A structure for actions, and pacing

I'm going to talk about pacing, and why it's important in ways you might not think. I'm also going to offer an idea of what should be done to remedy potential pacing problems, and keep them in check, drawing from old school D&D (got to keep up that old school appreciation). And that's going to involve diving deep into how, even, the whole rpg thing works - because you know by now how I do things.

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Pacing is important in ttrpgs. I've talked about pacing before, but mainly to note how the pace of my game was kind of running away from me. But I want to talk a little bit about how keeping the pace up isn't just a gloss or polish on your game. Speaking as a player, I prefer games that move along at a fair clip (I have a limited attention span), but I want to stress that a quick pace isn't a preference either - it's a necessity. That is, there is a lot of depth - depth of play, depth of involvement and immersion of the players in the world that you, the DM, have created - that you miss out on with poor pacing. To put this another way, here is the Paradox of Pacing:

PoP: Playing through every scene in detail actually makes the players' engagement with your game shallower, not deeper.

What does "detail" have to do with pacing? And how does any of this link to immersion and investment? Well, at the risk of going too deep into this, lets talk about framing the action in a scene. When you start on a scene, you, the GM, have to subtly and swiftly calculate the "resolution" (in the sense of camera or graphics resolution) at which you pitch the scene's activity. For example, in a negotiation scene, you have to decide if you're going to use RP (I'll use "RP" not "roleplaying" as code specifically for "speaking in character" - see this post for why), or whether you'll have the players give broad outlines of their arguments/bids, let them respond to rebuttals and so on, requiring rolls at some stages, or whether the whole scene can be resolved with a single roll.

Now, there's no default answer here, and it's important to realise that as a GM, because you're actually beholden to several forces pulling you in different directions that mean you have to vary it up constantly - I'll talk about those in a second. Note also that "no default answer" doesn't mean "no right answer". The right answer, the best resolution at which to frame the scene, is determined by the narrative stakes, and, secondarily, the complexity of the situation. If the scene is a tense negotiation between rival kingdoms, and the PC's actions will cause or prevent war, the scene probably warrants framing in detail, and thus RPing. Simply resolving the scene with broad brushstrokes or a die roll, while obviously possible, are likely to feel unsatisfying with these stakes. Unless, that is, such events are the bread and butter of your game - imagine RPing out the details of every negotiation, peace summit etc. in a Total War game.

On the flip side, if it's a negotiation with an innkeeper for a room, there's a 90% chance you don't need to RP, and don't want to RP it - remember the PoP, on which more in a moment. Name the price, take it or leave it, done - at most a Charisma roll for a discount. Of course, if the party has to get a room at this inn in particular on this night because this is where the kidnappings happened, and the plan requires them to get a specific room to make sure one of them gets kidnapped, and the innkeeper is being shifty about it and throwing in complications, then by all means RP the hell out of that thing. But that doesn't describe 90% of situations.

"Gimme my shirt back! And make it quick, I don't have all day!"

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But what's the actual problem here? What would be wrong with resolving every social interaction scene using RP, for instance, or resolving every scene spent navigating a space with detailed descriptions of exact spatial positioning (which applies to mapping up combat too)? I'm not going to cover obvious things, like the fact that such scenes could be tedious or what have you - players tend to make their own fun in such scenes anyway. Instead, I want to focus on the bigger picture.

Imagine you're running a dungeon. Dungeon rooms make a good (if rough) analogy for scenes in an overarching plot, so it's a helpful example. In room 2, you place a sword of ice. In room 9, you place a fire demon. Now obviously the sort of game you want is the sort of game where the players will think to use the sword on the demon, making the fight easier by some light problem solving. This represents engagement with your world, because they're marshalling facts about the world, using their grasp of the whole picture, to make plans (see whole-dungeon thinking).

The flipside of this, the opposite outcome, is for the players to move from one room/scene to the next, not thinking about the relations or connections there might be between the rooms, but simply dealing with whatever is in the current one, and moving on. It should be obvious that this is undesirable; it's a much shallower way of engaging with the dungeon, since the players' interest and attention never extends beyond what's presently directly in front of them. You couldn't build a Legend of Zelda-style dungeon if your players were limited to thinking like this.

But now imagine you resolve each room second by second, with each player describing to you in detail what they do, you narrating back results to them one at a time, and so on. Imagine that it takes, on average, an hour to resolve a dungeon room and move on. Not an inconceivable amount of time, although a long one. And imagine that you reliably play a 3-4 hour session every week (I'm going somewhere with this, I promise). By the time the players get to the fire demon, it's been 7 rooms = at least two weeks since they last saw the sword. Are they going to remember it? It's certainly not where their minds are going to go instantly, especially not if there's two weeks of gameplay to remember since then. So even if someone does wade through the memory banks, it won't be because they're plugged in and thinking routinely about the state of the whole dungeon, or engaging with it as a space.

