What’s The Story, Muthur?
To the point, tabletop gaming
Deadly, Not Frustrating: Keeping OSR TTRPGs Fun & Fair
A common reason I hear for folks being turned off from OSR games is their perceived or real deadliness. Most folks getting into the TTRPG hobby these days are the children of Matt Mercer, and following Critical Role as their primary example, so it’s natural they're sold on the idea that TTRPGs are supposed to be a long interactive story with traditional structure, and deep and satisfying character arcs.
A common reason I hear for folks being turned off from OSR games is their perceived or real deadliness. Most folks getting into the TTRPG hobby these days are the children of Matt Mercer, and following Critical Role as their primary example, so it’s natural they're sold on the idea that TTRPGs are supposed to be a long interactive story with traditional structure, and deep and satisfying character arcs.
When they hear about OSR games and start to understand their deadliness, they get to thinking: “How can I get invested into the story of a character if they die so frequently? This sounds terrible”.
I'm not going to try to tell them that they're wrong, that would be ridiculous, their fun is as legitimate as anyone’s. But I do want to see if I can open a new door for them.
So that got me to thinking, can the OSR come meet this new generation of players in the middle, to make sure that the game is not frustrating and remains a fair and enjoyable experience for them?
Of course it can. I have thoughts on the matter.
How Players Can stay alive in the OSR
My first suggestion is to the players
From the perspective of an OSR player looking in, games like 5e prescribe your characters a set of abilities and optimised choices. The gameplay focuses on providing balanced encounters, and the rules come with a plethora of elements (open Death Save rolls) and abilities (Healing Word) to ensure that player death is highly improbable. The designers want you to buy their long, and event driven story campaigns, and those can easily fall apart narratively if characters start dying.
Contrasting this, the OSR swings the opposite way. Generally speaking any notion of balance or pre-game solutionising is thrown out the window, and cheap ranged spells that you can fire off to heal people and get them back on their feet whilst still performing your main action are typically non existent. These games tend to lean more towards sandbox style play, which means that character death doesn’t have to be woven awkwardly into some pre existing story, because there is no pre existing story.
So the first thing you have to do as a new OSR player is adjust your playstyle. The answer to whatever encounter is in front of you is not on your character sheet. Instead the onus is now on you to use your personal ingenuity to try to shift the dynamics of whatever threat is in front of you, to push the odds in your favour before you engage.
What do I mean? I mean pay close attention to the descriptions given out by the GM, ask questions, fully engage your imagination and start dreaming up wild solutions, ask questions, make a point of being an active participant in the games narrative - ask more questions! Seriously, ask your GM about the situation to gain better understanding, suggest possible additional elements in the world that you can use to form part of your solution.
A good GM should be gratefully receptive to this - they should be rooting for you after all, and when you ask questions it gives the GM opportunity to fill in the gaps of your knowledge!
Of course, it should go without saying - if all else fails, be prepared to run away and fight another day.
Best GM practices To Ensure a Fair Game
Telegraph danger
Be liberal with information, even meta information about the dangers ahead. This will avoid those foul tasting “gotcha moments”. Remember, you are the player character’s eyes and ears in this world, it is unfair to expect the players themselves to be able to act in their best interest if they are unaware of of things that their characters would be very aware of.
For example, everyone in town knows about the dangers of the swamp at night, so the townsfolk stay clear. When you are explaining this to the players, why not show them the swamp random encounter table so they understand exactly what can happen? It would be common knowledge that the swamp was full of giant crocodiles and that there are ghostly lights in the water that try to lure you into peril. Also, lets not forget about the rumours of a nasty old lady who sets traps and kidnaps lost folks too.
Kill your darlings
You know that encounter that you think is going to be epic and you've been really looking forward to bringing it to the table? You need to be able to take joy in allowing the players to come up with ways to circumvent it entirely. Encourage this line of thinking, and when you sense that they’re trying to do this, make sure you equip your players with everything they would know in order to complete their strategy.
The best way to stay alive in the OSR is to play smart. Smart players don’t pick fights when the odds are against them, instead they find another way. Let them, that’s your side of the deal.
Also, keep that encounter on the back burner. The players may have circumvented it this time, but there’s probably going to be another opportunity to recycle it later on. Of course, you should let them avoid it again if they can!
