Smooth vs Chunky game design

Sometimes it helps to look at game design through the "Smooth or Chunky" lens. What do these terms mean? Well, they encapsulate certain vibes. They occupy the middle ground between game mechanics and game feel.

🥛🥛🥛 Smooth is

• small numbers changing incrementally
• things being at the same level
• player-facing subsystems with modest game impact (say, situational dice roll modifiers)
• overloaded dice rolls with small results
• rounded probability curves like 4d6
• anything pre-planned
• predictable consequences, with randomness used as a spice

Smooth is like gradient descent and intricate clockwork and elegant flowcharts. Typical Smooth design elements are sensible, explicable, predictable, fine-grained, subtle, simulationist, world-associated, and introduce enough complexity as they need to be internally coherent.

🥜🥜🥜 Chunky is

• one dice that does everything
• flat high-variance probability curves (say, a 1d100 roll)
• one number that represents a bunch of things
• rollercoaster rides of remarkable successes and sudden catastrophes
• randomness underpinning creative direction
• huge sudden changes to big important things
• hefty modifiers 
• random tables

Chunky is like high stakes roulette wheels and staccato noises and refusing to erase anything. Typical Chunky design elements are simple, wide-reaching, experimental, flashy, coarse-grained, gamist, surprising, central, and do as much as possible with one thing.

Now in game design, unlike with peanut butter, neither one is clearly better than the other. It's situational.

Case study 1

I'm working on a RPG called Overzealous. In this game, you're a well-meaning elder god but your cultists are the typical bloodthirsty crazed zealots. This sets up the tension. You need to become manifest in the world before your cult tears itself apart with ridiculous behaviour.

Early conceptualisation had Overzealous revolve around large random tables, with most of the consequences falling out of those. This played fast but felt random. And it meant that I couldn't model persistent problems, like your cultists getting bored and summoning a bunch of monsters that then hung around, or continuous schisms in your cult leading to further attrition and outrage.

I Smoothed out this Chunkiness by expanding two numerically-tracked stats to five, and adding a granular subsystem for acquiring ongoing "problems" which took trade-offs to solve. The gameplay became a lot richer!

Case study 2

After these changes to Overzealous, you have three "bad" stats (Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity) which you want to keep a lid on and two "good" stats (Imminence, Cultists) which you need to get high enough that your cult can perform a ritual to bring you into reality.

In the draft version after the Smooth changes, if a bad stat exceeded 20, it's game over. The bad stats crept up slowly through various mechanisms, all at about the same pace. This increase was slightly faster than you could deal with, which you generally attempted to do by sacrificing positive stats, setting yourself back. That's Smooth design! The intention was that the player needed to find and pursue a good strategy to secure a win before a loss became inevitable.

In practise, though, my introduction of this much Smoothness created two issues. Because the changes were small and fairly predictable,

1. A skilled player could find one obviously optimal strategy, and didn't have to deviate much from that strategy for random events. This reduced gameplay scope.
2. If through poor luck, lack of experience, or exploring other options, the player's negative stats got too high, there was a tipping point where it was obvious that a loss was inevitable... but it took a long time to lose the game.

To deal with this, I eased up on the Smooth pedal and re-introduced some Chunky. I had stats go to 13 instead of 20, took out some of the cases where multiple stats all change by 1, and doubled down on cases where a single stat change by 2 or 3. Also, the ongoing problems that beset your cult (like cannibalism, diabolism, and schisms) only have a chance to come into play each turn, but are more impactful when they do.

And these tweaks got me exactly the gameplay experience I wanted for Overzealous! There's no longer one clear strategy to follow, as the feeling is more one of running around putting out fires. Now the player is tempted to push things, to e.g. just spend one more turn scrambling towards completing the ritual when their Fervour has crested 10, because the end's in sight, knowing that a couple of bad rolls might be their downfall.

New words to use

Was I thinking about Smooth vs Chunky throughout this design process? Not exactly, but I was certainly aware of what was going on with the overall vibes, and now that I've constructed this jargon to talk about it, I suspect I'll be thinking in those terms in the future.

With gameplay pretty much where I want it, I'm ready to get the visual design finished!

Anyway, that is the age-old "Smooth vs Chunky" dichotomy, brought to you by peanut butter on toast.

