Tension.
It’s a word that comes into play often at the gaming table, and can manifest from any number of situations at the table. But quite often, it is represented by a simple dice roll. Granted, the results of that roll are usually pretty high stakes, but it’s always seemed slightly counter-intuitive that something that can be built over an entire adventure can often times be so quickly resolved. Now, there are games out there that deal with it in their own ways – extended tests, skill challenges, and all of those things can help to maintain the tension of a task.
And then there are games that handle tension brilliantly, but not always through any sort of intrinsic mechanics. This is most often seen in horror RPGs. Call of Cthulu introduced Sanity, which while very good at helping to increase the tension of a scene when it starts slipping down is still a very modular idea. Dread is a different example – the game is literally played with a Jenga tower instead of dice rolls, so the tension comes from trying to make pulls from the tower without toppling things over.
Now, any readers that follow me outside of these articles know that I do my fair share of personal design work. One of the ideas that I’ve had bouncing around in my head for quite some time now a game that actually makes tension an intrinsic part of the game engine – not something that is bolted on, but something that will always be there for the PCs to contend with. The idea was very heavily influenced by the Doom Pool mechanic from Margaret Weis Production’s Marvel Heroic Roleplaying as well as the interplay of Destiny Points in Fantasy Fight Game’s Star Wars Narrative Dice System
At it’s core, I want this to be a very simple system, keeping the actual resolution on the narrative side. So the base dice mechanic is relatively simple, and is a highly distilled version of the One Roll Engine mechanic, in which the players will throw two different d10s. One of these is the Power Die and the other is the Finesse Die. Each of them will have different uses in different aspects of game play, but at the core of it, the Power Die represents how well a character performs a task and the Finesse Die represents how quickly a character performs a task. When an action is taken where a dice roll becomes necessary, the player grabs his two dice and looks to beat a total of 10 on those two dice. If he is successful, the action succeeds. If he doesn’t beat a 10, the action fails.
Certain actions are more difficult to perform than others. These types of actions will be represented by having minimum success thresholds assigned to them. These will either be a Power Threshold or a Finesse Threshold, based on the nature of the task and the action. Thresholds are rated between a 2 and a 10, and in order for an action carrying one to be completely successful, the relevant die needs to equal or beat the Threshold in question. If the Threshold isn’t met, but the action would still have been successful otherwise, the character can choose one of two outcomes. He can choose to have the action simply fail. Or he can choose to have the action succeed, but at a cost.
So, as you can see, it is relatively simple. But I also want to include a sense of economy to the game. So I decided on a series of pools, between which points will flow back and forth in a zero-sum fashion. When points are spent from one pool, they go to another pool. Right now there is the Player Pool, the GM Pool, and the Tension Pool.
The Player Pool is the communal pool of points that the players all share amongst themselves. They can choose to spend points from the pool to do a number of things. The big thing they can do is spend points in order to lower the base difficulty of an action or decrease the success threshold of an action. Points that are spent from the Player’s Pool go directly to the GM Pool after the action is resolved. The GM on the other hand, can spend points at the same rate to either increase the base difficulty of an action or to increase the Success Threshold of an action by 1. Points that are spent from the GM Pool go directly back to the Player’s Pool. Points can be spent on the same action, and the player and GM can cancel the effects of each other’s actions by spending points, but points do not officially move until the action is resolved.
“Okay, that sounds neat, but what about the Tension Pool?” I hear you asking. Well, the Tension Pool represents the risk/reward element of the game in such a way that the basic dice system doesn’t. Higher risk actions will require the player to “wager” a number of points on it. He moves these points to the Tension Pool and then attempts the action. If he succeeds, he gets his desire. If he fails, the action fails and the points are spent without effect. Certain character abilities will also utilize the “wager” system as an activation mechanic. The GM is then able to spend points from the Tension Pool in order to increase the danger present in the scene, whether by introducing new threats or by activating abilities in present threats making them more dangerous. He might spend Tension Points to have a monster use a high powered attack. Or he might turn a small fire into a conflagration that begins to envelop the room. Points that are spent from the Tension Pool go back to the Player Pool when the action is resolved.
But Tension itself is a dangerous thing. The bigger the Tension Pool, the more potential there is for things to go wrong. I haven’t determined any values yet, but for every “X” points in the Tension Pool, the base difficulty of all actions increases by 1. For every “Y” points, the Success Thresholds of actions increase by 1, and actions that didn’t previously have a Success Threshold get one at 2.
This only affects the players at present, and so they have another action to try and mitigate the effect of Tension on the scene. They can attempt an action directly against the Tension Pool, increasing the base difficulty of the task by the number of points they want to remove. They cannot spend points from the Player Pool to lower the difficulty, but the GM can spend points from the GM pool to increase the difficulty. If the player’s action is successful, that number of points is removed from the Tension Pool and split evenly between the Player and GM Pool, with any remainder going to the Players.
So, as you can see, the idea is that Tension itself becomes as much of a NPC to the game as anything else. It will grow as the players take bigger and bigger risks to reach their goals. And it will shrink when they take actions to protect themselves, or it may very well come collapsing down and destroy them. This is still very much in it’s infancy as an idea and hasn’t been tested, but is my current iteration of the rules that I’m quite happy with. I’m eager to eventually get it to the table to test it, but I’m also eager to hear your thoughts on both the mechanics and great ways that you have seen other games utilize tension.
Ben Erickson
