Tick-tock-tock game design

Let's talk a bit about prototyping, i.e., creating the foundation of a game as the first step before iterating on the design.

I sometimes use a specific approach for this, which I call "tick-tock-tock game design".

The name (as opposed to tick-tock-tick-tock) is meant to evoke simplicity and granularity, procedurality and semi-predictability, and deliberate avoidance of symmetry. Specifically, tick-tock-tock game design is

• Minimalist: The game's complexity emerges from a small set of simple, interconnected processes and abstractions acting on each other. Additional complexity may be introduced creatively by the player. For example: The game has two stats and two actions, and the gameplay state is limited to a set of five possibilities plus some numbers.
• Clockwork: There is a core gameplay loop, precisely described, which you don't deviate from. The loop's particulars almost certainly involve randomness and player choice, but in general Z follows Y follows X. For example: The game is an escalating series of four-stage cycles where you ante up, make a bet, apply the consequences, then raise the stakes.
• Asymmetric: Although minimalism + clockwork permits a very high level of symmetry and regularity in principle, the game deliberately leans in the other direction. For example: The game has four stats, but they aren't equally important. The game has four actions with the same magnitude of effect, but one is only situationally useful, and another one has a cost.

This combination can be a potent one for engaging play.

I'll give a few examples from my current game project, Overzealous.

This is a solo TTRPG where you (an outsider god) want to be summoned into reality, but you're mismatched with a cartoonishly bloodthirsty cult who keep getting distracted by their own horrible havoc.

Poster by me. Art credits: Evlyn Moreau. Gordy Higgins. Adobe Stock. Lorc, CC-BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), modified.

 

Overzealous is Minimalist. There are five stats. The two 'good stats' are Cultists and Imminence. The three 'bad stats' are Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity. You want to get your good stats high and keep your bad stats from creeping up too fast.

All the game's additional mechanics (random weekly events, the actions an outsider god can take, ongoing problems like your cultists turning into cannibals, etc) revolve around these essentials. It is very easy to understand the fundamentals and everything hinging off them aids further comprehension.

Overzealous is Clockwork. Stats matter at the values 0 and 13 (as starting points, points where you win or lose, etc). Stats change iteratively, each turn, with a random factor. The actions available to you have precisely specified outcomes.

After setting up, play proceeds in a tight game loop in which a turn begins, developments happen, actions are chosen, random events are rolled, and consequences are suffered. The loop only ends in a victory or a loss, with a little extra gameplay associated with either, much of the complexity of which is driven by player creativity.

Overzealous is Asymmetric. You want 13 Cultists and 13 Imminence so that you can win, but you need more Cultists than that if your cult has too many heretical ideas. Also, having high Cultists increases the rate of increase in all your other stats.

Fervour, Divergence, and Monstrosity are all bad, but Divergence is the worst because it can passively make it harder to win the game. All three stats can make you lose the game if they reach 13, but Fervour and Divergence matter more before that because they result in worse effects from the random rolls you make for cult shenanigans.

Ongoing problems in your cult can cause stat penalties over time, and there are 25 possible combinations for this, but in practise you only face a subset of ten problems the cult can bring upon themselves, with stat penalties appropriate to the nature of those problems. There's a wide variety of actions that you can choose between to trade off your stats, but they don't all have quite the same expected value or magnitude of effect, some are random, and some effects you might want aren't encoded as actions.

Why tick-tock-tock game design?

Minimalist and clockwork approaches are easy to learn and play and well suited to casual and solo gaming. The flip side is that they can be boring, and the kind of complexity they create can be limited in various ways, such as predictability or lack of verisimilitude.

But small deviations from a pattern feel meaningful (whereas pure unpredictable randomness circles all the way around to pablum).

To put it another way, wielding asymmetry means setting up expectations – the player can envisage a huge gleaming clockwork machine built on these simple bones, a game where a player is barely needed because everything proceeds in so orderly a fashion – and then subverting them. Having things go in different directions. Hiding better solutions amidst worse ones. Presenting a damaged machine to play with. Making things messier and more interesting in the process.

The earlier the better

I think it's best to bake this sort of thing in at the prototyping stage, where it will necessarily affect the end result, rather than try to get it right in later stages of design.

Accidental symmetries are possible, and in my experience if you're not careful when you are designing to thread the needle between symmetrical and chaotic, you can end up e.g. creating trap choices or areas of game-space which never get reached because the better path is so obvious.

This is all part of the game design vision where you avoid having equilibrium states or necessary actions or unavoidable penalties or slow death spirals. Early in the design of Overzealous I switched from ongoing problems causing a stat change of 1 to a 50% chance of a stat change of 2. It should be obvious why. It's less fun to just go around in circles, tick tock tick tock tick tock.

 

Update: Overzealous is now available!

Complications! Serendipity! Action resolution twists

An envelope gets tugged out of your hand by the wind. You kick your desk and slosh coffee everywhere. You bump into a friend in an unexpected place. A bird lands on your shoulder. The pen runs out of ink when you try to sign.

Because of how our own world works, we expect fictional worlds to be full of lots of little chance things which individually happen rarely. Pieces of serendipity. Unwanted side effects. Unexpected interruptions. Unforeseen complications.

Characters in the fictive world of a tabletop game should expect to encounter little surprises here and there. Not all the time; perhaps not as much as they do in the real world, because of the focus on exciting impactful play — but enough for verisimilitude.