When player agency meets character compulsions

When you're playing a role, sometimes your character ought to act in some way.

• The goodly hero has a moral code regarding the treatment of prisoners
• The addicted wizard would do anything to get more purple poppy
• The impulsive barbarian wants to destroy doors, spines, and magic items
• The traditionalist dwarf can't rein in her hatred of goblins or desire for gold
• The life priest's role demands self-sacrifice if it comes down to it
• The emergency medic has a duty of care to her patients
• The brash brute can't keep his foot out of his mouth

These traits create roleplaying obligations. The obligation is on the player, constraining their choice down to how their character "should act".

It often happens that a character who acts on an obligation risks getting a negative outcome – perhaps even a catastrophic one. And this may be obvious to the player. So it's natural that players won't always want to have their character act as they "ought" to.

An aside: I'm talking about classic roleplaying games here, where character success amounts to player success. In storytelling games, or even in RPGs played as if they were storytelling games, players tend to be much more open to making deliberately "suboptimal" in-character choices.

At the game table, whose job is it to ensure that obligations are followed through? The rules? The GM? The social dynamics of the group?

The strength of an obligation – how much a player "should" follow it – varies depending on the character, player, group, and game system. For example, in a point buy system where a burdensome personality trait compensates you with extra points, there's a strong expectation that the trait's obligations will be followed. In these cases, there might be rules laid out to cover roleplaying obligations.

Compulsions versus obligations

Now compare in-world things that the characters might encounter like magical geases, mind control rays, charm spells, and brain parasites. These essentially do the same thing. The player character is compelled, rather than obliged, to act in some way.

Of course, modern games almost always structure these things in a meticulously rule-based way, with various "outs", and make them short term and/or weak.

That's because it's a truism of RPGs that it sucks to have your agency taken away.

(Your agency in particular; but your character stuff in general)

After character creation, a traditional TTRPG offers the player the ability to do exactly one thing: make in-world choices on their character's behalf. They can't choose the corresponding outcomes, or odds, or stakes, but they can choose what to try.

Undermining this one capability – even for the sake of in-world things, like established character compulsions or magical mind control – is generally a bad idea. It feels like an attack on autonomy and agency.

So we want to support situations where, through obligation or compulsion, players ought to have their characters act certain ways. But we don't want to take away their ability to decide.

 

How do we square these two things?

Player choice is pretty close to an unequivocal good, making constraint on player choice pretty unambiguously bad. My favourite approach just turns the bad thing into more of the good thing.

➡️ Let the player decide whether their character resists being obliged or compelled, at some in-world cost.

Let's say the player is confronted with some situation where their character is compelled or obliged to act some way. Now they decide whether the character is able to resist, suffering some consequence if they do.

"You resist the call of the purple poppy, at great personal cost. You'll have a morale penalty until you next imbibe it."

"Straining with every part of your soul, you overcome the suggestion spell. You feel a huge fatigue upon you."

"With muscles and tendons clenched, you give the goblin merchant a forced smile and polite nod as you pass. Something in your jaw clicks. Take 2 points of damage."

What is the in-world cost?

The consequence of managing to resist a compulsion/obligation should ideally

• be mechanically grounded (weighty and yet easy to apply)
• be player-facing (rules-based, or at least announced by the GM in advance)
• have an immediate impact (the consequence feels associated with the decision)

Obviously this is easiest in gritty detailed systems with character resources. Stress, Stamina, Focus, whatever it's called as long as it's measured in points that can be taken away.

What if my game doesn't have an appropriate stat?

You could improvise one. 

Or the character could suffer other in-world consequences.

• For an unmet abstract obligation like following a code of conduct, the character might well encounter social problems. Rumours spring up. Hirelings abandon the party. Opportunities dry up. The parent organisation sends a formal rebuke or starts an inquiry.
• For other obligatory traits, the character gets stressed/worried/grumpy/distracted when they don't follow their nature, and end up mislaying an object, getting a bad reaction roll, missing details when looking for clues, etc.
• When an external compulsion is resisted, the character might be disoriented and flub things for a while (rerolling successful rolls, etc).

A specific suggestion

I have long thought that the perfect RPG is one that rewards the PCs with a dice bonus/malus for getting a good/bad night's sleep. I wrote about this the other day. Use a general 'well-being' stat measuring a character's overall mental and physical condition, which the players can push to try to improve, and which modifies most if not all rolls and tests.

