Real Effects Rarely Represented (Or Not At All) In RPGs [Pt. 1]

Skills In Combat Situations: Adrenalin & The Fight-Flight Effects

The military has spent a lot of time studying how soldiers operate under stress situations. Interesting results have been discovered and confirmed. Some of those discoveries have included the following things that happen when adrenalin is flowing and the fight-or-flight responses are active:

• Skills that require cereberal tasks or tasks that require manual dexterity are harder to perform.
• A person whose adrenalin is switched up can perform physical tasks and simple cognitive tasks faster than they could without the adrenalin IF the skill is one that has been trained hard and long and where any physical movements have been committed to physical muscle memory.
• Visual cues gain primary focus and other cues (such as sounds, kinethesic sensations, touch, smell, and taste may be deprioritized.This results in slightly faster responses to visually observed information.
• Parsing speech can be harder because of the brain prioritizing visual data and, as a direct side effect, deprioritizing non-visual information processing. There are loud noises and often trauma to ones ears in combat which is part of the problem hearing instructions but the processing aspect is different and additive; Reduced processing of audible information slows comprehension or can prevent comprehension.
• When adrenalin wears off (usually shortly after a threat encounter, longer if one has traumatic injuries), exhaustion sets in because the body's neuroconductors are depleted and a lot of your available sugars and nutrients have been burnt through.
• A person that suffers a trivial or light injury will not percieve the injury as much or even at all. In extreme cases, some don't even notice they have a serious injury. The fight-and-flight response includes routing the blood to the torso and away from arms in case of a slash or bite.
• When adrenalin wears off, injuries become apparent. Someone with serious or mortal wounds could suddenly collapse and potentially die. With other injuries, pain will start to be noted and exhaustion (and maybe dehydration as well) and movement may be more difficult or impossible.
• When the adrenalin wears off, physical reactions can include shaking, shivering and issues with coordination or strength. Vomiting is not uncommon.
• When the adrenalin has worn off, emotional responses may also kick in and traumatic events can lead to dissociation or a '1000 yard stare'.'
• Shock (from injuries of physical or mental nature) can set in quickly when adrenal responses are switched off.
• One thing not seen while the adrenal response and the fight-or-flight are switched up is much in the way of impairment or functional degredation (prior bullet points describe this above in more detail) unless the wound taken is one that causes serious musculoskeletal damage, a life-threatening gross bleed, or significant damage to the brain or spinal column.

Injury Impacts: Aware Of A Threat Versus Unsuspecting

Some years ago, I spoke at length with a paramedic who worked in a city that had many gunshot wounds and stabbings. We discussed various aspects of how these things work in the real world. We spoke of the Golden Hour (the hour between a person sustaining a serious injury and getting the patient to a trauma center). That conversation included how horrific wounds not impacting the brain, heart, or a life-threatening gross bleed tends not to kill the target outright (unlike many game and TV wounds...) and if you can stabilize someone and get them to a trauma center within the Golden Hour, they had a good chance of surviving.

A number of other accounts I have read of people being one-shotted and dying or being hit at the start of a fight and just dropping, incapacitated, unconscious or dead. How does this happen when other times a similar human can take horrific damage and keep fighting effectively?

The answer lies in whether the injury is sustained while the adrenalin was cranked up and fight-and-flight responses were active or was sustained while the person was unaware and unsuspecting - that difference makes a world of difference.

If one is aware of at threat and is at least moderately switched up, a wound not destroying key areas (spine, brain, heart) or a gross bleed, there is a chance to ignore the impacts until the adrenalin wears off. The degree of success at the shrugging off is related to how aware and imminent the threat was when the injury was sustained.

If one is not aware of a threat and hasn't got their adrenalin switched up, then the first punch, the first kick, the first bullet can incapacitate the injured person. Sometimes they can pass out and/or have shock set in immediately which then presents a lethal risk for the injured person.

Skill Atrophy: Use It Or Lose It

When a person does not practice a skill, that skill becomes atrophied. In the worst case, a skill could be lost entirely. A skill one had become very competent at will tend to atrophy to a particular point, but not disappear. A skill one had only a limited competence at (such as one you started to learn but were re-vectored to other things and never came back) will tend to be lost.

