I'm hosting this month's RPG Blog Carnival and the theme is Over the Garden Wall - Beyond the OSR. This sadly hasn't garnered much activity yet (myself, admittedly, included) but I am going to work the bellows on those dying embers in this last week of March "save versus Madness."

I have made good use in my adventure gaming with a set of play techniques I was introduced to through story-games. These are each essentially agnostic of the underlying game dice mechanics, and instead operate at the meta-mechanical level of scene framing and lines of narrative authority. I will post a mini blog series giving a brief exposition of each, and how I have lightly adapted it to the needs of adventure gaming.

While reading along, I exhort you to 'get on the blogs' and venture over the garden wall yourself. Doesn't need to be storygames! Refer to the original post above for the full remit of the theme.

Negotiating stakes

My second post on this blog discussed the role of negotiating the stakes before rolling dice in Blades in the Dark (Blades), but in the wake of the stealth-dropped 1.5 edition of that game (Deep Cuts), I have been further galvanized by these ideas.

In Blades, you are directed to negotiate the present and possible future fictions (what I'm dubbing the stakes) before actually touching the dice for a threat (previously action) roll. The two components of this I will touch on are trading position for effect, and making a devil's bargain.

Position and effect were unfortunately somewhat over-explained in the original treatment, but a leaner folk version has since emerged: an explicit step before rolling of establishing what success, failure, or something in-between will look like. This permits the GM and players to then 'haggle' over the risk versus reward (when traditionally adventure games mechanise the chance/probability of saving throws or skill checks, but leave the actual stakes somewhere between GM fiat and prescribed in the adventure module). Jesse Schell in The Art of Game Design posited that such triangularity (risk versus reward) is perhaps the single most potent design lens, and I'm inclined to agree!

The devil's bargain is really a close cousin, where instead of dialling up or down the risk-reward scale, we can pay a definite cost for a boosted chance of success. This can be layered into almost any dice procedure with the usual circumstance modifier, or else rolling with advantage.

Both of these techniques blend seamlessly with the more concrete and less abstract, rulings over rules and OSR challenges style of adventure game play. If only immediate concerns are up for grabs (such as risking damage or loss of equipment, loss of time or health, etc. rather than ticking faction clocks or adjusting relationships) then it doesn't significantly move the narrative authority away from the GM or lose the 'player as pawn' stance (versus 'player as actor' or 'player as author/director').

What both trading position for effect and a devil's bargain offer is a greater fidelity of the fictional details, and this can further promote lateral thinking and creative problem solving. Don't focus on dice modifiers - haggle over all the possible futures.

Summary

• Raise the stakes by increasing both the impact of success and failure, or
• Lower the stakes by reducing both the impact of success and failure, or
• Improve your odds (eg. roll with advantage) by paying a fixed cost in time, gear, health or other resource.

Further reading

• 50/50 by John Harper
• Difficulty in Bastionland by Chris McDowall (Bastionland)
• Advantage and Impact by Sam Doebler (Dreaming Dragonslayer)