A few months back, I had a chance to run Soul Muppet’s Inevitable as a one-shot at a local con. Turned out great, and left me wondering how the game would hold up as a longer series. Some of my locals expressed interest in trying Inevitable for the terrific setting and premise, knowing or caring very little about the underlying system. This week we played the same quickstart scenario materials I used at the con, using the same pregens. My gearhead players, ie my inner circle IGRC brain trust, were evenly split on the game’s potential longevity.

The split came down to the fact that, as written, you’ll always beat the baddie at the final showdown. “Always” is doing a lot of work here! And it’s not even true. But it feels true. If you always win, the rules feel superfluous to them.

Under The Hood

The actual system of the Showdown in Inevitable stands apart from the rest of the game: rather than relying on personal abilities, reputations and equipment, you start with the big bad’s Threat (some value related to the threat’s scariness that can go up) and subtract tokens you’ve earned by beating challenges throughout. That creates a range. My baddie’s Threat is 10 when we have the Showdown, and the characters earned 7 tokens. That range is now 3 to 10. The last thing you do is negotiate a Cost, worth between +1 and +5, based entirely on vibes. Your character dying? That’s a +5. Your relationship with some faction sours? Might be a +1. Dunno. The guidelines aren’t great but the negotiating isn’t onerous.

You roll a d6 and add that Cost bonus. If you beat the low number but not the high number, you beat the Showdown and incur the Cost. If you beat the high number, everything’s coming up roses, no Cost. If you don’t beat the low number, it’s all Cost, no victory.

And then, if you lost? You can just … do it again. And again and again, each time incurring a new Cost and making another roll. That’s the “always.” I assume at some point the GM will impose death as the Cost. I know I’d make it the default if you’re taking a second swing at the big bad. But not every GM would do that, and it’s not codified. I assume in a sufficiently established campaign where everyone was committed to the fiction, a string of lower-stakes Costs might feel more costly.

The entire mechanical underpinning of Inevitable comes down to earning as many tokens as possible before entering the Showdown, creating the lowest possible low end of the “you win!” range, and accepting the lowest possible Cost before rolling. Unfortunately, if you make the low number low enough, you can definitely negotiate a very low Cost that only gets you a +1 or whatever. So the game comes down to the GM keeping an eye on the tokens earned versus the current Threat and calling for the Showdown while that roll is still interesting. If the Threat is 10 and they got 10 tokens? Uninteresting! There’s no motivation to accept a high, juicy Cost.

The answer to the old “you will succeed but at what cost?” question ends up being a shrug.

The Ghost of Game Chef

There used to be this annual game design contest called Game Chef. I participated in a bunch of them, and created some very neat little games, or stubs-of-games, in a very short amount of time. Here’s an example I wrote, a solo RPG journaling game from 2015!

A recurring joke of the event, based on a plurality of entries, was “you will win… but at what cost?” So many of the entries were meant to evoke a sense of loss over fictional things your character, and ideally the player, care about. It’s how lots of heroic fiction plays out, yeah? The hero always wins, and the audience appreciates their heroism more because of all they gave up along the way.

The desire to model this well-trod fictional arc has resulted in an entire generation of “you will win but at what cost?” games. New games where you don’t know if you even can win are in short supply these days. And if “you will succeed” isn’t baked right into the system (like Inevitable almost is), it shows up in lots of GMing. Because losing makes players sad, I guess? It’s not “how fiction works?”

I think this is a real thing: there are “but at what cost?” games, and there are “can you even do it?” games. I’ve played and loved both kinds! But boy is it frustrating when you think you’re getting one and discover you’re getting the other.

Smoke and Mirrors

I’ve used the admittedly derogatory phrase smoke and mirrors to describe lots of games in which I felt the system doesn’t “matter.” “Matter,” in my mind, comes down to the question of whether you can even succeed in the end. That’s my default position, right? If you’re always going to succeed, then did the system really matter? Well, it did if it was generating costs! More important, the players had to care about those costs. Not everyone is incentivized by the same incentives.

After watching the split in opinions about Inevitable unfold in real time at our table, I think I’ve narrowed down exactly where the smoke and mirrors are. It’s the use of timer systems.

Timer system
A system that meters non-specific effort toward a specific goal.

