This is going to be a quick post, but here it is:
Flee, my zombie game, works like a few of the other games I’m making. It runs on the same engine. Here’s that engine in brief. (I’m only talking about the conflict resolution engine at the moment.)
The Situation
We’ve got Cato, a human, and he’s going into this goblin’s cave to kill it for some grievance real or imagined. Perfect.
Let’s skip to the part where the pair is about to engage in mortal combat. And let’s say Cato’s player is playing it cool. He’s not making a move.
That’s where I, as the GM, the dude running the game, come in: I escalate.
GM (escalating): Okay, well, the goblin just starts truckin for you. He’s got his cleaver raised up over his head, both hands; he’s yellin and screaming goblin nonsense; there’s spit everywhere; and his footsteps sound like toad jelly. What do you do?
See, the implied thing there is that, if nothing is done, goblin will rain down the cleaver with unrighteous fury on top of our dear protagonistic head. So:
PLAYER (acting): I’m waiting with my shield up, and I’ve got my sword ready to do its business.
Ah, now, see? The player didn’t do anything that necessitated a response from me; he didn’t do anything that I have a say about. (He’s using this as an opportunity to do some secret things behind the scenes that we’re not going to get into now. It’s a bunch of resource-allocation to a move that he’s got planned. The move is in fiction, mind you; it’s conceptual. It’s not on a sheet anywhere.) So I’m going to escalate again and again, each time building tension, until he must react or until I can escalate no further without the thing that’s obviously going to happen happening.
GM: (escalation): So the goblin’s jumped up in the air, and he’s bringing the cleaver down on your head. What are you going to do?
PLAYER (acting): Cato’s got his shield angled up, right? So he’s deflecting the goblin’s cleaver; and, as soon as that happens, he’s thrusting his sword up into dude’s guts.
Now we do some behind-the-scenes consultation re: resource allocation.
GM: Alright; I’m good. Go ahead.
PLAYER: So I’m rolling 6d for the block and 2d for the attack.
GM: Yikes. I’ve got 3d on the attack and 2d to evade you. Let’s see what happens.
[DICE ROLLING + RESOURCE EXPENDITURE]
After we interpret the dice results (just one roll from each player), we see that the following happened:
- Cato’s shield blocked the goblin’s cleaver,
- but doing so shattered his brittle little shield.
- Cato’s skewered the gob for sure, with a critical hit,
- which in this case means the goblin’s dead,
- and it falls right on top of Cato
- and is stinky.
It’s actually a pretty complex system, but its complexity is layered and modular. You could play it with one die if you wanted and no reference sheets or play aids.
Anyway, the point of the preceding is to show what one little exchange of rolls can produce in the system. And I’ll note in closing that the system didn’t necessitate those results concretely. They instead determined that certain categories of things would occur, assigning mechanical weight to some of them, and then these logical/conceptual categories were specified or manifested by the players in the moment.
So things could have turned out differently—differently in a way that you can recount as fiction, depending on who’s playing and what sort of mood they’re in.