In Praise of Single-Step Resolution

     First of all, I want to thank everyone reading. Last year, I got nearly 10,000 views on this blog and 100 posts out, which is staggering to me. I would have never anticipated this sort of productivity or this response, and it means so much to me that you're here hearing me ramble.

    Second, I wanted to talk today about what I inadvertently discovered about my GLoGhack MARROW (it's getting more and more complete and fleshed out every day, and soon I'm gonna transition into writing GM advice for new people to run this system well, so I think it's worth checking out) recently. As I was thinking about how typical MARROW play works, and why it runs so well, I came to a conclusion about the resolution mechanism that MARROW uses, and why it makes the game so darn speedy.

--If specific examples of the principles I'm going to discuss bore you to tears, skip this.--

    MARROW is roll-under. That means that all the necessary info is facing the player. They calculate the difficulty of their actions, make the roll, and tell me if it works or not. Now that might not be to everyone's tastes, but when I started to integrate this system into my game, I found it intuitive and fast because the step where the player asked me if their number was high enough was cut out. Keep a hold on that concept, I want to move on to another example.

    Another development in MARROW is how WOUNDS and STRESS occupy standard inventory slots. As the number of slots is so limited, the numbers are kept usually below 5, so that means that I could make weapons take up a number of slots equal to the WOUNDS they deal. Another benefit of this was cutting damage dice out of the equation. While they are fun to pile up and roll, I found that this step added calculation, and wasted time. MARROW removed the step where players roll for damage. Hopefully you're starting to sense a pattern here.

    And my third and final example: the tri-act system. MARROW lets players take three "actions", each one separated by the word 'and'. This makes things a lot faster. There is still a constraint on action, but there is a freedom from constraint that makes systems with maneuvers or bonus actions seem clunky in comparison. Instead of creating these artificial constraints and choices, MARROW's action economy puts that player agency center with an aggressive focus on cutting out the multi-step decision process.

--Here's the good stuff.--

    What's my point here? What's my thesis? Well, here's what I think. One of the core ideas that MARROW has captured for me is the idea of single-step resolution. Instead of having to jump through hoops and take overwrought processes to determine the impact an action has on the story (processes like, say, using an action to take an attack, then asking the DM if it beats the AC, then rolling damage, then rolling INT to cast a spell with a bonus action, then rolling extra damage from the spell), MARROW puts all the information into a single dice roll or action point (roll to hit under STR with the magic sword that deals 3 WOUNDS, with a -2 due to armor). That way, the narrative action is condensed into a single step. The benefits, I argue are threefold:

    1) Haste. It speeds up the game. One roll instead of two will take about half the time, and in the example above where I contrast an average 5e action vs. an average MARROW action, the difference could not be so stark. Once you get used to putting all the information needed to "set up" rolls early, you can get the blood pumping a lot quicker, which helps with the emotional tension of a game session.

    2) Narrative Clarity. Imagine you're swinging an axe in ICRPG. You bring the blade down on the demon. 19! You roll your effort and get... a 2. What a bummer! You already rolled well the first time, why doesn't that reflect as strongly on the narrative as the second roll does? With this one-stop-shop system, you don't have to worry about describing and making sense of that tension, you can

    3) Universality. The more you cut away, the more you'll discover your core mechanics. If you can set up umbrella mechanics that apply in a lot of situations in reliable ways, you'll get a lot closer to single-step resolution, and your game will be clearer and more cohesive.

    I understand that many people have emotional attachments to the multi-step systems, and sometimes they do have a lot of weight (like the ICRPG EFFORT system, which I would argue is worth the extra resolution granularity). But when you're designing your game, think about how you can cut out the maximum number of steps and get as much information into the player's hands about the rolls they're making as possible. Your game will be smoother and translate easier to the narrative space for it.