Back in 2011 I wrote an essay titled Opening Your Game Table. It talked about how we can play our favorite games more, share them with more people, and create more of the memorable experiences we love by changing the way we approach roleplaying games. At the time this was a relatively new discovery for me, and Opening Your Game Table was a pretty casual exultation of the possibilities I saw in an open table.

Now, however, I’ve spent the last five years reaping the benefits of various open tables (and also seeing some open tables crash and burn). So I’d like to take the opportunity to share some of the lessons I’ve learned. Some of the material here will be familiar to those who have read the previous essay, but I think you’ll find the new insights of the Open Table Manifesto worth your time.

PLAYING CATCH

Imagine that you had never heard of baseball before and someone said, “Hey, wanna join a baseball team?”

“What’s that involve?” you ask.

“Well, we practice 3 hours every Wednesday evening and we’ll have a game every Saturday afternoon for the next 7 months.”

You’d have to be really, really curious about baseball to take that guy up on his offer, right? And if you actually made that commitment, then the quality of that baseball team would probably be really important and you’d need to be really convinced that someone was going to make a great baseball player before you’d invite them to join you, right? Plus, it’s such a huge commitment of your time that it would be incredibly difficult for you to commit to two different baseball teams, so at a certain point you’d just play baseball with the guys on your team and you’d stop inviting other people to play with you because there would be no room for them.

If that was the only way people could start playing baseball, it’s pretty easy to see that you wouldn’t have a lot of baseball players.

Of course, that’s not how people start playing baseball. Most people start playing baseball when somebody says, “Hey, wanna play catch?” And playing catch is easy. You pick up a ball and you throw it. And if you get bored, you can put the ball down and you do something else. There’s no commitment, so people will be more open to trying it (and inviting others to do it with them). Some people, of course, will never pick that ball up again. But lots of people will find they like throwing the ball around, and some of those people will eventually find themselves agreeing to spend 300 hours every year participating in amateur baseball leagues.

THE DEDICATED TABLE

When it comes to roleplaying games, the equivalent to the amateur baseball league is what I’ve come to call a dedicated table. And it’s the way that most people play RPGs today: They have a regular group of 5 or 6 people who plan to all get together on a regular or semi-regular basis for 10 or 20 or more 4-8 hour sessions.

When you agree to join a campaign like this, you’re making a minimum commitment of 80 hours or more spread out over months or years of your life. Dropping out or missing frequent sessions is usually considered bad form, since losing a player (and, therefore, their character) can be incredibly disruptive to the tightly woven continuity of the modern campaign.

And that level of commitment can result in truly amazing things. Last year, for example, I ran the Eternal Lies campaign for Trail of Cthulhu: We played for 95 hours split across 22 sessions, and that amount of time allowed us to explore a deep and interesting scenario while creating well-rounded characters who changed and grew over time. I’ve also got a D&D campaign that’s been running as a dedicated table since 2007 and, once again, the commitment of time and focus unlocks creative options that simply would not be possible otherwise. (Just like a baseball team that practices together regularly is going to be more skilled in their collective play than a pick-up team that plays for a single afternoon.)

But that mode of play also comes at a cost. Part of that cost can be personal: Lots of people talk about how they can’t play RPGs any more because they just don’t have the time to commit to them. Another part of that cost comes from the incredible difficulty of inviting new players to join your game (particularly if they’re completely new to roleplaying games because there’s no way to know whether or not they’ll like the game enough to make the significant commitment you’re asking of them).

What’s unfortunate is that many people believe that this is a cost which must be paid in order to play an RPG, and if they can’t pay that cost they conclude that they can’t play RPGs any more.

But there is another option.

THE OPEN TABLE

An open table campaign is structured so that you can pick it up and play it with little or no prep. This makes the game work like playing catch: You can spontaneously play it as a spur of the moment social activity. It also allows you to open your gaming table: Instead of having a regular set of players for each session, the GM can send an open invite to everyone participating (or interested) in the campaign. The same structures that make the game instantly playable also allow you to run it seamlessly for whichever set of players show up for a particular session.