Mothership: Telegraph monster attacks
I wrote a piece a couple of months back. Ostensibly it was about Mothership combat, but there’s this nifty GM style that the game promotes which really helps. Applied more generally to the OSR, it would look like this:
When a combat encounter is potentially devastating, at the start of every round of that combat, tell the players quite openly what the monster is going to attempt to do.
Firstly, this removes any gotcha’s, which is a good thing. Secondly, this creates an exciting feeling of existential dread and panic in the players, knowing what fate lays just ahead of them. Thirdly, it gives the players opportunity to play smart and change the future. Circumvent it, dodge it, whatever verb you like :)
Honestly, this lands a hell of a lot better than the anti climax of just smashing your players into dust out of nowhere.
GOZR: Death or Debasement
Did you catch my piece on GOZR perchance? It’s another OSR game, but it has a rather clever rule. JV West calls it “Death or Debasement”, and when your character would die, you as a player get to make a choice:
Death. You can accept that the character has died and get a bonus to the stats of your next character.
Debasement. You can say that your character survived on 1HP, however his stats have been permanently degraded in some way that does not break verisimilitude.
It’s cool, because as a player, only you know if you’re ready to draw a line under a characters career or not, and this empowers you to do so. However, it’s not a free pass, taking a hit to stats is a narratively satisfying major setback. Possibly even more so than death would be.
If I was to port this to something like Shadowdark, I might say that the consequence for Debasement is that you drop a level. That feels good to me, but you could go with all sorts, so figure it out with your players.
Conclusion
Alrighty, that’ll do pig. Let me know if I’ve managed to convince you. Also, lemme know if you think of anything else I’ve missed. If it’s good, I’ll add it to this article.
Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.
Using time as ttrpg currency to press urgency
Hey there, I’ve got a bit of a crazy idea in my head. A few months ago I watched a sci-fi movie called “In Time” starring Justin Trousersnake. It was OK to be honest, the hook was that in a dystopian future traditional currency is replaced with ‘life-time’.
Hey there, I’ve got a bit of a crazy idea in my head. A few months ago I watched a sci-fi movie called “In Time” starring Justin Trousersnake. It was OK to be honest, the hook was that in a dystopian future traditional currency is replaced with ‘life-time’.
The way this worked, upon birth people were augmented with a system that stopped them biologically aging at the point of early adulthood, but at that exact transitional moment, a clock on their wrist starts ticking backwards, counting down the rest of their lifespan.
This life-time as it’s known, is then traded as a currency, your wages are paid in life-time, and you buy your food and pay your rent with life-time.
The film was attempting to make a very blunt point about the modern low tax, low regulation, free-market Western economy, so of course - this situation empowers those that are ahead to get further ahead. It leads to the lower classes getting paid poverty wages forcing them to turn to loan sharks, gambling and criminal activities to survive.
As far as the film’s story goes, life-time creates frenetic pressure on Mr. Trousersnake as he’s literally in a race against time to save his mum, the girl, and the entirety of society from the evils of cAPiTaliSM.
Using real timers in games
OK, carpark that for a second, because now I’m going to talk about Shadowdark RPG and then rein it all back together again.
There’s a cool mechanic in Shadowdark whereby whenever you light a torch, you set a timer going on your phone for 60 minutes. At the end of the timer, the torch goes out. This serves to keep the urgency up and stop the players from becoming too cautious, it encourages them to take creative risks and makes the game much more action packed.
It’s method contrasts against OSR D&D which tries to solve the same problem, but it instead measures the passage of time abstractly using “dungeon turns” as 10 minute blocks per round of player actions (Modern D&D doesn’t bother with any of this, and just encourages hand waving it away).
While Shadowdark’s real-time method isn’t perfect, since the flow of in-game time rarely matches real-world time, it feels more organic and immersive. Traditional dungeon turns require conscious discipline to do right, and can easily feel rigid and boardgame-like, requiring bookkeeping that can bog down gameplay.
All that said, on balance, if you’re used to abstracting anyway, using real timers won’t break verisimilitude, and the Shadowdark method works well.
OK, so what’s the big idea Jimmi - this blog is meant to be about getting to the point?
OK, OK, sheesh. You’ve probably put two and two together by now, or read the title of this post, so I’ll get to the point.
In sci-fi games, what if we applied ‘life-time’ to track player character wealth? You could have them set a timer on their phone which you could add to and subtract from manually as the situation required.
