice (On A Scale From 1-10 Dice)

On a scale from one to ten, how well does this all play out?

Sterling Hundley - Sleeping Prophet

For Prismatic Wasteland's 'make a resolution system' challenge. This is the current state of a mechanic I've been circling around for a while. I started working on this in January, but only managed to finish it now.

I'm breaking this post into three parts--a quick summary of the system, a discussion of the design constraints I'm giving myself while designing a core resolution system, and then a more in depth look at the system and how it's meant to be used. The meat of the post is probably that middle segment--this whole challenge is really an excuse for me to think through all the subtle jobs that a good mechanic needs to fill.

The System

The core of the system sits close the core of all dice-rolling: when something happens with an unsure outcome you roll a d10--on a 1, the worst reasonable outcome happens. On a 10, the best reasonable outcome happens. On a 5, about what you'd expect happens, and so on.

Or, to restate it with a little more detail: Characters have a list of skills, each rated from 0-5. Whenever a player attempts an action where result is unclear, the GM may tell them to roll for outcome, declaring which skill is relevant. The player rolls a number of d10 equal to their character's skill rating--the result of the roll is the highest rolled number. If they have 0 in a skill, they roll two dice and take the lowest result. They then tell the result to the GM who uses that number to decide on the action's outcome--the higher the number the more favorable the outcome.

What Makes For A Good System?

Okay, so what's the significance of this system? How did I come to it? What am I trying to accomplish with it?

To answer this, let's talk a bit about what resolution systems do in a RPG. There's a whole bunch of functions they need to perform in play, and a whole bunch of pitfalls they need to avoid. Let's look at the design constraints I'm thinking about when I work on a system, noting systems that succeed or fail at these functions in notable ways.

Obviously different designers and players are going to value different of constraints to different degrees (and some may even disagree with them entirely). Pretty much every constraint on the list is in direct conflict with at least a few of the others; system design is an art of trade-offs, not something where you can ever hope to find the one ultimate design that fits all constraints perfectly.

I'm strongly influenced by the claim in Goblin Punch's post on base resolution mechanics (https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2023/03/critical-glog-base-resolution-mechanics.html) that resolution mechanics tend to just be fancy ways of generating a % chance of a pass/fail result. That whole post in general is solid foundation to how I'm thinking about systems.

Anyway, a good system should. . .

Draw A Distinction ⅂

This is the core job a resolution system fills--it draws a distinction between actions that succeed as intended and ones that go wrong in some way. This one's pretty straightforward: the system should have a way of declaring success/failure on an action.

Example: In D&D 5e you roll a d20+skill bonus against a difficulty set by the DM. If you hit or beat the difficulty, you succeed. Otherwise you fail.

Be Easy To Teach

This one's also a bit of a no-brainer--a good system is one that's quick and easy to teach to new players. It's also one of the more painful constraints; every additional mechanic you add to a system makes it more complex and more obnoxious to learn, so you have to be extremely stingy with the number of additional mechanics you tack onto a game.

Example: Lasers & Feelings fits its rules entirely on one page. It's simple enough you can run a one-shot and teach the game's rules without meaningfully cutting into your play-time.

Have A Non-Fussy Process

A game's core resolution method is going to be done over and over and over again, so it should feel good and be quick to do. Even a tiny bit of friction here is going to generate outsized problems, simply because it'll be popping up constantly throughout play. No part of the core mechanic should feel annoying.

Example: THAC0 in older D&D editions forces players to perform subtraction in their heads, which has worse brain-feel than addition.

Example: Exalted regularly has you throw a dozen+ dice and then hunt through them to count successes, taking a non-trivial amount of time and slowing down play. However, throwing a giant fist full of dice also feels pleasurable.

Allow For Quick Rolls

Sometimes moments crop up in play where you want to generate some uncertainty in outcome, but you also don't want to slow down play that much. You should be able to call for,  perform, and interpret a roll quick enough that it doesn't meaningfully interrupt the flow of conversation.

Example: Setting position and effect for every roll in Blades in the Dark gives a slightly elevated floor on minimum roll speed, but also lets the GM preview possible consequences very concisely.