This is awesome.

It’s awesome for you because you never have to worry about wrangling schedules. Feel like playing on Thursday? Send out an e-mail saying, “We’re playing on Thursday. Who wants to come?” and you’re good to go. Just hanging out with some friends and you’re trying to figure out what to do? Normally you’d never suggest an RPG because of the prep time involved; but with an open table you can always just pick it up and start playing.

It also makes it incredibly easy to invite new players. Even if they only play the one time, they can have a great experience without causing any disruption to “continuity”. Over the years I’ve heard many people say that they can’t make an open table work because they don’t know enough players. But when you actually have an open table, you’ll be astonished at how quickly you can end up with more players than you know what to do with. For my first open table I started with an e-mail list of 8 or 9 players. Within a couple of months that list had grown to more than 30. Today, I have more than 60 people in my pool of active players. And that’s only possible because the open table makes the recruitment of new players so easy.

This is also why having an open table can be really awesome even if you prefer the focus and intensity of a dedicated campaign: The open table is how you find the high quality, enthusiastic players who make dedicated campaigns possible. That awesome Eternal Lies campaign I ran last year? I first played with several key members of that group through my open table. And when I needed a replacement player for my long-running D&D campaign I knew exactly where to find her, because for months she’d been proving herself to be the perfect player for that campaign at my open table.

With an open table I can play with more people. I can play more frequently. I can use it as an incubator for testing out new ideas in a low-risk environment. And it improves all of my gaming, both open and dedicated.

If you love playing roleplaying games, I really believe you owe it to yourself to keep an open table in your back pocket.

It’s also awesome for the hobby and the industry. This type of open format which makes it easy for you to share something you love with other people is how activities become memetically viral. Most recently you can see that with the board game boom: When you get a game you love, you play it with other people. Then those people buy their own copies and share it with more people, who also end up buying copies.

When played as dedicated campaigns, RPGs don’t get that kind of viral spread. But that wasn’t always the case. When D&D was first created the game was designed around an open table. And, in fact, those open table values endured and remained common throughout the hobby’s rapid growth and boom. (Which, frankly, I don’t think was a coincidence.)

That first game structure was the Megadungeon: It took form in Dave Arneson’s Castle Blackmoor. Gygax copied it for Castle Greyhawk. And the vast majority of the earliest Dungeon Masters, following the guidelines laid out in the original D&D manuals, created their own megadungeons.

And the megadungeon campaign inherently leant itself to an open table: The dungeon didn’t care who plunged into its depths each week, and therefore each expedition into the dungeon was free to feature different players and characters. Arneson and Gygax both talked about the fact that a typical campaign would feature fifty or more players, and their campaigns (and the early rulebooks) featured a panoply of options for play which could only flourish in the rich dynamics these large player bases could make possible.

The megadungeon, however, is not the be-all or end-all of open table play. So let’s take a moment to step back and consider what’s needed for successful open tables.

Part 2: What An Open Table Needs

Here’s a quick miscellanea of some Alexandrian-related material that you can find around the internet at the moment.

Martin Tegelj has posted the latest installment of the RPG campaign he’s developing based on my pitch for Doctor Who: The Temporal Masters. There are currently six adventures in the series. Although only some of them are directly related to the Temporal Masters, I recommend checking out all of them:

A Conversion Before Christmas
Something Old, Something New
Dawn of the Temporal Masters
The Riot
(Prelude: Donna)
Fugue State
Alliance of the Daleks

Jose Manuel Real has translated the Three Clue Rule into Spanish as La regla de las tres pistas. I’m not fluent in Spanish, but if you do, you should check it out.

Hebrew is another language I am completely illiterate in, but Oded Deutch has also translated the Three Clue Rule into his native tongue as כלל שלושת הרמזים.

The Three Clue Rule has proven to be something of a “gateway drug” for better GMing, so I’m always excited to see it getting out in front of a larger audience. Thank you to Martin, Jose, and Oded for being awesome!