But there's another problem. It's two weeks back to room 2, and another two weeks to return to room 9. (Assuming restocking dungeon rooms, because that's how scenes work, and we're still in an analogy. Still with me? Good.) My intuition is that because of the timescale involved in implementing it, the plan to go back and get the sword wouldn't even occur to the party - it just subconsciously doesn't look plan-shaped. But even if it did, odds are the party will just tough it out, and cut to the demon, rather than making a month-long round trip to make one scene go over a bit easier. And so the cycle of being led willingly from scene to scene, not thinking about linking them together, and not engaging with the game beyond what's in front of you, gets reinforced. Because here's the thing: If a digression from the plot means that players could spend whole sessions (i.e.: weeks) sidelined instead of a handful of minutes, the players develop a hypersensitive awareness of the demands of the plot, especially when it involves characters acting independently, because the stakes are not getting to play for hours at a time. In other words, they learn to self-railroad - when it takes weeks to cover a few dungeon rooms, you don't want to take a wrong turn away from the party.

"Nooo - It'll take us forever to get back on track!"

It's pretty clear how to transfer this logic to RP scenes or combat encounters; if scenes routinely take a long time to resolve, it harms the macro game. And the macro game here means things like launching investigations, doing research, planning heists and doing prep missions for them (Ocean's Eleven, steal some guards' uniforms-type things), cultivating relationships with NPCs, exploring around a particular area, digging up dirt on a rival, etc etc. All of these are actions taken by the PCs under their own initiative, that feed into some scene later on, and that are all, strictly, non-essential. Meaning they'll be cut for time, or just outright won't occur to players, if the pacing doesn't allow for them to be resolved quick enough. Which is a shame, because the list reads like a beginner's guide to being immersed in a fantasy world as if it were a real place, which is the core thing that you, the GM, want to cultivate.

To sum up, in every scene there's a tug of war between abstract, fast resolution, and detailed, slow resolution. Fast resolution sacrifices detail in the scene for the ability to string scenes together into plans and such, and slow resolution gives the specific scene more detail, at the expense of the macro-game. What I'm saying is that you neglect the macro game at the expense of player immersion and engagement with your world - the PoP, that more detail for every scene means a shallower engagement with the world. If players can't make plans from day to day, or scene to scene, or room to room, then they can't think in character, and they're prohibited from taking all but the shallowest interest in the world around them. So next time you lament that players don't take an interest in your NPCs or your lore, take a moment to consider whether your pacing is permitting them really to do so.

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Okay, so pacing is important, not just from the point of view of preference, but from the point of view of game depth. But how do you actually set the pace at the game table? How do you set the "resolution" at which actions are going to be adjudicated?

There exist structures baked into the game to deal with this. So let's talk about the "exploration turn". Old editions of D&D used to be entirely turn-based. Just like a board game (or, more accurately, a wargame), players used to take it in turns to 1) move somewhere, 2) do something, 3) make appropriate checks for wandering monsters etc. Okay, that's not entirely accurate; the players as a group used to do that. And that's important - the players would decide as a group what they each wanted to be doing while the 10-minute turn elapsed, and when the referee had got an answer from everyone in the group (often via the caller), they'd resolve the actions in an order they deemed appropriate.

Why does this matter? Because there are several levels of resolution at which this mechanism works. In the dungeon, there's the exploration turn (10 minutes) and the combat round (1 or 2 minutes, depending on edition). And in the wilderness, a turn would be a few hours or a day - however long it took to tramp across a hex, basically. So from the beginning, D&D has had baked into it the idea of a scaling resolution for framing scenes. And when I say "baked in", I mean that there are mechanisms -  not just specific mechanics, but deeper mechanisms still integral to the game today - that only make sense within this framework.

Take, for instance, lockpicking. The thief rogue fails a roll to pick the lock on a door, then sits around looking stumped - can they try again? Can they even ask to try again? What would be the point in rolling in the first place if they could just try until they got it right? (Couldn't they just "take 20"?) And this is where the DM has to step in and say something unsatisfying to everyone concerned - either that yes, they can try again (so no, there is no real point in rolling), or no, you intuit that this lock is out of reach of your skill until you reach a higher level, or some such thing; Bullsh*t, basically. Because lockpicking tests were designed for a dungeon environment with a turn structure that required you to roll for a wandering monster every two turns (or so - editions again). In that context, choosing to keep trying to pick a lock is choosing to be stealthy, because bashing down the door is always a viable option, but a loud one. But fighting a wandering owlbear is both dangerous and loud, so you take a risk by trying to pick the lock, namely the risk of wasting a turn, when that could mean being savaged.