Example: In any system that lets players write their own skills, a step gets added where the player needs to ask the GM if the skill they want to use is applicable, turning a three-step (call for, roll, interpret) process into a five-step one (call for, propose skill, approve skill, roll, interpret).

Support Negotiation

A lot of the fun in RPGs comes from the players jockeying for advantages. For more consequential rolls, the player should be able to have a back and forth with the GM where they can come up with clever plans, expend resources, make arguments, and so on in order to improve their odds. This is a dynamic pretty core to RPGs, so most systems have this unless they actively move to restrict it.

Example: PbtA moves have strict rules on what dice to rolls and constrained lists of possible outcomes, limiting the amount of jockeying players can do (although there's still room for that in arguing which move applies and on hard move outcomes).

Example: The D&D 5e advantage system is a quick way to reward good player positioning in a situation (although it being an all-or-nothing bonus can be slightly limiting).

Create Hype-Moments

The outcome of a check should sometimes produce memorable moments. The dice should occasionally (but not constantly) derail expectations and force a re-evaluation of the situation as something wild happens.

Example: Rolling a natural 20 (or natural 1) in D&D on an important check.

Have Transparent Outcomes

The player should have a reasonable idea of what's at stake when they roll, both in terms of mechanics and within the fiction.

Example: In old World of Darkness dice pool games, it was pretty painful trying to calculate probabilities on the fly. What are the odds that 6d10 generate at least two successes with a difficulty of 7?

Example: Blades in the Dark's position and effect mechanics are amazing at letting the GM communicate narrative consequences and outcomes quickly and without needing to pause play to think up exact consequences pre-roll.

Support Non-Binary Outcomes

Aka partial successes. Can the system generate outcomes that aren't pure success or pure failure? Doing this well feels like a little bit of a white whale for RPG designers (see Don't Be Creatively Exhausting).

Example: PbtA, BitD, and lots of storygame systems all have partial success systems baked into their core systems.

Example: Sometimes in D&D 5e the DM forgets to set a DC and then the player rolls middling and then the DM narrates a result that's effectively a partial success.

Encourage Creativity

This is tightly related to the above entry, but a good system should encourage creativity and the creation of unexpected outcomes in play. Open-ended abilities for the players, creative prompts, unexpected results, etc.

Example: Partial success systems all do this--a partial success is basically always more interesting than a pure success or a pure failure. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. . .

Example: The Quiet Year explicitly hits players with writing prompt questions they need to answer through play.

Example: Rolling on random tables can inject unexpected twists in gameplay, taking the session in directions not anticipated by the GM or players.

Don't Be Creatively Exhausting

This is what makes partial successes so hard to pull off well. Success and failure are usually effortless to visualize, but if the system is constantly forcing the GM to come up with semi-successes it can get draining surprisingly quickly. Similarly, any system that gives big creative prompts without much structure can be overwhelming if that's not exactly what you're there for.

Example: The core mechanic of Fiasco is just "tell a story", which would be a bit exhausting if it didn't go so hard in giving you prompts and relationships before the game started to build off of.

Example: PbtA games have strictly listed possible outcomes to moves that are picked from, massively cutting down the drain of adjudicating results.

Example: The fact that BitD sets position and effect from a list prevents the need for GMs to be creative before the roll, but the fact that partial success is the most common outcome of a roll can definitely lead to some fatigue.

Have Non-Intimidating Character Creation

This is a subset of the game being easy to learn, but you should be able to make a character for the system quickly if you want to be able to have pick up play.

Example: D&D 5e effectively requires characters to be made at home and/or holding a session zero to work. There are a ton of character options, characters have builds that can be pre-planned-out, and there's a generally large amount of bookkeeping/derived stats/etc to jot down before you can play.

Example: I've lost enough characters in B/X D&D I can probably roll up a new character in sub-5-minutes at this point. Roll stats, pick a class, starting gear, maybe roll some spells, come up with a dumb joke name you'll regret later, and you're done.

Subtly Teach Play Procedures

As a player looks at a rules summary, or more commonly their character sheet, it should ground them in what play will actually look like. Skills are probably the most common form of this--my hot take is that skills have an overall negative effect on actual play (they tend to turn characters into minmaxed hammers in search of nails), but that they're so useful at presenting the expectations of play that they're still generally worth it.