This is a perfect candidate for tying in to this choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion system. If you decide your character resists, that bonus is reduced (or malus increased).

Otherwise

You could flip this around and offer a player character experience points (etc) for giving in to their obligation. But this doesn't feel the same, for a couple of reasons.

• Offering a mechanical benefit to specifically "good roleplaying that goes against the characters' best interests" will rankle.
• Paying an in-world cost to overcome a compulsion, or choosing to let the character act on it, make it feel like a thing actually having an effect. Just declining a prize feels like nothing happens.
• Players tend to be risk-averse when it comes to stuff like this, so you'll end up with the character whose character quirk never actually gets them into trouble, and the villain's charm spell that never actually does anything.

Other benefits

Sort of buried the lede here, but the big advantage of doing choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion is that you can hang lots of stuff off a single mechanic. So there's obligatory character traits, but also...

Thing #1: Mind control. As mentioned, taking away agency is usually unfun, can disrupt a game, and can be too swingy in a tactical combat game (strictly worse than save-or-suck); modern games usually make control spells very weak and brief as a result. (Compare OD&D, where the level one Charm person spell could control someone indefinitely, and even the first supplement only reined it in to the point where a particularly lucky superintelligence might shrug it off after a few days)

Suppose instead that the subject of the magic really feels the compulsion deeply, and can resist at some steep cost. And they can be effected by the spell and decide the point where it wears off, as the 'price' to escape goes down over time.

Thing #2: Other magical effects that subvert character control. Illusion, fascination, terror, berserk rage, altered perception, foolishness, cursed objects that whisper dark thoughts. Games tend to have detailed subsystems for these and/or be pretty weak, because of what they do to characters. Using choose-to-pay-and-resist-compulsion means a simpler, unified system, potentially greater effects, and more player agency through the whole thing.

Thing #3: Social-fu systems that can be used to influence PC action. Games are understandably reluctant to make social skill rolls have actual impact by influencing, let alone determining or constraining, PC choices. Now we have a framework where players will have to decide the lesser of two evils: go along with social influence, or pay the cost (become emotionally run-down, sapped of energy, have low morale, etc).

Thing #4: The same choose-whether-to-pay kind of tradeoff, but introduced to other parts of a game. Possibly as a single unified mechanic.

I'm thinking in particular of things like saving throws and luck points, which aren't very nuanced and involve no in-world decision-making. What if instead you could reliably avoid disaster by suffering some other major long-term consequence? "You fling yourself desperately away but hurt a tendon and can no longer stand up until you receive healing." "You block the blow but are winded and can't succeed on strength rolls until you rest." "You catch a branch on the way past but a strap snaps and your satchel disappears down the mountainside."

Thing #5: In a crunchy character-building system, we now have new options for a character's (in)ability to resist various things. Appropriate traits like "stubborn" or "weak-willed" or "dedicated to the cause" can vary up the cost that a character pays to resist particular obligations or compulsions.

Where'd this idea come from?

I don't remember; I suspect I saw at least the kernel of it somewhere. 

➡️ Lots of games have meta-resources, and sometimes trade in them directly. In Numenera, a GM can suggest something bad may happen and an affected player can either gain XP and let it happen, or lose XP to deny it. Related but not my preferred approach, and not specific to obligations/compulsions.

➡️ In that vein, player-facing story-gaming mechanics may directly affect character actions and/or overall narrative.

➡️ There's this blog post which I found quite compelling. It has a somewhat similar approach to the problem of combat stunts: https://oddskullblog.wordpress.com/2021/11/15/combat-maneuvers-the-easy-way/

➡️ I vaguely remember seeing a GURPS house rule or hack where Disadvantages that compel action can be paid off with FP. I don't recall, but it would make sense to vary the FP cost depending on whether the compulsion was mandatory or resisted with a self-control roll, or more generally if it depended on the point value of the Disadvantage.

If there's a notable/obvious game that does this, let me know!

Winning the game by being well-rested

I have long believed that the perfect RPG would reward the PCs for getting a good night's sleep – and penalise them for a bad enough one.

There are many upsides to doing this.