Twisting outcomes ad hoc

TTRPGs often have rules for very consequential rare outcomes (critical hits, spell mishaps, fumbles, etc). But (especially in rules-light games) it is often down to the referee to come up with any smaller "twists": the complications and bits of serendipity we expect to happen not-too-infrequently when someone attempts to do something.

There are two problems with having the referee add twists to action outcomes on the spur of the moment.

1. The imagination is a resource. Thinking requires time and effort, a referee has a lot of mental overhead, and adding twists to action resolution begins with remembering to actually do it. Even an experienced and confident ref likes to have tools at their disposal to reduce mental effort.
2. If it's not a formal procedure, it can feel arbitrary. If the referee just tells a player "your sword hilt catches in the reins of the knight's horse as it gallops past and is ripped away, pinwheeling across the battlefield" it may feel unfair, even punishing. Why them? Why now? Why misfortune instead of fortune? This naturally leads to the ref only adding complications in low-risk environments, which is less interesting.

So here's an approach you can bolt on to any game to add more twists.

 

A procedure for twists

I was reading some older blog posts about (1) spark tables (Bastionland), (2) GM intrusions in Numenera (Alexandrian), and (3) the habit of rolling for complications (Necropraxis), and they got me thinking. We can put together some simple tools for adding twists.

The design goal is to create a procedure that is

• quick, simple, and useful to a referee,
• neither too game-specific nor too vague,
• open-ended and flexible. 

We just need a few dice tables and a basic rule for rolling on them. 

Here's the simple procedure I came up with:

1️⃣ The referee (or designer) should decide on the mechanical trigger for adding a twist to an action outcome. This will be system-dependent, e.g., "when the margin of success or failure is 10 or more", or "when a 01-03 or 98-00 is rolled on percentage dice", or "when rolling with (dis)advantage", or "when anyone spends a luck point".

2️⃣ Ideally it's something that players and referee alike can notice, so that it gets remembered, and eventually comes to be expected.

3️⃣ Now if this trigger applies during action resolution, the referee rolls 1d10 twice and consults the following dice tables, picking whichever of the two outcomes is more plausible for the context. Reroll if absolutely necessary.

(If there's no appropriate trigger for your system, you might roll 1d12 before each action adjudication and give a positive twist on a 12 or a negative twist on a 1. Or if you want lots of serendipity/misfortune and fewer dice rolls, just extend the following dice tables to 1d20 size and roll a pair of d20s for every action adjudication, one for a positive twist and one for a negative twist, ignoring results higher than 10.)

 

Dice table #1: Combat-specific twists

In a fight, one side's boon is the other's bane. The table entries refer to a "combatant" who should either be the character acting, or the opponent they are focusing on, as appropriate for the trigger. (This should work even for games without symmetrical combat mechanics, with a reasonable choice of trigger.)

1. Exposed. Combatant is drawn out of position, surrounded, or put on bad footing.
2. Toppled. Combatant is knocked down.
3. Lost grip. Combatant drops their weapon, gets it stuck in something, or loses their grip.
4. Disoriented. Combatant is blinded, dazed, scared, or demoralised by a combat event.
5. Jostled. Combatant is trampled, grabbed, or knocked aside.
6. Extra injury. Combatant suffers an additional incidental wound.
7. Ally harmed. Combatant accidentally causes harm to (or disrupts) one of their allies.
8. Armour broken. Combatant's shield or a piece of body armour breaks, is removed, or is rendered useless.
9. Weapon breaks. Combatant's weapon is made useless: a blade breaks, string snaps, gun jams, etc.
10. Impeded. Combatant is tangled or otherwise hampered by terrain or their own armour.

 

Next we'll look at random tables for general actions. We can't expect there to be a zero-sum symmetry like there is in combat, so we'll need separate misfortune and benefit tables. Choose the appropriate one for the trigger.

(Depending on the trigger, negative twists might still occur for successful actions and positive twists for failures. I think this is a good thing.)

Dice table #2: General action twists (misfortune)

1. Incidental damage. Whatever the character is working on or with (a rope, lock, computer, tool, weapon, etc) is damaged.
2. Extra time. The action takes longer than expected (the character may choose to abandon the task early when this becomes clear).
3. Costly. The action will take more resources than expected (the character may choose to abandon the task instead when this becomes clear).
4. Loud or unimpressive. A mistake or coincidence causes the action to get everyone's attention. This may be laughable, socially objectionable, distracting, or dangerous.
5. Minor injury. The character suffers some small harm in the course of attempting the action.
6. Crudely done. The action is performed clumsily or its effect is crude and sloppy, in a way likely to have later repercussions.
7. Unwanted side effect. Attempting the action also causes a problem, likely related to the method used and the circumstances.
8. Hidden step. Attempting the action reveals a new challenge which must be overcome before the action can actually be completed. *
9. One shot. Attempting the action reveals circumstances which mean the task can't be tried again following this attempt. *
10. Tougher than it seems. Attempting the action reveals something about the situation which makes the task harder than anticipated. Adjust it for others and for future attempts. *

* Note the last three entries may necessitate changing the details of the world. This approach might not work for everyone.