Example: Skill lists in D&D 5e, Blades in the Dark, etc give a pretty good preview of the types of situations that crop up in play. If you don't know what to do at any given moment, you can always look at your skill list as a list of possible verbs to try out.

Example: Your torch going out as an entry on an overloaded encounter die makes it clear you'll be going into dark places where light sources are important.

Give Play Prompts

A player, especially a new player, should be given some roleplay prompts to lean on as they get comfortable filling out their character in play.

Example: Rolling for stats creates the framework for a story the player has to respond to. Figuring out what someone with 16 INT and 4 WIS is a fun starting point for goofy roleplaying, especially if you'd never allocate stats like that by hand.

Example: PbtA playbook details you choose from (name, appearance, etc) are great for starting to get a player thinking about their character.

Example: Into the Odd's starting item kits tend to have a lot of personality, which is important because the rest of the game is streamlined enough that it doesn't help much visualizing your character as a character. Electric Bastionland jobs also do a good job of getting players started.

Cultivate Desire To Play

This may be wandering out of 'core resolution mechanic' territory, but a system should solicit desire to play as it teaches itself/as players create characters. One reason character special abilities, crunchy rules, derived stats, tons of options, and so on are all so common is that they get players hyped to try the game--you see the mechanic and you fantasize about using it.

Example: Devising charop builds in D&D 3.5 required significant scholarship, with books and books of options to pour over for game breaking build combos. You could spend days lost inside the game without ever actually playing it.

Example: When you make an elf in B/X D&D you get a randomly rolled spell you start knowing, and immediately you can start fantasizing about how you might use it in the upcoming session.

Cultivate Desire To Keep Playing

Similar to the above, but for after the first session is over. A non-one-shot game should give players something to fantasize about achieving in the future. A lot of that comes from the game's premise/narrative, but ideally the system should help as well.

Example: A wizard in D&D sees 'Fireball' in the list of 3rd tier spells and fantasizes about reaching level 5.

Example: A player whose character's 'build' really comes together at level 7 will fantasize about reaching level 7.

Not Fall Apart Over Time

This is often in painful opposition to the above, but a good system shouldn't get less fun as player characters progress mechanically. If the game feels different as you level or or achieve your goals, it should probably feel different in a good way.

Example: D&D has basically always gotten less fun as you pass level 10 or so.

Break Functionally

Players are going to play differently that RAW, sometimes by mistake and sometimes by design. The game should still be fun when that happens.

Example: When the Adventure Zone played BitD I think they just completely stopped using injury penalties altogether. I couldn't tell if they just forgot or if they thought it was too punishing otherwise.

Example: Torchbearer is a beautiful rube goldberg device of a game, but it feels like if you run even a single rule wrong the whole machine will collapse and send the party into a death spiral.

In Depth Scale Dice Description

Now that we've gone over what qualities I find important in a system I'm designing, let's take another look at the Scale Dice resolution system and ways you can use it. I'll restate it, with a little more detail this time.

Character Creation

When a player creates a character they do a few steps not relevant to this post (pick a class, etc), then eventually come to picking their skills. There are three skill categories, each of which have five skills:

Skill: Research, Stealth, Tinkering, Medicine

Body: Strength, Finesse, Footwork, Endurance

Instinct: Perception, Presence, Empathy, Willpower

Skills are ranked in level from 0 to 5.

The player picks one category to be their good one, and marks all associated skills at level 2. They then pick one category to be their average one, and mark all associated skills at level 1. The remaining category is their bad one, with all skills starting at level 0.

The player may then distribute another 4 levels among any skills they choose.

Player-Facing Resolution

When a player attempts an action where result is unclear, the GM may tell them to roll for outcome, declaring which skill is relevant. The player rolls a number of d10 equal to their character's skill rating--the result of the roll is the highest rolled number. If they have 0 in a skill, they roll two dice and take the lowest result. They then tell the result to the GM who uses that number to decide on the action's outcome.

Higher rolls are better than low rolls. If the outcome is a 1, the worst reasonable outcome occurs. If the outcome is a 10, the best reasonable outcome occurs. And so on.