(click for PDF)

I’ve done several of these cheat sheets now, but for those who haven’t seen them before: I frequently prep cheat sheets for the RPGs I run. These summarize all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced combat options. It’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it also provides a valuable resource at the table for both the GMs and the players. (For more information on the procedure I follow when prepping these cheat sheets, click here.)

These cheat sheets for Technoir, a cyberpunk RPG with two incredibly clever mechanics:

First, instead of traditional ability scores, characters have Verbs. They use these Verbs to push Adjectives onto a target. So instead of making an attack roll and inflicting 15 points of damage, they’ll use Shoot to make their target Bloody. Or Winged. Or Lamed. Or Ruined. Or Shattered. Or…. well, anything that follows logically from the action they’re attempting. The beauty of the system is that it allows you to create very specific effects in the context of the game world, and it can do fluidly in any arena.

Second, an incredibly rich set of plot map mechanics which, when combined with the game’s Transmissions, allow an almost infinite amount of gameplay within a given setting with minimal or no prep.

I’ve written about Technoir a number of times here on the Alexandrian. Whether you’re familiar with the game or not, you may enjoy checking some of them out:

Technoir: Sequences vs. Skill Challenges
Technoir and the Three Clue Rule
Technoir and Smart Prep
Technoir and PvP
Technoir: The Untouched Core
Untested Technoir: Fleeting Relationships
Technoir + Vornheim Contacts

HOW I USE THEM

I keep a copy of the system cheat sheet for quick reference and I also provide copies for all of my players. Of course, I also keep at least one copy of the rulebook available, too. But my goal with the cheat sheets is to summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates book look-ups: Finding something in a half dozen or so pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The sheets for Technoir are fairly straightforward:

PAGE 1: This page contains the entire action resolution mechanic of the game, including rules for sequences and examples of common attacks. You’ll be looking at this page about 95% of the time that you’re playing.

PAGE 2: This page plays clean-up. It includes the Recovery rules. It also includes a quick reference for the equipment tags relating to the Interface and Links. And a Favors reference.

PAGE 3: A GM-only page summarizing the plot map mechanics.

Although this cheat sheet replaces some of the functionality of the Technoir Player’s Guide, that booklet can still be useful (particularly during character creation) by listing the Training Programs, equipment, and relationship adjectives used during character creation. Alternatively, you can print, in booklet format, multiple copies of the core equipment guide (pages 40-49 of the core rulebook). I’ll also print off a single sheet with a list of all the relationship adjectives in a large font (which can be passed around during character creation so that entries can be crossed off as they’re used).

I’ll also print out a reference to all the connections (and the favors they offer) in the current transmission on a single sheet of paper. This, again, facilitates quick and easy character creation without having to swap books around.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

I don’t actually use a GM screen when I’m running Technoir, but these cheat sheets have been designed with the same format of all my cheat sheets so that they can be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Ten days ago something, or someone, blotted out the sky. Now no stars can be seen, all communication with satellites has been lost, and the sun no longer lights up the sky. Five days ago, They came. No one knows who or what They are, but two very important things are clear:

They fear the light.

They’re coming for you.

Ten Candles is a masterful storytelling game by Stephen Dewey. The basic premise of the game remains the same every time you play: The sun and stars went out. They came. You and a handful of other survivors are clinging to flickering sources of light and trying to find a safe haven. But the mechanics of the game vary the identity, nature, and goals They possess, and this can be combined with an almost endless variety of starting conditions (which the book amply demonstrates by including twenty-five radically different modules) to create something unique and special every time you play.

Your characters will die. The story we’re going to tell today is not one of survival, but one of hope and loss. This is a story about what happens in the dark and the final few hours in the lives of a group of survivors fighting against it, losing themselves within it, and inevitably being consumed by it. Though their endeavor may be doomed to fail, it is our duty to make this story of their struggle as meaningful as possible.

During character creation, two major things will happen: First, your character will be defined by a Vice, a Virtue, a Hope (a moment which will give your character hope if it occurs during the game), and a Brink (the place to which your character can be pushed when things become desperate; and a place to which one of the other characters at the table has seen you go before). Second, ten candles are lit in the middle of the table.