1. It's realistic. In my experience, getting particularly good or bad sleep could have a +/- 50% effect on your baseline competence.
2. It encourages roleplaying. People want to get a good night's sleep. Now characters want to get a good night's sleep.
3. It incentivises investing in comforts and nice-to-haves. Without the carrot and the stick, most players tend to default to only getting functional equipment.
4. It adds more choice to campsite selection. More choice is better. (I think it was Peter D who suggested: concealed, secure, or comfortable; pick one)
5. You can tie it to character injury. In HP-based systems, characters tend to either be fine or dead, resulting in confusion about what HP and damage really "are". Well-restedness is pretty much a score of overall condition, so being wounded can reduce the same score. Now it's actually more difficult to jump around on a stabbed leg.
6. You can tie it to character morale. Generally, telling players how their characters feel is a bad idea. Telling them they must act some way as a result is disastrous. But a hard rule like "a character who sees a friend die loses 1 point of overall condition" is non-intrusive, assuming you don't allow sociopathic PCs.
7. It incentivises problem-solving. To get the best outcomes, you need to acquire and carry around more creature comforts, even through hard terrain. So now you have a to-do list and some logistics to work out.
8. It encourages having a bunch of attendants (lackeys, entertainers, back-scrubbers, cooks, night watchmen, etc). This is in keeping with commonly emulated genres like "low-technology fantasy", and opens up new kinds of gameplay.
9. It makes the weather feel real. Most of us are well insulated from the effects of weather in 2025. Travelling, sleeping, or making a meal in bad weather is really rough going. 

and

10. It's also a soft progression system!

Characters with more resources can spend them to improve their day-to-day efficacy.

Characters who end the first game flush with cash might be able to get good provisions and nice camping gear, and secure a future +1 when there's fine weather and uninterrupted nights. Later, they might hire some camp drudges so they can get more rest per day, porters to carry their extra stuff, and maybe a proper cook. They're looking to get that +2. By the end of the campaign, expect everyone to travel with fine silks and furs, feather mattresses, bevies of personal chefs and butlers, vintage wines, and magical solutions meant to ensure good dreams, chasing that +5.

(Of course, if you want your normal "levelly" game, you can turn it into a treadmill: characters get used to the finer things, and their baseline expectations slowly creep up, so the bonus never gets too big)

I've had worse naps. (Artwork via www.lustigesrollenspiel.de)

How to get a good night's sleep

I think this metric is dependent on six things:

• Being sated (not hungry, thirsty, etc)
• Being comfortable (resting in a quiet, comfortable place, in shelter, at a nice temperature, etc)
• Getting enough sleep and enough down time
• Having creature comforts (indulging in vices, enjoying entertainment, being with friends, etc)
• Being safe
• Being healthy (not injured, cursed, ill, in shock, etc)

Some games have relevant mechanics (like systems for dehydration or sleep deprivation), which this approach could either subsume or integrate with.

Mechanically, how does it work? Is there an individual character roll depending on the factors? GM fiat? Player-facing prescribed requirements for each tier? The implementation will of course differ with the system.

So will the outcome. Games with a single central dice mechanic obviously get a dice bonus or malus. Then it's just a matter of magnitude and deciding which rolls it applies to (I think you could make a very good case for "all of them").

Final thought

You might have noticed I didn't call this "the INSERT_NAME rule". My thesaurus failed me.

Fettle and Invigoration are awkward. Condition or Vigour would be good but tend to be reserved game terms, so might be confusing. Words like Well-Rested and Energised don't cover the negative cases. Restedness is apt, but clunky.

Freshness is pretty good (except for sounding like you're in a supermarket).

'Consume alien': Reviewing Encounter Critical

...You ever hear of Encounter Critical by Riley and Ireland? A long-forgotten piece of amateur RPG design from the 70s, originally published "on a school mimeograph" and sold through hobby stores, and now available only as a scan.

It's one of those early masterpieces in which fantasy and science fiction tropes collide. And yes, that does mean the currency is "gold credits".

Quest into the slaver kingdoms or hurl yourself into the galaxies of space to find wealth and destiny. Your tactics and your character are yours to control as you undertake ENCOUNTER CRITICAL.