Dice table #3: General action twists (benefit) 

1. Skill increase. The character performing the action learns something along the way. This may be as diegetic or game-mechanical as you please.
2. Mastery. The character can do this specific action again (in this same context) without any chance of failure.
3. Positive side-effect. Performing the action also causes an unexpected helpful outcome.
4. Good return. The action takes fewer resources than expected to accomplish, and/or yields more of some measurable outcome than it normally would.
5. Quick. The action takes half the time it normally would.
6. Quiet. The action is accomplished stealthily and subtly, or there's a distraction elsewhere that takes attention away from it.
7. Impressive. The character performs the action in a way that's inspirational, smooth, culturally appropriate, or garners public approval.
8. Stacking. The way this action changes the world makes it easier for allies or harder for foes to accomplish some related thing(s). *
9. Discovery. The character performing the action finds something (information or an object) when they attempt it. *
10. Easier than it seems. Attempting the action reveals something that makes the task easier than anticipated. Adjust it for others and for future attempts. *

* Again, the last three entries may require changing the details of the world. You'll need alternatives if you don't like that.

The benefits of table-based twists

There are three main benefits to this approach.

1. SALIENCE. The simple procedure means easy referee decisions. It reminds the ref of various outcomes that should be possible. And it's a quick way of selecting between side effects.
2. PLAUSIBILITY. The tables are fairly general. Rolling twice and picking the more plausible twist is easier than having to think of a particularly suitable possibility, but is quick and flexible.
3. PERMISSIVENESS. When a game system doesn't overtly empower the referee to intervene in small ways, adding a defined procedure feels less arbitrary. The one I've written up is neutral with regard to the player characters; in games where characters are more skilled than their opponents, it may even be a small advantage.

You no longer need as many specific rules for monsters, traps, etc, because it all works inside the established fiction of the world. Now if a monster is described as having a hard shell, whenever "Weapon breaks" is one of the rolled options you'll instinctively pick that one without thinking too hard about it.

Alternatively, you can hang stuff off the procedure to extend it.

• A cursed sword might always favour the "Ally harmed" twist when rolled as an option, and doubles the effect when it happens.
• A sticky jelly monster always permits "Lost grip" as a third option to choose between, so that more and more swords end up stuck inside it.

The procedure can be completely player-facing if you want. In story-telling games you could even make the choice of twist a collaborative decision.

You could also use the twist procedure to simplify rules-heavy games, turning their specialised action outcomes into simple table entries and then discarding their complex action resolution mechanics.

Finally, you could build your own tables to come up with task-specific results. If your game is mainly about tracking, you probably want a tracking-specific table of twists.

A potential drawback: Combat asymmetry

This will give you different ratios of good and bad side-effects depending on the number of combatants involved. If a dozen characters fight one giant, or fifteen minions fight one player character, there's a risk of the solo combatant being buffeted by constant 'bad luck' due to the sheer number of rolls the other side is making.

Ultimately this comes down to choice of trigger. Some possible adjustments: Only accept the first two twists that get rolled each round (for combat systems with initiative). Only take the biggest margin of success from each side (for combat systems where everything happens at once). Identify one-vs-many situations and change the trigger to benefit the one. Give boss monsters the power to ignore the first negative twist they would suffer each round.

And of course you can codify rule zero. The referee should simply reject a twist if none of the possibilities rolled seem suitable for the situation. That way a mob of gnomes can't keep knocking the giant over, making her drop her club, etc.

Finally

I should note that this procedure is untested, but I hope to give it a go at the table in the future. I'd love to hear if you have thoughts or feedback. Leave a comment or let me know on Bluesky or Mastodon!

 

The art in this post is by Gordy Higgins. Used with permission.

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).

Reviewn June 2025 part 3: Game books

In which I review the books I read in the first half of 2025

Part three: TTRPGs and game content

 

What games have I checked out in the last six months? Here I'm including published books and files, commercial or free, but not blog posts (which I read too many of).

It's Reviewn June!

 

Tiny Spaceship

An alien exploration to understand Planet Earth 

By Tanya Floaker (https://floaker.itch.io/tiny-spaceship)

A wholesome diceless three-page mini-RPG about a spaceship that's come to visit us, and the dangers it faces (from other players, in the roles of e.g. "a big flock of birds"). Has a beautiful cover by August Charters, and the layout is nice (although it would benefit from a proofread and a looser line spacing).

I appreciate the extensive endnote about inspirations and mechanical sources, and the use of CC0. 

Mechanically this is a collaborative story-building game with simple natural-language rules. The tiny spaceship plays off exploration (drawing attention to itself) against understanding (thereby resolving problems). With the caveat that I haven't yet played this, I would call it story-telling gaming done right: a game at a high level of abstraction should be fuelled by simple, abstract, broadly-interpretable rules. Looks fun.

 

RPG Design Zine 

A how-to zine about tabletop roleplaying game design

By Nathan D. Paoletta (https://ndpdesign.itch.io/rpg-design-zine)

Published 2019, it's 28 pages of quite abstract, but useful, advice. The thesis is "I'm not here to tell you which [design decisions] to make, but I do want you to know why you’re making them." That's largely borne out. The content covers pragmatic approaches to, and implications of, various design angles: articulating inspiration, interplay of structures, roleplaying-as-conversation, iteration, etc.

Overall, the zine doesn't align perfectly with my own conception of TTRPGs, but I found it all the more useful for that. For example, it makes some interesting points about granularity and utility, different to my usual approach of complexity is a cost you pay, and left me with lots to think about.

The scan quality had me squinting a few times. Corrections were made to the physical paper, which adds to the zine aesthetic, but a fair number of typos stayed in. Also, a lack of cite marks on the pasted text might have played well with the aesthetic, but meant the works cited list was less helpful than it could have been.

I'm looking forward to reading the 2025 edition to see how the author's approach has developed.