Players could steal life-time from enemies or have it stolen from them. They might raid a bank where dormant life-time is stored on USB-style devices or loan time to desperate NPCs.
My theory is that, like in Shadowdark, that this would drive the player activity and create a sense of urgency at the table, effectively getting rid of those sessions where everyone mulls around with analysis paralysis.
As a bonus, it’d also take care of having to manually account for the weight and amount of your character’s currency!
Conclusion
Using life-time in this way feels like it could be a game changer, but I’ve not tried it myself yet, so I’m going to integrate it into future games of Mothership to see how I get on with it. Mothership specifically seems like a good fit to me, since the tone of the game is all dystopian future and economic horror anyway, but you might be able to bake it into your fantasy games - magic is a thing! Get in touch if you have any thoughts about it. I’m on Bluesky or you could use my contact form.
Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.
These are the best death rules for your rpg
The moment a player character goes down in battle, you take a d20 and you hide it under the mug. You put the mug out on the table for all to see. For every player turn that the character remains “down” you hide another d20 under the mug. This is important, so remember to add another d20 every round…
…in my opinion
Before we get started, I want to be straight with you. This post contains links to my new online zazzle store - tldr: I designed a mug… because I’m peculiar and I think it’s funny. You don’t need to buy the mug, if you like these death rules, just use your own.
Oh, whilst I’m writing disclaimers, this D&D house rule of mine is inspired by the death rules in Mothership 1e, which is a fantastic little game by Tuesday Knight Games.
setup
You are going to need an opaque mug, cup or similar vessel, and you’re going to need a handful of d20s.
how to use the best death rules
The moment a player character goes down in battle, you take a d20 and you hide it under the mug. You put the mug out on the table for all to see. For every player turn that the character remains “down” you hide another d20 under the mug, this is important, so don’t forget!
At this point, no one knows the status of the character, all we know is that the longer they’re down, the more dice they’re getting, and the worse their odds of survival. Feel that tension baby!
The spicy bit
When another character goes to revive the downed character, be it during or after battle, using a spell or just a stabilising action, that’s when the fun begins.
The player making the revive action first shakes the mug, and reveals the d20s within. Read them as follows, with later conditions superseding earlier ones:
Condition 1) If at least 3 dice show a result of less than 11, the character is dead.
Condition 2) If any dice show a result of natural 1, the character is dead.
Condition 3) If any dice show a result of natural 20, the character is alive. (This overrules condition 1)
Condition 4) If multiple dice show results of 1 and 20, they cancel each other out. (This overrules conditions 2 and 3)
If the character is dead, the revive action fails.
Why do this?
Characters die, and the moment should be a glorious tension dripping swan song of nail biting action! Standard D&D rules (for example) rob you of this because everyone at the table knows your exact condition at all times, so there’s no need to rush over to cast healing word on you if you’ve already rolled 2 public successes on your death saves.
With my rules, You could be dead on turn 1. You could be dead even if they cast healing word on you immediately. The only thing players know for sure is that the longer they leave you face down in the dirt, the greater the odds are that you’ve stabbed your last goblin. Also, other than a natural 20, there is no way to ‘self stabilise’.
This creates a beautiful sense of urgency at the table, suddenly, someone going down is a cause for massive alarm that requires an immediate response. All the while, waiting patiently, the downed player has no idea if it’s already too late, sitting there grinning with anticipation, half imagining their next character…
About that mug I mentioned…
Because I’m peculiar, I thought it would be funny to actually make a specific mug for this purpose, so I designed one using royalty free art and stuck it up on Zazzle. “The Mug Of Death” amuses me greatly, and it has the best death rules laid out on it.
I know what you’re thinking, and to respond your very reasonable question: The image on the mug is intentionally upside down, because the mug is meant to be flipped over during play to hide the dice. When it is correctly oriented, everyone will be able to read the image as:
If you want one here’s the link to buy one from Zazzle (your transaction is entirely with them). I get a kickback from them, and it helps me keep the lights on.
But seriously (and I cannot stress this enough), just use a mug you have kicking around in your kitchen instead! Unless you’re peculiar too of course, in which case thank you very much in advance.
Conclusion
So that’s it, use these death rules to make character’s going down a spicier occasion, and then bask like a sea lion on the rocks of tension it creates!
Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.