Action rules
Actions are an aspect of the session where player creativity comes into the forefront. It’s up to players to come up with actions, and up to the disaster master to specify their difficulty and narrate successful or failed outcomes. Nudging players into taking the right actions might be a more subtle way for a DM to influence a session.
Setting difficulty
It should generally suffice to sort actions into three categories: easy, medium and hard. Those should, on average, be solvable by a player with tool proficiency (+2 bonus) and 1, 2 or 3 dice respectively. More precisely:
| Action | Difficulty |
|---|---|
| Interrupt | 3 |
| Easy | 7 |
| Medium | 10 |
| Hard | 13 |
Sometimes players will fail to perform an action in one turn and will retry it the next. In this case it’s a good idea to lower the difficulty rating. It often makes sense in the narrative. For example, if a player is going over a thread dump looking for clues, the more time they spend on it the more likely they’ll find them. It also helps the session progress.
RPG concept
Similarly to other tabletop RPGs, a DM should not allow players to make meaningless actions. Each action should, if it succeeds, help the players. For example it might help them eliminate some wrong presumptions, help them uncover the root cause of the incident or decrease its impact.
Narrating results
The action succeeds if dice roll + proficiency bonus matches or exceeds the difficulty. In that case either offer useful information to the players or let them know if something beneficial happened. Strictly speaking positive side effects might not be immediately obvious. However, requiring extra action on the next turn to confirm a previous action worked is bad for pacing. Oftentimes a successful action can be hinted by letting players know that some error based alert has closed.
In case action fails things become more interesting. Depending on the type of the action there are two ways of handling failure:
- In case of passive action DM just withholds information from players.
- In case of active action DM introduces a complication.
Complications
Disaster master can choose to introduce a complication at the beginning of a turn, or in response to a failed active action. There are two types of complications:
- Interrupts that require a low difficulty (i.e. 3) passive action to resolve.
- Degradations in the software system that might spread the impact of the incident, or make further actions more difficult.
Interrupts
Interrupts work well as complications randomly introduced at the beginning of a turn. They might be CTO contacting the team and requesting an update, or a client submitting a complaint and asking for some assistance. In both cases DM lets players know that they can answer the interrupter with a low difficulty passive action.
Notice
DM should be ready to introduce additional complications in case players choose to ignore an interrupt.
Use interrupts to slow the players down a bit.
Degradations
Degradations represent worsening situation. They might be caused by some player actions, for example a failed database query might lock up a table, or a failed code deployment might make an app instance inaccessible. These make for a good complication to follow a failed action attempt.
Alternatively, degradations might be brought on by changing conditions such as client behavior or slowly draining resources. This type of degradation can be introduced as complication at the beginning of a turn. Use this type of complication to focus players' attention on a certain part of the system.
Managing players
Each game turn represents 5 minutes of in game time. However, it will likely take players longer to agree on which actions to take. In general DM should let players brainstorm for 5 to 10 minutes. If discussion starts dragging on, DM can jump in with a run-down of discussed options and outline difficulty of each one. This can help players consider all possibilities and narrow down their choices.
DM can also use this summarizing of options to bring more introverted players into focus. To do this just start with suggestions of one of your quieter players This will help surface their ideas.