 

Sinister Hovering Orb

(Sinister Hovering Orb)

By David J Prokopetz / Penguin King Games (https://penguinking.itch.io/sinister-hovering-orb)

A single-page solo mini-RPG (plus title) which interested me because of the complete lack of strictly-flavour text: all the themes, implied goals, and flavour are purely wrapped in game mechanics. We have to learn the game to find out what it is about (to the extent that it can be said to be about something in particular).

For example, the reader discovers in the rules that they have four choices of activity/situation, used variously "when you are simply and suddenly present", "when your very presence brings down calamity", "when those who ponder you know what they must do", and "when you radiate a palpable sense of doom".

There are no player goals, high-level structures, rules about direction, best practises or suggestions to serve as connective tissue: only a series of game elements, presented with a sense of finality. I played a quick game and found it quite a compelling story generator, though a very open-ended one.

PUBLIC GUEST 5

Living With The Certainty of Death by the imminent explosion of our orbiting artificial planet PUBLIC GUEST 5

By Turtlebun (https://turtlebun.itch.io/public-guest-five) 

A solo RPG on a poster, with a delightful visual style. It's about, well, exactly what the subtitle says. It's a sort of journalling game, meant to be played a sentence at a time over the course of a long real-world period (probably about a month on average).

The diary mechanics are very simple, with two dice informing how you spend a week on your doomed world. When you roll boxcars, PUBLIC GUEST 5 explodes. (I broke the rules and played through in a single sitting, for a fairly melancholy experience.)

PUBLIC GUEST 5 and Sinister Floating Orb were interesting diversions. Together they're inspiring part of my approach to some upcoming projects which will explore themes of cosmic doom, inscrutability, inevitability, and loneliness.

Writing With Style

An editor's advice for RPG writers

By Ray Vallese / Rogue Genius Games (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/217525/writing-with-style-an-editor-s-advice-for-rpg-writers)

A 44-page book of advice for TTRPG writing. It had some tips and reminders I found useful. For someone without a background in technical writing, I bet this book is absolute gold.

There's plenty of generic advice, but plenty is specific to RPGs: sins to avoid (like read-aloud text that dictates the players' choices), lists of RPG-specific overused and confused words, writing to a game publisher's specification, etc. My only criticism is with the visual design: some odd typeface choices and the line spacing is too tight.

Worth the $5 on DriveThruRPG, especially for a new writer.

Dwarf Mine

A mapping game of adventure 

By James Hron / Paper Dice Games (https://paperdicegames.itch.io/dwarf-mine)

Perhaps not strictly an RPG, but a 25-page tabletop exploration game. You play as the location, and instead of levelling up, you add levels further down. It sort of feels like how Dwarf Fortress felt ~20 years ago: one plane, inscrutable dwarf characters, simple mechanics, inevitable doom, etc. But the cutaway is cross-section, not top-down.

There's a points (prestige) system for scoring, and a huge block of random tables. My trial game was quite enjoyable, and I definitely want to come back and give it a more thoughtful treatment.
 

The presentation has some rough edges, with typos, misplaced page references, inconsistent capitalisation, and the font size varying between tables.

A few of the rules could do with a rewrite:

• I'm a bit confused about multiple attacks vs entering combat multiple times, with persistent enemies who attack back.
• The connective geometry is mostly explained by example, not rules. Some of the rules contradict the examples, as in: "The walls of rooms, hallways, and ladders must all have at least a 1x1 square separating them", and also in "Rooms must be built in the orientation shown".
• Goblin invasion mechanics seem underdetermined.
• The appendix leaves the crucial word 'once' off the end of the sentence for Trap room. 

There's lots of neat mechanics, especially with the big monsters. I like that the Cave Wurm can damage the map itself.

The First of the Stone Folk puzzles me. It must be entombed in a 6x6 room – internal dimensions 4x4, so you only need to make 16 squares. Using 21 dwarves per square to minimise deaths, you will lose on average 168 dwarves. But I don't get the impression that total population is ever going to be over 100. Am I off the mark there? Or are you meant to wall this monster off really slowly? 

The dwarf leader ability adds a little more strategy. More inheritance tracking with the 'Bloodline' system would be interesting. I do like the idea of the Achievements list giving all future leaders a title. The room name generator appendix is clever, although wacky; you could get a barracks named "Bottom Watch" or a tomb named "New Trophy".

The author has written lots of official expansions and supporting content to keep the game fresh.

 

GURPS "Discworld Also"

A companion book for the original GURPS Discworld RPG

By Steve Jackson Games, Terry Pratchett, Phil Masters. Generally good, but most of the best stuff made it into the new edition (which I already read, and wrote some reviews for last year). So because I'll focus on the stuff that didn't, this review may sound more negative than I feel!

Sean Murray's illustrations feel quite Discworld-y, sketchy pen/pencil pictures that don't try to rip off Kidby's or Kirby's style. I like them. I'm not a fan of the book's layout, though. There's weird stuff going on with the kerning and text wrap. The column breaks are terribly confusing when there's a subheading (e.g., p 48 reads left to right then top to bottom, but p 49 reads top to bottom then left to right).

It's poorly copyedited for a professional product. For example, on just one page (29) I noticed

• A mangled seven-clause sentence
• "almost" should say "always"
• "could" should say "would"
• "fall off" should say "falling off"
• "unaging" / "ageing" spelling inconsistency
• "They not" should say "They are not"

The alternative troll stats, and the extra information on elfkin and gnolls is good to have. There's a nice robust peasant character template, with various background skills. We get a 'sentient animal' template, a disappointing miss on terminology (it should of course be 'sapient animal').