...Of course, it's a joke. This "forgotten gem from 1978" was created by S. John Ross in 2004, with flourishes such as advertisements for an official Gazette (a newsletter in four supposed issues), as well as a reference to "a forthcoming line of Encounter Critical miniatures" and a search for a book deal.

Originally it was cast back in time 26 years from the true 2004 publication. Now 21 years have passed in turn.

How does the hoax hold up?

🛸 The aesthetic is perfectly on point: typewritten; amateur; hand-crafted and hand-drawn; retro; photocopied

🛸 The prose is breathlessly earnest, and preoccupied with its own relationship to conventions of war gaming

🛸 The game is full of sci-fi plagiarism and the kind of dated sexism obsessed with 'seduction' and 'doxies'

🛸 It's the classic nine-stat system we all know and love: Adaptation, Dexterity, ESP, Intellect, Leadership, Luck, Magic Power, Robot Nature, and Strength.

Um

The insane retro creativity of Encounter Critical

You roll for character race. Possibilities include, on the fantasy side, 'Amazons', 'Frankensteins', and Hobbits I mean 'Hoblings'. The purloined sci fi IP includes 'Klengons', 'Planetary Apes', and 'Vulkins'.

You can also play as a 'Wooky' and be penalised for wearing armour, although of course 'a Wooky will seek out magical rings or energy armor when it is available'.

You also have a chance to end up as...

You also may be a mutant, and therefore suffer from character traits such as Cannibal Urges, Allergy to laser, Unusual Sexual Gifts, or Self-Consuming Brain.

The writing mostly serves the "lost 70s indie game" in-joke, but also has its genuine funny moments:

 

Amateur indie design 

The mechanics, while harking back to OD&D, very much like they're just being felt out.

🛸 Warriors get followers and/or animal companions, and an underdetermined number of multiattacks.

🛸 Hit points, damage, and number of monsters appearing, are given as ranges instead of the underlying dice codes.

🛸 The nine stats barely interact at all with the (percentage-based) class abilities, only underpinning the general character abilities.

🛸 Instead, a class's key stats give xp bonuses or penalties. So does Intellect, which means it'll stack for the classes with Intellect as a qualifying stat (pioneer or warlock). If they roll maximum Int they will get +20% experience as well as "a 10% chance at experience bonus", i.e., 10% chance of doubling.

🛸 The terminology is slightly inconsistent.

🛸 The game is stuffed with percentage tables.

In these ways and others, it's all deeply connected to OD&D (while taking sniping pot shots at that game).

The book is laid out as if you pull out the middle pages to use at the table. Pages 23 and 27 are ("mistakenly"?) transposed, breaking the table of monsters.

Which includes extremely compelling types such as: Asteroid Worm, Bee Girl, Dragon of Wisdom, Rogue Robodroid, Sky Piranha, and:

(The entry for the Phasic Wolf helpfully notes that it is "phasic in nature".)

The intended 70s style rings true, IMO

An incautiously designed disease table gives you a chance of getting a brain disorder from sex work. Or you could get the "Pestilence of Dark Withering" or "Curse of Seven Hundred Minds" from a rusty nail.

There is a combat system which somehow combines simplicity, percentage rolls, underspecification, and assuming an understanding of how OD&D did things.

Does the ranged weapon table have "sling", "musket", "tommy gun", and "phasic sniper rifle" on it? Yes. Is it possible to do more damage with the sling than said rifle? Yes.

The text is very persnickety and period-appropriate, with pot shots at house rules and gaming styles, etc. It describes its spells as "correctly balanced", snubs spell levels, and says the authors prefer "a more science fiction approach where a spell is a spell".

(Speaking of spells, I love that a science fiction game has a spell that lets you travel... 500 miles.)

The inscrutably-named abilities are pretty great. Consume alien, Ensorcel, Illicit, Machine friend, and See the future all on one character sheet!

...And Seduce, of course. I've draw a veil over all the gendered stuff, but it's there – doxies, amazons, succubuses, etc. While it's clearly intended as a send-up of the 70s trappings, and works as such, the benefit of another 20 years makes it feels awkward and unnecessary. Rather than making a lot of content actually hinge on it, it could have been presented as a one-note joke.

 

The world of Encounter Critical

In the accompanying adventure, goblins are stealing the brainwaves of abducted girls to fuel up a spaceship in a warlock's lair.

