I’m Just Taking It All In: Solving problems with on the Fly Design

If you run TTRPGs the realms of Rulings and Rules have a very evident border. You know when one or the other is being used. Rules are set in stone. Roll the D20, a 20 always crits, a 1 always fumbles. Rulings are for doing things we don’t have hard and fast Rules for. “I want to leap from the chandelier and do a diving attack onto the head of the vile wyrm”; congratulations GM you now have to do some on the fly game design to figure out what they have to roll, in what order they have to roll, whether or not the attack deals extra damage, has some blowback on the player and make it all vaguely fair and in line with the entire ruleset of the game you are all engaging with. This process can slow a game to halt if you are the kind of person who loves rules. I don’t mean that pejoratively, I love rules. Rules are necessary to make sure the things that happen are fair and unbiased. They absolve the GM from generating the consequences of their players' (often asinine) actions. They allow you to be trusted in some very nasty situations.

That’s not to say I don't revel in the realm of Rulings. I think that realistically when someone has a great memory of a TTRPG experience, they are usually remembering something that happened within that gestalt. Because I love the realm of rulings, I love games that run on the Apocalypse World framework (herein: Powered by the Apocalypse or PbtA). If you're familiar or have been made familiar by my evangelizing, you’ll know the system within is one of narrative rules made of natural language. The interpretable nature of the system's rules pushes them into a strange borderland between Rules and Rulings. It does this through its system of Moves (here he goes again) which impel the players and GM into playing within a chosen genre and serve to prompt the GM into making certain types of decisions. They therefore narrow the scope of possibility (like Rules), but demand flexibility (like Rulings).  I urge anyone who runs games to try and run a PbtA game. You will learn to run any TTRPG systems more effectively by constantly exercising the Rulings Muscle located about an inch behind your forehead.

Even within this ruleset It can happen that you will venture into the realm of pure Rulings  and this is where you can run into some problems if you are not comfortable with the idea of game design. You can’t just tell a player who wants to pickpocket someone to roll + Cool and on a 10+ they win. There needs to be three degrees of success/failure, or at the very least an action needs to act as a trigger to springboard another move. Apocalypse World doesn't have an explicit move for pickpocketing someone, though you could interpret some of the Subterfuge moves this way if you stretched their meaning. You have two choices. One, allow the player to do this without the possibility of failure. Two, writing a custom move. In this situation you probably end up writing a custom Move. This is something the rulebook explicitly tells you is probably going to be necessary the longer a campaign goes on. Mercifully you have not only the game's plethora of universal Moves, but also instructions on how to go about structuring a custom move. Once you’ve written it, you've got a new rule to add to your game. Do this enough and you learn that really the game is nothing but a playtested bricolage of these rulings which were deemed helpful in enforcing genre. 

The creation of custom moves really shined for me in a recent situation. Sometimes you get a player who is lost in the weeds, or is kind of just playing because this is a thing their friends do and they’re not really into it. They find it difficult to make decisions or don’t really have a direction for their character. At worst they say the thing that means death for narrative tension. 

“I don't do anything really”

I have that friend at my table. He is not super into TTRPGs.  Acts of creation are just kind of taxing for some people. For his character, life had recently become “untenable”. In game terms this means that the player's character has taken enough harm to kill them, but instead they can choose to return to the game with a new condition. In this case the player chose to come back with a bonus to their Weird stat and to make this consistent within the fiction we decided that their addiction to extremely base vices was gone, replaced with a complete lack of self preservation instinct. They have glimpsed the void and it doesn’t really bother them anymore. This is a problem. The character and player were once motivated by something. They had a prompt. Now they don’t want anything and don't fear the prospect of dying. They are utterlly rudderless. This came to a head when it became this player’s moment to take part in a powder keg of a situation. When given a turn to speak they told me. “I don't do anything really”. After a short discussion we came to the conclusion they 're just blankly watching it all unfold. I know my friend very well. I know if allowed to say this right now, then every time he’s put on the spot he is going to repeat  “I don't do anything really”. Oh Jesus God, what the fuck do I do? Violence doesn’t motivate them. I can’t just throw a threat to their bodily safety at them like the game advises.  When this happens, you’re forced to get a little existential. Enter their new custom move…

I’m Just Taking It All In: When you impassively observe a charged situation, Open your Mind to the World’s Psychic Maelstrom. 

Note: Open your Mind to the World’s Psychic Maelstrom, is a universal move in Apocalypse World, not some shit I made up.

This is far and away the laziest most on the fly piece of design I’ve ever birthed into the world. It’s just a trigger for an already established Move. It seems odd that doing nothing can trigger something, but anyone with a consistent meditation practice is well aware of the fact that the act of not acting can often be a trigger for some really weird shit. Initially I intended it as a joke; a piece of direction to nudge the player out of apathetic decision paralysis, but as it left my mouth it became a serious as heart attack permanent part of his character. We had entered the realm of pure Rulings and after running a game that demands the skillset from its GM for so long I was able to keep an unmotivated player rolling and the game moving for everyone else without undue time and effort. I decided that If I can’t threaten your physical safety as a narrative device, I can drag tension directly from the player with a short discussion of their character’s interiority. No situation is ever intractable. If you want to play a void, we can stare into it together. I should note that you probably shouldn’t play this trick on people who you haven't known for a period of many years and have not been at least a little vulnerable with. It can get a little tense and feel like you're intruding on their agency, but when you do it right you end up acting more like an intrusive thought/emotion than like God pulling the puppet strings. 

Anyway the session ended with a literal bang, a changed political landscape and multiple character deaths. It remains to be seen what is going to come of this piece of game design, but at the very least it served its purpose to keep everything flowing. Rulings at the end of the day do not have to be optimal or even balanced. You are not able to playtest them, you’re basically just pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the engine you’re using. Sometimes you blow the pistons through the hood and you’ve got to throttle back, but like it says in the Baker’s Book “Play to find out what happens”.