The Intended Procedure for Role-playing Games

Check this out this bit from this awesome post by Legendsmith:

As I have discovered the full extent of the the intended procedure for traditional RPGs, my games have become both easier to run and more fun for myself and my players. I feel like I was never that far off, but the full extent has been a noticeable improvement. Plenty of people taught themselves a traditional RPG, whether it was D&D or something else (in my case, GURPS), and we were able to intuit the intended procedure for the systems. But explicitly laid out procedures are better. The Time Use Cards and Improvement by Study rules provided in the GURPS Basic Set now make total sense! I use them regularly now that I’ve enforced Timekeeping and the ‘always on’ campaign to a good reception: Players like their characters doing things and learning! Those rules and cards included in GURPS show that these traditional TTRPGs were in fact, made with the assumption of a similar procedure to AD&D because they are the same medium, the same category of game: RPG.

Heartwarming! An “Always On” GURPS campaign! I had no idea!! Man, just think of all those happy players doing their thing like that now that one aspect of rpgs very nearly just starts to work by itself!! It’s beautiful!

A lot of people have taken the time to tell me that I didn’t invent any of this stuff. Many more have actually gone out of their way to argue that what I have been doing is not actually the intent of the old games. And there is something to that.

My reading of the old rule sets was colored by the description of the gigantic, world-spanning Napoleonics-era campaign that was detailed in the Blackmoor documentary. There is no way to coordinate time in something that big other than to let it run on in that way. Look back at, say, Empire of the Petal Throne and it is clear that the referee is arbitrarily moving other groups of PC’s up the timeline in order to catch them up to whichever group has gotten most ahead of things. The real world’s progression of time is not directly related to the campaign at all. Consequently, there is a great deal of handholding and negotiation and bookkeeping and arbitrary rulings that have to be done.

Similarly, “Always On” is not what Steve Jackson describes in his classic GURPS rule sets. Calendar time only propels the campaign between adventures, not sessions. Further, the PC party is the only thing in the game with any real agency. The tantalizing figure of the Adversary (which is still incorporated in the 4th edition rules) is more referee assistant than actual player.

There is a real question here then. Why is it that my approach to timekeeping is propagating and helping people run successful campaigns and inspiring people to permanently turn their backs on the way they ran rpgs for decades? There are several answers to this:

1. My method is strange, hard to explain, and completely counterintuitive, however once it is up and running nobody has to think about it or tinker with it at all.
2. Other approaches assume that the referee is a genius that knows what is important and who matters and what is best for everyone, while in reality this thinking tends to be a bunch of guff that is meant to cover up the fact that people selling you a game where they haven’t actually done any real game design or playtesting.
3. My approach allows for consistent, objective, and clear answers to countless questions regarding time resources available to everyone in the campaign regardless of what role they play, what tier of activity they operate on, and what all is happening within the game. Even better, such questions do not even need to be asked at all because everyone in the campaign can understand the rule that is being used to answer them all.
4. My approach forces referees to abandon the worst practices that have developed within typical conventional play groups. Further, it forces referees to learn parts of their rule sets that never saw much use before.
5. My approach makes it easier to scale up campaigns to include many more players, characters, and independent activity. Further, campaigns that go “always on” might start with small groups, but the gameplay is often so engaging the number of players and referees will often grow.
6. My approach makes it trivial coordinate interactions between independent campaigns.
7. My approach, more than any other, encourages the development of spontaneous Braunstein-style play dynamics.

#7 there is the kicker. And yes, Braunsteins are volatile. But they are the key to generating compelling emergent narratives. They are also the most fun you will ever have messing around with an rpg rule set. There is a reason for that.

None of these games were intended to stop being Braunsteins.