In most skill-driven games, character skill levels advance but no skill ever atrophies or is lost. That's just not how humans work. If we don't use it, we lose the fine points or the entire skill.

There will be some example at some point of how to integrate these facts into a gritty combat system without killing playability. I'm working at a 2D6 sci-fi game and plan to include as many of these as I can. Some are simple and some are harder to get both feeling right and also being low drag in play.

Game Design 101: Experience Points

What Role Do Experience Points Play In An RPG?

Experience points (XP) exist to provide a method of character advancement. That's really just another way of saying a way to reward players and to give them the feeling their characters are alive because they can change and grow in response to their experiences.

So the first, and obvious, use of XP is to give the player's a reward and to show that the game world is not static, that their character's have a reward motivation for doing what they do, and to let the player's feel like they are getting somewhere. Character's progress in ability, perhaps from neophytes capable of only the most basic and simple operations to hardened professionals (or feudal lords and mighty wizards, depending upon the genre).

Less obvious, but no less important (and moreso to the GM), is the notion that a system integrating experience points progresses the game world. Not only do the character's grow in capability, but the game world adapts to that change by constantly providing them with 'just right!' challenges that match their level of power. In a spy game, this would take the form of new agents becoming experienced and then eventually creme-de-la-creme '00' agents with a license not only to kill, but to engage in massive, thrilling, over the top spy-thriller action.

But how necessary are XP? Are they a needed mechanic? How do we best implement them?

A lot depends on the sort of game system you play under. Some are very granular and have skills that go up regularly by very small amounts but have no levels (or do have levels but the skills still operate in a similar fashion). Some are less granular and have skills but increases are fewer and further between. Some have levels and levels bring skill gains, feats, new aspects, class advancements, you name it!

Experience points aren't necessary for short story arc games with a very limited number of playing sessions. In longer campaigns, it is almost a certainty that the game will benefit from characters who can grow and change. How you implement XP best would relate to the particular mechanics of your game system, but here are some general thoughts that you might consider...

• Tracking XP towards skill advancement or level advancement can be a simple thing with one broad award for a game sessions result which was arrived at fairly simply or can boil down to painstaking calculation of XP returns from each adventure goal, class action, item of treasure, etc. throughout the session. In the intensive form, there is often a task in partitioning off awards for each character and a lot of bookkeeping.
• XP can be determined in a very granular fashion with intense attention to what exactly and precisely was done or much more generally in terms of how the story progressed. You can guess which method is faster.
• XP can also be determined in a narrative-driven fashion by deciding just how many sessions you want to have between each advancement, either as a function of a pre-conceived advancement rate (for example 4 sessions per level in a level dependent game) or based on how many sessions you wish an entire campaign arc to fit in (50 weekly sessions to get to level 15, so 3 sessions to a level). In skill dependent systems, this would translate to how many skill-specific XP you might want to award in a session.
• You can decide (if you are scheduling advancements) whether they are 'everyone up at once' or staggered (if one class might need more XP to level or if some player is clearly better than the others at the table for instance).
• Ultimately, my experience has been (as someone who calculated painstaking individual awards and then later just made arbitrary decisions on when to level people up) that the end results are about the same, the only difference is a big one in how much bookkeeping you do. If the players never see what the GM does exactly, they are honestly none the wiser.

I have found, in my experience, that just deciding on a progress rate (in a level based game) and levelling up characters either all together or one or two sessions apart (to reward good play or show that some classes are harder to level in) is just as effective and feels the same to the players as doing all the painstaking bookkeeping. What's more, they never need know you did this. Or you can just tell them, if they won't fuss.

In a skill based game, if you know you want character skills (looked at on a per-skill basis) to go up at a particular rate, the same logic applies. Award increases (or skill tallies, if you need to let the players see the progress between skill level gains) in accordance roughly with that schedule and player gameplay.

In the long run, by doing advancement in a somewhat arbitrary but considered fashion, you eliminate bookkeeping for the GM and players, the outcome feels good at the table, and you can significantly reduce the amount of column-inches in game rules covering XP awards. (Which is simpler: XP totals for each monster, each encounter, each class or alignment correct action, some of these pooled then divided out to players and some calculated per player... or just deciding when it is time for a player to advance?)

