#139: Pacing and the Deck
I know it sounds like a band name but it's actually about a deck of cards as a pacing tool.
I. Dear Reader,
At some point early last year, I started working on a Forged in the Dark game that was tentatively titled Depths Unfathomable. It was a post-apocalyptic game about diving underwater, recovering lost tech, and building up a community. My tagline for it was “salvaging the past, building the future”. I ran a month-long playtest and the game showed great promise but there was a lot of different moving parts to it. So I decided to break off the core mechanic and build a game based on just that.
That was how This Ship Is No Mother was born. As you might’ve guessed, This Ship Is No Mother is a reworking of Mothership to play like a storygame. My basic goal was to combine the core mechanic of my game with the lush, gross adventures that came with Mothership. The result is fantastic! I’ve played one-shots of the game every month of this year and truly, they’ve been some of the best one-shots I’ve ever had.
What is working? Basically, pacing. Pacing in a one-shot is hard. I think games like Dread, Starcrossed, Fiasco, etc. have a certain kind of tension and pacing baked into them and that’s why they make such good one-shot experiences. This Ship Is No Mother achieves a similar pacing through a standard card deck. As characters take actions, players draw from the deck. So as they take more actions, the deck becomes smaller and smaller. When it runs out, there’s a moment of climactic disaster. (This is a space-horror game. In another game, it would be a moment of climactic something-else.)
This is a bit like a doom clock. As you act, it ticks away. But because it’s a standard 52-card deck, there’s lots of other wonderful little side effects - including that you can count cards, calculating the exact probability of success at any point of time. And since the desk is stacked against you (sorry), this only adds tension into the game. It gives people expectations - either hopeful or anxious, which are affirmed or dashed quickly. And either way, it’s fun. It feels supremely satisfying as a game. When this game comes out, I’m really confident that it will be fun. That’s the kind of confidence I’ve never had in a design. It’s rare.
Here’s the caveat: doom clocks don’t work. A TWIST. Right at the third act? Unbelievable! Who could’ve seen this coming?
What I mean is: doom clocks don’t work perfectly. As a pacing mechanism, a deck of cards is a very large clock. It’s 52 cards. It takes time to work through it. But the promise is that the climax will happen EXACTLY when the deck runs out, right? But that is often not the perfect moment for a climax. Sometimes, for example, the perfect moment for a climax is with 4 cards still left. So now you have to kind of linger till the game allows for the climax to trigger. Things often don’t line up perfectly! They can - that’s important to emphases. It’s possible. I’ve had basically perfect sessions. But normally, things are messy.
To me, this is the goblin in the machine of all roleplaying games. The messiness is just there. Always. But this goblin is my friend. I embrace the messiness. The card-deck-doom-clock is an imperfect pacing tool. It offers a slow build toward a climax that isn’t perfect but is close enough for enough people at enough times.
It’s good enough and it offers the potential for sublime perfection. That’s roleplaying games, baby.
Yours counting down,
Thomas
PS. While my game isn’t out yet, the core mechanic I’m discussing above actually builds off an existing game that is out there. It’s Crash/Cart by Galen Pejeau. It’s a game of cyberpunk EMTs and was my pick for game of the year in 2021. I’m building of that game with Galen’s blessing.
II. Media of the Week
Really loved this video essay by AA Voigt about Rae Nedjadi’s Apocalypse Keys. It’s personal and insightful and treats the game very seriously. I know there aren’t a lot of reviews of game in the first place but there’s even less essay-style explorations of games and I’m really glad this exists. Apocalypse Keys is a baroque beast, mechanically hefty as well as deeply thematic. It’s a game that a lot can be said about!
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III. Links of the Week
POCGamer does a preview/review of Stoneburner, a game of scifi dwarves.
On Gnomestew, a review of Moonlight on Roseville Beach, a queer game of disco and cosmic horror.
Lowell Francis showcases all the esoteric prep for Fearful Symmetries, his Trail of Cthulhu campaign of occultism in interwar England.
The story of how early storygame Montsegur 1244 was developed, includes a journey through Ars Magica, Fastaval and more.
I’m always excited for posts about cities. This is a great one from the Grisly Eye blog about Cities in Cities.
Interviewer-on-interviewer: Dave Thaumavore does a fun interview with Craig Shipman, the host of Third Floor Wars.
IV. Small Ads
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Mitosis is a Mothership pamphlet adventure and in-universe board game. Back now on Kickstarter to get your own copy of the “family friendly” game of biological warfare.
This Mortal Coil, a standalone necromantic space horror setting for Liminal Horror, is 50% off while in public beta. 136 pages of necromantic fun await!
Host, a two-player micro TTRPG, from the perspective of a parasite and the host it inhabits, is on kickstarter!
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If you like the doom metal laugh-at-death vibe of Mork Borg, there’s a bundle of supplements that you should look at.
There’s also a bundle of the horror rpg Shiver.
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I really like Ironsworn's quest progress tracks as a pacing mechanism: every successful scene fills the track (amount depends on quest's difficulty) and at any moment players might decide they're done with the quest, roll against filled segments and see if they fulfilled the goal.
Really want to see how it works with a party that's too much into preparation. Like, okay, fill the whole track with gathering info and setting stuff up, and then we'll resolve success or failure narratively. No idea if that will satisfying, would love to know =)
There are ways to stack decks that allow for mixing a desired amount of unpredictability into the mix, which is something card-driven board games often do. Some of the methods I've seen used include:
* Special cards (e.g. aces or jokers in a normal deck) represent "ticks" towards doom and when the last one appears, boom!
* Split the deck into N parts (half, thirds, fourths, etc..) and distribute those special cards into them, and when they appear Bad Things happen .. this creates pacing ("sometime in the first half of the deck.." e.g.) without spoiling the surprise or removing predictability entirely.
* Split off the bottom N cards and shuffle the Doom Card into there.
* When the Doom Card appears, players can spend to delay it, reshuffle it into the deck, or otherwise skip it (in the case of multiple Doom Cards). What is spent and how depends on the game.
* When the Doom Card of a given card series (e.g. a suit in a regular deck) comes up, that suit is "dead" and no longer contributes to the story.
I'm sure there are many more. So, yes, while card decks as Doom Clocks are not perfect (and can't be: randomness and timing are inherently at odds with each other, and trying to build towards an unpredictable ending is always going to have some messiness), there are ways to make them better through stacking/salting the deck.