The answer, then, to what the GM should do in the thief situation outside the dungeon is "Up the pressure." E.g.: "You failed your check, so the door doesn't budge. You can try again, but you see the light of a torch coming round a corner; if you fail, a watchman will reach you in the time spent on the attempt." In other words: You wasted a turn, if you waste another, there'll be consequences, or at least complications. It's your choice whether you want to take the gamble. The idea of turns, and the ability to take only one action in each, is integral to that bit of the system working.

(As a comparison, note that the Dungeon World referee is told explicitly that this is how things work; a failed roll calls for the ref to make a soft move, which means introducing some element that sets up a hard move. Hard moves are what you make when the player doesn't deal adequately with your soft moves, or their plan to do so goes awry - so here, being tackled by a watchman. Dungeon World thus gets a nod as another game that bakes action resolution scale into its mechanics, here via the concept of "moves" generally.)

This is what Gary Gygax meant when he said that a campaign without thorough timekeeping is meaningless: He meant that the slow ticking down of resources and the risks involved with wasting time, coupled with the limitations on what you could achieve within a certain turn, of whatever length, were the framework around which the game was built - and they still are today. Gary had a simulationist's focus on "real" time (hours and minutes), but the fundamental point is about the turn structure. The Black Hack recognises this, explicitly recognising different scales at which to resolve the action, and explicitly making them fluid in terms of how much time they actually represent (e.g.: moments and minutes, not 60 seconds and ten minutes). In my opinion, this is one of the system's biggest, and most easily overlooked, strengths.

To put it into a soundbite: D&D runs on an action economy even outside combat. Messing with that would be like allowing someone as many attacks as they like in a combat round, and only letting the monsters (or the other players) have a go when you feel like it's getting silly. And if that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is - but it's that same ridiculousness that tells people something's wrong in the case of the lockpicking problem.

Or the knowledge skills problem. Or the passive scores problem. Or the Insight check problem. Or the Help action problem. (Sigh.) I could go on, and maybe I will, someday, but for now this post is already too long (already verging into "article" territory).

Suffice it to say, when you ask for a roll in D&D, you're making a choice, and placing a bet: You're sacrificing the opportunity to perform any other action this turn (however long that is) based on the probability that your action will turn up something useful. So, when you Help someone, you lend them advantage on their skill check, sure, but you're sacrificing your action for the turn. You have to weigh that against limited time e.g.: before a wandering monster shows up, or before the quest expires, or even just against the fact that it'll be a few minutes of table time before you get to do something interesting on your own. If you've played much 5e at all, you've probably experienced people playing silly-buggers with the Help action, i.e.: everyone getting Helped with everything. This is a result of not running turns properly.

But aside from resolving these problems, the exploration turn structure, and the fact that it can be applied at any level of resolution, are your friends for setting the pace of your game. Setting up this structure as the robust core of the game allows you to change the resolution at which actions are dealt with, allowing you to frame scenes such that actions have a particular scale or timeframe. Without it, you get trapped into loops of micro-managing character actions, as players describe each tiny bit of what they want to get done. Gear your introductory description to the scale you want, e.g.: "The town seems quiet, its people few and furtive, and the innkeeper you talk to is sullen. The meal he provides is meagre, and doesn't take you long to finish. As the light moves from afternoon to evening, what do you want to do?" This clues the players in that you're working with particular timeframes. Resolving actions using the turn structure then allows the game to really hum, rather than getting bogged down in unimportant minutiae - you of course want to leave room for important minutiae, but this structure allows you to do just that.

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So there you have it. I've already written, somewhere, about the phenomenon that gives rise, I think, to this sort of thing - if (as most of us have) you got into roleplaying games by playing under a really good DM (or, alternatively, watching a really good DM in action on Critical Role), it's entirely possible that you're emulating what you experienced as a player(/viewer) rather than looking at the basic structures that make the game tick. But familiarity with those structures is what makes those games seem so seamlessly good in the first place. The GM's job is to be hopping constantly from one resolution scale to another; that's not the exception, but the rule. If Job 1 is resolving the consequences of player actions, then Job 0 is framing the scene to set the scope of those actions. And it's possible to miss if you model your DMing on your experience playing, because when a really good DM does it, it's so seamless you might not notice it.

I'm intending to follow up this post (yep, a two-parter! God help us all...) with one with tips for framing scenes with the optimum resolution, but for now, that's all I've got in me. Happy hunting.