Translation of Discworld magic is done well. The additions are a bit uninspired, e.g. a magic item which replicates an air conditioner, with maybe a subtle joke about Maxwell's Demon.

The book provides some campaign settings. I mostly already read this content in the new edition GURPS Discworld RPG, with a couple of exceptions: Smarlhanger and Fourecks get more space here.

• Smarlhanger is a frontier boom town in sheep country. It doesn't commit to some details ("there may or may not be changes made", p 86), which is frustrating in a setting guide. Lots of other details to work with though.
• Fourecks cart races is a new subsystem, a spin-off of the GURPS Vehicles rules. The Mad Max pastiche from The Last Continent is fleshed out to a whole societal thing here. (It doesn't say so, but Fourecks definitely has a bunch of ultra-hardwood trees that would be used for the highest tier of armour.)

The book also has three adventures and three 'adventure seeds'. Again, I mostly already saw these in the newer edition. These seem pretty good, barring some vague patches.

'Walking the Spiral' is an adventure with an excellent idea: druids come to look for megaliths in Ankh-Morpork. (I really liked that the mouldering records were in the form of an ancient school essay.) The problem is that the implementation is painfully linear, with very little for the PCs to actually do until the setpiece fight. Especially if the druid emissaries are NPCs. The adventure also implies that the University's NPC wizards are perfectly capable of saving the day by themselves at the end, making this an adventure that doesn't need player involvement at all. The adventure premise is good enough that it's worth rescuing by redoing the structure, though.

Highland Vice

System-neutral Martian cowboy hexcrawl

By Strange Ian (https://ianstrange.itch.io/highland-vice) 

A 'kitchen sink' futuristic setting that meshes well. The concept: Mars has been scarred by poorly-thought out terraforming projects. It's reminiscent of Red Dwarf and Fallout and Futurama and Borderlands and Charles Stross, with extra Tibetan, Mongolian, Peruvian, Japanese, and Weird West elements. The goal is to find and retrieve a chunk of computer megabrain.

A 100-entry hexcrawl in 28 pages. With four hexes per page and system-neutral style, Highland Vice favours high-level terse description over gameplay details.

There's a great density of evocative ideas, which is what I want most out of content like this. An algae plantation heiress hunting with an overtuned laser rifle. The electromagnetic rail launcher used by wire-crowned shamans to send captives into orbit. A buried chest full of mismatched halves of different treasure maps. A hillbilly cyanobacteria moonshine shack guarded by a truck-sized amoeba. A monk riding a solar-powered robot turtle terrarium. An android executive assistant living for years impaled on a mammoth's tusk. A colossal mining engine meditating in the middle of a mountain, trying to free itself from the material. Gauchos duelling over a holographic pop idol in a field of cherry blossom. The primitive town built by a crashed trainload of plush robotic cuddle dolls.

Many of the hexes are linked, but some of the conceptual through-lines could be highlighted. For example, 'satellite shamans' come up in 0006, 0104, 0107, 0307, 0408, etc. If I ran this I'd make a quick setting overview using key concepts as subheadings, and add relevant pointers to/from each hex:

• Satellite shamans
• Teratorns, poebrothers, and other revived megafauna
• Robot prosthetics
• Hive drones 
• Sky bandits
• The Spinal War
• Sindovar
• The Maze 
• Josung (game)
• etc 

Definitely worth a look. It's recently published and free on Itch.
 

In progress

By my quick count, I have six different rulesets and splatbooks bookmarked and partially read. Possibly there's more, lurking in browser tabs or forgotten on the desktop.

I'd like to put some real effort in there. My ambition is that when I next fling reviews together, my "unfinished list" will be completely different!

Reviewn' June 2025 comes to a close.

So how'd I do? I didn't read as much as I hoped, but overall, not bad. For me, reviewing is ultimately about self-accountability, but hopefully you got something out of it.

Pushing the envelope: Deconstructing RPGs

When you push the boundaries of a medium, you tend to reveal interesting things.

A wrong, but illuminating, TTRPG theorypost

In the case of role-playing games, I think there are two very important axioms:

1. players get to make character choices that are meaningful
2. players are deeply constrained as to how they otherwise affect the world

Axiom 1. Players get to make meaningful character choices

By this, I mean their choices must be

real (the outcomes are not faked or predetermined), and

impactful (the outcomes and/or act of deciding matter to the player/character/setting), and

associated (the choices are made as if by the character within the world, not just by the player within the rules), and

plausibly adjudicated (the choices have predictable or at least credible impacts on the imagined world).

Axiom 2. Players are deeply constrained regarding the world

Players impact the world by their character choices, but otherwise have few or no ways to impact the imagined world.

(Most TTRPGs, of course, let a player decide details about the world specifically during character creation, which their character could not possibly have chosen 'in-world'. This is a pretty accepted carve-out, and one of the reasons I say 'deeply constrained'.)

Pushing the TTRPG envelope

Now let's contort these established TTRPG boundaries and principles, to see if anything interesting falls out.

-

We already know what happens when you step back further from Axiom 2 (as part of game design or during play), giving players more options to intervene directly in the world.

You get experiences that are more like collaborative story-telling games, and postmodernish games where the point is to play around with the truth, and eventually you end up with free-form roleplay and expressive world-building.

-

What happens when you deliberately change Axiom 1, making character choices less meaningful?

There are some obvious examples, which tend to be unpleasant, especially in the context of contorting an existing traditionally-designed game.

