Last Ditch Consequences

I. Dear Reader,

Feeling ill so this newsletter is coming out a little late – but I wanted to highlight a key piece of “GM-friendly design”.

I call it “last ditch consequences” which isn’t super clear but is easier to say than “the consequence that the GM can always dish out, even when it’s late and they’re tired and they can’t think of anything creative”.

Basically the idea is that in games with a partial success (which I love), it can be hard to think of consequences all the time. Usually, in a PbtA game, the moves make the GM’s job easy for partial or mixed successes – you usually just have to pick something. But if it’s one of those catch-all moves (like Act Under Fire) or it’s a Forged in the Dark game, it can be really tricky to always come up with consequences. So it’s just nice when a game has an easy, go-to consequence.

Now, this stuff tends to be mechanical and simplistic. It’s stuff that nobody ever singles out for praise as “great design”. I think harm or HP or wounds sometimes get added to games primarily for this reason. Nobody ever says they love the harm system in, say, Blades in the Dark but it works as an easy consequence. I think Heat in Blades also works the same way. You can almost always be like, “The consequence is you take one Heat. Oh, why? Uhhhhh, someone saw you.”

Less is more though – too many of these and you can end up making it a tough choice for the GM again. Just one or two is good. Have you noticed this when you’re running games? Do you have a game that you like because it makes dishing out consequences easy? How does it do thay?

This came up with this week because I’m working on Depths Unfathomable, my pirates-but-not-pirates game about diving for salvage in the post-apocalyptic water world. I found it hard to keep coming up with consequences so I went and added a few things – the lightest of touches – so the game remains easy to run even when it’s late and I’m ready to go to bed.

Off to bed now,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• On the new Lyrical Ludology podcast, Logan talks to Jay Dragon about all sorts of stuff but I especially liked the bit about making “lyric-informed” games.

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• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

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III. Links of the Week

• A lovely post titled Black Stars in a White Sky, looking back at one year of playing the Yellow King RPG form Pelgrane Press.
• Not strictly game but very relevant: In Uncanny magazine, a thoughtful article about “pseudotranslation”, the idea that we’re reading a text which is actually translated from a different, fictional language. Think how Lord of the Rings is supposed to be an actual book Frodo wrote.
• Throatpunch Games reviews Shadow of the Weird Wizard, the less dark sequel to Shadow of the Demon Lord.
• Four Letters At Random reviews Most Trusted Advisors, a comedy game of feudal intrigue that is on my to-play list.
• Wax Wings continues its dive into reading Blades in the Dark piece-by-piece. This post about resistances is great and I too wish more games would incorporate the idea into their design.

From the archive:

• Sandy Pug Games publishes their manifesto/how-to guide on running an informal games co-op. (Issue #17, November 2020)
• On Gnomestew, Di talks about ten things they learned about Japanese tabletalk RPGs. (Issue #18, December 2020)

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

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This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Cthulhu Hack, a Lovecraftian RPG build on the light Black Hack engine.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!