The process by which the GM turns the die roll result into an outcome is intentionally left slightly ambiguous. The baseline is simple, and all the player need to understand to be able to play, but there are a bunch of twists the GM can apply to a roll to match the needs of the situation.

Vanilla Rolls

This refers to unmodified rolls--the GM simply asks the player to roll a skill, gets told a number, and then uses the vibe of that number to decide on what happens. This style of rolling is best when you want to be either fast or flexible.

If a roll isn't meant to have a lot of narrative weight, just make it a vanilla roll. "You look the merchant up and down, roll Empathy to get a read on them."

Vanilla rolls are also good when a check can have a wide range of possible outcomes. How does the king respond to the player's joke? You can probably think of a dozen reasonable responses, so you just roll for it and try to match your response to how well the player rolled.

Difficulty Ratings

A problem with vanilla rolls is that they lack weight. If you want to ratchet up the drama of a roll, or if the action has a binary pass/fail state you can tell the player a number they need to beat before they roll.

"You try to talk the bandits into sparing your life. You'll succeed if you can roll at least a 6."--this works a lot like a vanilla roll, but you get a nice moment of suspense before the roll, with a clear moment of release (or terror) when the dice come to a stop.

"You try to pick the lock before the guard arrives. You only have a few seconds, so this is difficulty 8."--there's a clear pass/fail here, so you should give a concrete number to beat.

You can also get fancy if you're feeling inspired and give multiple DCs. "The king will believe your story if you can roll above an 8, will ask for more proof before he's willing to act if you get at least a 4, and will become enraged if you get a 3 or less."

Some Good Difficulty Numbers

Easy: 4 (50% chance of success at Skill 0)

Moderate: 6 (50% at Skill 1)

Difficult: 8 (50% at Skill 2)

Impossible: 10 (40% at Skill 5)

Player Negotiations

The vanilla roll is meant to be, above all other things, quick to resolve. However, if a player is invested in a roll enough to ask questions about the roll you should answer and be as transparent as possible. If they ask what they need to roll to get a certain outcome, tell them. If they ask what will happen if they roll badly, decide. If the player wants to try to improve their chances, either by changing their tactics or arguing that there was something you hadn't considered, you're encouraged to go back and forth with them, up until the point where you're going in circles or other players get bored and/or annoyed, at which point you can always put your foot down.

If the player takes action to increase their odds, there's no need to give them extra dice or change their roll. Simply lower the difficulty/interpret the roll more charitably. A rolled 3 on a character climbing a tall cliff without safety equipment may be them falling, while a rolled 3 on a character with equipment is probably just a sprained ankle.

If an outcome ever has the chance to be catastrophic, you should always broadcast that. Instant death or being thrown in jail for life should never come as a surprise.

Opposed Checks

If two characters are in direct opposition to each other, you can call for an opposed check. In this case they both roll as normal, and whoever rolls the higher result wins. If one character is a NPC you can just give them a reasonable skill rating, where 0 is incompetent, 2 is professional, and 5 is world-class.

Complex Challenges

Some situations are complex enough that a single roll doesn't feel weighty enough to handle them. In this case you can use complex challenges--jot down the name of the problem the player's trying to overcome on a piece of note paper and give it a hit-point rating underneath.

The player then rolls their skill check as normal, against a difficulty rating you provide. For each point they beat the difficulty by, remove 1hp from the problem. If this is enough to reduce the problem to 0hp, the player succeeds at whatever they were attempting.

If they fail to reach the difficulty or if the problem still has 1 or more hp, a complication occurs. This can be almost anything, but will generally be some form of harm or concession ("the out of control fire burns you for 1d6hp as you try to put it out" or "the guard will let you by, but they want a bribe first"), an escalation in stakes or the problem getting worse ("you lose your balance on the narrow path, and are now hanging onto the edge of the cliff by your fingers"), or the arrival of a new problem ("the commotion attracts the ogre in the room next door").

If the player wants to keep attempting to overcome the problem and the problem's still relevant, they can then roll again. If they defeat the problem, they succeed (minus any concessions given), and if they fail another complication occurs and the process repeats itself.