• If character choices aren't real, you get railroads, which almost nobody likes.
• If character choices aren't impactful, the game (and fiction) has no stakes, which few people like.
• If character choices aren't associated, you're playing something more like a boardgame that has heavy fiction/fluff elements, which some people like, but can be dissonant.
• If character choices aren't plausibly adjudicated, there's little sense in which you're making a 'choice', so you might as well be rolling dice instead, since that's fun.

...But those are mostly the results of taking a role-playing game and 'playing it wrong'.

Designing an experimental game

Challenge: Can we go against the zeitgeist and design games which play with the formula of Axiom 1? Can we push the envelope to deliberately make character choices less meaningful, and still create something compelling?

I can see two things to try.

Less meaningful choice... in pursuit of themes

You could do this deliberately, in an artsy way, to explore certain themes.

Inevitability and the linear nature of time. Doom and futility. Fate and prophecy. Closed-loop time travel. Nihilism.

Less meaningful choice... but more meaning elsewhere

You could shift the focus of the game from meaningful choice to something else, so that there's still something challenging for the player to do.

One possibility is having the player grapple with emotion and feeling, something reactive and exploratory rather than goal-oriented and decision-guided. The obvious pathway for doing this is through journaling games, which often emphasise those aspects more than traditional RPGs (as well as often relaxing Axiom 2).

Combining these ideas into new experimental game designs

I'd like to see a game develop some of those specific themes in parallel with locking down player choice in favour of developing character emotions and feelings (while still being on this side of 'being a roleplaying game').

I'd like to see a choose-your-own-path game set in a world deliberately designed to teach the player that their character's choices fundamentally don't matter in this particular fictional context, and develop an exploration of what that entails (...while still on this side of 'being a game at all').

I'd like to see some hybrid of boardgame and roleplaying game that's not just 'boardgame mechanics under deep layers of fictive fluff', but some other unusual interpolation of the two mediums.

And if I can't find them, maybe I'll make them.

 

What if every D&D power could be used at will?

Seriously, what would happen?

I think that in D&D 5e:

• Resource tracking is fiddly, takes valuably game time, and isn't particularly fun.
  
• The game's built-in resource management is one of its weakest design elements. So much hinges on the long rest mechanic that resources feel all-or-nothing. Between published adventure content and the relative lack of 'living world' rules under the hood, resting tends to be either impossible or unpunished, with little middle ground, depending on the situation. The DM gets little guidance on making it work.
• Resource management decisions are only sometimes important, and seldom very engaging or fun, compared to the other decisions made during play. You learn good spells and tactics, and it's seldom important to change them. You may sometimes have intel leading to an opportunity to prepare differently, but the game isn't so difficult that doing so is necessary, and there isn't much in the way of DM guidance or built-in mechanics for getting intel into the PCs' hands.
• Most of the game's rules are about tactical life-or-death combat, and therefore the game itself is about tactical life-or-death combat (although of course not everyone plays it this way). Trying to conserve resources in combat is a big gamble. After the particularly resource-limited early levels, play styles tend to converge on 'open with full broadside' and not be punished for that.
• It is a game where characters don't just have 'powers' but extravagant superpowers, and it's highly character-focused.
• Character classes all have a fairly similarly design, considered in the abstract. They get an array of at-will small superpowers plus various rate-limited superpowers, almost all of which can be used a low-single-digit number of times between rests. Other limiters on powers (e.g. HP or GP costs) are rare.
• The game's balance is precarious and a DM needs to develop skill to tread the line between 'feeling dangerous' and 'being unfair'.

Let's say you mostly agree with these premises. I think it follows that making all D&D 5e powers at-will – that is, removing their rate limits...

• Would remove part of the game, but not an important one
  
• Wouldn't get rid of interesting choices
• Would work for all classes without changing typical playstyles
• Would lean into the existing superpowered and character-focused feeling of the game
• Would make gameplay much faster
• Wouldn't upset a perfect game balance that doesn't exist.

Spam spells all you like. Action surge on every turn. Put ki points on every attack; metamagic on every spell; enter rage or confer bardic inspiration whenever you can spare a bonus action.

This is an idle fancy – I've never seen it done. But I'd be fascinated to see how it played out. Extrapolating some consequences that seem plausible:

1. The DM could then abandon CR and offer challenges which would otherwise be completely unfair, then see what the players come up with.
2. If the DM created a 'too easy' encounter as a result, it wouldn't matter, because the power disparity and lack of resource tracking means the encounter gets settled in a fraction of the time that combat, spell-based trickery, or the various resource-conserving hedges usually take at the table.
3. The DM could alternatively keep CR but remove all the rate limiters on adversaries' resources: recharges, dailies, slots, etc. (But unlike character classes, this would affect some creatures much more than others)
4. PCs wouldn't need to keep lesser powers and spell choices for backup offense. With normal ideas of challenge abandoned there should be more situations where a particular utility spell or defence is desperately needed. That suggests that spell selection might become a more interesting decision!

Now, historically this sort of thing would lead to a worsening of 'linear fighters, quadratic wizards', but I don't think the difference would be as large in this edition of the game, at least before the highest levels. Fighters getting two actions every turn via action surge is pretty huge, for example. The biggest difference might be in high-level utility powers, the kind where you normally have one use of a valuable high-level spell slot and have to consider whether to save it for a fight. Now you could Fabricate or create a permanent Wall of stone every ten minutes, Mind blank the whole party, spam divination spells, and so on.

What other issues would you need to navigate?