Conclusion

Your XP concept only really needs to exist insofar as it lets the players feel progress and growth in the characters and the players can grow to allow their challenges to grow bigger, building tension and cresendo as the campaign reaches its climactic moments. As long as the players feel their PCs are developing (and the developments are fair in proportion to player choices of class or actions at the table), then the mechanics (or lack thereof) of XP awards are largely irrelevant.

Advice: Go with the less pain option, spend the time on stories and characters in your game rather than accounting.

The Art and Science of Gamemastery: Lesson 1 - Playing What Motivates You

Having played RPGs for the better part of 28 years now (wow....), and having run about a dozen long running campaigns (one upwards of 20 years, but mostly active for about 15, the others in the 0.5 - 4 year range, not counting piles of little died-a-borning versions), I think I've developed some insights into Game Mastering.

So I'm going to do a series of brief musings on things I've learned along the way.

Lesson 1 - Play What Motivates You

The GM is the person with the most invested (emotionally, financially, and temporally) in any campaign. He has to be to spend the time required to put on a good campaign. If his interest wanes or his will falters, the campaign may well collapse.

The GM has to want to spent easily 200% extra time over and above playing the game to work on events, to track things that happened, to supervise book-keeping, etc. Of course, you can cut that if you use a pre-written story arc in some modules, but even then you'd better spend time familiarizing yourself with the material, the enemies, etc.

Players can show up without a character sheet, without dice, be half asleep (or entirely asleep if they are a Bugbear) at the table, and the GM is supposed to handle these situations without batting an eyelash. The GM, on the other hand, had better not show up groggy, unprepared, without dice, without his modules, etc. or there will be a ruckus.

So on the GM falls the larger part of the burden. I'm not saying that a campaign can work without motivated and involved players. It can't. The players are critical to the success of the campaign and if they are into the game, it is far more fun for everyone including the GM. But the GM has to be as into it and commit more time and effort.

So, the GM has to love the game he's putting on. He may not love everything about it (GMs never do - they think they could always do it better, differently, or in some more exciting fashion or they have this or that gripe with the rules, often tweaking to remedy the supposed flaws). But he has to, overall, love the game.

My observation has been that I always end up GMing the sorts of games I would want to play in. I think that is true of most GMs, allowing for a certain amount of flexibility to accomodate some of the wishes of the players.

So, GMs will end up running games they'd like to play. And that is mostly a good thing as long as it is not taken to extremes. It's a necessary thing to maintain the enthusiasm and the work session after session, some of which are guaranteed not to come up happily for all and not everyone is a home run. Some end up triple play blowouts.


The GM will always see his world more clearly and be more interested in it than his players. This is not to say the players will not be interested or cannot grasp some of what the GM is trying to convey to them, but the image can never be transferred whole cloth.

The GM's style of running a game is as much derived from this truth as his storyline is. This includes pacing, the role of NPCs and players in the World, how Epic or Gritty the game is, the subject matter of adventures, the sorts of characters he encourages, the sorts of scenes that he sets, and the general tone and flavour of everything in the game.

If the GM likes Space Opera, you may get a dose of Star Wars or Dune. If he like something pulpier with a common touch, you may get Serenity. If he enjoys huge empires and little people in them, you might get Traveller. If he likes high fantasy, Lord of the Rings might make sense, or Elric. If he likes rules crunchy fantasy that has a familiarity to everyone, you'll get some flavour of D&D. And so on.

The game sessions can be languid crawls with a lot of emphasis on the minutae of tasks like bargaining with a merchant for a new water skin or how the players are going to pack their backpacks. The games can be frenzied and somewhat forced chapters where the GM wants to get through encounters at a certain pre-conceived rate. The games can feature many side chats or those may be forbidden to speed up play and maintain focus.

The game can have frequent casualties or few to none. Advancement may be swift or glacial. The game can be realistic or fantastic, encouraging either sensible choices or exciting and cinematic ones.

All of this will be derived form the sort of game that the GM wants to play, how the GM sees PCs and NPCs, and so on. And this all ends up being the best experience when the GM loves what he is doing.

When he loves what he is doing, a GM can convey some of that emotional truth through the narrative. His players will sense his love for the material and his interest in it. ideally, they'll also sense his engagement with them and his interest in their goals within his world.

So, Lesson One: Run What You Love. Play What Motivates You. It might or might not work out, there are no guarantees, but it is more likely to succeed than any other alternative.