There is a dreaded moment in tabletop RPGs, more feared than a total party kill, more dreaded than the phrase “but that’s what my character would do!”
It’s that moment when all the players look at each other and realize they’ve spent the entirety of yet another game session doing nothing but going back and forth about what they might do… without having actually done anything.
I mentioned this to a friend of mine recently, and he passed along a concept I’d not thought about before: introducing a mechanic from the real world into the game.
“You tell the players the bad guys are going to show up in a day in game-time. Their characters can do anything they’d reasonably be able to do within a day. But the players have no more than an hour of time in the real world to tell you what preparations they’re going to make. So if they waste their time, that’s on them.”
The simplicity of it — as well as how it both moves things along but provides the freedom and space for people to think — struck me as a wonderful mechanic.
So, of course, I had to take it a step further.
I was planning to run an in-person one-shot over the holidays for a full table of friends, and wanted to run something new for them. I really liked the idea of Troy McConnell’s “Monster Chef” encounter on 2 Minute Tabletop, but I knew that pacing it to fit in a four-hour timeframe as the encounter is written would be challenging. I didn’t want the players to feel like they were entirely on rails for the entire session, so there had to be a way of moving things along. There are a lot of fun sub-encounters in the module, but as written they’re combat encounters, which tend to take longer with larger groups. And this holiday season, I thought we needed something more light-hearted than a bunch of fighting.
In the month after the election, I’d been clinging to Junior Taskmaster as a source of distilled joy and wonder. The delight in play was the antidote to the ugliness of the world outside.
And that’s when it hit me: I could get my players to do Taskmaster-style tasks by having the characters working to catch the animals instead of just killing them.
Designing And Choosing The Tasks
There were a few design principles that I had to keep in mind:
- Nobody was required to do the tasks; I wasn’t going to make a mistake like the one I described in this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zBYeLuIliKo. So to give the players an incentive to do the tasks, they got bonuses to the relevant die roll to catch the critter in question. Nobody would be penalized, so there was no way that participating in the task would hurt a player’s chances in the game.
- The tasks should have some kind of relationship to the in-game fiction.
- The tasks should cover a couple of different areas of skill — art, memory, words, etc.
- I found that three “tasks” per session/module seems to be the sweet spot; more than that and it starts to feel cumbersome.
- Everyone — including the GM — should have a chance to be silly and participate
I drew inspiration from Taskmaster itself, the Taskmaster wiki, and a number of wikis and forum posts discussing tasks to do at home, as well as old kid’s games from when I ran a scout pack. I also ended up running a variant of this scenario with my online campaign, which required a slightly different selection of tasks.
For example, one of the creatures in the module is a “spiderfish”. {1} I figured these creatures were ambush predators, so they’d be hiding away and would have to be tracked down or lured out.
For the in-person table, I printed out a little sketch of a spiderfish for each player on a 2″ (~4cm) square. They put their initials on the back of their spiderfish. I left the room for a few minutes, and they could hide the spiderfish on any flat surface, uncovered, and accessible. Then I had two minutes to find as many as I could. The first one found got a +1, the second +2, and any I couldn’t find (which was the rest of them) got a +5 to their survival roll to track the spiderfish to their hiding spot.
For the online group — which is audio-only — I told them they’d have to lure the spiderfish out of their hidey-holes with a certain strange call… which we represented by having the players say “Super Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity” as for as long as possible in the angriest voice possible without laughing. The person who kept at it the longest got the highest bonus, and so on. {2}
It was a blast for everyone involved.
Incorporating these kinds of real-world mechanics helped elevate a good session into a really fun and unique session for my players, both in-person and remotely.
{1} If you decide to run this adventure, check with your players about phobias. A player in one of my sessions has a bad snake phobia, so the venom chicken was replaced by a different kind of chimeric animal. If someone has a spider phobia, then the spiderfish would have to be replaced. Which is also why the example image of the spiderfish I used for the task is here: https://imgur.com/a/n4P8GGq to avoid triggering phobias of those reading this.
{2} Yeah, sometimes the “connection” between the task and what was happening in-game was somewhat tenuous, but there was enough of a link that it still felt like it was part of the session.