• A few character powers stop mattering. For example, second-rate but 'cheap' healing features are mostly obviated by having lay on hands or a decent healing spell. You might need to introduce some 'alternative features' available to all classes.
• Some character powers would become irrelevant as the character increased in level. This wouldn't matter except that I doubt they're evenly distributed over character classes. You'd want to add a mechanic for swapping defunct powers out once you grow out of them, for those classes that don't already have one.
• There are some slightly more or less resource-limited classes, and they become slightly better or worse choices respectively as a result. I don't think this matters except for warlocks, who deviate from the overarching class design patterns. They'd keep their major disadvantage (few powers) while everyone gets a better version of their major advantage (powers usable more often).
• At the highest levels, powers (and spells especially) can become absurdly strong. But having poked around, I think only a few of them would be real trouble. It might literally just be Wish and Divine Intervention!
• If you're abandoning material costs from spells as well as spell slots, you'd want to look at the few spells that are highly constrained by GP cost: Forcecage, Clone, Sequester, Gate, etc.
• I might be wrong; maybe top-tier spellcasting really does outcompete other classes. You could make level 8-9 spells the sole exception to the 'infinite resources' rule, perhaps sticking to slots or limiting them in some other way (once per hour?).
• Rogues would now get infinite Stroke of Luck as their capstone: their attacks always hit and their ability checks always succeed. I don't think this actually outshines having infinite spells, but it might be boring.
• If the PCs' opponents also have no constraints, there might be a risk at high levels of the game devolving into win-initiative-to-win-combat, but hopefully it would lead to unique solutions.

Implications for the world

Obviously things would get absurd, especially if this is the norm for all people in the setting. But I already think the implied and official D&D settings don't actually develop most of the implications of the things that are canonically possible within them. All sorts of things (technologies, prices, lifestyles, community structures, social structures, etc) ought to look completely alien on the basis of low-level spells alone, and yet the setting (with its dramatic mixture of tech levels, dramatic mixture of society types, dramatic mixture of stakes, etc) stands unaffected.

But overall, losing even more immersion in a typical fantasy setting does strike me as a glaring issue, yes. Maybe abandoning rate limits would work in a more (post-)apocalyptic setting? One where everything is chaotic and in flux, where huge changes happen in the world very quickly, where absurdly spectacular powers are harnessed to mundane ends, and where nightmarishly powerful entities regularly make an appearance?

One mechanic to fix RPG spellcasting

(Or, well... it's an untested work-in-progress idea for fixing the things that usually irk me about it, personally.)

Magic has to be constrained, obviously, to avoid just having an instant win button that any wizard can press at any time.

Fantasy game designers usually accomplish this by giving spellcasting certain factors:

• Limited uses (in the form of spell slots, power points, consumable resources, etc). Book-keeping, yuk. You also need to stretch to find a good in-world reason for the limits to exist and the character to be aware of them, so immersion doesn't break.
• Spells of different fixed power level. Usually these have to be unlocked. If only one high-level spell has some effect, then you'll never have a lesser magician who has a knack for that one spell, or can even use it. Different fixed power levels pairs with limited uses to have several consequences:
• Even more book-keeping (bleh).
• Spells often just succeed, or have a single opportunity to resist, because it sucks to have a valuable resource just do nothing.
  
• Strategic choices usually become obvious (and therefore boring). You might straight up stop using your weakest spells.
  
• If spells have different power levels and are only rate-limited then a spell can be exactly as powerful as you can bear if a wizard wants to cast it their allotted N times per day, every day, including in downtime. Get it wrong and some spells are too weak to bother with; others break the game. Usually both, and it gets worse the wider the range of power levels.
• Jarring styles of play. The wizards have expendable resources and an incentive to use them in overwhelming bursts and/or to solve every problem, as much as possible, and then switch to 'spell recovery mode' (usually rest). This doesn't apply to other characters (or it gets awkwardly levered in by giving them inexplicably rate-limited mundane powers).
  
• Quick casting. It's bad enough in D&D-likes, where most spells take six seconds to cast. That's on the shorter side of what I'd prefer. In more granular games like GURPS, they're often cast even faster.
  
• Not much ritual. If there's a big slow evil magical spell happening, it's almost always a plot point rather than a mechanically underpinned option, let alone the primary method of spellcasting. In a lot of the genre fiction, spells are cast over long periods, either building and building in power/effect, or building towards a moment where they take effect! I really like the feeling of this, and almost never see it in a RPG.
  

I think these four aspects are worth changing for their own sake. It's worth noting that they also lead to a 'best practise' which I dislike:

Bum-rush the wizard

The RPG spellcaster in combat is unarmoured or otherwise fragile, and makes up for this with a limited number of extra-powerful hits which they deliver quickly and at range without cost, and can usually snipe a specific target and/or affect swathes of foes at once.

That adds up to a nearly universally optimal strategy: bum-rush the enemy wizard. Expend resources or open yourself to risk in order to take out the spellcaster early; it'll be worth it.

This is made worse by the usual mechanical parity of NPC/PC spellcasters (a satisfying and useful part of most games which I'd like to keep). The strategy is also optimal when it's creatures fighting a PC party with spellcasters. Enemies either bum-rush the PC wizard or are complete idiots. The best you can do is switch up those two options, sometimes making it unpleasant for the PC wizard player and sometimes boring the whole group with stupid enemies.

Here's my solution so far.

 

One unified mechanic which solves all my problems

A spell has fairly minor base effects which always apply, and a buffet of advanced effects.