Once character creation is completed, the first scene begins. The players receive a communal pool of 10 six-sided dice (equal to the number of lit candles). Whenever a conflict roll needs to be made, the character initiating the conflict rolls the communal dice pool:

• As long as you roll at least one 6, the conflict is successful.
• Any dice that roll 1 are lost and discarded for the rest of the scene.

If the roll results in failure, a candle is darkened and the scene comes to an end. At that point, the communal dice pool is restored to the now reduced number of lit candles, and the GM gets a pool of dice equal to the number of darkened candles which can be rolled in order to seize narrative control of successful conflict rolls away from the players.

The major wrinkle to this simple resolution mechanic is that players can choose to burn their character traits: Each trait is written on a card and placed in a stack when the game begins, allowing each player to burn the top card of their stack. Literally burn it: Light it on a candle’s flame and toss it into a burn pot in the middle of the table. (This doesn’t destroy the character trait in the sense that it still defines who your character is, but it does force each trait of your character to be placed in the spotlight as the game proceeds.) Vices and Virtues can be burned to reroll 1’s. You can attempt to achieve your Hope by staging the moment and making a conflict roll. And your Brink, which is always a character’s last card, can be used to reroll all dice in a check repeatedly… until a check ultimately fails, at which point the Brink card is lost.

Once only one candle remains, unsuccessful conflict rolls now result in the death of the character attempting them. When the last character dies or the last candle burns out, the game concludes.

PERFECT PACING

The atmospheric effect of playing Ten Candles in a darkened room is tremendously effective: The candles going out one by one. The ritualistic elements of burning the cards. It all greatly heightens the mood of horror, suspense, and fatal tragedy engendered by the game’s premise.

But what makes Ten Candles a great game is its perfect control over pacing: Each scene builds in tension as the dice pool dwindles… and dwindles… and dwindles until failure seems absolutely certain and a candle is darkened forever. The restoration of the dice pool relieves this tension, but now the path to desperation is shorter. And so each scene generally becomes shorter, more intense, and more desperate creating an ever-escalating cycle of tension and release.

This simple pacing pattern is expertly disrupted, however, by the Brink mechanics: As the game nears its end, more and more of the characters will be pushed to the edge. And because each Brink survives until a roll is failed, at the very end of the game — as things reach their most desperate level — there is a momentary suspension of hope.

All of this is then thematically colored by the GM’s growing dice pool, allowing the GM to seize narrative control more and more frequently and viscerally creating in the mechanics the loss of control being experienced by the characters.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

A few years back I talked about how the fundamental failure of Dread — despite the strength of its core novelty — was the fact that the mechanics of the game ultimately created pacing that was deeply and irrevocably flawed: The collapsing Jenga tower created a similar “rising tension” to the Ten Candles scene mechanics, but on a scale of time which combines poorly with early player elimination and which lacks a satisfying conclusion. Although Ten Candles uses a completely different set of mechanics, I’ve repeatedly found myself comparing the two games because of the similar pacing hard-coded into their mechanics.

And, at the end of the day, I feel like Ten Candles basically just kills Dread and takes its stuff.

The only limitation of Ten Candles is that it’s tied to the central conceit of the sun going out and Them appearing. But I don’t think the ties are particularly tight: Although you might lose the thematic connection which exists between the candles and the loss-of-light premise, there’s really only one step in the character creation process which would need to be adapted for other premises. (There’s one card during Brink phase on which a player writes the Brink for Them. You would need to shift the nature of that card to match whatever survival horror scenario you were running.)

In any case, Ten Candles is great. I’ve only had the game for a couple of weeks and it’s already hit my table multiple times, which is a strong testament to its quality. An even stronger testament, perhaps, is that multiple players have bought copies of their own and are either planning to run or have already run their own sessions. That only happens when a game is getting something very, very right.

In short, Ten Candles nails it.

THESE THINGS ARE TRUE.

THE WORLD IS DARK.