This takes place in the game's setting: "Vanth, a fantasy world of adventure". (Is Vanth just Xanth, but different?)

It comes, of course, with a map:

 

It feels delightfully like the kind of thing I would have been making as an early teen.

My copy of Encounter Critical is from almost twenty years ago. These days you can find it for free on DriveThruRPG. Apparently there's an updated version.

To me, this game reads like a how-it-could have been of the original D&D, like an alternate history Dalluhn Manuscript. The game that resulted from Arneson watching some slightly different films.

Well done.

Out now: Monsters! Horrors & Abominations

 
My new book, Monsters! Horrors & Abominations, is now published!

It's a 215 page bestiary crammed full of weird and flavourful monsters for D&D 5e/2025, like the...
👹 Endlessphant (wrinkled grey elephant's leg with a million knees)
👹 Big scaly one (gormless rubbery hound-god of trolls)
👹 Void oyster (beautiful nacre-petrifying abomination from beyond the stars)
👹 Stillness mage (undead weather-worker and master of doldrums)

Streamlined for combat encounters and delivered with tactics information, modern design innovations, great illustrations, and a touch of humour! Between the base creatures and tons of variants, there are 240 monsters from Challenge Rating 0 to 20.

All focused on the unsettling, underground, unspeakable, unholy, and undead!

Now available here as a PDF or a neat hardcover book!

And as a blog reader, feel free to use this code for 10% off the PDF, or if you would like the hardcover, this code for 10% off the physical book!

Review: Secret Party House of the Hill Giant Playboy

It's Reviewn June! Revebrewary! Octobereview! Janreviewary!

It's August, and here is a quick review.

The adventure 

Secret Party House of the Hill Giant Playboy (hereafter SPHotHGP) is a location-based adventure for Swords & Wizardry, BX, OD&D, etc, released by Jason Sholtis in 2013.

You may know Sholtis from adventures like Operation Unfathomable, as well as blog The Dungeon Dozen. From the latter, years of incomparably high-density weird ideas got fleshed out into a book and then into a sequel. I consider those two of the best books in the entire TTRPG space when it comes to inspiration.

SPHotHGP is 20 pages, released for free. To an extent, it's a pastiche of the classic 1978 module, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. Some of the set-up is the same, and there are several little nods. For example, in the 1978 module, the hill giant's name is Nosnra (that is, almost Arneson backwards), whereas in SPHotHGP it's Sadrox... who crudely disguises his identity by calling himself Lord Xordas.

Sadrox/Xordas is the Hill Giant Playboy of the title, and his party pad is a den of iniquity and a hoard of much treasure.

As well as giving adventure hooks, Sholtis writes a great background story about how the evil Xordas acquired his huge wealth and party house, although it's not clear how this would become known to the players.

The content 

SPHotHGP is absolutely full of tables. Find the type, nature, extent, and progress of the party. Determine how the PCs are received. Roll to see what kinds of brawl break out, and what giant-sized and gruesome banquet foods are being served: Megatherium done 5 ways. Sweagledactyl, a swan stuffed in a giant eagle inside a pterodactyl.

There's a fascinating array of evil VIP guests and regulars:

• Raver Ylyach the Swamp Hag and her putrescent servitors
• Zogorion, the surprisingly scheming Lord of the Hippogriffs
• Zhemorna, caterpillar-headed high priestess of the Worm Sultan
• Glurt “Beef” Wellington, possibly the world's handsomest hill giant
• The Piper from Beyond Comprehension
• etc 

And Xordas has a very weird treasure hoard indeed.

The presentation 

SPHotHGP is semi-professionally put together. There's a keyed map, and this being for an oldschool game, inline stat blocks for each key being.

I noticed one unfinished page reference, some stray punctuation, and Glok the ogre captain seems to be incorrectly statted. Content-wise, I liked everything except that the characters and complex are largely reactive, with only a few VIPs having guidance for active agendas. I certainly can't complain about getting a good adventure for the low low price of free.

Sholtis's description is terse but evocative. You can practically hear and smell the place.

A few illustrations by Sholtis also help to really tie it together.

 

Normally I'd leave a link for you to take a look yourself. I found SPHotHGP a while ago on Sholtis's blog, but the download has sadly succumbed to bit-rot. I hope the author will repost it some time, because this is great stuff!