Building Steam with a Grain of Salt
Happy September, everyone! It’s now officially Halloween, a three-month celebration of tricking, treating, and all things spoopy.
I’m pretty pleased that I’m sending out these things more than like twice a year. In fact, you’re actually going to get two this month! This one will include some discussion of what it was like returning to running a Forged in the Dark campaign after a couple months off. A little geeky, but not really any more than usual.
The other piece, on the other hand, is very geeky. It’s my attempt to wrap my head around Relational Frame Theory, the philosophy of language underpinning Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I think it’s worth a read and addresses an important topic that everyone should be interested in: the root cause of human suffering! Wooo! Yeah! That’s the good stuff!
In all seriousness, though, it’s pretty long and maybe a little dense in places but I do my best to break things down since I’m not only trying to explain it to you, I’m trying to really understand it myself.
Anyway, with no further ado …
Summer is always a little busier, filled with vacations and camping trips and totally avoidable outbreaks of deadly COVID variants. Oops! But it was in that context that we ended up about three months without gathering around the ol’ digital tabletop for our fortnightly game of Neon Black.
Coming back to it after such a long break necessarily meant I came back a little rusty. I think this would be the case with any system, but even with this being our second campaign using Forged in the Dark, I just still don’t feel I have the system mastery of the Powered by the Apocalypse games I’ve run the most — Monster of the Week, Dungeon World, Freebooters on the Frontier, The Woodlands, Escape from Dino Island. I’m sure if I restarted my long-running Freebooters campaign there’d be some adjustments, but FitD just feels so much fiddlier than PbtA.
(To be sure, not in the way crunchier games are, with dozens of subsystems and special rules, but FitD games do tend to have more procedure, and things to keep track of, particularly for the GM.)
I’ve never been great at pacing FitD games, but it felt especially apparent to me during our first session back that something was off. We got a late start since we all wanted to catch up and socialize, and that was no doubt part of it (and much needed!), but it was more than that. The score went long, with something that should have been fairly simple taking up a whole session, forcing us to continue next time. I also could have done a better job with the spotlight, but the thing that really stuck with me afterwards was how I could have paced things better.
The following day, the answer came to me, and seemed so obvious.
I bet that if you’ve played Blades in the Dark or any of the games that have descended from it, you already know what I’m about to say.
That’s right: clocks.
For the uninitiated, clocks are a way to abstract and track obstacles, impending trouble, etc. The number of segments a clock has (usually between four and eight, sometimes as many as twelve), the more complex the task the clock represents. The clocks typically are about the obstacle the crew is facing, rather than the specific approach. For example, if the obstacle is that there’s a patrol that the crew will need to get past, they can do that in any number of ways, so “sneak past the guards” isn’t a good clock. They could also kill the guards, or bribe them, or trick them, etc. The guards who are on patrol are the obstacle, and the crew can fill that clock in whatever way they think of.
There are also clocks representing impending danger, racing clocks, linked series of clocks, mission clocks, tug-of-war clocks, and faction clocks. Although I prep very little for any given session of Neon Black, it can be helpful to come up with a couple of potential progress or mission clocks. I did not do this for our session on Sunday, and when clocks did come up they were almost exclusively danger clocks that were ticking down in the background.
Clocks are a really great pacing mechanism, because there’s no getting caught up in playing out just how effective an action is — we know, because the Decker just rolled a hit on a risky action with great effect: that’s three ticks on a six-step clock. And then the Synth rolled a hit on an action with limited effect for one more tick. We play out what those hits look like, what it means to have limited, standard, or great effect, but the fiction always follows from the action rolls (which follow from the fiction, and so on, in an ongoing conversation between GM and players, involving dice whenever the character does something challenging) so whatever happened, it results in the obstacle being more than halfway dealt with.
The 55 Crew were trying to smuggle a friend, the renowned hacker Cereal Habit (they/them, wearable cyberdeck, loud, punk) into a cyberware clinic to have a subdermal tracker removed from their neck. The tracker was placed there by the Auditors (tier 3 faction, corporate), and was certain to raise suspicion. To get Cereal in, they disguised them as a viral pop star that’s really an avatar for the Fixer. The plan was solid and they rolled a 5 on their engagement roll, so they got the friend in, but were presented with the next obstacle in a risky position: how, in a clinic very concerned about the privacy of its wealthy clients and for some reason swarming with Sentinels, do they get back into the operating room with their friend? They came up with some plausible ideas and rolled well, and, once in the operating room, faced the next obstacle: they needed to convince the surgeon, Dr. Hope Proxy (she/her, smoker, muttering, always wears a lab coat) not to report to the Auditors that someone showed up to get one of their trackers removed.
Again, the crew came up with a pretty good approach and rolled well. It worked out. But both of these obstacles could have been (and should have been) represented by progress clocks. It would have made the action more focused, and kept the pacing tight. Things that ended up taking multiple action rolls to accomplish could have been done in one or two since the obstacles weren’t particularly complex. Convincing the front desk to let them back with Cereal could have probably been a 4-step clock, convincing the doc either 4 or 6.
But I just completely forgot to use clocks in this way.
(We did have a danger clock running in the background: someone will discover that the Fixer, Checkmate Boots (they/them, silver mohawk, androgynous, connected) is behind the viral pop sensation Kitamura Mai (she/her, digital, iridescent, vintage, bubblegum). It was a six-step clock and only ended up getting ticked once, I think as part of a devil’s bargain I offered Mary, who was playing Check. It will likely come back up.)
It was such an obvious realization that I felt almost disappointed in myself. And really, I’d just come off this run of Rebel Crown that felt (to me at least) like a masterclass in how to run FitD games. The GM, Jesse, was excellent at keeping the pacing (though he will probably tell you this is not his strong suit, he did a great job), reminding players of the various levers they can use to affect the action roll (pushing yourself, taking a devil’s bargain, exchanging position for effect, and so on), and giving hard consequences that felt earned (always reminding the players the consequences can be resisted). I brought some of that back to the game with me, but it’s a work in progress.
Both running this game and playing in that game (and that great series of MOTH-LIGHT) have been incredibly helpful in terms of my other big project (that I work on here and there because life is busy and I don’t have the energy I once had for creative pursuits), which is designing my own Forged in the Dark game. It started as a fairly one-to-one port of Monster of the Week, which quickly showed me that PbtA and FitD, despite sharing a lot of DNA, are very different systems with different assumptions. It’s subsequently started growing into its own thing, and I’m pretty excited about it. I have completed drafts of all the PC playbooks, and I’ve just started work on crew playbooks. I haven’t written the setting or lore yet, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be taken from my all-too-short-lived MOTW game I ran a few years ago. There’s more I want to say, but since there’s no guarantee I’ll actually be ready to playtest it anytime soon, I should probably stay mum for now.
I had a really good experience playing in a run of Cloven Pine Games’ wonderful Checkpoint Midnight, currently in playtesting. It was probably the most PvP I’ve ever experienced in a game, even more than our Urban Shadows run, and it was very, very satisfying. Hopefully I can share a playlist of the videos sometime soon.
I’m currently in a game of Wool of Bat, a GMless, diceless game about a community of witches. It’s inspired by Discworld, which I haven’t read, but sounds fun. Not sure if those videos will be posted or not, but if they are, I’ll share them here.
No other news really. 2021 seems to be just flying by. I’ve said before that March of 2020 was about six years long, and every month since has lasted two days at most. It’s a weird contraction and dilation of time that we’re experiencing. Will it ever normalize? Who the fuck knows.
j.