AND WE ARE ALIVE.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Stephen Dewey
Publisher: Cavalry Games
Print Cost: $28.00
PDF Cost: $10.00
Page Count: 90

Go to Part 1

Now that we’ve discussed the totality of making a ruling from beginning to end, I want to discuss a handful of advanced techniques – various tips and tricks I’ve picked up or created over the years.

We’ll start with fortune positioning. As we’ll discuss in detail in a moment, this is a really valuable concept revolving around the point at which you roll dice (the fortune) during the process of resolving an action, and what happens before and after you roll those dice. Before we begin, however, I need to briefly discuss the history of this terminology to clear up some difficulties.

The basic principles of fortune positioning were first laid out by Ron Edwards, who coined the terms fortune in the middle and fortune at the end to describe unexamined practices that had been hanging around the hobby for decades. They were useful terms and they caught on. A few years later, however, Ron Edwards decided to redefine the terms because he’d decided that it didn’t actually have anything to do with mechanics (despite the use of mechanics being in the damn name). Around this same time period, he also decided that fortune at the beginning didn’t exist (which, as we’ll see, is also wrong). The result was a complete muddle, but since Edwards had coined the terms his nonsense follow-up held a great deal of sway. People tried to solve the problems Edwards had created with various patches (you’ll see people using terms like “with teeth” if you go poking around), but this just sort of added to the confusion and debasing of the terminology.

With the terms being thoroughly mucked up, therefore, I had to make a decision about whether I should abandon them entirely (and try to come up with new terms to cover the same territory) or just clarify that people should ignore the later nonsense. After considerable thought, I decided that the concept of “fortune positioning” was too intuitively obvious to discard, so I’m sticking with it (and you get this preamble explaining why).

Final note here: Any time I talk about “fortune” or “rolling the dice”, that’s shorthand for any sort of action resolution. These concepts are generally most applicable to mechanical resolution (whether that involves rolling dice or not), but they have some applicability even on the spectrum of GM fiat.

FORTUNE AT THE END

Fortune at the end seems to be what most GMs and groups default to. (I’m not sure if that’s because it’s actually clearer and conceptually simpler, or if it’s just a legacy of D&D’s wargame-derived mechanics and familiarity makes it seem more natural.) With fortune at the end you:

• Establish method.
• Check the fortune.
• Describe the result.

You say, “I want to shoot the blade runner!” (Establish intention.) You make an attack roll. (Check the fortune.) And the mechanical result tells you whether the intention succeeded or failed. (You either hit the target or you miss them, which means you can now describe that end result.)

FORTUNE AT THE BEGINNING

Fortune at the beginning is a technique in which you ask the mechanics what happens and then you use the mechanical result to decide what you attempt. To put it another way, fortune at the beginning means putting the mechanical resolution between the statement of intention and the statement of method.

• Indicate intention (or experience a reaction trigger).
• Check the fortune.
• Determine method.
• Describe the result.

Whereas fortune at the end has a player activate character expertise to determine whether or not the method they’ve proposed succeeds, fortune at the beginning has the player activate character expertise to tell them what method the character would use to achieve a general intention.

This can be useful when playing out a social situation: You state your intention (“I want to convince the Duke to give us troops”), then make your Diplomacy check, and then use the outcome of the Diplomacy check to inform how you roleplay the scene.

Fortune at the beginning is often used in personality mechanics: You make a Sanity check to see how you react to a monster or you make a Resolve check to see if you can resist temptation, and if you can’t that determines how you play the next action (whether it’s fleeing in terror or turning away from Madame Shadow’s insistent kisses).

I also often see players do things like making an Intelligence check to see whether or not their character is smart enough to think of the idea they just had. (And if they fail, they won’t share it.)

FORTUNE IN THE MIDDLE

Fortune in the middle means that your first action check determines the initial momentum of the attempt, but then the player/character has another choice that can affect the ultimate outcome. So you might make a check to resolve a social encounter, discover that you’ve made a bad first impression, and then have an opportunity to recover from that. (Or just shoot the guy in the head. “It was a boring conversation any way.”)

