Team-Updates #4: Cerebro Issue X
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Run #8: Spectaculars
Have you heard our latest run yet? We played Scratchpad Publishing’s Spectaculars with the one and only Seanan McGuire. We are huge fans of her writing, so getting to do this was a real treat and the end result was a lot of fun to play, and we think to listen to. Especially if you like shouting. And cat shenanigans (both in- and out-of-game).
Run #9: See Issue X
For our next game, we’re playing See Issue X by Chris Longhurst. This one’s probably best described as a journaling game, but it works wonderfully as a multiplayer storytelling game as well (superheroes going to team up, after all).
See Issue X focuses on the way that Big 2 superhero stories — long-running, serially-published, and passed among authors — have characters, themes, or other elements that keeping coming back up. Sometimes these repeaters are exciting, and give a new perspective on a familiar character, and sometimes they’re awkward, continuity-defying, and best patched up later.
With that in mind, we turned to someone who excels at describing and discussing the long in-universe history of superheroes: Connor Goldsmith! On his Cerebro podcast, Connor deep-dives with guests for several hours on X-Men and X-Men–related characters. (Stephanie has been on twice, to talk about Warlock and — of course — Kate Pryde.)
Recording with Connor was an absolute blast. Make sure you’re subscribed in your podcatcher so you’ll get these episodes as they come out in March.
GM Opinions: Handling Failed Rolls
One of the things that’s been on my mind recently, especially after playing Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game and Spectaculars for this show, and the Root RPG in home games, is the idea of failed rolls in TTRPGs. If we’re telling stories with dice, we’re going to see them. But games have a fair amount of variety in how much or how well they support handling them.
As an example, I’m going to use the clichéd fantasy adventure task of getting through a locked door. Assume that, as a GM, you call for a roll, perhaps a lock picking skill check in Dungeons and Dragons 5E. How do you adjudicate the result?
Success is actually the easiest outcome to handle. The player character gets what they want (in this case, unlocking the door).
What about when the dice comes up below the DC, or you get the 7–9 “mixed success” of Powered by the Apocalypse, or the drawbacks/disadvantages of a game like Spectaculars or Genesys? A GMing philosophy that I try to adhere to — learned from a lot of time running PbtA games — is that a die roll should meaningfully change the situation. It happens naturally in success, but how does it happen in failure?
Rules-as-written D&D 5E is actually silent on this topic. The attempt did not succeed, and, other than in-game time being spent, there is no specified consequence and technically no rule preventing the PC from trying again and again until it succeeds.
In a Powered by the Apocalypse game, such as the Root RPG or Masks (possibly the greatest superhero TTRPG; coming soon to Team-Up Moves!), the GM is expected to “make a move” after a failed roll and change the situation somewhow. (You can of course houserule to do this in D&D as well, and TBH probably should.)
Some examples of changing the situation include:
- “You jam the lock.” — Now it can’t be retried.
- “You trigger a small trap, take 4 damage.” — Use up their resources (e.g. health).
- “Your lockpicks break, you’ll need to replace them before you can unlock anything else.” — Shutting down the ability in the near term.
- “You trigger an alarm and hear guards’ footsteps down the corridor.” — Escalating the situation.
- “You open the door just in time to see your rival slip out a secret exit with the treasure.” — They get what they asked for (an unlocked door) but not what they want. Sometimes described as “failing forward.”
Some RPGs provide general guidance on how to respond to failure. PbtA games do this a lot, sometimes talking about “softer” and “harder” moves, as in April Kit Walsh’s Thirsty Sword Lesbians, or — my favorite formulation — the “setting it up” / “knocking it down” in Avery Alder’s Monsterhearts 2.
The Sentinel Comics RPG doesn’t talk much about complete failure, though admittedly it’s rare in that game. Instead, players who don’t roll complete success will often “succeed with a minor twist” or “succeed with a major twist,” and how to handle those are is described with many examples and advice. Other games, like D&D 5E or Spectaculars, leave how to handle failure essentially unstated.
Regardless of rules-as-written, the choice of how to handle failure has a direct effect on one of the GM’s most important responsibilities: the game’s pacing. If every response is “that didn’t work, your stuff’s broken and you can’t try again,” the game can slow down as the players run out of options (and possibly interest). On the other hand, if the PCs are always going from frying pan to fire to even more fire, the consequences will snowball out of control until any hope of success (and memory of what you were doing in the first place) is lost.
I see it as one of the GM’s jobs to respond to a failed roll by making the failure meaningful (otherwise, why are we rolling?) and keeping the momentum of the story going.
Overall, I find it helpful to think of failure responses as falling into 3 categories:
- A new (probably more urgent / threatening) situation.
- A narrative drawback.
- A cost in resources.
Different RPG rulesets will have a big effect on how straightforward or natural it is to do these different types of responses. The easier these are for a GM to apply, the more responsive the story will be to the actions and results of the PCs.
Almost all RPGs support the first type, definitionally, because you’re just giving the players more of the game they’re already playing. The dangers that the rules make possible become manifest. To go back to our lockpicking example, this is guards showing up, implying that combat is going to break out.
You can scale these sorts of consequences from minor (an easily-dispatched combatant) to major (your campaign’s Big Bad appears), so they’re pretty flexible, but there are still two things to keep in mind: how easy it is to run these scenes on-demand, and how they’ll affect the overall narrative.
- If the threats require detailed specifications like stat blocks, you’ll need to have options pre-prepared or be faster at flipping through your game’s bestiary than your players are at falling asleep.
- If you’re playing through a pre-written adventure or scenario, you have to be aware of how this improvised situation affects the narrative you’re working from.
Nevertheless, if you’re looking for the consequences of characters’ actions to really drive the story — and you probably should — these kinds of responses are great.