Other Mods

As you play, I'm sure you can think of other situations where twists on the vanilla die roll method seem appropriate. Go ahead and use them--the system is meant to be flexible. The system's explicitly made to slot in well with a 'rulings not rules' playstyle.

Involved Skill Check System

I’m resigning myself to the fact that most people just want to play 5e D&D, so I should probably be making sure that what I make is 5e compatible, if at all possible. Here’s a shot at adding a system for resolving complex problems in a slightly more dynamic way. You can use this for social negotiations, climbing cliffs, disarming complex traps, sneaking through a temple full of cultists, or whatever else you’d like.

The Core Mechanic Whenever you have a skill check trying to resolve a problem, you set two numbers: a Difficulty/DC rating, which is the minimum number you need to roll to make progress, and a Complexity rating, which is sort of like the problem you’re dealing with’s HP. Roll the skill check normally. For each point you beat the DC by, lower the Complexity by one. If you reduce the Complexity to 0 you fully succeed--congratulations! However, if you fail to beat the DC or don’t beat it by enough to wipe out the Complexity in one go, the problem then gets to act/you get hit with a Complication/something goes wrong. You then respond to or suffer the effects of the Complication, and if the original problem is still relevant you can take another shot at it. Repeat until you’ve either succeeded or things have gone wrong enough that you have entirely new problems to deal with.

You can think of this almost as a reformatting of combat--you and the problem take turns attacking each other until either the problem is solved or you’re defeated. It’s meant to let some non-combat situations have a bit more weight and chance for partial successes than the normally binary skill check system would allow for.

It’s also meant to hew as close to the existing 5e skill system as possible. If you set the Complexity to 0 you’re basically just using the default skill system, and most of your challenges should probably be Complexity 0.

I tried to keep the above description as short as possible, so let’s unpack it a bit/offer some additional advice/add a few extra rules:

Complications Severity

A Complication occurs whenever you roll on a problem and fail to finish it off. They should flow from common sense and the situation at hand, and I’m intentionally avoiding giving them much mechanical definition. That’s not super helpful, though, so here’s a bunch of non-binding advice on how to think about them.

Problems can be thought of as having a severity rating of the Complications they’re likely to produce: Safe, Risky, Dangerous, or Deadly. If a player wants to know the severity of a problem before they roll you should probably tell them. If the outcome of a problem is unknown (unlocking a treasure chest that may or may not be trapped), just tell them that instead--maybe they’ll choose to gather more info before they act.

Safe Complications are ones where the worst case scenario is generally just that you won’t be able to try again, or that you’ll waste time getting nowhere. A good default result of failing to finish off a Safe Problem is that it becomes Risky--you’re fine for now, but continuing the conversation might make the guard suspicious/you’re starting to feel overheated as you hike through the desert--no mechanical penalty this time, but from now on failing a roll might inflict HP loss or Exhaustion.

Risky Complications cause short-term problems. The farmer you’re talking to gets mad and doesn’t want to talk to you any more. The king you’re asking a favor from asks you something in return. The raging fire you’re trying to put out spreads to a new location. If you’re taking damage it’s probably equivalent to one attack from a level-appropriate monster.

Dangerous Complications cause long-term problems. The farmer decides you’re devil-worshippers and raises up a mob to come after you. The king tells the guards to throw you in prison. The fire causes the building you’re in to start collapsing, cutting of your way out. You contract a status condition that takes you out of the fight--paralyzed, confused, or asleep. You can break out wildly level-inappropriate damage dice at this level.

Deadly Complications are instant death or permanent debilitation. You fall into lava. You’re crushed under the giant block. The demon rips your soul from your body. Medusa turns you to stone. Problems should basically never start out at these stakes--if you’re shimmying along a cliff over a bottomless pit a failure should be you losing your grip and starting to slide down, not you instantly plummeting. That gives you a chance to come up with a goofy plan or burn some resources to save yourself, instead of just instantly losing your character.

The entire point of having a Severity system is so that you don’t need to think up exactly what the outcome of a failure or partial success would be for every single roll. If there’s an obvious outcome, you can just say that instead of picking a Severity. This is all to help make life easier, not give you extra busy work.

