Taking Turns

Every roleplayer has heard it from their GM a million times: “Okay, what do you do?” It’s practically the defining phrase of RPG play. The player responds to a situation by describing the action their character takes.

Every game’s design needs to address this response in terms of what a character can do and when they can do it, perhaps compared to what other characters can do.

Actions

What is an action? Board games clearly define what a player can do on their turn. But RPGs are far more open-ended when it comes to options. RPGs are supposed to let you do anything, right? Well, it might be more accurate to say they let you try anything. But when talking about actions in an RPG and what a character can do, it’s just as important to ask: how much can a character do?

Obviously, most (but not all) RPGs divide character actions into discrete units (rounds, turns, actions, etc.) with limitations being the defining characteristic. You can do some proscribed “thing” on your turn, and then it’s someone else’s turn. This often makes for gameplay where everyone feels like they’re participating equally because, just like most non-RPG games, everyone gets their turn.

These units of action are so fundamental to gameplay, time in the encounter is kept in terms of these these turns or rounds. A special ability lasts for 10 rounds, meaning that all involved can do 10 actions before it’s over. You could just as easily say that every character gets their 10 seconds (or however long the game says a turn takes), and then when everyone’s 10 seconds is done, you do the next 10 seconds, and so on. Count the number of actions you’ve taken and you should get a fairly accurate measurement of how much in-game time has passed.

The drawback is that playing the game this way can be unsatisfying at times. If one character wields a sword to fight a dragon and his friend is running to help from across a wide open field, the fighting character (and the dragon) probably get to do many things before the friend even arrives on the scene, because it takes a lot longer to run across a field than to swing a sword. And in terms of gameplay, running across the field isn’t very fun, at least compared to being right up with the dragon and perhaps dealing it damage or accomplishing something else significant.

Also, this strict, round-by-round play pretty much has to ignore the realism of taking a moment to catch your breath, survey the situation at hand, or adjust your position that you might see in a film. The “currency” in the “action economy” is so precious that the player’s going to balk at doing anything other than their utmost to accomplish something significant.

Alternately, other games go with a more variable flow.

Think about an exciting scene with multiple characters in a movie. The actions of the characters are rarely portrayed the way they are in an RPG. We don’t see Jack do a thing, and then Lucia do a thing, and then Kalisha do a thing, and then back to Jack doing a thing, etc. Instead, we see Jack jump off the moving truck, land in a dumpster, climb out, recover from all that, and then run into the burning building. Then the movie cuts to Lucia, who leans out of the window of the building holding a young child, dropping the kid safely down into the net held by Kalisha and her friend Emil. Kalisha grabs the child in her arms and carries them to safety across the street while Emil shouts up to Lucia to ask if anyone else is in the burning building. Lucia responds by saying she’ll make one last check.

That’s a very fluid set of events, but it doesn’t break down like most games would. Instead, Jack arguably does five things, Lucia then does one thing, Kalisha and Emil do an action together, and then Kalisha does another on her own. And then, rather than jumping back to Jack, we go to Emil and Lucia. Basically, the game isn’t dividing events into actions, but rather a variable series of actions, effectively completing a brief arc of what a character does. Everyone’s turn is their time to try to accomplish something satisfying and significant. 

Running activities like this can make things feel more satisfying for the overall story. It’s similar to reading a paragraph in a story rather than just one sentence. Each character’s action isn’t really quantified the same as the others, but rather according to what resolves what’s happening in a satisfying way. The problem, of course, is that this might seem as unfair from a gameplay (as opposed to story) perspective. In our example, Jack gets to do more things than Lucia. 

Although, does he really? Jack’s numerous actions together are really just one long action—it just takes more steps to resolve it. There’s probably a die roll involved with at least three moments in his action, and pretty clearly only one for Lucia. While Lucia’s player might not really mind, at some point, a player could easily try to abuse this system by hogging the spotlight with strings of actions that just keep going and going. 

This puts the onus on the GM, rather than the rules, to keep this kind of behavior in check and adjudicate when the attention of the game as a whole needs to switch to a different character. The designer, then, rather than coming up with carefully designed and explained rules for what a player can and can’t do on their turn in a specific amount of time, instead must focus on explaining to the GM how to handle this kind of variable flow so that it feels both natural and fun. A relatively clear definition of when a character’s turn ends is needed. The GM needs to know when to stop following the activities of one character and move to another, like a film editor cutting back and forth between different actors. 

Another way of looking at it is that the flow of the game is based on the story rather than on the characters.

Doing Something Significant 

Because RPGs grew from D&D, and D&D arose from wargames that use combat to let us define how much a character can do on a turn. Namely, the length of time it takes to make an attack, or perhaps move toward a foe and make that attack, is the length of time of any action, combat-related or not. So it takes (roughly) the same time to open a heavy door as to swing a sword, and thus they’re both actions. You can look at in in a different way, though. Opening a door and attacking a foe are both examples of a character acting upon something outside of themself. Affecting the world around you feels significant.

What if a game attempted to reach a middle ground between the strict round-by-round action system and the more fluid system defined a player’s turn by simply saying, “You get to try to accomplish something significant.” This can be fleshed out, of course, but it means that a player doesn’t “waste” their turn doing something that isn’t very interesting or exciting. Looking for that magic potion you shoved to the bottom of your pack might take a lot of time realistically, but looking through a bag isn’t as satisfying as casting a spell or flying a spaceship through a debris field would be. 

This sort of system would mean that we’d have to likely drop the idea that an “action” is defined by the passage of time. This causes problems because sometimes we need to know how many times the stormtroopers can shoot their blasters as you climb the ladder out of the starship’s cargo bay, to at least give a nod to verisimilitude. We need to know which actions can be accomplished before other actions if we want to maintain any kind of tactical nature. Further, even ignoring believability, balance, or other issues, if the game allows for or encourages things to happen that no one can easily imagine—like the stormtroopers just standing there and not shooting as the guy they’re after gets away—it hurts the shared imaginary space that we try to create when we play. (Stormtroopers may not ever hit anything, but they’re always shooting.)

The size and importance of the issue is directly related to the degree of simulation or verisimilitude the designer is working toward. In a more freeform game—again, a game paced like a film—few players will notice or be bothered by such issues. In a slightly more tactical game, however, the round-by-round, action-by-action system might be preferable. 

Or, maybe there’s another possible way to look at the whole issue. Let’s go over that next time.