And getting drawn into discussions about it. At least until I decide to publish my own role-playing game and use it as one of the core structural mechanics for adventure and encounter design. I also kept expanding, tweaking, refining, and – above all – simplifying the mechanic.Īnd finally, I wrote one last article about the whole damned thing and called it finished. And once I did that, I also discovered that whenever I stopped using it because I didn’t want to be bothered – I’m really lazy – it made my game worse and created frustrations. And when I looked at it, I realized it was actually a powerful, open-ended tool to add risks and costs to almost any action in any encounter or scene in any RPG.Īnd so, I wrote about it a few times more and, more importantly, I started using it myself. Except that people kept using the mechanic. And this rule was neat, but nothing I couldn’t do better with just my f$&%ing brain. And then I promptly forgot about the mechanic because I can’t be bothered to use all these brilliant rules I come up with. So, I wrote up an article about dungeon exploration. They WANTED to add secrets and hidden things and obstacles that required exploration and analysis because otherwise, the game is just slogging from combat to combat, or worse, one of those insipid game sessions Twitter GMs brag about that are “all ‘role-playing’ – sarcastic quotes – and don’t involve any die rolling at all.” So, I came up with this mechanic for those people. The rest were frustrated that there just wasn’t any sort of downside to this sort of behavior. And, while lots of people were of the opinion that traps and secret doors and s$&% were useless relics of a dead era of gaming, thankfully forgotten, those people weren’t the sorts of people anyone wanted to game with. Once upon a time, I invented this mechanic called the Time Pool because I was trying to help other people deal with the fact that players will search every inch of the dungeon for secret doors and traps if you let them and they will try the same skill checks over and over again if you let them.
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