The first timer system I ran into was InSpectres, a Ghostbusters-inspired game about a monster-hunting franchise, written by Jared Sorensen in 2006. In InSpectres, the ghostbusters are regularly rolling dice to do things in pursuit of their quarry. Characters cast spells, research old tomes, run away from the cops, pick locks, whatever. Every time they do, they roll a d6. On a 5 or 6, they succeed…and gain a Franchise Die. The GM decides how many Franchise Dice you need to earn before the mission is over. If it’s 10, then you’ll need to generate around 30 rolls, yeah? That’s the non-diegetic timer: it doesn’t really “matter” what those rolls entailed, when you roll a 5 or 6 10 times, game’s over and you won.

Clocks in Blades in the Dark are another version of this. Among their many functions, Clocks are an abstract countdown of non-specific effort toward a specific outcome. “Escape the Bluecoats” is a 4-slice Clock, so players need to earn four ticks by doing escape-related rolls. Escape could have been a single roll! But it’s going to be several rolls because characters will be burning down Stress and invoking Devil’s Bargains along the way. That’s the “at what cost?” question answered.

There’s a similar system in The Wildsea, but it’s a track instead of a circle. And there are “track breaks,” triggers along the track, which is a nice innovation. “When you’ve made this much progress, X will then happen.” The ongoing effort is in closer dialogue with the fiction.

The Clock thing shows up once again in Cowboy Bebop, with the additional structure of each Clock being tied to formal chapters called tabs, fitting the game’s jazz music theme. The characters make rolls to earn ticks on the tab’s Clock, the last tick on that Clock has to be generated by the same character stat the Clock is keyed to, and there are (almost) always three tabs to work through. You get an authentic Cowboy Bebop experience out of it! Even if the nature of those individual tests didn’t “matter.”

The most on-the-nose timer system I’ve seen yet is in Zoetrope: Death Didn’t Take, a zany time-travel problem-solving adventure game. It’s absolutely packed with every Bill and Ted style time travel trope you can think of. The pleasure of the game lies in creating, and then unraveling, elaborate causal loops, going back in time with new information, all that. But the timer system is that, whenever the GM wants, they can say “yup, you solved it!” The point of play is the problem-solving, not the problem itself. Did any of the card play “matter?” I mean, it filled a few hours with fun! But nothing the characters specifically accomplished led them to the finale.

That’s where Inevitable’s smoke and mirrors are. You can cruise around doing literally anything that requires a formal Challenge (difficult or dangerous), or even just have lengthy social scenes where the GM grants a token without rolling. The content of the Challenge can be anything so long as you’ve met the rubric to roll. Then the GM watches that pool of successes build up until they feel like the Showdown is going to be an interesting roll. Are you 15 minutes from the end of your evening? Time for the Showdown.

Caveat Ludio

To be clear: I am in no way criticizing this sort of system. What I am thinking about is how expecting one kind of game and getting another can be frustrating.

I think preloading the players with what’s going down inside the machinery of an RPG is always important, but highlighting whether it’s a smoke-and-mirrors game (or the friendlier timer system I’ve just sort of coined), seems especially important in light of how our Inevitable game played out.

It’s also important for players to know their own taste. Lots of folks don’t want to feel like their efforts are “meaningless.” Others want to see a narratively meaningful arc emerge. Still others, particularly those marinated in more trad games, might want their efforts to mean something more substantial in the fiction than how many times they rolled.

A well-run timer of course will have fictional consequences. Every single roll in Blades in the Dark changes the fiction, and may also tick a Clock. Every wacky new plan in Zoetrope creates more fictional problems than it solved, while leading the fiction to a point where it’s reasonable for the GM to declare they’ve fixed the time stream.

Not all timer games are the same, either. You can fail at a score in Doskvol. Your bounty hunters might not catch their target (although the odds are very much in their favor). You might not beat the boss at the Showdown. The thing that binds them all is that the GM’s thumb is obviously on the scales. It’s only over when they say it’s over.

“Illusionism” was a derogatory game-theory phrase that relates to all this. The difference between illusionism and smoke and mirrors timer systems is that the players actually do have agency! It’s just that the impact of their choices is metered out for intentional pacing reasons outside the fiction. You gotta do enough of the thing to satisfy the pacing, and the thing is broadly defined.