Picking Complications

Some good Complications might be: take damage, take a status effect, lose an opportunity, lose an item, a new problem occurs, things get worse, roll on a table, a fight breaks out, something is demanded of the player, an NPC makes an ultimatum, the player has to make a choice between two possible Complications, the severity escalates. Ultimately, though, just go by what makes sense given what’s been established so far.

Especially fun are Complications that force a response from the players--rather than hitting them with damage or a status immediately, throw a new sub-problem at them that they need to be able to have an answer for; if they have the answer that’s good, but if not hit them with an even stronger effect. High stakes but with chances to save yourself is more fun than a lot of little unavoidable attrition hits. In a negotiation, have the NPC ask the player an inconvenient question. Climbing a cliff, have the rope fray slow enough they can leap to another or cast a spell. Set up threats, then give the player one or more turns worth of actions to diffuse them.

Complications can and should often involve rolls. Failing a Safe check in a dungeon might result in burning enough time to trigger a Random Encounter Roll. Getting pricked by a hidden poison needle in a treasure chest might trigger a CON save. A good wilderness exploration Complication might be to roll to avoid becoming lost. Your hireling makes a morale roll. There’s a 1-in-10 chance per Complication that the fire reaches the gunpowder and the ship blows up. You can temper the severity of an outcome somewhat by giving the player an extra chance to avoid it.

Should failing to hit a DC trigger a worse Complication than simply failing to finish off the problem? Sure, why not! If you don’t have any better ideas, hit the player with both an immediate Complication AND raise the Severity of the problem on a full failure, but only do one OR the other on a partial success.

Should a problem hand out the same Complication each round or do new ones? That probably depends on the situation at hand. It makes sense that if the problem is a room filling with poison gas that you’d have the same Save vs Poison Damage or whatever each round, but in a negotiation with a king it’d make sense to throw all sorts of stuff at the players--unexpected requests, interruptions, breaches in etiquette, etc.

Setting Your Ratings

You can write out these types of problems as DC #/# if you want, using the first number as the Difficulty and the second as Complexity. So DC 15/5 would be a Difficulty of 15 and a Complexity of 5. Complexity is a long word and writing it a bunch seems annoying.

I’m going to encourage you to set your DC and Complexity both to numbers divisible by 5, just to make the math easier. 

For lots of problems, a Complexity of 5 is probably plenty. 15/5 means a low-level character with a +5 to their roll has a 50/50 shot of getting a partial success and a 25% chance of succeeding outright. That feels about right as a default quick problem, like jumping across a chasm or a classic reaction roll-type situation.

A big scene-consuming problem that the entire team is working against might have a Complexity that is much higher--50 or more.

Possible Modifications

I’m tempted to change the rules so that you reduce the Complexity by 1 if you hit the DC and then by an additional 1 for each 5 you beat the DC by--the math seems a little easier than subtracting the DC from your roll and the result from the Complexity. That might create weird dead zones in the dice results, though. 

5e skill checks are not nearly bounded enough. This system breaks down a bit when you have one player with a -1 to a check and another with a +17/minimum roll of 10. This was already a bit of an issue in 5e, and if anything it helps a little--a mid PC can succeed at what an optimized PC can, it just takes them longer and they run into more complications--but it’s still a problem. 

My idea for a solution: When rolling a skill check you add your Stat bonus to the roll. If you have proficiency in the skill, roll one extra d20 and take the higher. If you have expertise, roll a third.s This stacks with advantage/disadvantage.

This fix makes low level characters a lot more competent--proficiency moves from being a +2 to the equivalent of a +5--while making high level ones a bit less--from a +6 to a +5ish, but also weakens expertise a bit--you get some diminishing returns from all those extra dice. It also makes the range of possible DCs way smaller--the highest a character could ever roll would be a 25, but a character with proficiency and a +0 stat is still going to roll over DC10 75% of the time and is going to beat DC21 0% of the time. It means you’d probably just want to be using DC10 or DC15 for most situations, setting difficulty more with Complexity. That sounds fine to me, but I should test it out more.

Procedures Are Habits, Not Rules

 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.