Basically, fortune in the middle creates an additional decision point in the middle of resolution:

• Establish method.
• Check the fortune.
• Make a secondary decision.
• Check secondary fortune.
• Describe the result.

Sometimes this decision point is actually baked into the mechanics. The use of Fate Points is a simple and common example. Apocalypse World uses a number of “moves” which are resolved with a 2d6 roll in which there is a failure range, a success range, and (between the two) a range in which the PC has to make a secondary decision between consequences and/or partial successes.

Speaking of partial successes, a GM can often resolve a partial success by asking for a fortune in the middle response. They can also be used in other situations: For example, after a successful Dodge roll the GM might ask, “Do you want to duck through the door on your right or behind the wooden crate on your left?”

The resolution of the secondary decision may not require another action check; i.e., whether you duck through the door or behind the wooden crate success is automatic (the GM is defaulting to yes). Alternatively, the options could easily require additional mechanical resolution (and choosing between the form of mechanical resolution could be the primary difference between choices). It’s also possible that only some of the choices would require additional mechanical checks (you need to make a Strength check to bash through the closed door, but you can duck behind the crates automatically).

And, of course, the GM doesn’t have to be the one to come up with the options. “Okay, you succeeded on your Dodge roll. Where do you want to seek cover from the hail of machine gun fire?”

MULTI-STAGE RESOLUTION

The principles of fortune in the middle resolution can be extended to include multiple decision points, opening up the potential for a variety of multi-stage resolution methods.

In my experience, this is a poorly explored region of mechanical design. Probably the most prominent example are the skill challenges from 4^th Edition D&D, and those were absolutely terrible to the point where the designers had to completely rewrite the mechanics multiple times within mere weeks of the game being released… and still didn’t fix it.

Dice pool systems have fared a little better with this because the ability to count a variable number of successes in each dice pool allows for a simple complex skill check mechanic (continue making checks until you’ve achieved X number of successes).

But much like Apocalypse World, other games have begun making specific mechanics which exploit fortune in the middle resolution principles, I think there’s a real potential for more specific multi-stage resolution mechanics (particularly if you start allowing for decision points by those opposing the character or characters carrying out the multi-stage resolution).

But I digress.

What distinguishes multi-stage resolution from simply being a series of discrete actions? Because there’s a single intention and each stage of resolution carries you towards discovering the ultimate outcome of that intention, either through a variety of methods or by the progression of a single method through discrete steps.

USING FORTUNE POSITIONING

Over the years I’ve seen a surprising amount of one-true-wayism when it comes to fortune positioning. This makes little sense to me: The ideal fortune positioning varies by both type of action and the situation in which the action is taken. And even people who aren’t familiar with the terminology will often freely flow from one to the next depending purely on the instinct of the moment

Fortune at the end has simplicity to its advantage: You ask a question of the system, the system provides an answer.

Fortune at the beginning allows the mechanics to provide you with an improv seed that you can then flesh out accordingly. (This makes it particularly good for determining the outcome of larger actions: The more specific and discrete the action the more awkward it can become to resolve with fortune at the beginning. For example, if your mechanics resolve a single attack, fortune at the beginning generally isn’t useful. If they’re resolving an entire fight – or, say, a jousting pass – then, in my experience, they become more useful.)

Fortune in the middle is more complicated, but allows for a richer interplay between the player and the mechanic along with a greater range of potential outcome. It can also focus your attention on the action being resolved, signaling that this particular action is more significant than others.

Each of these has its place. And, as I implied before, trying to rigidly define that place is not always the best answer. (Maybe this time you roll the dice to see how your negotiations with the Duke will proceed before roleplaying it, but next time you’ve got a “surefire” idea for how to seduce the Duchess.) But they’re incredibly useful tools for expanding and varying the experience at the game table, and if you find that your rulings are generally limited to only a single fortuning position, you may find it useful to practice using others until you become comfortable and familiar with them (whether that involves playing games with explicit fortune positioning in their mechanics or simply challenging yourself to explore a particular type of fortune positioning for the next few sessions).

Go to Part 11