If you're not already casting a spell, you can always try to cast any spell you know. You must continue casting it if you want the effect to continue (no check) or build (requires check).

When you cast a spell, its base effects take place. When you continue casting a spell, you either maintain it, or you try to make it more powerful by adding an advanced effect. You can do this each round, for most reasonable definitions of 'round'. Each time you want to add an advanced effect to the spell you are casting, you must make an appropriate check, which becomes more difficult with each effect added.

If you spend a round winding down a spell you're casting to end it, there's no risk at all. If you choose to stop casting it abruptly, there's a small risk. If you're forced to stop casting by some interruption or injury, there's a moderate risk. And if you bite off more than you can chew with advanced effects and fail the spellcasting check, there's a high risk.

The more risk, the worse the potential outcomes when the spell ends, and the higher the weighting towards the worse outcomes. The spell might just fizzle or have some cosmetic effect, but then again it might lash out at or turn on the caster, or run horribly rampant. These effects could be generic, tuned to the spell, or both.

The more skilled at wizardry you are, the more likely you are to succeed on your checks, and therefore reduce the risks you face by casting a more sophisticated spell.

Examples

The mage's change spell only makes her target look like a frog, at first. As she adds more and more advanced effects, they become the size of a frog, and then become a frog, and then start thinking like a frog. By adding other advanced effects, she can make the spell last – first an hour, then a week, then permanently – even after she stops casting it.

The wizard raises a wall from the ground at the heel of his staff. As he walks, it follows in his tracks. He puts more effort in, and it changes from packed earth to sandstone, and then to granite. If he risks enough advanced effects, he can make it higher and thicker, or join it up and add features to turn it into a building, or make it last well beyond the time he spends casting. A skilled wizard with patience and a tolerance for repeated small risks could make a whole stone fortress, a little section at a time, and only have to renew it (say) once per year.

The warlock starts casting a spell to call lightning down on the enemy camp. Clouds gather, roil, and darken as she casts. If she releases it immediately, it will have no effect, but as she continues casting, an ominous glow signals more and more charge is gathering. The choice of when to actually bring the lightning down is a calculated risk. Wait too long, and it might lash out at her!

The evil cultist starts conjuring blood eels directly from the bodies of the victims. Over time, more and more of them exsanguinate, and the blood eels grow larger, more numerous, more self-directed, and roam further from the caster. If he doesn't want to push his luck, he can then maintain his swarm of eels for as long as he keeps casting.

Outcomes

So how about those desiderata from the start of this post.

Limited uses? Nope.

Spells of different fixed power level? Gone.

Quick casting? Not if you want to accomplish much!

Not much ritual? Effects build as the chanting continues, which is the key part; see also Possible Extensions, below.

The "bum-rush the wizard" strategy? Still useful, for PCs and NPCs alike, but not a no-brainer. When the wizard starts casting, he's not particularly dangerous. If you let him keep on casting, he eventually becomes very dangerous indeed ...unless he overreaches and destroys himself! We have arrived at "actual decision-making", the backbone of TTRPGs!

Corollaries:

• Casting a spell is a risk, so spells can be powerful and yet not rate-limited. Just play out the spell each time, to see whether something goes horribly wrong. The more powerful the effects you're invoking (and thus the more potential to 'break the game' when done over and over), the more likely you are to suffer catastrophe.
• Note that this requires negative outcomes to have actual major impacts, not just be slaps on the wrist. Otherwise you end up with a long, slow cycle of spend-resources-to-make-resources-to-fix-the-harm-which-occurred-while-making-free-resources-etc. It's going to work best in games where healing is neither easy nor quick, and where character death is a possibility.
• Character improvement for magicians is easy. You can take whatever approach you want with learning/acquiring spells or specific advanced effects, specialising in spells, etc. The main improvement is just in spellcasting skill: a better caster can reliably get more spell effects before something horrible happens. This is skill-system-independent, with one exception: casters shouldn't get so powerful that they can do magic without risk (except possibly for the weak base effects of the spell, which might be safely freely repeatable if that won't damage the setting).
• Certain styles of spell, with quickly-achievable instant fixed effects, wouldn't work very well with this. Your words of command, snap featherfalls, reflexive shields, wizard knocks/locks cast while fleeing, etc. But I'm confident that every interesting spell can be made more interesting with effects that build and layer.
• I expect this to work very well with progressive status conditions, Pathfinder-style. Binary save-or-suck is often a problem with magic systems. "Spells get more powerful as the casting continues" fixed that pretty directly.
  

There are games that have elements of this mechanic – the GLOG's wizards, which I like; games with spells you pump up over time like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy; that one Conan game with open-ended / modular casting; any game with spell mishaps. I haven't seen anything exactly like this, but if I'm reinventing the wheel, please let me know.

Possible Extensions

Off the cuff, ideas for advanced rules:

1. Capacity for the caster to change the spell they're casting on the fly by relinquishing specific advanced effects they added previously, lowering the check difficulty.
2. Extensions for counterspelling / duels of wizardry.
3. In some styles of game, advanced effects might be improvised rather than listed for the player.
4. Rituals involving long timespans and more casters: Increase the time requirement for each 'stage' of the spell, multiplying by some factor or by the number of casters. Get a benefit like reduced risk or easier checks for adding advanced effects.
5. Maybe everyone can do magic; the specialised wizards are just the ones who are good enough to do it with advanced effects and lower risk.
   
6. If you really wanted, you could add complexity back in by giving each advanced spell effect a numeric power level, and a corresponding increase to check difficulty.