Narrative drawbacks are also fairly universal in TTRPGs. These can be something like your rival getting the treasure your character wants, or — as happened in a Thirsty Sword Lesbians campaign I ran — having to sacrifice your beloved cape to tie a ship’s wheel steady during the storm. This wasn’t even a +1 Cape of Awesomeness or anything; Kamchatka just looked really fierce when she wore it, and was devastated to see it lost.
These kind of drawbacks can be some of the most memorable consequences in a game that your players will talk about later. They can also drive the story forward (now the players are scheming on how to follow the rival back to their lair and steal the treasure back!). But to have any weight at all, they require both buy-in from the affected players and long-term commitment from the GM. “The blacksmith will never look at you the same way again” is a toothless consequence if the player decides that their character doesn’t care about her anyway, or if the campaign leaves that town, never to return.
Finally, there are resource costs. TTRPGs vary a lot in what resources characters have, and (therefore) in how resources can “pay” for consequences. Health is one of the most common resources, of course, as seen regularly in D&D: “you slip climbing down the rocks, take 1d6 points of damage.”
Other games have more resources to burn. The Root RPG has — besides wear on your items — 3 tracks: one for injuries, one for exhaustion, and one called “depletion,” which abstracts the “stuff” that an adventurous person would have on them that doesn’t need to be spelled out in an inventory (food, spare change, some rope, figurines of badgers, &c.). Players will often “spend” exhaustion or wear or depletion to trigger their more powerful abilities, so using those up as a consequence can have a meaningful effect.
The Sentinel Comics RPG has damage as a possible consequence for a minor or major twist, along with applying “hinders” — negative modifiers — to future rolls. (FWIW I probably relied too heavily on hinders when GMing SC:RPG in our 7th run, believing them to be a mild consequence. Negative modifiers are actually powerful, especially when they stack up, and too many slows down the game by preventing success. Damage is often a better choice since it both increases tension and helps the heroes unlock their more powerful abilities.)
Forged in the Dark games like Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy make frequent use of “clocks” as a timer mechanism. If there’s a clock on the table counting down until a disaster, time becomes a very precious resource indeed.
What makes spending resources an appealing consequence for failure from the GM’s perspective is that it can have a sizable impact for a very small amount of time and mental effort. Picking an appropriate resource and asking the player to decrement it on their character sheet is a quick decision with a quick resolution, so the momentum of the scene is maintained, and since you’re not drastically changing the situation, the focus of the scene is maintained, too. This is an excellent option for when there’s a lot going on that the players are already excited about. Hit ’em with a cost, making things harder and therefore more tense and exciting, and keep rolling.
There are, of course, times not to use this consequence. If the players are already very low on their resources, taking away more can make the game less fun. Rather than having to pick the one perfect moment to trigger their exciting ability, now they just can’t. It’s also only in those extremes that this pushes the story, and even then it tends to be more along the lines of “now we go find a healer” than “now we have even greater adventures.”
Framing things this way, I can say that as much as there were parts of Spectaculars that we really loved, one thing to note about it is that its two resources, resistance and hero points, both reset at the beginning of action scenes. (Completely to 100 in the case of resistance, and back up to a minimum in the case of hero points.) Consequently, I struggled with how to handle failures and drawbacks that came up in the interlude scenes. While some Spectaculars issues penalize failure by having a ticking clock behind each interlude, our issue did not. Since — owing to our recording time constraints — I felt like I couldn’t introduce an on-the-fly action sequence, at one point I ended up taking a drawback and saying “I’ll bank that for later” but then never used it. Which, in retrospect, is somewhat disappointing.
My thoughts on this will probably evolve as I play more Root, since it encourages the “use up their resources” more than any other RPG I’ve run so far, but I am currently feeling quite positive about using that as a consequence much of the time. That way I can save the “new, threatening situation” and “something to have feelings about” choices for when I can really make them impactful.
What we’ve been playing or reading:
Fiona: Not much in the way of superhero things, though I did get chance to read the Fantastic Four #1 written by Ryan North and liked it a lot. (Surprising no one.)
In RPGs there is the aforementioned Root campaign that Stephanie is a part of, and a Thirsty Sword Lesbians campaign with Ceci and Shana that is in spaaaaaacccce. My goal for these games is to pre-plan less and let the dice, game mechanisms, and well-timed leading questions to the players take us to unexpected places.
I’ll also say that the computer game Against the Storm, available on Steam Early Access, is phenomenal. Like, “jeopardized the timely release of podcast content” phenomenal. It’s a settlement building and logistics game that plays like the first 2 hours of Sim City or Civilization, when everything is intimate and new and exciting.
Stephanie: Fiona persuaded me to start Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes, and after I got to page 20 the book pretty much read itself to me. [I can also highly recommend the audiobook, where the author will read it to you. —F] Ever wonder what would happen if your favorite butt-kicking, deathly-sword-swinging full-on orc PC got so sick of killing that she decided to open a coffee shop instead? What if she then fell in love… very quietly, in a low-key way… with a succubus… who turned out to be one of the good guys? Anyway, if you have even come within 20’ of a long-running D&D game, or if you just like Terry Pratchett, go read Baldree. If not, I guess read Sir Terry? (Always good advice.) [Can confirm. –F]
The poetry half of my brain, meanwhile, has been re-devouring Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On. It is what it says on the tin. There’s even a poem called “Science Fiction Poetry.” And no, it’s not all dystopian. More like “if we can get through these days, better days lie ahead.”
We hope some of those better days come with your ears attached! As always, get back to us with likes (or dislikes) at show@teamupmoves.com, and if you’ve got a game you’d like us to try, let us know!
— Fiona and Stephanie